Three Summers Page 9

  “And that is very dangerous.”

  “And very wonderful.”

  Father could have invented the most magnificent machine in the whole world. But instead he works at a bank.

  “I was scared of great things,” he said quietly.

  “And yet back then . . . when we were in love you could have done so much.”

  “Perhaps, then.”

  They had reached the pavilion with the jasmine. Mother paused a moment and looked around her. She laughed, a little nervously.

  “Do you remember?” she asked.

  “Yes, I remember.” He laughed too, sadly. “Anna, I’m thinking of getting married,” he said after a bit.

  In the meantime we were getting ready and dressing Maria. She hadn’t wanted to wear a white dress and veil. “That’s too old-fashioned,” she declared. “That’s for when girls were as pure as lilies.” Instead she wore a light blue dress with a white flower pattern.

  “Now I’ll become as pure as a lily,” she said, laughing. But when we also began to laugh she got serious and looked straight in front of her. “It’s good to be pure, isn’t it Katerina?”

  Infanta was looking out the window thoughtfully.

  “Not Infanta’s kind of purity. Do you see what I mean, Katerina?”

  “Yes, something that’s inside us,” I said, picking up the comb and beginning to comb her hair.

  Infanta turned toward us as if she wanted to say something of great importance. Her face was long and thin, too thin, her cheeks were pale.

  “Has Nikitas come yet?” she asked.

  “We’ll find Nikitas at the church with Petros and Emilios.”

  Those three would represent Marios’s friends, and Margarita and Eleni were to represent Maria’s.

  I like brushing Maria’s hair, bringing the brush under the hair and watching it get blacker and shinier. Her hair has a splendid vitality.

  “Will you have children, Maria?”

  “Five or six,” she answers simply.

  She stands in front of the mirror. Her legs are long and shapely, her body rests on them perfectly. Her thighs are round and full, her waist slim, and her breasts free and proud, like petals on a stem. I help her put on the light blue dress. As soon as she’s wearing it her face and body acquire a calm. Her breasts and thighs are less obvious and her hair less shiny.

  Infanta’s dress is a light pistachio color, mine is coral, Infanta doesn’t look like she’s going to get dressed. She stares out the window, totally absorbed. We go over to the window and look out at the garden and the pavilion with the jasmine where Mother and Father are silently sitting next to each other on the wooden bench. Suddenly Father leans over and kisses Mother’s hand.

  At church they found all their relatives gathered. The neighborhood church was small and poor with old, dark icons painted on the whitewashed walls. It had a courtyard with two cypresses and an old priest who always mixed up his words. Often at dusk, returning from a walk, I would go in and sit in the pew by the window and watch the sun, which outside was diffuse and immaterial, passing through the stained glass windows and becoming red, yellow, and green rays. I would bathe in the light and would feel a new light being born inside me.

  Marios’s mother came up immediately to greet us. She seemed moved. She started to embrace Maria tenderly, but at the last moment she changed her mind and, holding her by her shoulders, kissed her on both cheeks. She was wearing a white dress, very youthful, adorned at the waist with a bouquet of obviously artificial flowers. She also wore a string of pearls and pearl earrings. Her hair was light brown, combed up with great care. It only puffed up above her forehead, making a soft wave before it was abruptly stopped by a hairpin. Her eyes were blue, without a spark, as if the world around her didn’t have meaning for her. Laura Parigori lived in the past. She fed off nostalgia. And on those days when that well was dry, and she was left there leaning over trying to draw something up, then she turned to books with the same anxiety. And when she wasn’t reading she was thinking about what she had read, and it was as if she were very far away. Sometimes at dinner she would forget to eat, other times Yannis would talk to her and she would answer yes, yes without having heard a word he said. All this made her think that she wasn’t intended for this life. But then she couldn’t imagine any other, more appropriate life.

  “You are very beautiful today, my dear,” she said to Maria as she looked her up and down. “Pale blue suits you marvelously, even if I would have preferred white.”

  “Mother, are you already talking like a mother-in-law?” said Marios laughing, a glint in his eyes.

