67 Pelagia's Lament
This was my place of safety, my single refuge, the substance of my memory. Here in this house my mother held me, her brown eyes shining, and in this house she died. And my grieving father gathered in his love and gave it to me only, and he brought me up and made me unpalatable, manly meals, and sat me on his knees, and he made my feet grow into the earth by telling me its stories. He talked to me with so much love, he worked for me, he let me be a child. When I was tired he picked me up and carried me, he laid me in my bed and stroked my
hair, and in the darkness I would hear him saying, `Koritsimou, if it wasn't for you, if it wasn't for you . . . ' and he would shake his head because for once he had no words, his heart was too big to hold them, and I would close my eyes and go to sleep with my nostrils full of the smells of ointment and tobacco, and in my dreams there were no Turks and no monsters to scare me, and sometimes at night I thought I saw my mother passing through the door and smiling.
And in the morning he would wake me up and bring me chocolate, and say, `Koritsimou, I'm off to the kapheneion, and make sure you're up by the time I come back,' and he was still saying that when I was twenty, and I would lie there as happy as a nun for the new day, thinking of everything I could do, and I would listen for his footsteps on the flags, and fly out of bed, and he would come in and say, `Lazy little miss, this time I nearly caught you,' until I would say it first, and he would laugh and say, `Right, today I am going to tell you all about Pythagoras, and then this evening you'll choose a poem to read to me, and I'll choose a poem to read to you, and then I'll tell you why I don't like yours, and you can tell me why you don't like mine, and then we can lose our tempers and have a fight.'
And I would jump up and down and say, `Let's fight now, let's fight now,' and he would tickle me until I nearly fell sick with laughing, and then he'd sit me in a chair and comb my hair, pulling it much too hard, and telling me frightful stories about Cretan abbots who burned themselves and their monks to death in their churches rather than surrender to the Turks. And he told me about islands he had seen, where women had four husbands and no one wore any clothes, and places in Africa where the people's backsides were wider than their height, and places so cold that the sea froze over and everything was white.
But it's all gone now. I come and sit in the ruins of my home and all I see is ghosts. There is nothing now but withered grass and broken stones and a severed tree. There is no table where the boys of La Scala sing, there is no Psipsina catching mice, no goat to bleat in the dawn and wake me, there is no Antonio seducing my heart with his flowers and mandolin, there is do Papas returning from the kapheneion and saying, 'Kokolios said the most ridiculous thing..'
All my home is nothing but sadness and silence and ruin and memory. I have been reduced, I am my own ghost, all my beauty and youth have shrivelled away, there are no illusions of happiness to impel me. Life is a prison of poverty
and aborted dreams, it is nothing but a slow progress to my place beneath the soil, it is a plot by God to disenchant us with the flesh, it is nothing but a brief flame in a bowl of oil between one darkness and another one that ends it. - I sit here and remember former times. I remember music in the night, and I know that all my joys have been pulled out of my mouth like teeth. I shall be hungry and thirsty and longing forever. If only I had a child, a child to suckle at the breast, if I had Antonio. I have been eaten up like bread. I lie down in thorns and my well is filled with stones. All my happiness was smoke.
O my poor father, silent and still, wasted and lost forever. My own father, who brought me up alone and taught me, who explained everything, and took my hand and walked with me. Never again will I see your face, and in the morning you will not wake me. Never again in our ruined house will I see you sit, writing, always writing, your pipe clenched between your teeth and your sharp eyes shining. O my poor father, who never tired of healing, who could not heal himself and died without his daughter; my throat aches from the hour you died alone.
I remain upon these piles of shattered rocks and imagine it how it was. I remember Velisarios heaving away the tiles and beams as though it were his own father dead beneath them. And I remember when he brought my father out, covered in white dust, his head hanging back in Velisarios' arms, his mouth hanging open, his limbs all limp and dangling. I remember when Velisarios set him down and I knelt beside him, blind and drunk with tears, and I cradled his bloodied head in my hands and saw that his eyes were empty. His old eyes, looking not on me but on the hidden world beyond. And I thought then for the first time how small and frail he was, how beaten and betrayed, and I realised that without his soul he was so light and thin that even I could lift him. And I raised up his body and clasped his head in my breast, and a great cry carne out that must have been mine, and I saw as clearly as one sees a mountain that he was the only man I've loved who loved me to the end, and never bruised my heart, and never for a single moment failed me.