A Room in Athens

by Frances Karlen Santamaria

  To wrap the baby Bunting in.

  Or, one of my favorites:

  Hush, little baby, don’t say a word,

  Daddy’s gonna buy you a mocking bird,

  And if that mocking bird don’t sing,

  Daddy’s gonna buy you a diamond ring

  For me, because I’ve known it longest, the oldest is the lovely Fais Dodo. As a girl in Paris, my mother sang it to her baby brother; then in Cleveland, she sang it to me and my brother; and now I sing it to my son:

  Fais dodo

  Colas mon petit frère

  Fais dodo

  T’auras du lolo.

  Maman est en haut

  Qui fait du gâteau

  Papa est en bas

  Qui fait du chocolat.

  Fais dodo

  Colas mon petit frère

  Fais dodo

  T’auras du lolo.

  Roughly, “Go to sleep, Colas, my little brother, go to sleep, you will have your milk. Mama is upstairs baking a cake, Papa is downstairs making cocoa, go to sleep my little brother.”

  What do the lullabies tell us? What is the message behind the words? Fais dodo is a sort of nose count: everyone is home and accounted for and doing something nice for baby, fais dodo, go to sleep. We all know that at any moment, any or all could, conceivably, vanish.

  Hush, Little Baby says if this doesn’t work and if that doesn’t work, we’ll try something else: Baby, you shall not want, you will not be let down—if we can help it. With roses bedight, with lilies and angels and big sisters, with mamas and with papas—Baby, go to sleep. Be at ease. For the moment—this moment—your world is foolproof, and you have—fais dodo—around you that beautiful human mess, the family.

  Why is that edge of sadness in all the lullabies I’ve ever heard? Except, of course, Rock-a-Bye, Baby, which is the only one that isn’t sad, but is, with its more cheery tune, downright menacing. What does it mean? When the bough breaks the cradle will fall / and down will come baby cradle and all? Unless it is an incantation for the use of jealous siblings.

  I am reminded of a passage from Rebecca West’s magnificent book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. She speaks of medieval European man and his love of the disagreeable, which is, she says, our most hateful quality:

  Natural man, uncorrected by education, does not love beauty or pleasure or peace; he does not want to eat and drink and be merry; he is on the whole averse from wine, women, and song. He prefers to fast, to groan in melancholy, and to be sterile. This is easy enough to understand. To feast one must form friendships and spend money, to be merry one must cultivate fortitude and forbearance and wit, to have a wife and children one must assume the heavy obligation of keeping them and the still heavier obligation of loving them. All these are kinds of generosity, and natural man is mean.87

  Why shouldn’t our lullabies reflect, if not more joie de vivre, at least a lighter tone? The melodies are sad. Can’t a tune be happy and quiet? The lullabies I know seem to express the weary assumption of that “heavy obligation” of loving.

  January 8

  There goes that blasted Never on Sunday hurdy-gurdy again, for the third time today. Really, do these people believe the same myth about themselves they are broadcasting? From everything we hear, it’s more like “Never on Any Day” for any one, and certainly “Never with Pleasure.” It would spoil the joy of guilt. This hurdy-gurdy continues to punctuate each day with its mindless good humor, like a hollow laugh.

  January 9

  In bottle-fed America, adults in phenomenal numbers chew gum, their mouths moving like suckling babies. In Greece, where infants are denied the use of their hands, solemn men play finger games with strings of beads.

  January 10

  First cereal for Joshua. Three teaspoons of Gerber’s Rice Cereal with milk. On the first, he started to cry, then changed his mind and grinned wildly through the next two. He’s on his way.

  January 11

  Joshua twelve weeks old tomorrow. During the past week, he has gotten some control of his right hand and turns his head in all directions. He looks like a poorly constructed windup toy hitting himself in the head each time he tries to put his hand in his mouth. He is sturdy, sits up in the tub with feet propped against the side.

