A Room in Athens

by Frances Karlen Santamaria

  The baby sleeps. His eyes move back and forth behind the lids. Twelve days old. Does he dream? What images collect in such a sleepy dozen days? Of what to dream? Darkness? Light? The feel of the breast or the sensations of sucking? Perhaps a dim, moving shape? …

  As we walk outside I often stop under trees so he can study them from the carriage. I find I am always thinking “How does it look to him? What must he see from that position?”

  As she herself realizes, her isolation probably intensifies her focus on her baby, though I think she would have been a doting mother in any case: not only had motherhood been a dream since she was a girl, but she was also very much in love with my father and had endured a miscarriage and a ghastly illegal abortion, which had left her with deep remorse and an intensified yearning for a child, mingled with a fear that childbirth might not be physically possible for her.10

  No doubt her enthrallment with her infant, and her struggles to learn how to become a mother, will raise an empathetic smile for many women who read it. For others, these pages may appear, in places, cloying—the sort of baby stories told by all enchanted new parents, oblivious to listeners’ polite indulgence. But any tendency toward sentimentality or self-preoccupation always quickly yields to a distancing curiosity and, often, a saving wit. She also is courageously candid, especially for that era, about her rage at her newborn, sensuality in nursing, and her own absurdities, like jealousy of a sofa. When she realizes that she is lapsing into “mommamania,” she tries to curb it.

  During these months she is not completely alone, though, and part of the interest of this portion of the story is her acquaintance with two young Greek women, Hari and Liesel, who in their separate ways have returned to Athens after living in America and are dangling uncomfortably between cultures. In fact, throughout the diary, she encounters women—including the girls in the clinic and Mme. Kladaki herself—who each occupy a slightly different position in their relation to traditional Greek culture amid the changes of the sixties, and this is another motif running through the diary.

  Meanwhile, my parents were coming to suspect that they might not reach their charmed island before my father had to return to the Holiday offices (he had been promoted amid a shakeup of the editorial staff while they were in Greece, and summoned back with some urgency). By now, however, they were doubtful that their island would hold the idyll they had sought. Their European travel and their stay in Greece had led my mother to a more mature view about not only her island fantasy but also youthful fantasies in general. One by one, she realizes ruefully, her girlish daydreams about adult life—love, childbirth, motherhood, marriage, fatherhood, artists, travel to exotic places—are all falling apart in this fabled land of myth-making. “I could almost call the past year’s journal The Death of Fantasy,” she writes toward the end of their stay. She concludes with a statement that sounds like an adage, yet is no less true for that, and it rings with particular truth given her experiences in Athens:

  That Greece, where baths and changing clothes and sleep are sweet, and where, several thousand years ago, Homer’s hero cried out for light—if only to die by it—is a state of the spirit only, to which plane fare can’t take you.

  • • •

  When the diary was published, five years later, in October 1970, my family, America, and Greece had all radically changed.

  My parents had divorced in 1969 and had quickly remarried; I also had a younger brother, born in New York City. America had erupted with the flower-power movement, campus riots, assassinations, and all the rest of the fury of the period. In Greece, a military coup in 1967 had overthrown the government, establishing the seven-year dictatorship of “the Colonials.”

  In the decades since the book was published, far greater changes—technological, political, and cultural—have reshaped the world in ways that were then unimaginable. Childbirth has been revolutionized by astounding technological advances, contributing to the sense that my mother’s experiences occurred long ago: her diary records that distant time before epidural injections allowed mothers to be both conscious and pain-free during labor; before ultrasounds allowed us to know a baby’s gender; and before genetic tests revealed its health. Back here in 1964, we see a Greek doctor divine (correctly) a fetus’ gender as a boy simply by the way it appears to sit in the womb as she looks at my mother’s belly. Moreover, the women in the clinic beds freely smoke cigarettes.

