And here was great old Piraeus. Ships lined up along the quay like an apartment complex with high rises and low-rises and chimney stacks scattered here and there. Men pushed carts in front of departing ferry boats, in case passengers hungered for sugar cane, almonds, cashews, pistachios, dried apricots. Islanders with overflowing families arrived with dreams stuffed into their overflowing suitcases. Women carried bags with kataifi and baklava to sweeten their sudden appearance at the door of unsuspecting relatives. Men just off the ships walked into small polypoleiaand wondered what sort of jobs were available. Some walked right up to the gates of the Hercules Cement Company or the Bodosaki shipyards or the Mobil Oil refineries and asked for work. It was 1960 and all of Greece was on the move.
For the islanders the first thing they saw coming into port was the tall Niarchos building. Most of them had never seen anything over four stories and this building was at least twice as tall and three times as wide and many commented on whether Niarchos had really killed his wife or whether she had died on her own. From their holds the ships unloaded crates of tile from Italy, cars from Germany, radios from Minnesotta, bright orange tractors with fresh-smelling tires from Iowa, round metal drums of chemicals from Holland; and in exchange they took on wheat to North Africa, pieces of marble big as a truck to the mastercavers in Italy, crates of olives and olive oil, manganese, aluminum and aluminium, tin, phosphorus and limestone, and wads and wads of cotton to the ports of Rotterdam, Bristol, Southampton, the Hague and Hamburg.
Not everybody was arriving those years. Many were leaving. Sometimes a young boy, an adolescent, departed from his home in Piraeus with only a hundred drachmas in his pocket and six months later his parents would receive a telegram telling them he’d just docked in Shanghai or Havana or New York or Puerto del Fuego or Mozambique and that for the last half year he’d worked as a moutsos aboard the SS Orion or the SS Hercules and that he missed them and his sister and his friend Aris, and his parents, who’d suspected as much, because when they recalled their son’s mood in the weeks preceeding his departure they did detect a certain aloofness. Only then did they find, beneath his mattress, an Atlas with lines connecting cities across the seas, all of them radiating out like a great spoke, from the port of Piraeus. They knew that the captain’s of most ships weren’t averse to letting a young man test himself on the great oceans of the world, after all they knew what kind of men Greece needed and they knew the call of the sea because they too had answered that call years ago, before they became captains. Most on the ship believed such boys brought good luck, these boys who boarded with hope and a questing countenance that noticed everything, from the length of the masts to the balls of rope, from the links of the chains to the hum of the engines.This lent a little lustre and glamour to their jobs, the boys’ fawning awe and desperate fascination.
How many young men have clattered up the narrow slatted base of the sliding stairs and asked the captain for berth in exchange for kitchen duty, engine mate, or simply deck swabbing? And when the ropes are tossed off the metal stays, when the ship hoots and the chains rattle and the propellers churn and the great behemoth lumbers slowly out of the great port, taking a long while before the last ship is out of sight, past the stretch along the mainland, past Sounion, past the rocky and raw islands and then on down to the Suez canal or past the Rock of Gibraltar along the shores of Africa, docking for two nights at the Ivory Coast where the boy purchases a colorful shawl for his mother whom he has suddenly missed and three bagfuls of nuts for less than two drachmas or docking in the port of Liberia where everybody spoke English and had American names and spent dollars, or trading a pack of American cigarettes for a night with a woman in Santiago or clothes for a wooden carving from an old man in the port of Shanghai.
Andreas was one of those who came to Piraeus from the islands, with his parents and his three sisters, Ioulia, Varvara, and the eldest, Smaragdi who’d married Dimitris the policeman from the sixth precinct in Pireas. He himself had considered boarding a ship and busting butt out of here but since his older brother’s death of drowning — the best sponger in Hydra — Andreas wanted nothing to do with the sea. He was afraid of it. Spongers told of waves big as buildings crashing against the hull of ships and cracking the metal like it was made of clay; of monster sightings in the Gulf of Corinth and the Ionian Sea, stories of great beasts latching onto ships and tipping them over and then swallowing survivors like they were bits of bread like bait, ready for the taking. Pireaus was solid, the mainland, and there was no need for Andreas ever to board a ship or anything that floated again, anything that roiled and heaved and spilled you into the cold depths.
