A Room in Athens

by Frances Karlen Santamaria

  As I see it, the last thing a Greek man would want is a Greek woman who is free, uninhibited, self-fulfilling, and who could really talk. He wouldn’t know what to do with her. And she would not know how to be with a man who considered her an equal. We are seeing something of this with Costis and Gella, whose marriage is a little shaky just now. She wants to be like all the other middle-class Greek girls, with clothes and free time and card games and a man who keeps her in her right place. Costis’s four-year self-exile in England has made him unfit to be a Greek husband. He told us how his family adored Gella when he was in the army and she was his mistress. But what outrage when he wanted to marry her—because she was not a virgin. Now they live in a room at his parents’ house and are looking for a place of their own.

  December 17

  Late afternoon. At Kolonaki Square with Joshua asleep in the baby carriage lent us by Liesel. It is old and beat-up, and I notice many people stare at it.

  The square is quite small. There are ten red benches on a flagstone patio, around which grow grass, shrubs, and the small orange trees. Stuck among the bushes is the most glib bust I have ever seen. It must be some nineteenth-century king, but it looks like a plaster-of-Paris replica of Cesar Romero as a young bottom-pincher.78

  The square is surrounded on all sides by the inevitable five-story white apartment buildings. On one corner is the British Embassy, on others, expensive pastry shops and cafés with outdoor tables, where, if a woman sits alone, she is taken for, and often is, a hustler.

  The people who sit on the benches are a mixture, typical perhaps, of this new Athens with its young middle class pushing up from a background of villages, islands, and peasant life with all its rigid codes. No, the people in the square today are not the usual Greek and French governesses carefully dressed in hand-tailored suits of rich fabric and fur collars. There are no children today in Kolonaki playing in front of the watchful, proprietary eyes of all who sit on the benches. But when they are here, they play quietly—compared with American children. They listen to their elders, look charming as they play, never answer back or fight, and are never scolded. All is obedience and affection, and a more or less quiet good time.

  On one bench is a soldier in khaki, his beret tilting jauntily over one eye, his trousers neatly tucked into high brown boots, his face a rosy tan. He is talking to a shop girl—I can tell because of her clothes: red-and-black-checked straight skirt on dumpy hips and legs, a red cardigan and a lavender cardigan over that. A turquoise band around her black hair. Battered shoes covered with the Athens dust. Her face is brown, round, and doubtless—I cannot see from this distance—covered with some black hairs on her upper lip and down the sides of her cheeks. He gestures with his hand. I guess from the motions of his fingers that they are missing the amber “worry beads” Greek men so often carry. She bends forward, moving her hand from nose, to mouth, to chest, folding her arms and looking as though she is relaxed and being simply who she is. One does not see such ease and forgetfulness often in Kolonaki.

  A child, a little girl, has come to fill out the square’s afternoon by batting a yellow balloon and jumping up and down.

  Across the square is one of the old peasant women who often come here to sit. Her face is leathery, with lines and seams. It is the only part of her body visible as she huddles on the bench. Her hands are tucked to her lean body and the rest is draped in black. Black kerchief, black dress and sweater, stockings, and shoes. She probably wears her hair braided in long thin tails to her waist. There are many such women who come to Kolonaki and sit and gossip and laugh together. They too are relaxed, and I think they must come here to embarrass the rightful Kolonakians.

  As people walk through, they are carefully studied from each bench. No one is allowed to pass unremarked. And the passersby study the benches. As in Italy, the favorite Greek pastime is the Staring Game. Across the street, on the opposite side of the square, a florist shop sells Christmas trees on the sidewalk. They stand under the orange trees in the warm, spring-like sun, and Christmas, a week away, is not to be believed.

  All around the square, the taxicabs are lined up; they are big American cars, and the drivers stand and dust them with the pink feather dusters. Suddenly, there is the sound of traffic in the narrow-angled streets. More and more people pass through the square, going back to work, going to shop. I hear the singing cries of the lottery men who walk up and down carrying long poles covered with paper chances. Benches fill, and Athens has come to life after the long midday lull. It must be five o’clock.

  Diary description of an afternoon scene at Kolonaki Square, in Athens, left largely unchanged in the book.

  I will take Joshua back soon, before it becomes impossible to cross the streets. Athenian drivers are as bad as any in Europe, and although grown men here, soldiers even, will peek into a passing baby carriage, no one would dream of slowing down a car to let one pass safely across the street. We were almost hit four times last evening trying to cross narrow Karneadou Street, Arno furiously yelling, “What’s wrong with the bastards!”

  Later

  Last week, Joshua’s seventh, he began to smile, and that wild, lopsided grin breaking out when I least expect it sends me into shrieks and squeals of pleasure. Arno tells me that the past few days I’ve turned into a crooning mother. When I do “make those sounds” he looks at me with some surprise, as he’s never heard them from me before. Nor have I. It seems as though Joshua gained full consciousness last week. Went from baby animal to baby human. He stares everywhere, at everything, cross-eyed with wonder, goggle-eyed with joy. His love, however, is the couch. It is the only place to sit in our small living room and it has a high back, and when I hold him over my shoulder he can stare at it. It is a hideous object covered with red stripes and dirty little flowers, and to him it is the most exciting thing in the world. He loves it. Staring and smiling and wishing (I can feel his body’s impulse) to hurl himself at it, he moves his tongue as though he wants to nurse from it. Love, love, love. I have actually felt pangs of jealousy. “Loud, red-striped sofa,” I mutter, and it has the satisfying ring of calling another woman a brazen hussy.

