A Separation

4.

Later that afternoon, I hired a taxi and drove to one of the small villages inland. I imagined Christopher must have done the same at some point—there was only so much time you could spend on the terrace, by the pool, or otherwise within the confines of the hotel before tedium set in.

I said to Kostas that I wanted to see the surrounding area. He tried to explain that there was nothing to see. I said this could not be the case, there were miles of country stretching behind us. Eventually, he reluctantly mentioned a nearby church with some frescoes that had been impressive once, until they had been defaced by members of the local Communist Party.

I said that sounded fine, it sounded interesting. He immediately backtracked, flipping through a pile of brochures and leaflets in search of some other option with which to tempt me. There were a number of excursions he could suggest, or he could reserve a table at a popular restaurant one village over along the shore. That village was larger than Gerolimenas, there were bars, even a nightclub. Or I could hire a boat, there was a nearby island with wonderful beaches that was well worth seeing, he could recommend it.

I told him I preferred to go to the church, perhaps I would try the restaurant and the island another day. He still seemed to hesitate, I told him that I only wanted to get a little air, a change of scene. It did not need to be anything spectacular. At last, he shrugged and called the local taxi company and ordered a car. As he hung up, he warned me again that it was not impressive, just a local church, very small and virtually defunct, it was not what people came to the area to see. They came for the sea, for the beach, for the view . . .

It began to rain as we drove out of the village. I asked the driver his name, he said it was Stefano. I asked him if he knew Kostas and Maria. Yes, he said, he had known them his entire life. They had grown up together. Maria in particular—she was like a sister to him. I said that it was a small village. He nodded. Everybody knew everybody, and nobody ever left. I asked if people moved to the cities, to Athens for example. He shook his head. There are no jobs in Athens, the unemployment rate is the highest it has ever been.

Then we sat in silence. Outside, the entire landscape was black from the fires. We drove up through the hills, away from the shore. The vegetation had been decimated, replaced by mounds of burnt charcoal, a lunar landscape. Row after row of the curious forms stretched across the ground. In places there was smoke still rising up from the ground—the fires had been burning as little as a week ago, Stefano said, they had only recently succeeded in putting them out after weeks, after months of burning.

I asked Stefano how the fires had started and he said it was arson. I waited for him to continue. A feud between two farmers, apparently it was over stolen livestock. The livestock wandered all over the place, he said, who knew which animals belonged to whom? One goat ends up in the wrong field, it was hardly a matter that called for retribution. But of course the farmers did not think, they made crazy accusations, first one and then the other, each claim more outrageous. They began actually stealing animals from each other, from stolen livestock it was only a small step to vandalism, the situation escalated, more and more people became involved—family and friends, then extended family and friends of friends—and then suddenly the entire countryside was burning.

An absurdity, he said. It was hard not to agree, there was an unbridgeable gap between the fact of missing livestock, a goat, a cow, a sheep, and the devastation that surrounded us. It was not so simple, he explained, the matter was a modern-day blood feud, the livestock and the fires were simply the latest iteration of something that renewed itself every year. The way the earth does, he said, and will do again after the fires—with spring there will come a new feud, about something else but really it is the same thing, this is a country addicted to fighting.

Especially in Mani, he said the area was known for its fierce history of fighting, the Maniots—as the people of Mani were called—were known for being very independent but it was hard to know what that independence had been good for. There is nothing here, he said. Look, you can see—there is nothing but rocks, the place is a collection of rocks. We have fought for our independence and our land and all we have to show for it is a collection of rocks.

He turned the car down a narrow one-lane road, here the vegetation had not burnt to the ground but had somehow melted, along both sides of the road stood drooping cactuses, their arms folding forward and their edges singed. The smell was terrible. The land was rotting, Stefano said. It had smelled like this all summer. By the coast, where the hotel was, the smell dissipated, the wind carried it off to sea, but farther inland the stench had accumulated, day after day. It had been worst at the height of summer, when the temperatures had been very high and the smell so heavy you could barely breath.

A small stone church was visible on the horizon. There was nothing in its vicinity, only the burnt landscape. We drove up to the church. There were crushed and rusted cans in the charred grass outside, all manner of debris. Graffiti had been scrawled across the stone exterior—large Greek characters that I struggled to decipher, lambda, phi, epsilon, I spoke and translated French. Further marks had been carved into the wooden doors, the place was in very bad condition, it did not seem as if anyone was responsible for its care, it was hard to imagine a congregation gathering there. Stefano turned the engine off and shrugged, his face clouded.