  We got his Greek birth certificate after Arno’s five trips to various offices. It is a two-page, typed saga reminiscent of Hiawatha, Beowulf, and the Bible. It is an official government translation from the Greek to English. All about the “male of Arno,” it relates how Arno, of occupation a writer, an Israelite, came before the Magistrate, and told him how I, Frances, of occupation a housewife, an Israelite, did, on Bouboulinas Street, bring forth a male infant, an Israelite, and how he has been named “Tzotoya.” That is, no less, the official translation, with not a single name correct, except Arno.

  January 10

  The trip yesterday to pick up Joshua’s birth certificate was fascinating to me and exasperating beyond belief. Arno had been banging his head against bureaucracy here since our arrival. He has had to register for several different things and is getting used to the system. It was my first exposure.

  The office was crowded with supplicants. A big, bare room with three desks in a row across it. At the desks were men whose little finger sported the Sign—the long, pointed, filed fingernail which show the world that these hands do no menial work, and which we had also seen on taxi drivers in Rome. The men at the desks sat and talked to one another, too obviously ignoring the people, some in peasant dress, some middle class, who came before them and waited patiently with papers in their hands.

  One of the officials would pick his teeth, look at the person before him coolly, shuffle a few papers, get up and walk away, leaving the man speaking to himself. After ten minutes he would return to the supplicant, who waited patiently. He would sit down, quiz the man before him briefly, sift paper clips, talk, and joke with one of the other officials. On and on, for perhaps more than half an hour.

  Arno said to me, “I saw Costis come here once. You should have seen him. It was a total transformation. He wrung his hands and pleaded and showed tears in his eyes, which apparently is expected.” And that is what we saw.

  Finally, we were the only ones left. I had been holding Joshua in my arms for several hours. Now, the three men sat and watched us. There was no place to sit and in my anger I was certain that we had been left for last and now were kept waiting an extra half hour while they gossiped because I was standing with the heavy, sleeping child.

  “A couple of Americans I’ve spoken with who have lived here awhile said to get very tough,” Arno whispered. “They’re not used to it from the Greeks and it’s worth a try.”

  Willing to try anything, we began to storm and shout and threaten; attention was immediate and gratifying.

  January 12

  I am reading Confessions of Zeno, a novel of turn-of–the-century Trieste by Italo Svevo.88 Near the end is this fascinating paragraph:

  I will describe some visions that came to me another day, and which the doctor regarded as so important that he declared I was cured.

  In the state between sleep and waking into which I had sunk I had a dream that was fixed and unmoving as a nightmare. I dreamt of myself as a tiny child, only to see what a baby’s dreams are like. As it lay there, its whole small being was filled with joy. Yet it was lying there quite alone. But it could see and feel with a clearness with which in dreams one sometimes perceives quite distant objects. The baby, who was lying in a room in my house, saw, God knows how, that on the roof there was a cage … and that he need not move to get there, for the cage would come to him. In it was only one piece of furniture, an armchair on which was seated a beautiful woman, perfect in shape and dressed in black. She had fair hair, great blue eyes, and exquisitely white hands; she wore patent-leather shoes on her feet, which shed a faint reflection from under her skirt. She seemed to me to be one indivisible whole in her black dress and patent-leather shoes. It was all part of her. And the child dream
ed of possessing that woman, but in the strangest manner; he was convinced that he would be able to eat little bits off her at the top and bottom!

  Elsewhere in the same section Svevo writes:

  My second vision carried me back also to a comparatively recent date … I saw a room in our house, but I don’t know which, for it was larger than any that is there in reality … The room was quite white, indeed I had never seen such a white room, nor one so entirely flooded with sunlight. Could it be that the sun was really shining through the walls? It must have been high in the sky, but I was still in bed with a cup in my hand from which I had drunk up all the caffelatte …

  The sun! The sun! dazzling sunlight! From the picture of what I thought to be my youth, so much sun streamed out that it was hard for me not to believe in it … I am under the table playing with some marbles. I move nearer and nearer to Mamma …

  Joshua’s eyes cannot stand the light of day. When I carry him outside, he still winces at the shock of the light; it pains him, even when it is day without sunlight.