  December 18

  On Saturday afternoon, I wheeled Joshua through back streets of the Kolonaki section. At the ends of the streets in the near distance are the high, bare, purplish mountains. You can see white Athens spilling down the slopes, climbing up the sides. There are still some streets that show what prewar Athens must have looked like. Orange and yellowish houses with shutters and ironwork balconies; in the back are hanging laundry and unbaked crockery, in the front, olive trees, lemon trees, and bird cages in the windows of what seem like wealthy homes.

  Last night, I was singing Misirlou,79 the Greek snake-dance we used to come running across the campus to join. It is minor, haunting, irresistible. I sang it to the baby, who was lying on my lap. He had been smiling at me before, repeatedly breaking into those big, happy grins. When I started Misirlou, however, he became hushed, his eyes widened, and he seemed to be trying to lift himself. He did not smile once, but continued to stare at me. As I finished the song, he broke in on the final note. It was eerie—his desire to sing. Today, he is trying to make his voice speak. I talk to him and he tries to make, not random sounds, but the sounds that will be speech someday, pursing his lips in imitation of me and getting some g and h sounds. Arno was dubious when I told him last night but today he, too, saw Joshua grinning and cooing back each time I spoke. I wish I knew more about what to expect. His desire to communicate is intense and obvious at nine weeks. I don’t know if this is common or not. Anyway, he’s developing quickly and is so happy.

  We had the babysitter again, and we went for another of our long walks down to Omonia Square and back. Again, I’m aware of my effort not to talk constantly about Joshua. We grabbed dinner off the stands—strudel-like spinach and cheese pastry, and the souvlaki we have been half-living on since we’ve been here. It’s nearly Christmas and a few streets are decorated in rather Turkish-
looking patterns of lights. A number of shop windows are decorated and some people—not many—have lighted trees in their apartments, but for some reason it is all unconvincing. Like Japanese Santa Clauses.

  Saturday, when I took Joshua home in his carriage, an old woman stopped me. Her face full of concern, she pulled up the hood of the carriage. “Pourquoi?” I asked. She showed me by rubbing the back of her hand with her fingers that it was to keep the air off him. Then she tucked the blanket up over one ear and tied his wool cap tighter. She was so concerned for him that I let her go ahead but couldn’t help smiling and when I looked down I saw Josh grinning. I thanked her and took him home in the 65-degree winter afternoon.

  The Greeks are frightened of fresh air. Babies are kept in hot, closed rooms. Even our enlightened university-student sitter, Francisca, worries because the window is open in the room where he sleeps, and when I pulled him up gently she acted as though his head would fall off.

  Women here are not supposed to think much.

  December 20

  Liesel and George’s house is slowly being built. It has already taken three years, and it will be at least one more until it is completed. They live in a few finished rooms. It is, of course, being built not only for George and Liesel and the two girls, but for George’s parents and Liesel’s grandfather, a man of ninety.

  It will be a very nice house, and not unlike an American two-story home in the suburbs. Liesel does, in fact, live in the suburbs, up on a hill. We visit late in the winter afternoon. As we sit drinking the cloudy, whitish ouzo80 and water, with its strong taste of anise we have become fond of, Josh sleeps on the couch hemmed in by pillows, and we talk with Liesel. The two little girls, Antoinette and Maria, both gay and noisy in school clothes and braids, are being given their dinner of soup and the unsalted Greek bread in the adjoining alcove by a fat and rather jolly-looking cook. Actually, she not only cooks but also cleans and takes care of the girls. She sleeps in a room at the back of the house. Although she looks fifty at least, Liesel tells us that she is thirty-five; a puritanical woman who would never marry, because she thinks the love of man and woman sinful.

  We gathered she was a fairly common type, and I recalled Miss Elleadou’s fleeting reference to couples who had given up on sex altogether. The maid was putting great pressure on them, Liesel said, to send the girls to church even more often than they already went. Although the maid obviously did have a great deal to say about the household, I noticed the same tone of voice I’d heard the girls in the clinic use to the nurses, whenever Liesel spoke to her.

  The room we sat in had that look of an American summer cottage I had seen in other homes, even Frieda’s wealthier and more settled household. All the furniture was covered with the floral chintz: easy chairs, tabletops, straight-back chairs, couch.

  Liesel got up to see to some detail of the girls’ dinner, then she relaxed once more with her ouzo. “I am so tired,” she said. “There is so much work to be done at the office these days, and between working and the house going up and the girls—whew!” She rolled her great green eyes and threw back her head on the long neck.

  “The girls in the clinic thought you were American,” I told her.