It’s nothing much, it is nothing worth seeing.

Is it in use?

Oh yes, he said. He looked a little surprised. Of course.

I opened the car door. The drizzle of rain was instantly absorbed by the soil, which remained dry. Stefano asked if I needed an umbrella, he thought he might have one in the trunk. I told him I was fine, the rain itself was warm and not unpleasant. He shrugged and got out of the car. I followed him to the double doors of the church, which he pulled open, evidently nothing was locked around here. He stepped back and gestured toward the dim interior. He reached into his pocket and took out a packet of cigarettes, then said that he would wait outside.

I switched on the light—a single electric bulb came on with a loud buzz. It did very little to illuminate the interior. After a moment, my eyes adjusted to the darkness. It was true that it was a humble space, several rows of wooden benches, a simple altar and reliquary. The church was Byzantine, probably twelfth or thirteenth century, there was a large fresco on three of the walls. The faces on the fresco had been rubbed out and the effect was strange, a row of saints standing blind and faceless, rendered anonymous by a likewise unidentified hand.

More characters had been written across the wall inside in paint—they did not seem as if they had been written by the same person or persons who had defaced the exterior of the church, the paint was another color, more faded despite the evident lack of sunlight inside, the jumbled characters differently formed. From the entrance, Stefano smoked. I asked him what the graffiti said. Carefully, he ground out the cigarette before leaning over to retrieve the butt.

He entered the church, quickly making the sign of the cross before stopping in front of the fresco. This is from the civil war. He stepped forward and touched the wall. The Communists defaced the saints—literally defaced them, he said with a grim smile, you see—and wrote some stupid Communist propaganda. You can’t see all the characters, some of it is covered, but it says, he translated, United Front from Below.

He pointed to a row of characters, large parts of which had been covered. I saw that it was not a single piece of graffiti as I had initially thought, but two separate messages written at two different times, the first set of characters imperfectly blacked out and only partially covered by the second set. Stefano moved his fingers and pointed to the second set of characters. The army came and covered the Communist slogan and wrote their own slogan, Athens Is Greece. But you can see they did a sloppy job of it. So parts of the original Communist slogan are still visible, Uni— and —elow, if you read the whole thing together, it is nonsense, a nonsense phrase, Uni Athens Is Greece Elow.

He continued. They thought it wasn’t enough to paint over the old slogan with their own message, they also scratched their message into the stone, only they didn’t finish the job. I peered at the stone surface, it was true, someone had scored a few characters in—they only measured a few inches in height, much smaller than the sprawling graffiti below, which had been painted with a freer hand, after all it was much more difficult to carve into stone—and then abruptly stopped, as if they had been interrupted or perhaps decided it wasn’t worth the effort.

It is extraordinary, I said to Stefano, as a record of the conflict. He shrugged, the church is much older than this political argument, many centuries older, in another country it would have been cleaned up, there would have been money to preserve the church, to make repairs, but here?

I nodded. He waited a moment, as if to see whether or not I had any further questions. Then he turned and retreated outside. I stayed only a few minutes longer, I did not want to keep Stefano waiting—although I saw that he had already lit another cigarette, probably he would have been happy enough to wait, after all the meter was running on the fare. It was cool inside the church, a respite from the dry heat outside. I stood before the line of blank-faced saints, I had never seen anything like it. As we returned to the car I asked Stefano what else I should see, I had the rest of the afternoon and I wanted to tour the area.

You could go to Porto Sternes, it is not too far, a little way down the peninsula. There are some very nice ruins on the beach, of a church. They say that the entrance to Hades is located in a cave at Porto Sternes—the tourists like it, although it is nothing more than a cave, a very nice cave, a big one even, but still just a cave. I said in that case I thought I could do without, although I liked the association between myths and ordinary places, places you could go to, perhaps if my stay extended further I would go.

What has brought you to Mani? Stefano asked. It was a reasonable question to which I could not think of a response. For a holiday, in order to relax, I was taking a break, I’ve always wanted to come to Greece. When I didn’t reply he continued, Most of the people who come to the village do not leave the hotel, maybe they go to the beach or to one of the islands. They are never interested in seeing the interior.

