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IN MY HUMBLE OPINION Okie White FEATURED COLUMNIST Ray Collins FICTION |
Seline woke and said nothing, just lay there in the sheets, watching Dino carefully but not daring to make a sound for fear he would wake up. I am with you, he seemed to be saying, I will be with you from now on. I will be with you, Seline, forever.
"You do not know how to give," he had said last
night. "You try, but do not know how. And you must learn
what you want in return." What was an artist doing in Athens without a job? What
did she lose that she was searching for in a country only vaguely
familiar to her? Memories. Ah yes. And endless stories: Parents who uprooted
themselves and her from the island, many years back, to find
a sure job and a decent life across the Atlantic. She had memories of running and playing by the water, memories
of feeding herself and smelling the sea breeze, hearing it rustle
through the pink and white flowers of the holyhock and the flat
green leaves of the vine on the warm portch, and learning to
swim and dress herself, even memories of learning to fish and
sail. Seline Politou, once stuffer of fish, once assistant to
her marine taxidermist father on a coastal village of the island,
lowered her thorough-blue eyes, and overcome lifted the covers
off herself and sat up on the edge of the bed. Back then her father and she would turn dead, empty-eyed
fish into handsome, live-looking, trophies that customers hung
on their walls, for friends to admire, but eventually neglected.
Seline now mulled over the many things she neglected, had not
learned from the aberrant stares of the angled 'prizes'. But what did it promise? She slipped her jeans on, and went to the canvas. She didn't
wake Dino up, but brought with her a mug of Nescafe' and settled
in the chair. The pungency of the black brew briefly dispersed
the persistent sleepiness in her head. She had seen the place again and again. She saw herself give a hefty shove to the deserted, wooden
quay and row till she was well away. Then turn and look back.
She savored the crisp, stretching splendor around their sea side
home with the slumped, patched red roof, the airy porch, the
flowers, the table. But for the vision inside her, she would
never see the place that had first nurtured her again--a disco/restaurant
now took its place. And she wanted to so much, more than anything
else in the world. But her fingers today felt thick, clumsy, undisciplined.
The tips were blistered with splotches of colors and the thumb
cramped from fatigue. "How are your strokes proceeding?" Anastasi had
asked her at the studio the other day, giving her a pat as she
stretched the knotted muscles of her back. "Just fine." He had looked at her with those knowing eyes, weighing
and regarding, as he stood in front of her, twice attempting
to say something that he did not. She enjoyed watching his curiously delicate manner. He
used his large hazel eyes to tell more than his tongue--but that
morning she pretended to busy herself preparing, not looking
at him for long, for she knew he was probing her. She had even
evaded their usual patter. "You're not well?" he had finally said. "Not very. It'll pass." He put the stool and foot rest in place, shifted ebulliently
with brisk, spirited movement. And he paused a little. He did
not sit immediately, but delayed this moment of focus. He relinquished
himself to it as thoroughly as to his muse. He was never hurried
at this particular stage; he never rushed at this point. It was,
she thought, a kind of liturgy in him, just as if he was performing,
he was undividedly surrendering. Yet Anastasi could be as utterly grave or severe. He taught
as an evangelist man preached. It was for this thoroughness,
she imagined, that she felt esteem for him. Seline now raised the brush... ...The pristine break of day was balmy and bright and promised
good voyaging. She took a hefty whiff of iodine, and her boyish
bust bulged. The sail fluttered a bit and she pushed the tiler
out to trim it. The bag swelled with salty breeze. The skiff
leaped forward hissing as it skimmed the gentle brew like a gull's
wing through air. The boat cleaved the sleek bay in two, tacking
into the draught. Bit-by-bit the cove receded and soon melded
into the checkerboard of gold-brown fields in the backdrop. Ahead
spanned kilometers of sparkling Aegean. The small boat pranced
onward banging on the ripening crests, lifting a coruscating
spray and dozens of little morning rainbows... ...the reverie then scattered into glimmering fragments.
