A Room in Athens

by Frances Karlen Santamaria

  The grandmother and great-grandmother looked dubious. Silently, the men left the room. I wondered uncomfortably how many centuries—or millennia—of tradition had been broken that afternoon, and how long Stella’s new freedom would last. I could not imagine these women allowing the baby to continue to go unwrapped. Seeing the baby’s arms move freely, aimlessly, was as much against their deepest knowledge and better judgment as restraint and wrapping were against mine. I could not believe we were meant to begin our lives in a straitjacket.

  The rest of the visit was a little awkward. Everyone was still friendly but I felt as though I had intruded terribly. It was getting dark when the cab came. Frieda thrust her hand in a glass case which held a collection of Greek dolls. She gave me one dressed in the native costume of some part of Greece.

  “For the baby,” she said. We waved our good-byes. It was dark as I rode back to Athens; the baby, held closely against me, was seeking hungrily. In the dark, I raised my sweater and he nursed. I still felt both disquieted and very pleased.

  How long and how widely in Europe was swaddling still practiced, and what, if anything, did it have to do with a certain passivity I had seen in European children? How would stifling the movement of arms and legs stifle the ability to think?73 As we got out of the cab at Karneadou, I thought with a smile how often Americans say that in Europe, and especially in the Mediterranean, babies are brought up more “naturally.” As far as I could see, their rearing seemed anything but natural. But, I thought, with my condescending smile vanishing—we may not swaddle or overdress in America, but we don’t breastfeed, either.

  Chapter VI

  The Spartan Athenian Couch

  December 10

  The baby is almost two months old. Life here has fallen into a rough routine. Arno works at the typewriter during the day from about noon till six, often handing me the just-finished manuscript pages over the baby’s head as he nurses. We discuss the characters as though they were intimate friends. They seem to live here with us, although, of course, they have residences and lives of their own.

  “Then what is Mark going to do?” I’ll ask. (Mark is the main character.)

  “Don’t ask me,” says Arno joking, but half-meaning it. “He may go to Europe.”

  The source of his gift remains mysterious to him as well as to me. We refer to the source as The Troll, will say he’s dormant lately, or turning over and grunting, or sometimes in full steam sending up ten different sparks at a time (when Arno has worked simultaneously on a poem, an article, his journal, a story, and the novel), the image being some gnome-like creature banging away at an anvil in a cellar.

  Afternoons, I leave him working and wheel the baby to Kolonaki Square; come back, shop for groceries or the peppery souvlaki for dinner, and the typing stops. The sharp staccato of his typing is a steady accompaniment to our daytime lives; its speed and accuracy seem to express perfectly the efficiency, single-mindedness, and discipline of his work life that I admire wholeheartedly but can’t myself achieve. We eat, and then it is time for Joshua’s bath on the coffee table in the round, yellow tub, and the final nursing. I must spend six hours of the day with the baby at the breast.

  By then it is eight or nine, and Arno usually leaves for the Plaka or to walk, ending up at some café, scribbling on napkins. He has made a few friends, whom we badly need, and these he sometimes asks home for me to meet.

  The evenings have their own nature and belong to me. The apartment is semi-dark, except for one light in the bedroom or bathroom. Often lately, Joshua can’t fall asleep and, after I’ve rocked him, nursed him again, sung to him, and I still can’t get him comfortable, I finally have to leave him in his crib to cry awhile. I can’t stand to hear the crying, so I turn on the water full-force in the bathtub and wash the day’s dozen diapers, sheets, shirts, and our own clothes. The running water will usually just cover the bleating cry.

  Transfiguration of excrement. When you become a mother, all of life transforms. I have seen on Arno’s face a combination of pain, revulsion, and anger watching me, once or twice, as I stood laughing, my robe running with the baby’s spit-up milk and the contents of a leaky diaper.

  I thought: “Oh, you are still thinking of it in the old terms.” When you are a mother and it’s your baby, those just don’t hold any more. What slides down the drain in the yellow water, what I see in the diapers is a mixture of him and me. I wash away the curds of my own milk and try not to hear his sobs which cut under the pouring water and into my gut.

  Sometimes, when I have tried very hard to make him comfortable and get nowhere, I become furious, want to shake him, even hit him. Sometimes I do shake him or rock him too violently in the carriage. Then I am ashamed of my temper and lack of control and feel guilty.