As he spoke, we were driving inland, through a village. There were small single-story houses on either side of the road. The houses were built from concrete rather than stone, entirely charmless, it was true there was nothing much to see. Dogs roamed the street and the front yards were cordoned off by wire fences. In places, lengths of wire had come undone from the stakes. Plastic chairs stood outside the houses, warped and yellowed by exposure to the sun. It had nothing in common with Gerolimenas, an essentially picturesque village. This, rather than Gerolimenas, was the place where Stefano, and Maria, and Kostas, were from.

The driver was still watching me in the rearview mirror, he repeated the question—What has brought you to Mani? I had a brief impulse to reply in earnest—there might be relief in articulating my situation to someone, the purpose behind my visit, its perplexing duration, which was still undecided. Why not this man, essentially a stranger, one not obviously sympathetic, but also not unsympathetic? He might, for example, have driven Christopher at some point, he might even know where he had gone. But I did not. I said instead, without entirely knowing why, not even where the words came from, I’m working on a book about mourning.

The words sounded false as soon as I spoke them, the thinnest of fictions. Had Stefano met Christopher at some point, he would have known the explanation to be untrue, it was highly unlikely that two tourists would be writing two separate books about mourning. But to my surprise and relief, the explanation did not seem especially implausible to Stefano, he appeared interested and even pleased. He said that was not the usual reason why people came to Mani but it was a good reason, an interesting reason that he could understand, much better than the tourists who came for the beaches.

Had I come for the weepers, he asked. And I replied, Yes, exactly. And then could not think of anything further to say. Luckily he continued, had I ever heard a weeper, it was an amazing thing, very beautiful, very moving. No, I said. I’ve never heard one, I’ve only heard recordings—this was untrue and I had no idea why I continued to elaborate the meaningless lie, I had to hope that he would not ask me to describe the recordings, or tell him where I had obtained them, perhaps weepers did not allow their grieving to be recorded and he had known at once that I was not telling the truth.

I would have liked to change the subject but he was too enthused, he said to me that in fact his great-aunt was a widely admired weeper, one of the very best in the region. Sometimes she traveled great distances in order to mourn, people hired her even when there was a local woman available. It was too bad there wasn’t a funeral for me to attend, unfortunately nobody had died in any of the local villages. He said this without a trace of morbidity, he was only being practical. If I had come a month earlier! he said. Several people had died in the fires and the country had been full with the sound of weeping. His great-aunt and a friend of hers, who often sang together, had traveled from funeral to funeral, singing the entire way, they had poured their ululation—the music of grief—into the air.

I said that I was sorry to have missed it, an idiotic thing to say, but he did not seem to notice. It was a dying practice, he said abruptly. None of the younger generation wanted to become mourners, it was not even practiced in very many places outside of Mani. He thought this was a terrible shame. It was not that he was a traditionalist, he said. But nowadays, girls wanted to be famous, they wanted to be on television, they dressed like prostitutes and then were surprised when they were disrespected. He fell into a brooding silence, it was obvious he was talking about someone in particular.

At any rate, your friend Maria does not seem like that, I said, she seems like a very sensible girl. He was silent for a moment—his face had brightened at the thought of the woman and then darkened again, clearly there was some kind of impediment. Yes, he said at last. She is almost too sensible, she is a very practical girl. This is a great virtue but it also can make her a little hard. She does not appear to suffer fools easily, I said. He agreed. That is certainly true, she is sometimes impatient, it shows in her manner, she does not hide anything, she is incapable of being deceitful, and he sounded proud, almost as though he were bragging.

What does such a woman want, I asked, what does she hope for? (Was it in fact my husband?) What does she hope for? he repeated. To get married, to have children, to live in a nice house. His voice was irritated. This was impossible, no woman had so limited an imagination, Maria would be no exception. She had seemed to me ambitious, even if her ambitions did not necessarily mean that she wished to find herself gyrating on national television, even if her ambitions were for nothing more than escape, in some as yet undefined form.

I thought Stefano must know this, he looked ill even as he spoke. The proverbial heart, beating on his sleeve. I expected to feel pity—although I did not know what had taken place between Maria and Christopher, or what was transpiring between her and the driver—but instead I felt an affinity with this man, I had none of the clarifying distance of pity. This despite the fact that the reasons for this affinity—if indeed that was the word—were thin at best, there was nothing we shared other than the fact that we had both, hypothetically, been betrayed.

