To the Wedding

2

Several weeks went by. Somebody speaking French in the crowd, my selling another tama with a heart on it, the screech of a motorcycle tearing away from the traffic lights — from time to time such things reminded me of the railwayman and his daughter Ninon. The two of them passed by, they never stayed. Then one night, at the beginning of June, something changed.

In the evenings, I walk home from Plaka. One of the effects of blindness is that you can develop an uncanny sense of time. Watches are useless — though sometimes I sell them — yet I know to the minute what time of day it is. On my way home I regularly pass ten people to whom I say a few words. To them I’m a reminder of the hour. Since a year one of the ten has been Kostas — but he and I are another story, as yet untold.

On the bookshelves in my room I keep the tamata, my many pairs of shoes, a tray of glasses with a carafe, my fragments of marble, some pieces of coral, some conch shells, my baglama on the top shelf — I seldom take it down — a jar of pistachio nuts, a number of framed photographs — yes — and my pot plants: hibiscus, begonia, asphodels, roses. I touch them each evening to see how they are doing and how many new flowers have come out.

After a drink and a wash, I like to take the train to Piraeus. I walk along the quayside, asking the occasional question to inform myself which big ships have docked and which ones are going to sail that night, and then I spend the evening with my friend Yanni. Nowadays he runs a small bar.

Sights are ever-present. That’s why eyes get tired. But voices — like everything to do with words — they come from far away. I stand at Yanni’s bar and I listen to old men talking.

Yanni is the age of my father. He was a rembetis, a bouzouki player, with a considerable following after the war and played with the great Markos Vamvakarious. Nowadays he picks up his six-stringed bouzouki only when old friends ask him. They ask him most nights and he has forgotten nothing. He plays sitting on a cane-seated chair with a cigarette stuck between the fourth and little finger of his left hand, touching the frets. It can happen that if he plays, I dance.

When you dance to a rembetiko song, you step into the circle of the music and the rhythm is like a round cage with bars, and there you dance before the man or woman who once lived the song. You dance a tribute to their sorrow which the music is throwing out.

Drive Death out of the yard

So I don’t have to meet him.

And the clock on the wall

Leads the funeral dirge.

Listening night after night to rembetika is like being tattooed.

*

Ah my friend, Yanni said to me that June evening after we’d drunk two glasses of raki, why don’t you live with him?

He’s not blind, I said.

You repeat yourself, he said.

I left the bar to buy some souvlaki to eat at the corner. Afterwards, as I often do, I asked Vasilli, the grandson, to carry a chair for me and I installed myself on the pavement a good way down the narrow street opposite some trees where the troughs of silence are deeper. Behind my back was a blind wall facing west and I could feel the warmth it had stored during the day.

Distantly I heard Yanni playing a rembetiko which he knew was one of my favourites:

Your eyes, little sister,

Crack open my heart.

For some reason I didn’t return to the bar. I sat on the cane-seated chair with my back to the wall and my stick between my legs and I waited, as you wait before you slowly get to your feet to dance. That rembetiko ended, I guess, without anyone dancing to it.

I sat there. I could hear the cranes loading, they load all night. Then a completely silent voice spoke, and I recognised it as the railwayman’s.

Federico, he is saying, come sta? It’s good to hear you, Federico. Yes, I’m leaving early tomorrow morning, in a few hours, and I will be with you on Friday. Don’t forget, Federico, all the champagne I pay, I pay, so order three, four crates! Whatever you think. Ninon’s my only daughter. And she’s getting married. Sì. Certo.

The railwayman is talking Italian into a telephone and standing in the kitchen of his three-roomed house in the town of Modane on the French side of the Alps. He is a signalman, Grade II, and the name on his letterbox is Jean Ferrero. His parents were emigrants from the rice town of Vercelli in Italy.

The kitchen is not big and seems smaller because of a large motorbike on its stand behind the front door which gives on to the street. The way the saucepans have been left on the stove shows that the cooking is done by a man. In his room, as in mine in Athens, there’s no trace of a feminine touch. A room where a man lives without a woman, and man and room are used to it.

The railwayman hangs up the telephone, goes over to the kitchen table where a map is spread out and picks up a list of road numbers and towns: Pinerolo, Lombriasco, Torino, Casale Monferrato, Pavia, Casalmaggiore, Borgoforte, Ferrara. With scotchtape he sticks the list beside the dials of the bike. He checks the brake fluid, the cooling liquid, the oil, the pressure of the tyres. He feels the weight of the chain with his left forefinger to test whether it’s tight enough. He turns the ignition on. The dials light up red. He examines the two headlights. His gestures are methodical, careful and — above all — gentle, as if the bike was alive.

Twenty-six years ago Jean lived in this same three-roomed house with his wife, who was called Nicole. One day Nicole left him. She said she had had enough of him working at nights and spending every other minute organising for the CGT and reading pamphlets in bed — she wanted to live. Then she slammed the front door and never came back to Modane. They had no children.