  Often it happens when I have just put him back in his crib around two in the morning and count on at least three hours of sleep for myself before the next feeding—and an hour later I hear him crying with colic in the next room.

  He is a very big, muscular baby and his appetite seems insatiable. At two-and-a-half months he is still nursing about every three or four hours around the clock. His demands on me, both physical and emotional, are so great that I need his sleeping periods as much as he does, so that I can greet him with eagerness and affection at the next meeting.

  Once in a while, when I have been counting on a rest from him and he won’t sleep, there are flashes, not just of anger, but resentment and actual hate. I find I’m okay as long as I let the true intensity of feeling come through (to myself, if not to him). If I let myself really feel the resentment and even the hate, it soon passes off, permitting my love to flow back swiftly on the next psychic wave; whereas, if I stifle my anger, I feel cold and rejecting toward him for hours.

  December 12

  As I tiptoe past the crib on the way to the kitchen, I am once again—as I’ve been a hundred times—struck by the beauty of the shape of his head.

  “If he never got any hair he’d still be beautiful,” I think. “But you’d have to have a mother’s eye to appreciate it, probably” (I add out of fairness but not truly believing it).

  The mouth makes a sucking movement, he stirs, and I go on to heat the water for our nightly camomile. Although I was told to give it to Joshua, we have taken to drinking it ourselves, as do most of the Greeks, at least the aging ones. It is a beautiful tranquilizer and soporific. Also good, supposedly, for soothing the stomach. It cheers and relaxes us both, and I love the tiny flowers and stems that lay swirling gently in the bottom of the cup, wet and golden. Its sweetness and warmth is part of the nightly ritual. The scent of the camomile flowers is haunting—it reminds us of something and neither of us can place it.

  We drink it lying on the Spartan Athenian Couch, our miserably uncomfortable bed which is composed of two cots, placed together, one considerably higher than the other. In fonder moments, I think of it as a split-level pallet, which thanks to the power of language gives it a certain tone in my mind.

  At two in the morning, uncomfortable and unable to huddle because of the precipice between us, freezing with cold, as winter has set in, teeth chattering, hearing loud snatches of a drunken song outside our windows from stragglers returning from the tavernas—we lie and talk.

  Last night, I finally spoke about something that had been bothering me for a very long time.

  “Do you realize, Arno, that the word ‘people’ is disappearing from the news media altogether? I haven’t seen it in the Times or magazines in—since I don’t remember when. It’s a shame and I miss it. Now everything is ‘persons.’”

  It was beginning to take on the proportions of a conspiracy in my head. “They” had taken a perfectly good, useful, friendly word and knocked it out of the language. But why? Who would want to do such a thing? It was no longer used except in its formal meaning as in “The peoples of the world,” never for just plain folks.

  “Listen,” said Arno. “Substitute: ‘The Persons, Yes.’ ‘Persons are Funny.’ �
�Of the persons, by the persons, for the persons.’ ‘Just plain persons.’ ‘You can fool some of the persons, some of the time.’”74

  And on and on. One thing led to another and when Joshua woke for a 3:00 A.M. feeding, we had just created a new creature called the Jeopard and its native country, Jeopardy—not far from its neighbors Picardy, Lombardy, Drunkardy, Slovenly, and Bastardy.

  December 13

  Late. And cold. It’s after 2:00 A.M. and I’ve just put the baby back in his crib.

  I know Arno is off making the social contacts we need to survive and getting a breather from his long grind at the typewriter, but I must admit I resent his going out almost every night. I haven’t spoken to him of my resentment. Am I still feeling too guilty over making a father of him to let it out? Or is that an excuse to avoid conflict?

  One day he brought home a Wellesley dropout on her way to India. She simply had—she said in her Wellesley accent—to smell the flowers in the Himalayas (which she pronounced to rhyme with dahlias). Deep from my bleary-eyed maternity, I looked at her unbelieving, intolerant, although, come to think of it, our own reason for being here isn’t that much more solid.75

  He did better when he brought blond Costis—a painter—and his wife, Gella. He had met them and about half-a-dozen other people to whom he enjoyed talking, at a place called the Nine Muses in the Plaka. We left Costis’ sister-in-law to babysit, and he took me there one evening. It was another world: carpeting, dim lights, benches, and low coffee tables around which sat sleek, intelligent, beautiful women, and men with interesting faces, sipping coffees, brandies. There was music—the haunting, sentimental melodies of Hadjidakis, the cauterizing music of Theodorakis.76 At the Nine Muses in Athens a rare thing was happening: men and women were talking to one another.