  “I was in America twice,” she said. “The first time I was only seventeen. I was sent to a girl’s school in Connecticut. Everyone asked my father, how can you send her? It is so full of danger and sin. She will be unprotected. I have to laugh. Although I would stay out all night with my American boyfriend, we never did anything. We would talk by the hour. Here, where boys and girls do not date at all, but meet each other only at parties, there is a lot more of what they call sin. Here, if a boy and girl want to see each other alone they have to lie and plan and arrange to meet up in the mountains outside of town. Believe me,” she said in her dry, husky way, “when you go through all that to meet, you don’t spend the time talking. I have tried to tell that to people here, but they don’t believe it. I’ve stopped trying.”

  “Instant Photos,” taken for passports, December 1964, at an Athens photo booth. “Am sending you picture of mother and elf. The resemblance to Arno can hardly fail to hit you in the face, except of course, Arno would never wear a hat like that.”

  (Letter, January 12, 1965.) Right: Joshua at 12 weeks (passport photo).

  “How long were you in America the first time?” I ask.

  “A year. Then I came back to Greece, and after a while George and I were introduced and we were married. He wanted to study horticulture, so we packed up and went to Purdue.” She laughed. “It was hectic, those days. George didn’t know English at all well, and I had to help him with it and his studies. Then I got pregnant and I was so young and we didn’t have any money. People were wonderful to us. They gave us furniture for the baby and clothes, and got me to the doctor and all the rest. Then we had Antoinette—she’s a United States citizen, you know. And we were all in one room, George studying, and the baby crying, and me weeping and screaming, because I was having so much trouble nursing her till George made me stop—” Liesel looked through this room and into that other room in Purdue eight years ago. It was clear that to her it was still utterly precious.

  “The Americans were so good to me. I told you at the clinic I had hoped to be able to repay it a little. But that, too, is hard to explain to the people here. They don’t want to believe it.”

  “But why not?” Arno asked. “Why do the Greeks say as their great compliment, ‘Really, you don’t seem American.’” He leaned back and put a foot up on a stool. Liesel looked at the foot significantly, and with a smile said, “Well, when a Greek or any European looks at Americans, they see—” and she stopped.

  “Children?” he asked with a grin.

  “Well, yes,” she admitted, pointing to his foot. She looked away for a second, then broke into a grin herself. She said a few harsh yet apparently joking words to the girls who were dawdling over their soup and trying to get our attention. Even as she scolded, Liesel still retained some look of the American schoolgirl she had once been.

  “The Greeks here, if you want to know, are anti-American in good part because of the American-Greeks who come over in such number every year. They are really hated, unfortunately. And not for anything they do. But they grow up hearing about Greece from their parents or grandparents who left maybe twenty-five or fifty years ago. Then, when they see Athens, or our other towns, they are shocked. “Oh! You have electricity!” they say. “You have cars!” It is as though they expected Greece to have stood still. Then, even though it is more modern than they thought, when they get over that surprise, they complain about plumbing or other things, inconvenience, et cetera. Anyway, that is what the Greeks say. And of course, the Greeks are jealous. The American-Greeks have so much more money to spend.”

  “What do the Greeks say about Americans in general?” I asked. “Not the Greek-Americans, but the tourists, the ones they see at the American Express on Constitution Square.”

  She looked reluctant again for a moment but went ahead gamely.

  “We say they are rude and noisy and brash. People complain that they don’t bother to get to know the country, but just rush around with their guide books and go to the Acropolis and ruins. Modern Greece does not interest them.”

  We laughed. “Noisy!” I said. “The Greeks are like the Italians! You should hear the voices on our street in the middle of the night.”

  “You are really bothered by all this,” said Liesel. “I wish George were here too, but now let me see about our dinner for a moment.”

  “May I come?” I asked. As I stood, I could tell the ouzo had hit me hard. Feeling quite high I followed her to the kitchen, where she gave the maid the usual sharp-sounding instructions.

  It was late when George came in. He was a small, thin man fifteen years or so older than Liesel. His face was complex, humorous, and homely in a Lincolnesque way. He looked very unlike the other and more handsome Greek men I’d seen. But he also seemed much more likable, more cheerful, an
d less remote than most of them. We drank more ouzo and his daughters climbed over his knees. At eight-thirty, they were sent off to their room. Josh woke, nursed, and slept again. At last, we went to the table. Liesel turned on the radio for some music (there is no television yet in Greece), and we sat down to an enormous, fine dinner: after the appetizer came thick, rich, egg-lemon soup, followed by roast lamb, stuffed okra, spinach and cheese pie, salad. Finally, coffee and the elaborate Greek pastries. Once, when a political announcement came over the radio, Liesel and George looked strained and conversation stopped. When they spoke next, it was in Greek. “It was the Right,” Liesel said and nothing more. They missed American food they said, and we promised an American dinner. Several hours of laughter and good talk, and Metaxa brandy. As we were leaving, I told Liesel how good it had been for me to get out of our apartment and how fine the feeling, rare to us both now, of being among friends for an evening, after being so long away from home.