  And Aunt Aglaia bent down and whispered to Aunt Aspasia that in the past brides had worn white, but she had never seen a mother-in-law wear white.

  “White with pink and purple flowers . . . She’s pretending to be a young thing. Just fancy, the other day I saw her in the center of Kifissia with a rose in her hair. And another time . . .”

  Marios and Maria stood next to each other, straight like tall candles, listening to the words of the priest. Marios seemed distracted, but Maria listened to every word, as if she were listening to a lesson at school that she wanted to learn well.

  I began to weep so hard I couldn’t hide it. I heard Father take out his handkerchief and blow his nose loudly. Mother, nearby, cried silently to herself, trying not to let it show. Grandfather remained calm. Only at the end did he lean down and mention something about great-grandchildren to Grandmother. Once or twice Nikitas turned to look at Infanta. And Petros stared at me the whole time. When we came out of the church, he approached me and said:

  “Finally you decided to wear red.”

  “It doesn’t mean a thing,” I retorted. “And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t make a fool of me by staring at me in church.”

  “I was not looking at you. There was a beautiful angel painted on the wall behind you.”

  We all kissed Marios and Maria, wishing them every happiness. Then we slowly descended the road to our house. Uncle Agisilaos began telling jokes, and Ellie, who hadn’t said a thing all day, confessed to me that she was in love and that she too would like to get married. Aunt Theresa added that when two people join together in holy matrimony neither one has any hopes of ever achieving perfection.

  “But what is perfection, Aunt Theresa?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer, but only speeded up her step. In front of us were Marios and Maria. They were holding hands. They seemed calm and happy.

  •

  That first night, though, Maria didn’t sleep a wink. She kept Marios warm but remained cold herself. Only her palms were burning. She rubbed them over her body to warm herself up, beginning at her neck and ending at her feet. Her pulse was throbbing. She could feel it everywhere, in the palm of her hand, in her belly, in her temples, in her chest, as if her whole body was a clock ticking away monotonously through the night. She grabbed at her heart to stop it, she pressed on her temples, but the beat only grew stronger. And it was as if it didn’t come from inside her but from a foreign body, and it annoyed her that it was keeping her awake.

  Next to her Marios had fallen asleep. He had taken her warmth and shut it up inside himself. His face was calm, his black hair had fallen across his brow and touched his shut eyelids, and on his lips a smile was floating like a child dreaming of wonderful toys.

  The few morning clouds had disappeared. The air was clear and crisp because it was the day after the full moon. Every nook and cranny in the room was lit up. The moon rays even fell on the pillow, in her eyes. She rolled over to the left to find some shade, then to the right; she tossed this way and that. Light surrounded her. It flooded her face and crept across her throat. Her hair dipped into the light as if into cold water, and she felt cold, very cold. In a while the moon came to rest across from her. Its face was smiling, and then angry. And sometimes it was really two faces kissing each other. She tried to find the exact place where the lips met, as she had done as a child. She would sit at the back o
f the house, on the cement step outside the kitchen, waiting. A vague light, timid at first, a light with no color, would light up the mountain range across the way, making it clearer and clearer as time went by. Later, she never knew exactly when, it would begin to turn red, and then after the red turned to orange the moon would come out. At that hour no one could get her to move from the step. While the man and woman kissed in their faraway heavenly world, she would be dreaming. “Look, it’s laughing,” Katerina would say. How could it be that she saw two sad faces while Katerina saw only one and it was laughing?

  She couldn’t sleep. She lay there on her back with wide open eyes looking out at the sleeping garden. It was a night without wind. Marios stretched out his arm and embraced her. She must stay still while he slept.

  Her insomnia seemed to her like lethargy. She saw and heard and thought as if a shroud was covering her senses, erasing differences, so that she could no longer tell vision and sound apart, and ideas became vague, distant, and foreign.

  Near dawn she thought about how she loved Marios. That was why, after all, she had married him.

  VII. AUTUMN

  AUTUMN came after Maria’s wedding was over. The days got shorter. In the afternoon, tired of the cool shade of my room and needing sunlight, I would go for a walk, hesitating at the doorstep, surprised and saddened to find that the sun already seemed to want to hide behind the mountain.