  People I had never seen came up and greeted Arno, who was obviously a regular. They laughed together and gossiped, picking up conversations whose beginnings I had missed, last week, last month.

  Oh. There he is. I hear whistling in the hall. Dinos, he says, was showing some poems he had written.

  December 14

  I went to the drugstore tonight to get the diaphragm for which Madame Kladaki had so magically fitted me. I told the druggist a size, and he turned to a pile of pessaries lying randomly on the counter in back of him. They appeared to be samples. He started to wrap one for me.

  I asked, God knows how, if he had any spermicide—any kind of medication to go with it. He looked at me with puzzlement and turned to his woman assistant.

  “Cream?” I asked. They looked amazed and shrugged, suppressing smiles. No. They had never heard of any such thing! Now, thinking back, I wonder if they thought I wanted to eat it.

  “Never mind wrapping it,” I said. “I won’t take it now.” I looked around the store. “Do you have saccharine?” I asked. Arno had wanted some for his coffee and the camomile tea. Two men came in and pushed me gently but firmly out of the way, stepping up so they could talk to the druggist. It was ten minutes before I could finish my business with him.

  I crossed Kolonaki Square in the cold dark and turned into Karneadou Street, a little dazed. As I neared the apartment, I could see Arno through the window; three coffee cups were on the desk and a cigarette burned unclaimed in the ashtray; his strong, dark head was bent over his work, and his typing was so rapid and expert it sounded like machine-gun fire in the hallway.

  I walked into the apartment humming a chorus of Hopa nina nai, and he looked up from the typewriter expectantly.

  “Well? I hear the song—I’ll bet you didn’t get it. I thought you wouldn’t be able to get a diaphragm without a written prescription from Madame Kladaki!”

  “Arno,” I said gently. “I could have gotten ten diaphragms, and probably all the wrong size—they were lying around like cough drops. It was the saccharine I couldn’t get. They absolutely refused to sell it to me without a written prescription.”

  “It may be a question of values,” I said, as he turned back to the typewriter.

  “Excuse me,” he said simply, “I’ve got culture shock.”

  December 15, Afternoon

  Is it irrational? Am I lacking some maternal feeling that I am only relieved that Joshua is quietly sleeping? It would never occur to me to check to see if he breathes (and possibly wake him in the process).

  Why do many parents look to see if a baby breathes? Frieda was terrified that if Josh lay on his stomach he wouldn’t be able to breathe, but a number of American parents I have known seem rather morbidly driven to peek in on a baby, “just to see if he’s breathing all right.” What if they spoke it more plainly: “Oh, I just want to look in to see if the baby is alive.” It is bald, shocking. Worse yet: “I’m afraid the baby might be dead.” And I think that may be the real motivation behind the frequent checking. I’m convinced it isn’t because of the rather rare crib death, but, instead, some lack of faith in the strength of the child’s grip on life—perhaps a disguised questioning of the strength of one’s own transmitted life-force.

  Our myths about babies come from watching several generations of those born drugged with the mother’s anesthetic. As I was growing up I saw, almost exclusively, babies born “naturally.” The couple of babies I have known who were born of anesthetized mothers were completely different. They seemed, by comparison, dazed, dopey, unsure they wanted to participate in the whole business of being alive in this world. They had none of the wide-eyed expectancy and brightness of the natural ones—or the good humor. It is easy to understand why people, seeing a couple of generations of these children, say that babies don’t see well, or only want to sleep, or are unaware.

  I have a feeling of completion these days unknown to me before in my life. I am like someone who, never having had quite enough to eat, finally knows what it is to feel full. But instead of dulling them, the fullness stimulates other appetites. I feel a release of all creative powers. I am beginning to write a magazine article and I’m working differently, and with a new discipline. It is as though the big job is done, and now it is possible to go on about one’s life. I am doing what I came to do—the prolonged girlhood is finally over.

  Joyousness in simply breathing out and in.