  The Athens that my mother knew has also undergone vast changes. The city, with its suburbs, is three times as large as it was in 1964; the metro system has been built out to serve its population. The kamakia—the Greek men who pursued European women tourists in Syntagma Square, of whom my mother wrote—have faded away. Computers, mobile devices, and the Internet are of course ubiquitous, while during my mother’s time, even television had not yet reached Athens. The city has also received new immigrant groups, from Iraq, Albania, Pakistan, and elsewhere, adding diversity to the population. Mme. Kladaki’s clinic has vanished; but maternity clinics have proliferated. The custom of swaddling infants is not as widely practiced, nor are dowries required of brides, nor are marriages generally arranged, nor are women expected to leave the taverna and kafeneion solely to men.

  Nevertheless, a reader of this diary who knew Athens in 1964 would, I am told, recognize much: the wild traffic, the crowds of Constitution and Omonia squares, the street sponge-sellers and lottery-ticket vendors, the ever-present worry beads, the city’s afternoon siesta, the white apartment buildings, and always, the Acropolis and the hills that ring the city in the violet twilight—all remain and define the city as in my mother’s day.

  • • •

  The book received little notice. Perhaps, amid the clamor and turmoil in America at the time—the Charles Manson murders and the Kent State killings bracketed its publication—such a quiet little book was simply too quiet, and Greece too far from the country’s urgent preoccupations, to be much noticed. And a narrative about natural childbirth and motherhood, as it was billed on its dust-jacket, would have excited little interest among male book reviewers and potential male readers. In 1974, however, the book was honored by inclusion in the first mainstream anthology of women’s diaries, Revelations: Diaries of Women,11 where it has continued to be enjoyed, in excerpt, by generations of readers and included in curriculums for college courses. In the pages of this groundbreaking collection, she shares company with such great writers as Anaïs Nin, George Sand, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, Katherine Mansfield, and one of her own favorite authors, Virginia Woolf.

  The Revelations anthology marked the beginning of an explosion of interest, both among the general public and across academia, in women’s diaries, letters, travel journals, and autobiography. These works, left unpublished or relegated to obscurity for decades, even centuries, have in an astonishingly brief time gained a wide audience and become a touchstone in academic fields such as gender studies, feminist studies, cross-cultural studies, English composition, and so on. A Room in Athens, as the diary, or memoir, of a daughter of the New World who gives birth at the ancient source of Old World civilization and suddenly faces challenges to her most fundamental beliefs about the cultural roles of women, men, and children, is in many ways relevant today as it could not have been nearly fifty years ago.

  My mother, after she returned from Greece, continued to write fiction as well as in her diary. She never pursued a career, although she worked, for her own pleasure, as a freelance copy editor for publishing houses for many years. Family and writing provided her with ample fulfilment, and she was both a daily writer and a caring and devoted mother (she would have four children, all by natural childbirth, in New York). However, in her early forties she began showing symptoms of what was eventually diagnosed as multiple sclerosis, a degenerative nerve disease which crippled her and slowly wiped her mind blank. She lived the remainder of her life in a Manhattan nursing home, where she died, in her sleep, in 2013, at age seventy-six.

  Early in her book, shortly
after learning of her pregnancy, she writes, “I think, rather I vow, he will have good parents. He, or she, will have a father to be proud of. And I shall try to be the best mother I can.” She kept her vow to all her children: she was an extraordinarily loving mother, struggling to be so even as she saw her disease begin to debilitate her.

  During her short active life, her trip to Greece provided the only period when her gifts could fully flourish before she began to show her disintegration, less than a decade after the book was published.

  When I was growing up, she had little reason to speak of Greece to me in our daily lives. But I knew I had been born in Athens and of her book. And in addition to the Cartier-Bresson photographs on our walls, I remember how she often played the Greek-music records she had received as a parting gift by her Athenian friend Liesel; and I remember the striking, snow-white wool cape, or cloak, with its black fringe, which was made for her in Greece, hanging in her closet, and sometimes worn. Although she writes in the diary’s pages that she brought back a shard of the Acropolis for me, I don’t recall ever seeing it in New York, and I would certainly treasure it now. On the other hand, I have some of the books my parents read in Athens, which I grew up seeing on their shelves: Rebecca West, Svevo, The Odyssey, De Vries. The old hardcover spines lined up on my own shelf bring my parents’ Greece to me with a strange immediacy.

