A Room in Athens

by Frances Karlen Santamaria

  “It is good for us, too,” said Liesel. “We have had no one for dinner for more than a year. We could not dream of asking a middle-class Greek couple to our house for an evening like this. Why? Because the house is not finished, the furniture not right. We have no place in our social lives for the informal visit. This was a very American evening you had! For a Greek evening we will have to go out to the Plaka for music and food one evening soon.” Once again, the feeling of a rigid structure, unbreakable rules, right ways and wrong ways. The wind was too cold. It tore at the baby’s blanket and we hurried to the little Citroën and waved good-bye from the car.

  December 22

  For the fourth time now in a week, I have seen a young woman sitting alone holding a baby, as I used to before Liesel gave me her old carriage. She is, I think, either American or English. I like her looks and would like to talk to her. I find that now, like the Greeks or Europeans, I too watch the foreigners as I sit in the square each afternoon. I peg people by clothes and walk and shoes and a dozen subtleties, staring sharply as the Greeks do.

  It is true, unfortunately, how readily Americans can be spotted by their graceless, swinging walk, their lack of minute-to-minute concern for appearances. The English walk is as graceless as the American, perhaps more. But it is hard to tell the national differences, on sight, between groups of migrating kids (boys with shoulder-length hair wearing Army clothes and girls with straggly hair, dressed like the boys). They are from Paris, or Scandinavia, or London. We saw them all over the Left Bank81 and in other parts of Europe. The Greeks stare at them in amazement. My vision is becoming Europeanized. New awareness of “grace,” sedateness, etc. Sometimes, when I have playfully pushed the baby’s carriage ahead of me a few feet and then caught up with it, I have received shocked stares. I feel like a child. It is unimaginable adult European (certainly Greek) behavior; it is too undignified.

  As she insisted, Liesel went with Arno to buy a radio. She would not hear of him going alone. He came back with a Japanese transistor for which he paid eighteen dollars—the price seems high to me. But I wonder what it would have cost had Liesel not gone.

  From the American Army base station nearby, we get the news and frequent weather reports. The American passion for weather is comic here, for in Athens the weather so rarely changes it is ridiculous to report on it every half hour. But it must be habit.

  December 24

  Yesterday, I met Hari, the girl with the baby. She was born in Athens and went to the American school here until she was eighteen, then went to America to study biophysics. She is working for her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin. This is her first trip back in seven years. The baby, a beautiful, chubby, dark-haired boy, is ten months old. She says with a trace of accent that she and her husband, an Athenian she met and married at the University of Wisconsin, have just divorced, and that she has brought the baby back for her family to take care of until she finishes school in the States. Her family insists—and it hurts her—that the baby looks foreign. Hari is slight and dark-haired; she has black eyes and a long face. Her look is one of thoughtfulness; she does not look happy, yet not unhappy. She is rather plain and yet not unattractive. She enjoys her son, who burbles and grins on her lap, and she brightens when she plays and talks with him. But seated on the bench holding the child, she seems very much alone. I like her and I, too, am so alone each day as I sit my few hours in the little square with the baby sleeping or staring at the trees above, feeling each moment—even as I enjoy the sun or the souvlaki I have bought from a stand across the way, or read—that I am a stranger, that the life around me is alien, often hostile, or merely unaccepting and closed. I hunger for companionship. Today, when we left the square late in the afternoon, both going our separate ways, I felt enriched, and oddly secure in the knowledge that she will come there again and I will not sit so isolated in the long afternoons.

  December 28

  I try not to talk about the baby obsessively to Arno. I don’t want to become an obsessive mother. I have known—and been repelled by—several of my bright school friends who became what I call “Mamamaniacal.” I remember Arno saying to me years ago, when I first wanted a child, “I’m afraid it would fill your whole life and you wouldn’t have room for anything else.” When, if ever, do most young men actively want to become fathers?

  Arno hadn’t really wanted to be a father. Yet. He objected to the accidental (read unconscious-deliberate) pregnancy. (How awesome, I suppose, to say, “I’m ready. Today, we will create life.”)