She laid the brush back down on a desk scattered with sketches
and empty white sheets of paper, a copy of Chosen Country by
J. dos Passos, and Mary Magdalene portrayed weeping. She had heard Dino get up. She shut her eyes. The tiny garret closed in on her. A
sudden vortex made her slump to one side. She caught herself
from falling just in time, and sprung her slight, lean torso
up straight on the uncomfortable chair. Two years, Anastasi had said. Two hard years for the eye
to break in. "Don't give up," was his favorite infamous
statement, "you come to me with a perfect sense of proportion." She whiffed the heavy blue smoke meandering into her cubby-hole
study from the Gauloises Dino was smoking in the kitchen. Her
throat tightened and her nostrils pinched. He was making Greek
coffee. Its rich fragrance mingled, somewhere along the way,
with the silty wafts from his cigarette and made her head whirl.
Oblivious to her discomfort she could hear him murmuring/singing,
" Take my hand/Take my whole life too..." to himself--the
King was The King for Dino. She sat there listening to him sing. His torso yielded
slightly, his back bowing a little with the lyric. Tall and nimble.
Crude and rasping, the timbre seesawed, and she pondered what
it ment. What was going on inside him to make this harmony come
out? She turned away and listlessly stared at the only two paintings
in the apartment, one was an Andrew Wyeth and the other a Norton
Simon. They represented her wealth and were sent by her father,
who had bought them in Astoria six months after Seline had departed
from her home. She had crossed an ocean and a sea and had been living since her arrival in the ancient neighborhood of Plaka in a house of post-classical architecture that vaunted better days right after the war. The family was moderately wealthy and an old Athenian family, endorsing the old ways, trying hard not to be assimilated by the onrush of world changes fostered by satellite television and her media-nurtured generation. From childhood Seline had known that her future was already planned out. She would be sent to college, earn her degree, and marry a man with a solid profession, perhaps even somebody like her father. But all that had changed when one morning she left her home with rucksack bearing down on her thin shoulders and trust in a calling. And I will love thee still, my dear, They had been together for almost a year, then she was
twenty-three and he twenty-five. He was like nobody she had ever
met before. He didn't worry any more about the years ahead than
did cattle in green pastures. There was a primal manner in his
air and a puerile spontaneity that uninhibited her. He had a
careering way about him, like a twentieth century gladiator,
all was intense sport, love-making, drinking, prancing his shiny
second-hand Harley as if he were Marlon Brando and she the counter
waitress. His family had been killed in a train disaster when he
was four. He had been on his own since he was twelve, when he
had done away with the source of his obstacles by hurtling over
a glass-strewn wall. The opportunity had come, just before Christmas
dawn, another inmate and he had scaled the shard-sowed barrier
to freedom, bloodied and frost-bitten. Nightmares of the orphanage
shattered his sleep often. Meanwhile the canvas stood waiting. Elegantly and emmaculently
silent, skillfully tormenting, crafting her pain, like picks
etching away in her heart. It ignored her and the fever in her
hands. Two years had passed four months ago, and still the hues
did not fit--clashed like cymbals. The colors dragged slowly,
sluggishly, producing a cacophony-- rebellion in parody. There
were days when she painted adeptly, but few. She could not account
for it; if she could only do that. Dino's deep, black eyes--she could feel it--were upon her
from where he sat, this minute. She could sense their moot, fixed
look. It had been a bad night, last night. A bad night for love
and dreams. There had been depression in the dark of the room,
a tiredness she felt more often than not. He had finally left
her and gone to the other end of the bed, and she had lain alone
and silent, and sirocco-warm tears ebbed out of her, scouring
the hours by. The night faded once more whence it came. She massaged the thumb muscle to lessen the stiffness.
Veins stood out like winding blue worms on her forearm and on
the back of her hand. She dipped the brush into the dish of solvent.