What he needed most he couldn’t have – something else, something he couldn’t quite define. Each time he thought he had it in his hands, like a soft ball of clay or a solid watermelon, that’s how certain he was that this aching inside was about to disappear, and then it would appear again, larger and more aching than ever. He was certain that this aching, this strange longing, which came usually at night when he stared out at the port and listened to the hoot of ships arriving or leaving, could be quenched and satisfied in the embrace of a woman and so convinced was he of this palliative that he often ended up in just such an embrace, only to find that the ache would return the following night, more insistent, calling him once more and then again he would leave his home in search of something he soon knew he would never find, but he couldn’t stop himself from searching.
It might hit him in the morning, when his head was clear. His job was to scrub the hulls of trawlers in the shipyards. Sometimes he’d be rubbing back and forth and the steady motion would bring another kind of motion to mind and he would push himself up against the hard hull as if he were reaching high up for a difficult spot and the need was so great that he would nearly faint and the pressure of his pelvis against the ship both soothed and excited him and there were times when he was certain he wouldn’t make it until the night. The curve of the hull, the feel of the wet shammy rag in his hand, the way the mussels stuck to the ship with such tenacity, the pile of open barnacles strewn at his feet, this for him were signs that man was born with woman’s open legs in their heads, inside the never-ending folds of the brain. Even those folds reminded him of a woman; somedays every fold, every curve and sinewy shape, everything that arched, turned and curled brought the idea of woman to his mind. Not a particular woman, but this other being, so different than him. He was sure that god had imprinted the idea of woman into man’s brain, like food. The days when the shammyrag felt full and swollen in his palm, when it felt he was holding a live object in his hand, that smelled of wet sea and felt like the softness of something slick, that’s when he began to see mountza everywhere, everywhere a woman’s mountza.
He blamed his sisters too. They slept in his room and it was wrong for women, even sisters, to lay in beds so close to a man. Only a few nights ago, while he lay sprawled on his hard bed, his mind dazed by two kilos of retsina and three hours of bouzouki, Varvara, the older sister, sighed and moaned as if Neptune himself had entered her dreams and when the moon rose and its beams searched out and discovered a direct line through the window, he saw the firm marble-colored flesh of her breasts heaving like the sea and he stilled a long cry of desire and shame by stuffing his mouth with his fist.
We are poor, Andreas thought. Poverty was god’s punishment to man. Poverty meant no shower, no kitchen, and no room for him to sleep in nor to bring a woman home. Poverty meant sleeping in the same small bedroom with his sisters, four saints, and a snail.
Why would anyone have made a decision to locate him on the corner of Drama and Aghiou Dimitriou, stuck between buildings, leaning like a cripple against the wall, one sock on one foot, the other in his hand, full of a longing that he himself couldn’t decipher.
He had grown however into one of the well known tough guys, better known as the ace of Pireas. Those who knew him knew he drank retsina instead of ouzo, sprinkled oregano on his goat cheese, spat on his shoes to keep them shiny and wore his shirt open to expose his mother’s crucifix.
After last night’s sortie, in the company of men hunched over like bent spoons as they danced, it was a wonder that he was up this fine Sunday morning, but up he was, making chortling noises in the water-filled sink, and, as if he hadn’t been carried to bed by his sisters because his own motor had simply stopped running, as if his ears weren’t buzzing, he strolled out the front door just as an amber sun rose over Pireas. Still, he was so tired his face had already reached his feet.
The ace didn’t like getting drunk so often, but did he have any choice? Each night someone in the world went down that road, and he was doing his part, fulfilling the world-wide quota of Saturday night drunks. If it wasn’t him, it would be someone else.
He headed toward the harbor.
