The Xaniá Town News, 14

Maria’s Book

Maria was quite the reader. What else was there to do in a little byway trinket shop during a tourist district’s slack hours?

I wanted to buy her a nice prezzie for all the little niceties she’d done — watering my balcony plants while I was gone, buying me a fragrant βασιλικός vassilikos (basil) plant for my table, bringing me some gooey στιφτος stiftos (incalculably caloric bread twists with nuts and honey inside) every Monday. Not to mention her cheery Καλή μέρα, Ντόγκλας, Kali Mera, Dooglahs, every morning when she arrived.

But today, Maria complained of abdominal cramps. I went up to my room and made her some chamomile tea from the fresh-picked buds that a contingent of sweet old ladies in black purvey in front of the Post Office.

Later she said was feeling much better. She confided that she was going through 'the change' and that I had given her the one folk remedy Cretan women believe in.

Then she asked slyly why I, a man, would be drinking chamomile. I told her because it helps me sleep. But she knew I was fifty-five and I surmised that she was convinced that males go through the menopause, too, for which chamomile works just as well.

It turned out that Cretan etiquette deems that a kindly deed be reciprocated with a gift. The next morning as I was upstairs tickety-ticking away on the laptop Maria arrived in her decisive, outta-my-way-I-got-work-to-do manner. Soon after the clangorous wind chime went up at the entrance notifying everyone that Αρμονία Κεραμικά, Armonia Keramika, was now officially open for the day. Her voice bellowed up the stairs, 'Dooglahs, Ellah! Ελλαχ!'

Now, by the dictionary Ελλαχ means 'come here.' It is one of the dozen or so words that once you get the hang of how it is used, is a passport to Cretan apprenticeship. Ελλαχ is so redolent with undictionaried meanings that its import was more in the way it is said than the literal meaning. A few others are Καλά Kala! ('Good! Fab! Great!'), Ορεα Orea (‘Nice, Beautiful, Lovely, Fine'), and Ορίστη Oristi ('Please?' or 'How’s that?' — the French equivalent being comment?).

Ελλαχ! was the locution I’d hear from the neighbourhood mothers below my balcony wondering where the dickens the kids are. Voiced with more coo, it was the word Maria used when her husband Tassos was around and she needed a hand. Ελλαχ! is also the word screeched by tots who want Mommy NOW!

It was the word used by henna-haired Anna several doors down where she held court with several gossipy black-garbed dowagers in front of her own little trinket shop.

Anna was teaching her little boy, about five, to ride his bicycle. Gripping the tiny handlebars for dear life, tiny feet flailing on tiny pedals, he would wobble his way half-coasting and half-propelling down the Zambeliou decline past the gauntlet of mothers encouraging 'Bravo! Bravo!' to the corner where Anna was crouched on her knees, calling Ελλαχ! Ελλαχ!

This scene alone could bring a lifelong bachelor to pine for matrimony.

So when Maria called me, I ellah’d my way down the steep wooden staircase. Maria presented me with a gift-wrapped slab, which, given its shape, was either a book or a very large bar of soap.

Now, Xaniotes don’t throw a fizzy little ribbon around a piece of tissue paper and call it a gift wrap. This package came slathered in velvety green-brown paper with a banded sateen surface pattern that would not have looked out of place over the shoulders of an archbishop. The ribbon, circled and bow-knotted twice, was a finger-wide cerise strip with a wood-grain weave, pasted down fore and aft with an ellipsoid sticker from the shop Βιβλιοπωλείο Ξαρτοπωλείο, Bibliopoleio Xartopoleio. The whole affair made me think of Aldus Manutius’s book bindery back in the days when the craft of the book was being turned into the art of the book.

Cretans may be seemly when it comes to packaging gifts, but they’re far less prim when it comes to opening them. Maria motioned with a shooing-the-children wave of her hands, ανοιχτό, anoichtó — Open! Open!'

At the time I was used to Asian customs, one of which is that you never open a package in the presence of the person giving it to you. If you don’t like what is inside the giver will see it in your eyes and lose face.

Not so in Crete. They prefer something more like a strip-tease on fast forward. So off came all that luxurious wrap and ribbon (me feeling like I was desecrating an altar) and there inside was Maria’s personal Nobel Prize nominee, Yannis Ritsos’s Iconostasis of Anonymous Saints.

I riffled through the pages.

Maria beamed.

She then recited several passages that she had committed to heart.

I could see why she loved him. Page after page of deliciously complex prose, prose like poetry, poetry like myth, the events and thoughts of his characters like the cultural personas of Greece — the benevolently giving, the emotionally supportive, the seemingly submissive self-server, some who speak through the music of the heart and others who speak through the dust of their years.

Yannis Ritsos was a panurge all his own. His pages could better be termed Remembrances of Things That Always Are instead of Proust’s cookie-tin of things past. Indeed, even though his book was written in the past tense, it was really the past that is present in the future, for the past and the future merged in his lovely image-intoxicant style —

‘... or those white moths fluttering around the light bulb in the dining room and the poor creatures kept falling on the table and often even into the dinner dishes; and once Father got furious and threw his napkin into the soup and strode into the hallway and started smoking, puff-puff, and cursing away, and Mama started to weep. Gingerly, she picked up the napkin and laid it on the tray, and though she was still mutely weeping, she used her finger to remove the moth soaking wet from the soup, looking sad. ... And I said to myself when I grow up and become (by all means) a great poet, I’ll put many moths in my verses, birds, even owls (but not Athena’s owls, of course—they’re for the philosophers), even magpies, and many, many butterflies, and pigeons, the white ones and the grey and the speckled ones, as well as the carrier-pigeons (and the non-carrier too!), especially the carrier-pigeons holding a child’s letter in their beaks to post to God, or a letter from a soldier, carried by these pigeons unscathed high above the fires and the bullets, all the way to his mother or his sweetheart; or those other pigeon-doves with an olive branch in their beak, or the doves which have moulted because of all those traps, until Picasso rescued them and they grew all downy again; or these flirtatious pigeons which come and leave their droppings here on my terrace and I can see them through the large glass door of my balcony and I smile at them as they kiss one another on the mouth. I, a seventy-five year-old child, here on my couch, smiling still more as I watched these pigeons on my terrace kissing beak to beak.’

I was hard-put to think of an adequate response to a book like this. It had to be a book, assuredly, anything else would have been an altar without a candle. So I waited till her husband Tassos had the weekend duty at Armonia Keramika and asked him what kind of books she liked.

He opened a little cabinet where they kept the utilitarian items like the screwdriver to pry the door when the lock hangs up (live with a family and you learn these things) and the sugar packets for coffee and the tray of loose beads to replenish the bracelets that sold, and so on.

In there was her library. I was astonished. No heaving-bodice-in-gold-foil reader was this Maria! Her taste ran to George Seferis, Nanos Valaoritis, Odysseus Elitis, Katerina Gogou, and the tragically brief comet of Maria Polydouri whose intense love affair with Kostas Karyotakis ended in his suicide as a shamed syphlitic and her demise from a morphine overdose in an Athens tuberculosis sanatorium.

And how could she neglect Nikos Kazantzakis?

I decided nothing else would do than something by Gina Barriault or Amy Tan. A Cathy Bates film on video would have been nice, given Maria’s ampleness and the comforts of seeing a role model who’s made good, but Maria and Tassos didn’t have a VCR.

So I went to the bookstore and asked what they had. The best of the lot turned out to be Isabel Allende.

Maria and Isabel are now friends for life.

All this from a cup of chamomile tea.

Download and read the original Xaniá book that inspired this Substack here.