But only hypothetically, and only betrayal of a kind: we had no claims on these people, or merely partial and imperfect ones. Stefano had no formal claim but he had the weight of his affection; I had the legal claim but not the authority of love. Together, we might have had the right to be outraged or jealous, but as it was we had nothing but a private well of feeling. In my case, I thought, that feeling was increasingly ill-defined, as my life with Christopher began to recede into the past, everything that I learned about him—a meaningless detail from his new life, a revelation from his past one—was a source of potential discomfort, causing a pang of greater or lesser pain, or even occasional indifference. This was the process by which two lives were disentangled, eventually the dread and discomfort would fade and be replaced by unbroken indifference, I would see him in the street by chance, and it would be like seeing an old photograph of yourself: you recognize the image but are unable to remember quite what it was to be that person.

But Stefano—who knew whether his passion would also give in to this lassitude, or whether it would prove stronger and endure. Would he eventually marry another girl—there was another girl, whether or not he was aware of it, aware of her, he was a handsome man and for a handsome man there is always another girl—but still tend to the embers of his original love? People were capable of living their lives in a state of permanent disappointment, there were plenty of people who did not marry the person they hoped to marry, much less live the life they hoped to live, other people invented new dreams to replace the old ones, finding fresh reasons for discontent.

I watched Stefano as he chewed on his lip and stared at the road. He did not strike me as one of these inventors of discontent. He knew what he wanted, it was not even necessarily out of reach, although persuading the unwilling into love was a hazardous endeavor, and one that only rarely succeeded. Unfortunately, it is difficult to convince someone that they need something they cannot see the purpose of.

It began raining again as we reached the hotel. Stefano hesitated a moment before he switched the engine off, and then asked if I wanted to meet his great-aunt, the weeper. He was quick to add that I wouldn’t be able to hear the actual weeping—She doesn’t do it on order, he said, somewhat illogically, as I thought that was precisely what she did. But I would be able to talk to her, he said, to interview her, interview her, he repeated the phrase, as if it were foreign to his tongue.

I said that would be useful. I couldn’t think of any other response that would sound logical, I was supposedly in Mani researching the region’s mourning rituals, in my position Christopher would have accepted Stefano’s offer without hesitation. Perhaps in fact he had—if the great-aunt was so renowned a mourner, wasn’t it more than likely that Christopher had sought her out? He might even have shared with her his research and travel plans, the mystery of his current location. Stefano checked his watch, he said he thought his great-aunt would be home now, it was just after the time of her afternoon nap—she was old, she needed a siesta—if I was free, we could go and have a cup of coffee with her.

I said that sounded good. He took out his cell phone and dialed as I sat in the back of the car. He spoke only briefly before hanging up, his voice had been jovial, he was probably a good son to his mother, a man who cared about family. It’s fine, he said, I told her you were my friend, she is very happy to meet with you. We can explain about the book later. He started the engine and added that it was not far, only ten miles inland. We drove back down the road we had just traversed, Stefano was talkative, he seemed pleased to be introducing his great-aunt to me, pleased that I was coming. There was something almost disingenuous to his manner, I wondered again if he had driven Christopher, perhaps even to his great-aunt’s house, he might have spoken the same words, She is very happy to meet with you, her house is not far.

We soon approached another village, very similar to the one we had just driven through, a collection of low-slung houses along another single-lane road. He stopped the car in front of a small white house, there was laundry hanging from a line and plastic flowers in pots by the door, even from the outside it was somehow both threadbare and carefully tended. That impression did not change as we went up the front steps, Stefano knocking on the door before swinging it open—he now seemed younger, like a boy returning home at the end of the school day—and calling to his great-aunt, who appeared at once.

She greeted us with a smile, then shook her head apologetically as Stefano explained that she spoke no English. As she waved us into the kitchen and pulled out a chair for me she continued smiling, she seemed almost unremittingly cheerful. Nescafé? she asked—a question I could understand—and I nodded. Soon, the three of us were around a small table (it was covered in a vinyl tablecloth with a bright pattern of cherries and strawberries, garish but easy to clean) with cups of instant coffee, thin and bitter.