  Where did I read that having a child destroys a man’s sense of his own immortality?

  It is true that I no longer belong exclusively to him. The baby is a preoccupation (of necessity) that borders on obsession. We start to make love, but my ear catches a whimper and I have to try to block it out. Or he wails and we decide to ignore it, which is as bad as if I got up. Arno says nothing, or quietly, “damn,” or even grins and shrugs, but I feel guilty, responsible for having brought this upon us.

  Did I indeed plan an accident? I don’t know. Never consciously. (In the old days it was enough to be responsible for one’s conscious actions—now we are held to account for what we may have done without knowing it.)

  But the “blame” for conception (not that I have been overtly blamed) rests on me. It never occurs to me to say “Hey, you take care of him—it’s your kid, too.” (Partly breastfeeding is responsible. It makes an unbreakable union.)

  I often think of the elflike Tony West welcoming his eleventh child in those strange Welsh hills, saying, “A child comes when he wants to be born.” Comforting as it is, I can’t really accept it; in my head I hear the voice of an old black woman I know saying drily, “Honey—it take two to tango.” But I don’t really buy that, either.

  Old standard: He got her pregnant. Now it goes, “She let him.” Responsibility has gone from totally masculine to the opposite.

  December 31

  Tonight is New Year’s Eve and the streets are bustling with hurrying people carrying balloons and flowers and large, round flat cakes with the date written on them. The shop windows are full of small, butchered lambs, whole little dead pigs. Geese and ducks—naked of feathers—swing from their feet, their heads tastefully wrapped in paper cones.

  There are flowers everywhere in newly built stands on the sidewalks, and the grocers have festooned their shopfronts with the drooping stalks of onions and the green hair of leeks. The beggars, who appeared about a week ago for the first time, have all turned out after a rest from Christmas. Beggar women carry infants as in Morocco, but without the swarms of flies around the babies’ mouths and eyes; men lead “blind” little boys from house to house to ask for drachmas (and American cigarettes when I open the door).

  It is a happy day in Athens. Coins are being cooked into cakes,82 the bakery man is hoarse from yelling to the sweating bakers. Tonight, everything stays open late. Families visit and exchange gifts. We will probably take the baby and walk up Stadiou Street.83

  I took Joshua to the doctor that Liesel recommended to get his first shots against diphtheria, whooping cough, and tetanus. What a surprise! He was ten weeks old that day and had almost doubled his birth weight; this usually takes about five months. Dr. Papadatous was amazed, and told me I must have plenty of good milk. He is to start with a teaspoon of cereal. If he keeps on growing like this, we’ll have to move him around by steam shovel!

  That night, the shots upset him. He sobbed for several hours before I could reach the doctor by phone. When I finally did, he told me the baby could have some aspirin. By then it was 1:00 a.m. Arno came in from the Plaka and dissolved his aspirin in a spoonful of boiled water and made a little wet dressing out of shaving lotion and gauze for his arm, which was hard and swollen from the injection. After Joshua nursed, he suddenly smiled at me, his lopsided, toothless, slaphappy grin. I was so excited and relieved that he was better, I kept hugging him and kissing him. Then he went to sleep and slept soundly all night, his first crisis past
.

  He is a wonderfully happy boy, always staring wide-eyed at anything colorful or moving or bright. Now he is teaching himself to laugh.

  If anyone had told me before that the life of an infant is so intense I don’t think I would have believed it. He can only take being awake about an hour and a half at a time. Consciousness for him is utterly exhausting, and small wonder. If he sees one new thing or has one different new experience he is quite worn out and sleeps sounder and longer. I remember how tired Arno and I were each day of our visit to Casablanca, and especially Tangiers. Everywhere we looked, life was so unfamiliar, so strange, unexpected, mysterious; our senses were like overloaded circuits under the new impressions. We slept the afternoons and nights exhausted, and were glad to leave after several days of total attention. Life for Joshua, or every waking period, must be like our days in Tangiers. I remember reading in a biography of Maria Montessori a description of an infant’s life as something like being in a factory whose purpose and machinery you know nothing about.