  If my mother left Greece disillusioned, back in America she would recall her time in Athens fondly. This nostalgia shone through when she did reminisce, and she spoke once or twice wistfully of wanting to return to Athens and to chat again with Mme. Kladaki and Liesel. Long afterward, I found among her diaries unfinished letters she had begun to write to each of them. For all its frustrations, her time in Athens was revealed, unexpectedly, as the Greek idyll she had sought.

  At the end of her book, she mulls what significance my birth in Greece might hold for me when I was grown. I haven’t yet been to Greece. But through her writing I have many times visited her vivid and living Athens of 1964. And it is in her diary of Greece that I hear again her true voice, her youthful voice, before her long illness—witty, insightful, earthy, erudite, adventurous, romantic, American, and, yes, barbed. I think, I hope, it is a voice that others will find companionable, likable, that of a friend.

  It is impossible for me to know how much of my affection for this book is based on its merits. But for readers, both women and men, it offers, I believe, an abundance of riches for such a small volume: a fascinating travel journal, a time-capsule from the 1960s, an exemplar of the diary form, and more. But perhaps most importantly, it offers simply a beautifully written story whose subject—a woman’s first pregnancy and motherhood—is far older than even Greece, yet remains as new as the nurslings which today fill Athens’ many modern clinics and hospitals.

  JOSH KARLEN

  NEW YORK CITY, APRIL 2016

  A Room in Athens

  To AMK

  (1959–1969)

  with thanks

  and to the memory of Thel

  To rejoice in life, to find the world beautiful and delightful to live in, was a mark of the Greek spirit which distinguished it from all that had gone before.

  —Edith Hamilton

  Dear to us ever is the banquet, and the harp, and the dance, and changes of raiment, and the warm bath, and love, and sleep.

  —Homer, The Odyssey

  Prologue

  March 21, 1964, Friday

  I am going to have a baby, early next November. Today, the first day of spring, I know for certain. We are sailing for Tangiers in June and the baby will be born in Europe, Athens perhaps. Arno and I have not talked much about it yet. I feel like telling people, calling the family long-distance, but we’ve barely said anything to each other. Arno is worried about keeping his job with the magazine until we leave, worried about having enough money to go to Europe, and worried about selling articles and stories.

  At night, I dream of children and colored pigeons’ eggs and rites of passage. Before I suspected the presence of the child, I dreamt I spoke to my dead mother in peace and as an equal—and other conflicts from long ago resolved themselves in dreams. Part of the mind must know long before consciousness makes the discovery, feigning surprise. An aunt told me how once, not knowing she was pregnant, she dreamt she broke two eggs in a bowl and the next day she miscarried twins.

  I have been suspended for several weeks sleeping long hours like an animal and then sleeping again. Sleep itself has changed. It drops on me like a heavy black curtain, sudden, deep. Both the tiredness and very slight nausea are passing. I have carried the presence in my womb perhaps six or seven weeks now.

  My body is forming another human body with its comforts, good feelings, pulsings of the veins, arches, and warm flesh and hair. And miracle of all miracles, it is Arno’s child I’m making.

  April 1, Wednesday

  Today we met to get our passport photos taken. The trip is almost on top of us. Arno’s photo is a good one. Suddenly, he looks full grown. The boy has disappeared. His tie is askew, his face with the moustache is vigorous, handsome; the whole impression one of energy and strength. His brow is slightly lined, as it has been since he was eighteen, and for the first time in any picture, the premature gray in his hair can be seen.

  Right now I am wondering what to do with our two Siamese cats. Who will be willing to take Charlotte and Emily for so many months? And I can’t bear the thought of leaving them.

  Later.

  I look down at the passport photos before me on the table. Arno. Me. Another set of pictures in somebody else’s gallery. “See? This is/was my mother. This, my father.” I think, rather I vow, he will have good parents. He, or she, will have a father to be proud of. And I shall try to be the best mother I can.