I asked her how long she had lived in the village, and after waiting for Stefano to translate, she replied, All my life, which Stefano translated back into English. I nodded, we continued in this way, each morsel of conversation passed back and forth by Stefano, the conversation unfolding more slowly than it otherwise might have. I was more often used to being in Stefano’s position—one of transmission, but also one of understanding—however, I found that I did not mind, in a curious way it took the awkwardness out of the situation. It was not exactly like speaking to a stranger, not for either of us, since in a way she was speaking not to me but to Stefano, her eyes moving back and forth between the two of us.

As I looked at Stefano and his great-aunt, tracing out the unlikely family resemblances between them, a crease at the eyes, the angle of the jaw, I thought of Christopher. Of my husband, who might so easily have been here, only a few days earlier. I almost thought I felt his presence in the room with us, he might have sat in this exact seat, opposite these exact people, looked at them exactly as I now looked at them. But what he would have made of them I did not know, I could not guess the questions he might have asked. As always, I returned to the absence that was at the heart of my experience of him.

I almost asked the great-aunt then if she had met Christopher, if he had been here in real life and not supposition. But I couldn’t locate the words, I didn’t know how I would phrase the question, and after a moment, I asked the great-aunt about the fires instead, whether she knew any of the parties involved. She laughed, her body shaking a little, she was short but not a small woman, her body looked as if it was made of compacted flesh, she was wearing a flower-print dress but her features were androgynous, perhaps by nature or perhaps by age. She knows everyone, Stefano said. The men behind the arson—she says they are boys. They are men, but they are boys. She smiled, nodding as he spoke, as if she understood English perfectly.

Should he ask about the weeping, Stefano said, lowering his voice and leaning toward me. I was startled, I had almost forgotten the reason for our visit, quickly I replied. How long have you been a weeper? It was an inane question, I felt immediately self-conscious, I almost thought Stefano gave me a look of reproach, perhaps the question was too blunt. Christopher would undoubtedly have made a better job of it. But Stefano promptly translated the question and the reply, My mother was a weeper, and so was my aunt, it is in the family, there was no question that I would not also become a weeper, once it became obvious that I could do it.

When did you realize you could?

When I was very young. Like I said, my mother and my aunt were both weepers, they would sing together, I remember being a child and hearing them perform at a funeral. I would sit with the bereaved, and I would watch them begin the wailing, they were famous, they performed together. So I was young when I began trying to sing. And I learned, they taught me first to sing, then to channel the sadness that is necessary to weeping.

They taught you this when you were only a child?

Even children have experience of sadness. At first, when I was a young woman, I would think about sad stories that I had heard, about soldiers who had been killed at war, and the wives and girlfriends who waited for them in vain. Eventually, as I became older, I had my own losses to call upon, and it became easier: I lost my father, my brother, then my husband, at this point in my life there is no shortage of inspiration.

So you think of a personal loss?

Yes. The songs themselves, they are fixed lamentations, they tell stories. But in order to really feel the songs, in order to trigger the emotion that you need to lament, I need to think about something personal, it is hard if it remains abstract. This is one reason why you become better as you grow older, when you are young, you do not have an intimate experience of death, of loss, you do not have enough sadness in you to mourn. You need to have a great deal of sadness inside you in order to mourn for other people, and not only yourself.

Her eyes were twinkling as she said this and she smiled, as if she had made a joke. Then she cleared her throat and looked at Stefano, as if waiting for him to ask the next question.

Do you think she would be willing to sing for me?

He seemed to hesitate—he had already told me it was unlikely—but then asked the question anyway. She paused, adjusting the folds of her skirt with her hands. She cleared her throat again and then began to sing. Her voice was low and throaty, she began almost tentatively, as if growing accustomed to its weight, raising one hand in the air as she sang in a series of atonal registers. She seemed then to find the thread she had been seeking, her fingers pulled together against her thumb as though she were drawing it through the air.

Her voice, as it unfolded across the room, was not beautiful. It was heavy, as heavy and awkward as the boulders that marked the Mani landscape, a collection of rocks. The notes dropped out of her mouth and tumbled across the room, first one and then the next and then the next. They accumulated, the room was soon full of their discordance. She continued, her voice growing in volume, the objects in the room vibrating, the sound of her singing transforming the kitchen interior where we sat. She began slapping her hand against the table, she closed her eyes and then she rocked back and forth, her hand still keeping rhythm.