  Indoors, he is fascinated by the large, crystal chandelier. It always surprises me that daylight should be so hard to take.

  The idea of the baby, alone, filled with joy, excites me. I am also reading with intense curiosity a biography of Tolstoy’s wife, drawn mainly from her diaries. How familiar much of it is to me. Why do women marry artists? It is like marrying a man with a built-in mistress, a rival one can never compete with—and who, rather than kill off, one would do anything to nurture and protect. Paradoxical and often bitter.

  The gift is like an electric current which lights the man, and if it failed, he would become zombie-like—or be, simply, someone else. Can the current be separated from the conductor? Otto Rank says the artist nominates himself, usually in childhood or adolescence.89 I believe the woman who chooses him seconds the nomination—and settles for something. But what? She will never be First Lady. Perhaps she is Vice President. Or maybe she settles to reflect the light or to be around to watch the sparks fly. The current excites her. She feels she participates in immortality. My grandfather, a fanatic cantor, had himself buried, not near his wife of forty years, but near his rabbi. Was he pledging allegiance? Or did he imagine, slyly behind his beard, that he could slip into heaven on the rabbi’s coattails? For some women—myself too, I think—marriage with an artist is something like that.

  Later

  More thoughts on artists. If a woman is a steady acting “inspiration” to her chosen artist, then she has nominated herself (or accepted the nomination) to Musehood, achieving a kind of secondhand immortality (providing she has chosen carefully and her artist’s art will wear well). I believe I see the urge to Musehood as a kind of perverted power drive—the devious, back-of-history stuff that strong women—but not strong enough to do it themselves—have resorted to (or had thrust on them) as wives, as lovers, and as mothers.

  From my own experience and that of women friends who’ve married poets and writers, I would advise a woman who wants to hear poetry about herself—or who craves a “poetic” relationship with a man—to, by all means, shun poets! To them, poetry is business (craft) and they have been the least poetic, most matter-of-fact men I have known. If one wants an “artistic” life, look to the artiste manqué.

  January 13

  Hari meets me at Kolonaki Square each afternoon. She is finding her return puzzling, difficult, exasperating. Asked me for my pediatrician’s name, as the one her family has been using is trying to tell her the baby has a heart condition. Her son underwent an operation for a hernia in the States in the early months of infancy and had been especially thoroughly checked before she brought him to Greece last month. Hari is not worried but her parents are ready to send him for the “necessary weekly treatments.” She tells me that even though her parents know it is not uncommon for a Greek doctor to say a child is ill in order to make money, they are afraid not to heed the doctor, just in case he is right. (One thing about the Greeks—they are not prejudiced—they extend their hostility to foreigners and fellow Greeks alike. A refreshing broadness of outlook.) Hari will see my doctor, Papadatous, this week.

  Hari tells me that the newspapers her family takes give much attention to American news; daily articles appear telling about how children are mistreated by their parents (either made up or clipped from the sensational American press). She described several of these and one editorial about how American fathers have little to do with their children because of the short lunch hour and no siesta.

  All these articles tend to intensify the feeling many Europeans already have, that Americans are rather subhuman, and it is always easier to exploit and cheat someone who is inferior anyway. Whether there are political motives or not, I can’t figure out. I have the impression that the newspapers the family is reading are right-wing, but I’m not sure.

  Hari is shocked at her position as a woman; described how she was bodily put out of a jewelry store last week when she complained that the watch they had fixed didn’t work properly. “Impossible!” she was told.

  I am getting more and more irritated at how often a man will step in front of me at a counter in a store. Apparently, it is his right to do so. Or perhaps, as in Yugoslavia, the idea of forming a line has never evolved here.90

  There is no possibility of a job for Hari in Greece. And apparently getting a job is a tricky business. There are no agencies and no such thing as job hunting. We are told that if you walked into a place and asked if there were a job opening you would be laughed out. One gets positions through connections, and for women getting a job is very tricky, indeed.

