“Who cares?”
“What do you mean, who cares? He has no money anymore, no estates, no grandeur. Don’t you see? He’s poor and wants to kick me out of my house so he can live here, with that woman. He’s got agents. They ring my doorbell, they threaten me.”
She walks over to the television and turns it on. We silently watch the commercials as night falls outside.
“Shhh! Listen!”
What’s there to listen to? A blond woman is chopping onions to show how natural and healthy a particular brand of instant soup is.
“Don’t you hear what she’s saying?”
“No, Amalia, what’s she saying?”
“I’ll chop you to pieces just like these onions, if you don’t do what we tell you to!”
I light a cigarette. Aunt Amalia claps.
“That’s the idea, a smoke screen!” She apparently knows her James Bond, too.
I hug her, exhaling the smoke behind her back, down onto an empty candle holder sitting on a side table that looks like a God’s eye from above. A proud, unforgiving god, who has completely forgotten his servant Amalia. Forgotten my mother, too.
“Where did you disappear to this time?”
Mom doesn’t really enjoy my visits. We spend the whole time discussing my lengthy absences, my indifference toward my family.
“I have something for you.” She hands me an envelope covered with little angels and roses.
“Who’s getting married?”
“The wedding already happened. Your old friend from Aegina, Martha. I called you for days. Aren’t you ever at home?”
“I was in Paris, with Anna.”
“One logical individual meeting another. .”
“How was the wedding?” I know she likes that kind of thing.
“It was nice, lots of people came. We went to the reception afterward, too.”
She’s talking to me, but looking at the television. Her soap operas have expanded to take over the whole middle of the day. Mom lives a life of weddings and divorces, dastardly deeds of revenge, silk sheets and champagne.
“When are you going to give me that joy?”
On the screen we see a couple in profile, kissing — a redhead with thick, gorgeous eyelashes and a blond guy with a square jaw who’s probably gay in real life. The kind of people you want to throw a bomb at.
“You’re twenty-six, when are you planning on getting married? Do you want to end up like Aunt Amalia?”
“I don’t want to end up like her, or like you, either.”
Mom gives me a hurt look, a perfect imitation of the women on her soaps. She doesn’t wear makeup or curl her hair, but she’s mastered that wounded look of middle-aged actresses watching as their daughters or lovers walk off, leaving them helpless. It makes me want to smash the screen. I don’t know anything more satisfying than the act of throwing a television through a shop window.
“Are we going on vacation together this year?”
Anna’s voice sounds pinched on the other end of the line.
“What happened?”
“Thierry and I broke up. Won’t you comfort your old friend?”
It turns out Thierry was more interested in whales, turtles and oil spills than in Anna. “Merde, he can go live with his turtles, I’ve had enough!” She tells me that I was right, environmentalism is dangerous, because it distances you from people’s real problems. Now she’s working for a lawyer, a friend of hers from the collective, who defends large families in Paris from eviction.
“So, should I come to Greece and we can go crazy this year?”
“We’ll see.”
Vacations are a bourgeois habit that’s out of keeping with my new way of life. I tell Camus about my conversation with Anna. “You’re overdoing it,” he replies. “You’re always talking about that friend of yours, Anna, but you’re not that different from her, in the end. You let your ideas take over your life. No one throws bombs all the time.”
He takes off his shirt. There are no wings sprouting from his back. It turns out he’s only human, too. He pulls me down onto the tattered mattress, in the room where he once gave me drawing lessons. His fingers reek of nicotine, his breath of coffee. His smell brings me down to earth with a bang. Usually, for me, Camus is as portable as a slogan.
I bleed, therefore I am.
It’s entirely logical for me to sink my fingernails into his back.
“Maria, you’re the only one who understands me. They installed a transmitter in my TV and are broadcasting the most terrible words. They curse at me, ridicule me. If I don’t escape, they’ll drag me naked through the streets to Syntagma, to the guillotine. Where can I go? I have no where to go!”
But she does. She jumps from her third-story balcony, finally headed elsewhere, to some dark refuge. She’s in a coma when they take her to the hospital, with contusions in her brain and all her ribs broken. Dad is waving the note in his hand when I arrive. Mom’s eyes are red and swollen from crying.
“Our Amalia,” she says.
Dad brings us coffee. Mom is holding an old photograph with crumpled edges that she’s had in her wallet for as long as I’ve been alive. She and Amalia are sitting on the stoop of Mom’s childhood house in Kypseli, laughing, their mouths open in gap-toothed grins. Their knees are filthy, but their braids gleam. They’re each proudly holding a rag doll. “We were like sisters, just like you and Anna.” She starts in on the stories: how they grew up on that stoop, swapping those dolls for trading cards of Hollywood actors, and later for actual men.
“You mean she had a boyfriend once?”
“Amalia had more marriage proposals than I could count. She loved to be taken out for walks, to have men promise her this or that. But that’s as far as it ever went. She’d found her prince.” Amalia slept with the crown prince’s photograph under her pillow. It started as a family joke: Amalia was going to marry Konstantinos and on Sundays they would all go out for rides in the palace gardens. Those idyllic daydreams had led to others, about social welfare: Amalia would distribute soup and children’s toys to the poor. She wasn’t a royalist, she was a romantic. A proletarian royalist, as Anna always said. Toward the end of her life, a whole army of religious panhandlers had paraded through her house, praying for her and pocketing her pension.
“What happened when you and Dad left for Africa?”
“She cried, begged me to think it over. It was a real drama. I told her to come with us. But she couldn’t possibly, because one day her prince was going to come for her. Even at the airport she tried to get me to stay. She said she would die. And now she’s made good on that threat!”
“Mom, please. She’s not dead yet.” Though deep down I don’t think Amalia will live, either. Besides, if you jump off a balcony, what’s the use in surviving?
We’re sitting on an uncomfortable hospital bench, in a narrow hallway with the same harsh lighting you find in butcher’s shops, or prisons. Mom and I are finally sharing something, if only the cell of the same emotional helplessness. The women in Mom’s soap operas go to the hospital dressed to the nines, their emotions overflowing everywhere — rage, pain, sadness, despair. Mom just silently twists a handkerchief in her hand, one she embroidered back in Africa.
At last they let us into the ICU. They give us masks. We’re like aliens, bending over the bed of a relative who’s been infected by contact with earthlings. Aunt Amalia, hooked up to machines, with an IV and an unrecognizable face, looks like a martyred saint who’s finally at rest. No black dress with doo-dads on it, no buns or curlers in her hair. If I were to say “fart on my balls,” would the shock of it wake her up?
I bend over and whisper all the bad words I can think of in her ear, a free association of filth.