Soon enough, relief was in sight: behind a passing tram, behind an overturned boat, between massive ships and mounds of netting, the first glimpse of the sea, a sea which was sometimes silver-grey, sometimes dark deep blue or sometimes light as the heavens. A quickened step carried him over the traintracks and there, with the city of Pireas at his back, the sea, was once again his, glittering like crushed glass in the early morning light. Sitting on one of the bronzed stays, next to the custom house, he listened. There was something comforting in the rhythmic sound of water slapping against the wharf, in the sight of fishermen mending their nets, and in the rugged voices of the stevedores helping the large ships dock.
He hadn’t been sitting there for more than a half hour when he noticed a poster of Aliki Vouyouklaki, the kitten-like actress, plastered on the old custom building’s wall. Her short dress, her kid-like pony-tails, her white teeth and her smooth face instantly reminded him of Anna, Angelou’s daughter. Both the actress and Anna had this impish femininity, child-like innocence trapped inside a body made for sin.
Andreas had never been with a woman like Anna, you know, proper, educated, soft-spoken, well-dressed, hard-working. In Anna he believed he could quench this unfathomable longing for something that he couldn’t quite define. She’d just returned from boarding school that week and he’d seen her sitting primly on her porch with her legs together, a pyramid of beauty, exposing the fringed white lace of her slip. She was the perfect seven. Two knees, two palms, two perfect breasts. Plus one perfect forehead. In all of Pireas you wouldn’t find more than a handful of girls like her.
Suddenly he stood, pressed his cheek against Aliki’s face and closed his eyes. Ignoring the scrabbly surface pushing through the poster he drew in his breath. From the cusom station’s yard came a strong smell, full of colors, like a bouquet of wild flowers. That’s how Anna would smell.
The ace returned home at a fast pace, stopping only for a moment at Mouslopoulos’ aroma store. He waved to the Coffinas brothers who were banging nails into wood. Tsaka Tsouka had already passed by with his cart, he could tell from the sunflower seeds that children were spitting out.
He had known Anna for three years but the idea of something more permanent suddenly possessed a powerful logic. Anna gave off this bright yellow color, like a small sun. But her countenance, which seemed to him demure and calm by day, returned to him by night through the gashy haze of his sleep, her face now distorted by anxious desire, her eyes wanton and bright, her lips full and red. Perhaps he was confusing his many women with this single one.
A bird from Ramfos’ garden cried a strange warbling cry. As if this were a signal, the ace left the home and with a strong gait, heart pounding in his ears, crossed the street. The evenings sounds grew sharper; boys playing soccer shouted “Pass! Pass!” From somewhere behind the houses a man shouted that he would sharpen knives for half a drachma; in the distance, the deep blare of a ship, and from an open window came the scratchy voice of the old hash-smoking singer, Tsitsanis.
With that bright chipmunk called hope gnawing at his heart, he ran his fingers through his hair, skipped up the four steps to Anna’s home and banged on the door. The door unlocked with two turns.
“May I help you?” Anna’s father’s tall form filled the entrance. His face was pale and dry, with blotchy violet liver spots. His bony hand gripped the door, not quite opening all the way.
“I’d like to speak to Anna.” The ace pushed the door but the old man held it firmly in place.
“Speak to me.” He looked as tough as gnarled wood.
“Anna, please.”
“Anna please?” he repeated. “What is my daughter, something on a menu? Miss Angelou to you.”
The ace drew in his breath and looked down. The father’s shoes were spotlessly clean, the worn laces carefully tied.
“May I speak to Miss Angelou?”
“There’s only one reason a man like you asks to speak to my daughter. Am I right?”
Without hesitating, without thinking, he answered. “Yes.” What else could he say?
“Father, who is it?” His breath quickened. A girlish intonation, but also a woman’s full and confident voice. His hand rose automatically to touch the small bottle of perfume inside his jacket. He searched for her but saw only a painting of a ship caught between two gigantic white-topped waves.
“I have something for her,” The ace said, bringing out the small glass flask of perfume. He imagined Anna’s red-face, her bright eyes looking up at him expectantly, her golden-brown hair swept back to reveal her honest forehead, her skirt lifting above her knees, the sound of her stockings sifting as she came to greet him.