  I read the other day that at this stage the embryo becomes a fetus; that his features are made, his eyes wide open and lidless, his skeleton being formed; and I believe the sex is readily distinguishable. All the major systems have been formed; he even has his own blood system! I was amazed to find out that at two months he could live for a few hours on his own!

  Imagine saying to another human being, “Look, here is the world.”

  April 15

  Terrible scare last week when I discovered that due to my doctor’s unreadable handwriting, the pharmacist gave me the wrong drug last month. It turned out to be similar to the prescribed one, but the incident left me shaky and worried.

  April 22

  The baby is growing quickly and obviously. I am wearing loose blouses and some borrowed maternity clothes. I start to feel my centers shift; and I begin, unconsciously, to make the gestures all pregnant women make: the occasional rubbing of the swelling belly, as though checking to see that the swelling remains; the light resting of the hand upon it when one sits; the heavy tramping upstairs, lifting one foot and putting it down flat like a small child as I walk up the five flights to our loft.

  Next week I go into the fourth month. I am completely happy. Arno automatically says “he” when speaking of the baby now, and although he did not want me to become pregnant when I did, he seems quite intrigued with my bursting front. He shows a new gallantry and protectiveness.

  June 11

  We drove down the turnpike from Philadelphia on our way to the boat today. Tomorrow we will sail for Casablanca, then debark at Tangiers. At the end of the voyage, whatever it will be, is Greece and the birth.

  We were singing in the car—the chorus from a Greek song: Hopa nina nina nai. The song—with its lilting gaiety—has become a symbol. Our friend Ben had been to Greece a few years ago. He has told us of the hospitality extended to him in the villages, of a grand, tough old man who had taken him under his wing, and most especially, of lying in bed in a whitewashed room one morning with his fiancée while outside his window a boy on a white horse passed by singing that song. Hopa nina nina nai, Hopa nina nai; we don’t know what the words mean and it doesn’t matter; the song has a life of its own.12

&
nbsp; The anxiety, the fears I have had about the trip, have given way to euphoria. The car sped us, hurtled us toward—what? Whatever that grand adventure is to be. The breathless, unspoken seeking.

  June 21, 3:00 A.M.

  We are passing up the coast of North West Africa. From the ship, the land looks stylized, stark; dark hills and moon; a Rousseau painting. Suddenly, we are hit by a breeze carrying mint, earth, and a thousand sleeping flowers. After two weeks on board, can’t get enough of the earth, of the jasmine smell of Africa. We come toward the harbor lights and the great engines stop. Unexpected silence. We are outside the port of Tangiers.

  TANGIERS

  June 26

  We are leaving here soon. The city lies heavy on us, undigested; kaleidoscopic and dizzying. We are frankly exhausted and disoriented. The Arab section, where we have stayed, is a place of tortuous, winding alleyways that give the sense of depths within depths, leading into some centerless maze. Up and down narrow, steep steps walk veiled women, men in their robes—the jalabas13—and symbolic headdresses, ragged children, and beggar women carrying infants with flies on their mouths (they are often abandoned outside the city). Several times a day and in the night, the voice of the muezzin14 is broadcast from the mosque outside our window. It insinuates the city. Sometimes there is a topsy-turvy quality to the life we watch: live hens are carried upside down by their feet; a child not yet three carries his infant brother on his back; women in veils and sunglasses ride by on motor scooters. Adolescent boys, dressed as women, do the belly dance. One boy beats a dog across the windpipe with a stick; another tries to sell us a beloved hedgehog. A gouged eye turns its vacant white on us; sores run. As we walk people stare at us, especially our shoes, as though they hold some terrifying secret. Beggars murmur and pluck our sleeves every few steps. We give to one, and a silent crowd gathers around us, palms up, making the money sign. At night, the air is choked with the pervasive jasmine smell, pulsating and dense. We don’t know the rules here, or if there are any. We are vulnerable, unsure.