  At that hour, though, everything took on a tremulous beauty. The pine needles stood out independent from each other, while the grass below seemed to be one solid body, a single skin covering the whole earth like an orange peel. The goats grazing nearby had a supernatural power as if they had been sent by some higher being. Their coats gleamed, their look had a peculiar steadiness about it, a frightening motionlessness. As the last rays of sunlight fell on them, it seemed to me as if they suddenly disappeared, as if their bodies dissolved into the mist that enveloped the trees. But it was only because I had closed my eyes. When I opened them they were still in the same spot, chewing, as if reborn from the mist. The faces of Georgos or Tasia or any other worker who happened to pass by were striking, beseeching. Mother Kapatos’s shrieks, “Kostas, Koula, hey! . . . Manolis! . . .” were like those of the witch in the fairy tale. The cistern was getting ready to accept the reflections of the stars and the frogs’ loves. The water’s surface rippled slightly.

  Everything took on a tremulous beauty, and I tried to capture that beauty, the way someone tries to hold on to an object. But it always escaped me, so I’d go running off, whipping the air with a switch I’d fashioned from a willow branch, trying to forget.

  The sun would vanish abruptly. The meadow after a day of reveling in the sun reached a climax, turned a brilliant, gold red, and then became suddenly dark. At this moment the olive trees would show the faces and arms they had kept hidden all day.

  Autumn sunsets always come earlier than you expect because every day is shorter than the day before. Many times in the afternoon I would take the road toward Mr. Louzis’s, which was full of blackberry bushes, and this hour would find me far from home. Other times I would be caught up in a book and I would just manage to run outside to the meadow before the sun vanished completely.

  The books I read at this time filled my life, and thrilled me. I wanted to tell someone but I didn’t know where to begin. So when I was outside I would sing different songs, as I happened to remember them, all mixed up—it was kind of like my crazy garden, if it’s possible to compare a song to a garden—and instead of words I would put in the names of the heroes of the books I had read, sometimes repeating them two or three times, and I would talk to them. “Alyosha,” I would say, “Alyosha, could a soul as perfect as yours really exist? Alyosha, Alyosha . . .” And I would wonder how Mary who was so good and honest could love two men at the same time, and I cried because Liza died—she shouldn’t have, nobody should die—and I would cry as if she were the dearest person to me in the world.

  I broke off two or three berries from the hedge and ate them for comfort. Without realizing it, I had arrived at Mr. Louzis’s property. I looked at the cypresses that blocked the icy wind on the north side, just the tops, that is, because there was a wall around the compound with barbed-wire fencing covered in climbing flowers. In the spring there were little pink and purple roses and wisteria, and in the fall there were golden yellow flowers with copper red leaves as if the sun were reflecting off them. If I wanted I could push the gate open and go in. Mrs. Aphrodite would offer me pudding, maybe even ice cream, and Mr. Louzis would tell me some jokes. But then he would surely ask after Mother. “How is your mother? Does she still have those headaches that she sometimes has in the summer?” “Headaches? Mother never has headaches.” “Yes, she does. What about that pressure she complains of?” “You must be mistaken, Mr. Louzis.”

  So I didn’t push open the gate. I just bent down a little to find an opening in the leaves to peep through. Although I went often to Mr. Louzis’s and I was free to look at everything when I was there, somehow from the outside peeping in I had the sense that I might see something new. Perhaps because from the little holes between the leaves everything appeared in fragments: a piece of the stairs, half a window; and when I shifted my position, the rooftop, the foot of a visitor.

  Once I saw Mr. Louzis kissing the gardener’s daughter. She was concentrating so hard on cutting the roses that she didn’t notice him, until she was startled by a kiss on the back of her neck. It seemed he had kissed her before, because she didn’t say anything when she turned around. She only laughed loudly, showing her gold tooth, her neck wrinkling up like a face in a grimace.