The old man exhaled.
“Look, when my daughter chased you around, she was only twelve and didn’t know any better. Back then I didn’t mind. Besides, back then you held out promise.” The man tried to close the door but the ace didn’t let him. “My daughter is not available,” he said. “She didn’t return from boarding school so she could end up with a man who drinks all night long. She’s not meant for an ace, let alone the ace of Tambouria.”
The bottle slipped from the ace’s fingers and landed on his foot. He stared at it and wondered how it got there. The father bent down to get it and when he straightened up, pressed it gently back into the ace’s hand.
“Look, no harm meant,” the father added, “it’s just that my daughter is special to me.”
“Zero plus zero makes zero,” The ace managed to say without shouting and then with a tremendous effort turned away sharply before Anna’s father had a chance to say anything more.
He stood in the street and looked up at the door which now seemed shut forever. He heard a loud crack, a sound loud as a gunshot. Shards of wet glass glittered next to his shoes. He’d hurled the bottle of perfume against the asphalt. The Leotsakou boys ran around him like excited puppies and pointed to the broken glass. One of them bent down to examine the broken bottle and the ace slapped his head. “Eh, get lost!” They ran off, one of them holding a large piece of the bottle in the air, a trophy.
He tramped into the run-down sections of Tambouria. The walls were still pocked from bullets from the Civil War. From somewhere nearby came muffled laughter and the austere notes of a bouzouki. He picked up his pace and reached the steps to the basement entrance, which was guarded by a knee-high gate. When he bent to walk down he recalled Anna’s father stooping for the perfume, he recalled the man’s neat polished shoes. He lifted his head and spat.
Through the low window the ace saw Maki and Kyr-Vassili at their usual table, their faces bright from drink. Already he felt better. Down the narrow stone steps he went. A pack of grizzled faces lifted their heads when he entered and nodded their heads. Cardsharps, gamblers, hashish smokers, singers, a few working aces like himself, they were all here. In one corner a large man exhaled two tusks of white smoke from his nostrils. Home at last.
“Eh, what’s the matter with you,” Kyr-Vassili said when he saw him come in. “You look different tonight. Pssst! Are you listening?”
“What’s the matter with me?” The ace sat down with them. “What’s the matter with you? When’s the last time any of you bums tasted fresh fruit? I mean real fresh?”
“Dried fig’s what I’ve been tasting.” Captain Yanni said. “Dried up old fig. Can’t afford anything else.”
“Better a dried fig than a Peloponnesian cucumber,” said Kyr-Vassili.
“I don’t like cucumber,” Captain Yanni said, “bitter stuff.”
“Maki loves cucumber,” Kyr-Vassili said and stared at a dirty-blonde haired youth. “I’ve seen him coming out of Achillia’s.”
“I heard that Achillia keeps butterfly wings in matchboxes,” Captain Yanni said.
“Yeah, and feathers above his doorway,” Kyr-Vassili added, raising his elbows and clucking like a chicken.
Captain Yanni sang, “Fag loves a fag, slut loves a slut, but Maki the stag will hunt any butt.”
The ace put money on the table and the waiter brought another bottle.
“I knocked on a proper woman’s door tonight,” he said after downing his third glass. “When the door opened and the father saw me, dressed in my good shirt,” he paused and poured another retsina, “he thought I’d come to ask him for her hand! Just because an ace knows how to dress they imagine all kinds of things. Me! Asking for a life sentence! Me, asking for a life of sweet talk, dinners with relatives, walks in the park, children… All I want is a good woman, the kind that shoot craps and fry their fish in garlic and beet sauce, the kind that won’t care if I curse.” They all shook their heads in sympathy. “The father was lucky he wasn’t any younger. I’d have ground his cheek against the asphalt and shown him an ant’s perspective of Psarron street.” The ace wiped his neck and sniffed his palm. The scent of perfume lingered there.
“An ace never votes for tyranny,” the Captain said.
“To the democracy of bachelors.” Kyr-Vassili lifted his glass.
“To Andreas,” Captain Yanni said. “May he never join the respectable classes.” They raised their glasses.
