“We’ll come and help,” Kayo says.
They don’t, of course. I always go to them, they never come to me. It makes me feel that Athens is small and lacking, as if everything is happening elsewhere. And that reminds me again of how Anna tricked me, left me behind.
“Mom, I decided to move out after all. I found a two-bedroom place on Stournari Street.”
She turns toward me, her hands covered in soap suds.
“Where on Stournari?”
“Just on the other side of the square, Mom. Right around the corner.”
Whenever we talk about it, something always drops from her hands — a knife, a glass. The way she sees things, if a child wants to move out, it means the parents have failed.
“I was thinking we could buy a bigger place, so you could have a little more space, a studio to work in. .”
“Mom, it’s done. I signed a lease.”
She turns her back on me.
“I’ve already made it clear to you, we can’t afford to pay your rent.”
“Don’t worry, I found a job.”
“What kind of job?”
“I’m going to wait tables at Brutus.”
That’s when she drops the plate. “My daughter, a waitress?”
A waitress with a tough shift. Nine at night to two in the morning, every day, in a closed space full of smoke and loud music. My clothes stink of tomato sauce and garlic, my mouth tastes like an ashtray. I feel sort of like a character from an old movie, with a white apron and a cigarette dangling from my lips, accidentally blowing smoke into my own eyes as I serve plates of pasta. The fatigue I feel on the way home after my shift is incredible — as if I’ve been out marching all day, at a demonstration whose goal is simply to save myself.
My social conscience has shriveled up again. I should really be thinking more about others. We’re supposedly on the verge of war with Turkey again, this time over the Sismik, a Turkish geophysical survey ship exploring the area between Limnos and Mytilini. Antigone has put all her trust in Leonidas Kirkos and his new leftist party. Anna, meanwhile, has entered a new phase. Just as I had anticipated, the fear of AIDS found its way to her, too: she found out that Basquiat’s lover, the one she slept with, was HIV positive. She goes to get tested in a state of hysteria. The results come back negative, but she replaces sex with communist ideals, just to be on the safe side. And we’re talking hard-core communism. Near the very end of the spring semester she decides to drop out of art school, because “art isn’t interested in the needs of the working class.”
“Come on, Anna, really?” I say over the phone. “There is no working class anymore, there are only working conditions.” Anna heaves an angry sigh on the other end of the line. Our mobilizations, she says, should serve the greatest number, and our creativity should be poured into the production of awareness-raising materials that people can take with them — flyers, posters, newspapers — rather than isolated works of art intended to be hung on the wall.
Anna disappears off the face of the earth. Kayo tells me she’s spending all her time at factories, with the workers — she calls him at some point to say that union leaders have set up tents for striking workers outside the factory where she’s spending most of her time, but they haven’t yet taken over the building. How on earth, she says, can you call for strikes and passive resistance all day long and then go quietly home to your nice, warm bed at night? What kind of armchair revolution is that?
Around the same time I wake from my lethargy, too. When the PASOK wiretapping scandal breaks, I start to record conversations with people I know and edit them at a studio in the suburbs. I dream of setting up two megaphones in Syntagma where I could play these conversations between six and seven every morning, when people are on their way to work. At that time of day you’re still half-asleep, but the things you hear get recorded in your subconscious. Returning home at the end of the day, shop clerks and civil servants would start to think again about the recordings, and thus about the wiretaps, would wonder just how much the state apparatus is hiding from them, how much it knows. I’m hoping that Anna might finally be proud of me. I’ve done the closest thing to political art that a person can do in 1987, in an atmosphere of mass complacency that even these continual political scandals can’t seem to disturb.
“That’s not political art, it’s narcissism. The only truly political art is when you take to the streets, when you stop believing that the problems of an artist are different from those of a blacksmith,” she says over the phone.
“Anna, just let me send you one of the cassettes—”
“I don’t have time for stuff like that, Maria. When people get all dressed up to go to some gallery opening, they’re missing the whole point.”
“It’s not a gallery piece. I don’t believe in galleries, you know that.”
But she sighs at the idea of Syntagma, too. “The only sound we should be hearing in public squares is the shouting of slogans.”
I record that conversation, too. She’ll be furious if she ever finds out, but for me art is as important as politics. As important as Anna.
“I hope it’s just a phase.” As always, Antigone isn’t eating her salad so much as playing with it. It’s my day off and we’re having dinner at a taverna in Exarheia.
“She hasn’t set foot in the university in ages,” I say.
Antigone wrinkles her brow, and her face fills with tiny little lines.
“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”
“I thought you knew.” I’m sick of her treating me like Anna’s keeper, like a detective agency with only one client.
She pushes her plate away. “I don’t know where I went wrong. We were democratic parents, we never deprived her of anything, she was always free to voice her opinion. These days she’s just part of the herd — she asks permission from the party just to go to the bathroom!”
People at nearby tables turn to look at us. Antigone’s voice has grown louder and louder, until now she’s practically shouting. She hates the Communist Party even more than she hates the right. Her leftist politics are nostalgic, with a tinge of elitism. That may be what Anna is reacting against, just as I’m reacting against my mother’s political agnosticism.
“How is your family doing these days? Your mother?” Antigone asks, as if she read my mind.
“She’s fine, same as always, with her soap operas and her icons.”
“Part of the herd, just like Anna. Sometimes I wonder if you two girls were switched at birth.”
If she’d said that to me ten years earlier, tears of pride would have sprung to my eyes. Now I just take another bite of my food.
I drag my bed over to the window so the light falls on it, position a chair in the middle of the room like a statue. I haven’t put anything on the walls since I rented the apartment, but now I hang some of my paintings. Kayo is coming! The Athenian sun, the arrangement of the furniture, the male nudes from my first year of art school — it all screams out how badly I want him. He’s not HIV positive, it’s not too late for him to change, to think seriously about bisexuality, and to pass from there into heterosexuality, into incurable love for me.
I keep breaking glasses at Brutus. I’m dreaming with open eyes: Kayo embraces me at the airport, we come back to the apartment, the light falls through the grates over the windows, we make love on the chair in the middle of the room, Kayo gives up modeling and helps me design posters about racism, minorities, AIDS. We go out at night to put up the posters, get caught in a downpour, Kayo opens his arms wide and shouts, “This is how to really feel the rain!”