Her voice raised an octave or two, she began to make a high keening sound, and as I listened, transfixed, I saw that there were tears gathering in her eyes, which she had opened very slightly, her head still tilted back. The tears rested on the bottom rim of her eye for a long moment before slowly trickling down. She paused for a ragged intake of breath and then continued, as if she were in a trance, her eyes now wide open, the lamentation pouring out of her, her face wet with tears.

I looked at Stefano, I wanted her to stop—she was in pain, and to what purpose? I felt at once the extent of my deception: I was not writing a book, I was not researching the ritual of mourning, there was nothing I could learn from her grief, whose authenticity I did not doubt. Notwithstanding the fact that it was a performance, essentially on demand, the entire situation a fabrication. And I understood that this was why she was paid, not because of her vocal capabilities, not even for the considerable strength of her emoting, but because she agreed to undergo suffering, in the place of others.

She did stop at last, and Stefano handed her a tissue, which she used to wipe away her tears. She took a glass of water, she did not make eye contact with me, I thought she looked—as she drank the water and waved away Stefano’s concerned attentions—embarrassed, as though she had been caught making a scene. I too felt embarrassed and soon stood up. She waved good-bye in a halfhearted way. I didn’t know how to ask Stefano about leaving some money for her so I left some bills on a table by the door. It didn’t feel like the right thing to do, I saw Stefano glance at the bills, but he didn’t say anything. It was still raining when we left, and we walked quickly to the car to avoid the rain.

In my room, I sat down on the bed. Despite the rain, the window was open and the fan overhead turned in slow, rhythmic circuits. I was exhausted, the afternoon had physically depleted me. I was not easy with the deception—the impersonation of Christopher, or at least his interest in Mani, his reason for being here, an act of duplicity that had taken me all the way into that house, that kitchen—still less with the phantom sense I’d had of my husband, sitting at that table, the odor of his presence even stronger than it had been in his abandoned room.

It had been three days since I had arrived, and there was still no sign of Christopher. For the first time, I felt a sense of panic—what if something had happened? I had to admit to myself that I was not clear about what my responsibilities were in this situation, Christopher had every right to disappear without being hounded by me. But hadn’t he been gone too long without word, wasn’t there something strange, something wrong about Christopher’s absence? I called the front desk and asked for a list of hotels in the neighboring villages, without specifying why. The list was not long, within five minutes Kostas had called back with the telephone numbers.

I immediately telephoned all the hotels. He was not staying in any of them, or if he was he was not using his name—although why would he stay in a hotel under a false name, even the notion was ridiculous—and I hung up, uncertain. Perhaps I should have asked Stefano outright if he had driven Christopher, if he knew where he had been planning to do his research, perhaps he even knew the driver Christopher had ultimately hired, it wasn’t impossible. A moment later, the telephone rang. It was Kostas, he asked if I needed anything further. I told him that I was fine. He hesitated, then said that Christopher had been seen yesterday in Cape Tenaro, not too far from Gerolimenas. I felt an immediate wave of relief, which was subsequently replaced by irritation—the entire time I had been waiting, Christopher had merely been sightseeing—I asked Kostas if he knew when Christopher would be back.

He said no, nobody from the hotel had spoken to him. He paused and then said, A friend of Maria’s saw him, he was with a woman. I was too surprised to respond. She is very upset, she is crying, he continued, and for a moment I didn’t know who he was referring to. I’m sorry, I said. Who has been crying? Maria, he replied, she has been crying, it is a real nightmare. Oh, I said, and then added without knowing why, I’m sorry. Don’t worry, Kostas replied, and he sounded cheerful, as if he were speaking of nothing of consequence, She’ll be fine. But would you like to arrange a car, would you like to go to Cape Tenaro to join your husband?

No, I said. My face was hot and I no longer wished to be speaking on the phone, I had to keep myself from hanging up at once. Kostas was silent and then said, Of course, and that I should let him know if there was anything further he could do. I told him that I would stay another night but no longer, that I was looking for a flight that would return to London the next day. Very good, he said. I hope you’ve enjoyed your stay with us. Yes, I said. Thank you, I have. I hung up and then I called Yvan and told him that I was coming home, and he said good, without asking any questions he said, Good, I am glad.