Dino brushed by her on his way out. She smelled the tobacco
on his clothes. He halted and stood by the door not speaking,
then closed it behind him. "The canvas is like a man," came Anastasi's first
words that decisive March noon. Seline's first lesson about love
had begun. "He will want and want some more. You will hate
and love him. Give yourself to him and he will give everything
to you. 'Love is, above all, the gift of oneself',' someone once
said." Anastasi had then begun to paint. Dantea's last minute
doubts dissolved with certainty. Each undulating stroke charged
a longing that had so long been left yearning for its mate. The
colors mingled and blended, entwined and braided, melded and
plexed and fused weaving a dulcet onomatopoeia plenishing her
every pore, progressing so ever softly turning, spinning longingly
sheer spring air into a depth that had no end. The dappling of
the tints echoed on, ignoring, conquering time. "The moan of doves in immemorial elms/And murmuring
of innumerable bees--do you see him, do you see Master Tennyson's
sigh in the strokes? You are in love, no?" Anastasi had
remarked, putting the brush down. Yes. But the canvas before her today seemed unconcerned, aloof,
like Dino. Both promised ecstasy, both wanted her soul. But she
had not the strength to serve two masters. When she had awaken that morning it was a comfort to know
that the entire day would belong to her to be alone. But by the
time she got through mixing the easels, even the light burden
of the brush was too much for her. She had not slept much during
the night, she realized, for her eyelids drooped more often than
not. She had a drifty feeling that made her dreamlike and lose
herself. "Rest if you must,/but don't you quit." came
Cushing's words from the poem Anastasi had drilled into her memory
two years before. Finally, she put the palette down. The morning sun rays
dabbed the wall next to her with a craggy segment of column from
the Parthenon beyond. She found herself glide into oblivion on
the chair. She dozed. She was overwhelmed by her dreaming of
her mother, and felt happiness. She was seldom like this, not ever since she had met Dino.
But now, like a torrent, the cumulated snags in their relationship
suddenly all deluged upon her, and she was surprised that she
did nothing to stop the onset. She recollected afresh the quarrel
the night before, recalled the options remaining--put to her;
about the painting, she could not remember what had been said
to be wrong with it; possibly it was not the painting; she did
not know. She retained only the oppressive, mostly mute, suffocation
of Dino's demands. Now, at this recollection she began to tremble for an instant,
uncontrollably, and gasp for more air to enter her lungs. It
had been a turbulent episode, the worst; like an Aegean August
gale, with only a hint of warning, that drowns one unsuspectingly.
She was sinking, she told herself. She was feeble against his
wants--whatever these were. And perhaps the giving on her part
would never quench the needing on his.... The fingers felt better. She dipped the brush once more
and waited. And the vision came again, this time urging and stronger
than before. She picked up the palette and gave, yielding herself
to the strokes. There was a knock on the door that she did not
hear. She was solely aware that the mellifluous strokes did not come from the brush but from her. Like heartbeats, they were as much hers as her heart's. A presence was there, completing a metamorphosis. Unlike before, she knew, the threshold now was scaled, the union of her and her dream realized. She painted, all of her, and did not stop her care because now she could not. Like the pulsing in her chest, her will no longer participated in its existence. A being had been freed, and free it reigned over a kingdom of two. The knocking stopped, the footsteps died softly away behind the closed door, and the room glowed in the autumn morning with Seline and her island home, her very own place in the spring, to look at and be close to wherever forever. © Copyright 1998 by Vasilis Adams A. A little about Vasilis in the author's own words -- I am an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher. I have been teaching English full-time for the last twelve years. Prior to that I worked as a Technical Specifications Writer for seven years and as an Engineer for five years. I was born in Thessaloniki, Greece. I went to university in
the United My writing credits include published fiction and non-fiction appearing both in Greece and in the USA. Stateside publications I have written for are Greek Accent, National Herald (Proini), and Crosscurrents. In Greece I've been published in 30-Days, Key Travel News, Greece's Weekly, Athena Magazine and had a weekend travel column in The Athens Star newspaper. E-Zines that have puplished my stories are The Domain, Ibn Quirtaiba, Cosmic Visions, ThinkB, Aphelion, Dark Planet, Basket Case, BORNmagazine, Aspiring Writer, Appalachians, Newwords, and Zine in Time, and a couple dozen more. |