  And how random the information must be. You look at an object and if you’re fortunate, someone explains it. Gives you a name so that you can get a grip on it. Suppose you have a feeling. For example, you are attracted, infatuated, etc. Don’t understand what’s happening to you. If you’re lucky, someone comes along and says, “Oh, that. Yes. That’s called love. L O V E. Yes. Very common.” I remember my four-month-old nephew looking at me with intense interest and something like gratitude when I named objects for him. He registered them, and seemingly with great pleasure: Cat. Piano. Music. Siren. Bells.

  I want to assault my son’s senses. I often carry him from one room to another. We stand before the mirror, look at the Christmas cards and Frieda’s purple-and-scarlet doll on the dresser in the living room. Stare in the cupboards at the dishes in the kitchen. Listen to the water run in the sink. My instincts tell me what he sees and touches is forming him, and I want him to see and hear and touch as much as there is to see and hear and touch.

  I have strung his crib with colored paper, silver foil, bright string (there are no mobiles or crib toys here, so I make my own). I cut shapes out of paper and then hang them on a wire across the crib. Next to the red triangle I hang the box his vitamins came in, next to that a star of foil cut from the inside of a cigarette pack. I line the crib’s sides with Christmas cards and colored pictures from magazines.

  About a dozen different objects to look at swing above his head. He lies on his back and stares at them with wonder for an hour at a time. More, if I let him. (There is some unaccountable fear that he shouldn’t be concentrating so long. Am I afraid he’ll be hypnotized or guilty that I am not holding and amusing him?) I find I abhor the idea of a baby looking at a blank space. When they are newborn and face a white carriage or bassinet wall, what must they make of it? How strange and unimaginable not to know what you are and to be looking at a blank space. I read once in a medical journal that a single dot or picture placed on the wall in a hospital encouraged normal mental development simply by giving the infants and/or children something to focus on.

  I notice, though, that if he is drifting off and I put a colored object in front of his eyes he will stay awake instead of sleep, and fight sleep to watch it. Which brings up a different point: how much of the sleeping that infants do is out of boredom? I have known a couple of infants who have slept almost all the time for many months, but, interestingly, they have not been natural births.

  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?” From staring at the string of objects in his crib he has learned to hit at them. At first, his arm would wave and the vitamin box jumped. After a few days, he learned to aim at the box so he could hit it directly with his fist.

  I must buy him some winter clothes. For soon we are going home. Our plans have been made. Arno has unexpectedly been offered a marvelous job at the magazine.

  New Year’s Eve

  The quietest I’ve spent since babysitting days, ten and twelve years ago. We stayed in. I got Josh to bed shortly before midnight. Determined not to let the evening go completely unmarked, I poured the last of the Yugoslav Kruskovac we’ve been carrying around for four months. There was about a tablespoon of the pear brandy for each of us. I brought the cups into the bedroom and we turned on the radio. Got Benny Goodman followed by Auld Lang Syne, and at midnight we exchanged a kiss and lay quietly for a short while, thus bringing to a close a year that gave us eight months of travel and living abroad, a novel, and a son. Thoroughly happy, I walked from room to room. What more could you ask of a year? We spent the rest of the night till dawn reading the novel, laughing aloud often—even Arno, to his own surprise. “I guess it really is funny,” he says. “When I’m working on it, I can’t tell.”

  New Year’s is quiet in Athens, so different from American New Year’s, which is brimming with that utopian faith in the future. Next year will be different. I will be different. Everything will be better. I will be wiser, richer, thinner, dress differently. I will, in fact, be someone else. After almost a year in Europe, I find the idea of a people who make New Year’s resolutions touching, absurd, magnificent.

  January 2

  The lambs. Still can’t get used to seeing their startled, severed heads in every other window.