  December 16

  Sometimes when the writing doesn’t go smoothly, Arno dictates to me. Yesterday, he dictated while I typed, a very funny new chapter in which Mark and his girlfriend, Madeleine, try to act out their sexual fantasies with each other. Otherwise, a long Sunday. We are trying to talk Costis into coming to the States. Our Balkan babysitter, Francisca, who is Costis’s sister-in-law, hasn’t shown up for the third time, and we haven’t gone out in nearly two weeks. I think she left home. She is writing a book, she says. She told us how she would have to pay to have it published, as authors here normally do pay to see their work in print, rather than the other way around.

  Like her sister, Gella (Costis’ wife), she has the same beautifully petulant mouth. The most interesting feature of her face, perhaps, is the great pouting lower lip which she, like Gella, pulls out and down when she speaks. Arno and I have spent hours trying to imitate the way she says “of course.” It is absolutely original. Blond Costis with his English accent (“Boolsheet! I say Boolsheet to soch seely pearsons”) has told us that if he shows his paintings in some galleries that are willing to give him an exhibit, he would be fired from his job. Gella, who was married and divorced from her first husband, an Athenian, in Arizona, tells us what the Greek men are really saying when they talk to women on the street. “He told me I was beeootifol. He said he wanted to fock me.” And she pouts and tosses her blond hair and plays with her delicate, dark-blue worry beads like a horny nun. We spoke with Gella about it at length. I have gotten so I detest walking around the streets. Because I am foreign, I am automatically considered likely to be a whore. They follow me and talk to me—as they do with other foreign women and some Greek women. One evening, out on an errand, I was walking in the rain. Suddenly, I felt something on my leg. It was the po
int of an umbrella held against my shin. I felt, rather than saw, the presence at my side. The man’s voice went on and on, and he walked with me with the umbrella just touching my leg. I looked neither left nor right, but walked as he talked. After three blocks, he crossed the street and I saw a finely dressed, middle-aged man. This kind of thing—sans the half-comical, half-sinister umbrella—happens at least three times a day. And you can never pass by a man without reading his thoughts. The American man imagines. The Greek assumes it’s really possible, even likely. One evening, I was standing looking at a poster advertising a movie. A short man with a moustache watched me. I glanced at him and looked back at the poster. Then I walked home. After a block or two, I felt as if I were being followed but walked on until I was near our apartment. To check, I turned my head for an instant. The moustache was indeed several feet in back of me. I turned into the apartment and could see him searching for the bell! (Hustlers here often live in the plusher buildings, give a single name on the bell, or have a special little light.) He was still there five minutes later, certain that because I had turned around I was giving him an invitation. Arno finally threw open the window and shouted at him and he disappeared.

  Costis tells us that men not only tell pretty girls they are pretty and that they want to “fock” them, but they often make a special point of telling a homely girl just how homely she is. It is a fact of Athenian middle-class life that there are summer widows—the wives of men who spend the tourist months around Constitution Square to pick up the English, Scandinavian, Dutch, and American women who are the special prey of the Athenian man.77 They are special to him for the same reasons the Greek man may have a special charm for her. She is Northern. He is (in her mind) Southern. He must, therefore, be passionate and free. She (he thinks) is from the North, where life is freer. Not so many rules and prohibitions. She is sexually more willing and responsive. More passionate, in short, than the Greek women. Mostly, she is more accessible. She can even be talked to. Greek men, especially the young ones, complain that no man can talk to a Greek woman. They are interested in clothes and money and small talk and not in understanding a man, nor in sex. From what Costis tells us, and the new friends that Arno is meeting at the Nine Muses, we gather that “it is a miracle almost beyond belief if a Greek girl moves her hips in bed,” and that even among the Greek equivalent of the dolce vita crowd, it is hardly unusual for a girl to go to bed with her lover while moaning “it’s a sin, it’s a sin.” But how could things be much different? A Greek girl is raised from the first moment to be a second-class citizen. (“Let them cry.”) Her marriage is arranged and, in the middle class, she is carefully schooled to fit in with the husband and, those very important people—who must also approve of her—his friends. To make up for lack of romance in her life, she focuses her attention on clothes, furniture, and other goods and spends much time playing cards with her women friends. The feeling against men is bitter.