  Arno and I go for long walks whenever we can. Sometimes we take our scuffed carriage, which still collects stares as (Hari says) it is not good, new, or attractive enough. Last Sunday night after a long, brisk walk in the cold, we passed across deserted Constitution Square with its bright lights flashing on and off. Caught sight of our old friend Vasilios with an American couple in tow, slipping down an alley.

  January 15

  Nursing Joshua gives me more pleasure each day. He fingers my clothes, grins up at me now with milk trickling down his cheek. I find pleasure, although sometimes there is also discomfort, in the sensations of feeding. The special tingling and fullness as the milk comes flooding in or is “let down,” hardening and tensing the entire breast. Tension builds, and is released at the moment when the baby takes hold. It is not sexual pleasure, but the rhythm of buildup and release is not dissimilar. We are like interlocking gears. Often my milk floods in only a minute or so before he wakes and cries for it.

  Sometimes the breast gets so full the milk leaks, squirting with great force in a steady stream. Occasionally, when I’ve wanted his attention, I have hit Arno with it at a distance of five feet.

  Funny moment yesterday when I noticed a crumb on Josh’s cheek and had a sudden, strong desire to flick out my tongue to clean him. Catch myself at seconds with a semi-urge to lick him.

  Why isn’t more said about the sensuousness between mother and baby? Men paint it and seem to assume it—women don’t even mention it among themselves. Either it is completely taken for granted or it isn’t considered at all. It is more than a fringe benefit. His waking hours infuse my life with a steady sensuous pleasure. The growing mutual familiarity, the sensations I get each time I pick him up, the good feeling I get of his heft, his smell (which is sweet even when he’s soiled, because of the breast milk) and the feel of him—we merge into one another giving and taking heat, comfort, love.

  Man stays closer to his mother. A woman has her mother intimately only once; man can recapture, draw strength from, and relive physical sensations women never have again, and in turn, must give.

  January 16

  The night has become an entity; since Joshua’s birth it seems to belong to me in a special way. Enfolded in the hours of the night, the deep intimacy with the child.

  My sleep patterns have changed drastically; I used to sleep deeply, hearing nothing. Now I sleep
at a different level of attention, still aware of his slight sounds. So much so, that I couldn’t bear to have him in our bedroom.

  Enormous sense of confidence from nursing the baby. No worry about changing the formula, or if he had enough. It is the absolutely perfect pacifier if you don’t mind spending a lot of time half-dressed. If you nurse a healthy baby, you know you have the right answers. So most of the time I do feel pretty sure of things, but often enough I’ll ask Arno, Why is he still crying? What’s the matter? We consult. Usually the answers are digestive in nature.

  Arno’s matter-of-factness and calmness add to my growing confidence. If he were a worrier, it would be dreadful. He, too, seems to have great faith in the baby’s sturdiness and sound health.

  January 17

  We are having a running fight with Quasimodo and her husband about our water bill. The first month we were here they charged us about one dollar. This month, however, we were given a bill for ten dollars. Perhaps they thought that the rich Americans wouldn’t notice the difference.

  We question our friends, who tell us with anger, and the by now familiar embarrassment, that such a bill is impossible. Conversation with Quasimodo would be comical if it weren’t so exasperating. The only words of French she speaks are oui, non, Madame, et, and Monsieur. Using these five words she tries to communicate the intricacies of the Athenian water system and upbraid us for our overdue remittance.

  Extraction of a baby and extraction of money are basic human endeavors, however, and just as I mysteriously understood what to do during birth, I manage to understand Quasimodo, who points to the faucets and shouts, “Oui, Madame et Madame, et oui, oui!” And I shout back, “Okhi, okhi!” No! No!

  Joshua cries in my arms because we are shouting and he feels how tense I have become.

  Fascinating experience going to a movie theater to see love story (American). Watch Greek couples who fill the audience. Men about ten years older than their wives, arranged matches only. Wonder what they think as they watch the film with its simple American assumption of the right boy for the right girl in a blaze of passion-love forever.