  Day after day, I shop in the food stores, each day learning another word or two until I can buy most of our food in fractured Greek. The merchants watch me impassively, and it makes me angry and uneasy. For three months, I have shopped in the milk and fruit stores, the grocery and bakery, every day, and each time it is as though the clerks have never seen me before. Is there any greater rejection than no response?

  January 3

  Some men pitch right in with a new baby. Others hang back and seem afraid. What makes the difference? It seems unlikely that a grown man who can tackle ordinary household mechanics and extraordinary intellectual acrobatics is incapable of pinning two pieces of cloth together, but when I occasionally suggest he diaper the baby or learn how, in case he should ever have to, Arno seems uncomfortable and I don’t persist.

  January 4

  With surprise and longing, I see we do not stand together gazing wonderingly into his borrowed crib. We are so very matter-of-fact. At least at this stage, Arno doesn’t express much traditional pride in “my son,” or consciousness of what I think of as their immense, binding link. (Perhaps I have read too much D. H. Lawrence?)84 Arno has his own baby in his book and it takes, in its way, as much care and coddling as our flesh one. Arno is often amused by Josh, sometimes impatient, on the whole tolerant and affectionate, if not as excited as I would like him to be. His attitude could be summed up in a masculine—and not unhealthy—“Look, lady, he may be the new Messiah to you, but to me he’s a very nice baby with wet pants.” But I want more.

  Once again, something is not quite right. But what? Seeking it out, I realize that underlying my disappointment is another of those dangerous (because hidden) fantasies. Just as I had believed there was a “right” way to give birth, I also carry in me a deeply rooted idea of a “right” way to be pregnant and then raise the new child. It is, at least partially, a legacy from the nineteen-forties Sunday afternoon Dan Dailey-Betty Grable Technicolor festivals I absorbed.85

  The fantasy—a two-parter called “First Baby”—is common and probably as destructive as our other standard fantasies: Ideal Husband, Ideal Wife, Great Lover, Wedding Night, Happy Family, etc. In Part One of “First Baby,” you mistily tell your husband—by either your telltale knitting or a significant look—that you are Expecting. He does a take and looks moistly back; music plays, and in an ecstasy of masculine pride, he lifts you up, kisses you tenderly, and swings you around the room. That’s for openers. Dan Dailey would never—under any circumstances—gulp and say Oy vey, or suggest an abortion, or cover his eyes with his hands as though his life had been placed in jeopardy, and you do
not see that he is in obvious peril.

  Part Two of the fantasy is Baby Comes Home. In this part, the fond parents are united in and by their affection and pride. “Tea-for-two-and-two-for-tea / A-boy-for-you-and-a-girl-for-me.” Log cabin, or scrubbed cottage, or suburban house—it doesn’t matter, for all is cozy and secure. Mama is beautiful and fresh as baking bread, preferably wearing a white eyelet apron. The baby does not have colic, spit up on her collar, or crap in her lap. He does the things all good fantasy babies do: He burbles and coos and kicks and goes to sleep and gets up when he is supposed to—conveniently. And Papa. Papa is—what? Papa is, above all, Proud. Proud of his child, proud of the wife who bore the child, proud of himself. He should want to stand gazing into the crib with an arm around his wife, so that the child draws his parents ever closer together. And I have to smile at myself.

  Fantasy rules us. You can see a thousand rotten marriages and know that, in all ways, yours will be different. You can remember your own childhood with its yowling kids and shrieking mamas, and still see motherhood as essentially a kind lady saying “Yes, dear,” and “No, dear,” and doling out cookies like a domestic Blue Fairy.86 You know when you are in the presence of true fantasy (really good, solid stuff) because no amount of reality can alter it one whit. It has the immovability and solidity of stone and is probably, in the end, the most durable stuff man makes.

  January 5

  I spend a lot of time singing to Joshua, often the French songs my mother sang to me, or the legacy of folk songs from Antioch. I have a couple of special songs I made for him—rather, the songs seemed to form themselves around him—the first week he was home. What are the songs about, the old ones?

  Bye, Baby Bunting

  Papa’s gone a-hunting

  To get a little rabbit skin