  That’s when I realized that Mr. Louzis and the Comtesse de Noailles couldn’t possibly be relatives. Besides, Mr. Louzis himself had never mentioned it. Others talked about it, referring to the photograph with the dedication that hung over his fireplace in which the Comtesse de Noailles was looking off into space, wearing a thick ribbon, perhaps velvet, which hung low on her forehead, giving her a thoughtful and nostalgic air.

  The first person to suggest that they might be relatives was Mrs. Montelandi, Marios’s grandmother. She had come over to visit us one day and had brought the conversation around to the trips she used to take to Paris every year when she was younger, and to the people she had met there. One of us, I don’t remember how or why, mentioned Mr. Louzis. Mrs. Montelandi, as soon as she heard his name sat up in her chair, began stroking the double row of pearls that hung around her neck, and, throwing us an inquisitive look that was also full of respect, began asking us for details about Mr. Louzis: Have you known him a long time? Where did he used to live? Was he always this rich? When she finished she added with an almost indifferent tone that Mr. Louzis frequented the salon of the Comtesse de Noailles when he lived abroad, and that she had even heard people say they were related in some way.

  Aunt Theresa could not hide her joy.

  “He comes here too,” she said, “and rather often.”

  “Is he from the Ionian islands?” asked Mrs. Montelandi, trying to let Aunt Theresa’s remark pass unnoticed.

  “Who?” asked Aunt Theresa, as if there was any doubt.

  “Mr. Louzis.”

  “Ah . . . Mr. Louzis . . . no, no. He’s not from there.”

  The photograph of the Comtesse de Noailles hangs all by itself in the drawing room on those afternoons when the sun sets quickly. Everyone else is out in the garden, while inside the blinds are drawn shut, forgotten since noon. It is almost dark—which is even sadder than total darkness. And some dust has gathered on the piano. In this dim light her eyes probably appear even more nostalgic.

  The way back was beautiful, full of that sweet feeling of exhaustion and the damp smell of wheat. The mountains of Parnitha and Pendeli loomed grand and silent. I was frightened by them, in awe of them, and I felt so tiny, like an ant, and calm, like a flower that closes its petals and goes to sleep.

  The minute I opened the gate to our house the train to Europe passed
through Tatoï. It whistled two or three times, and I could hear the sound of the wagons on the tracks. That was the train the Polish grandmother had left on. In Athens at the station all would have gone smoothly. The musician, seeing her coming, would have taken a few steps toward her, bowed, and kissed her hand. But when the train passed through Tatoï, what would the Polish grandmother have done? Leaning out the window, perhaps she would have tried to see the lights of our house beyond the meadows and the woods that separated us from the tracks. “Does anyone you know live around here?” she would hear him ask. “It’s beautiful land. But it’s dark—how can you see anything?” She would have lowered her veil over her eyes, full of nostalgia for what she was leaving, for what was already distant, inaccessible . . .

  That’s what I would think about when I heard the train passing, and other things, too. I would lose my calm, also my respect for Parnitha and Pendeli. They weren’t so far away. I could easily reach them. Everything lost its calm; the flowers even seemed to be moving and the roofs shaking.

  •

  Mornings were different now. Day broke with less brilliance than in the summer, but everything was somehow clearer. The air smelled of crushed apples, and left in your mouth the juicy, tart taste of apples eaten unpeeled. It was a delicate air, sometimes chilly. The sky was blue—a deep, rich blue—with white clouds racing by. But the more the day progressed the lighter the blue became until it was almost gray-white. And by midday it seemed an ashen covering had descended, pressing on foreheads, weighing on hearts, bringing a certain gloominess. Breathing was harder, but then at some moment the covering would lift, become deep blue once again with white clouds racing by.

  Often on such mornings Nikitas would come over riding Vicky. Infanta and Romeo would be waiting for them. They would go off on a two- or three-hour ride and then come back laughing, and very thirsty. I would put down the book I was reading and come out of my hiding place—it was a shady spot beneath three or four trees that had grown close together, making a little room—and I would go to the well to draw up cold water because I always liked watching people or animals quench their thirst. Their return would break my morning into two parts as different as two different seasons. I would fill two glasses and two buckets without hurrying, enjoying their anticipation, and then after they had drunk, their joy.