The ace drew some bills from his wallet, licked them, and with a light slap placed them on the foreheads of each of the musicians — a squat accordionist and a gaunt bouzouki player, who nodded their heads in thanks. The ace then stood in front of them, and head down, as if looking at the floor, arms extended, hunching low, began to dance. He gained speed, spun and filled the room with his body. He grabbed a glass, put it on the floor, sank to his knees, clenched the glass between his teeth, lifted his head back, emptied the contents into his mouth, and then flung the empty glass away with a toss of his head. The glass tumbled through the air, bounced off someone’s shoulder and landed on the floor without breaking. He grabbed another glass and threw it directly onto the floor. This one shattered instantly and shards ricocheted through the room, hitting the musicians’ feet. Satisfied, he sat down, ordered more wine and a replacement for the glasses while the boy swept away the damage.
The ace closed his eyes and listened to the man singing. The man had a voice that could bring an ache into every man’s heart. Rather than leave the ace in his solitude, Kyr-Vassili, started saying something about women and bachelorhood.
“I’ve had enough of all of you!” With a single swipe of his hand the ace cleared the table of its contents — bottles, glasses, plates, olives, toothpicks – and sent the whole thing to the floor. A man g stopped dancing. The ace glared at him. “C’mon,” he said, fists up, head erect, “you dance like a woman!” The man, dressed in a poor, shabby suit, shrugged, looked the other way and sat down.
The boy swept up the damage, like he did every night for men who got into these moods. The ace stood a while longer, grabbed a bottle from a passing tray, excused himself and left. He swayed so much climbing up the basement steps that he held onto the railing so he didn’t tumble.
Outside he slapped himself. There was no sting. He checked his pocketbook just in case he’d miscalculated and recounted the money he’d spent: musician’s foreheads, bottles of wine, perfume, and the new shirt he was wearing. Like all men leaving the bouzouki house, he was broke. Not even two hundred drachmas for Aphrodite or Brigitte, in whose wallowing embrace he would find some comfort.
In front of the Church of Aghia Triada he crossed himself, kissed his fingers and sat in the middle of the square to finish the bottle. Swishing the retsina around his mouth he finally let the liquid slide down his throat and leaned over to bring the cuff of his pants as close as he could to his nose, inhaling the smell of perfume that had spilled there. Wasn’t all of Tambouria animated by Anna’s spirit? These streets, this very square in which he now sat were hers. She too had grown up here. He never paid attention to her when she was just a knobby-kneed, hair-chewing girl with a crush on a slightly older man, never noticed her when she brought him a basketful of fruits and vegetables from her village each Sunday afternoon. A woman of her purity could possess all of Tambouria. Own it. He got to his feet and held the retsina bottle up.
“I, the ace of Tambouria,” he shouted, “now cede to you, Anna, all my rights!” He took a swig. “Do you here me out there? Anna, for you! All this!” He spread his arms. “From the church of Aghia Triada to the port of Pireas, from the Koffinas Brothers to the Arkadia Theater, this is now your domain!”
A window flew open. “Shut the hell up down there! Some of us have to work, you know!”
“Yeah?” the ace shouted back. “I’m at work right now!” He made the sign of the cross. “I christen you Anna, Queen of Tambouria,” he said, sprinkling the rest of the retsina in the air like a priest with his censer blessing his flock. Maybe she would be willing to share, fifty-fifty. He, the night-bound roamer and she, the daytime pearl. He sat down again.
Ah, what he would give for a woman, just a single a glance at one, his eyes fastening on her legs, the swell of breast, the shake of her head when she realized he was staring, the quickening of her steps, the huffy denial when he murmured something dirty. He cradled the empty bottle and rocked back and forth.
Finally he stood and headed up Macedonia Boulevard. Next to the California movie theater he came across a poster of Aliki Vouyouklaki like the one he’d seen this morning. “Anna,” he said “Anna.”
Bits of poster still clenched in his fists, he tumbled from wall to wall and continued to wander through a maze of narrow and dirty streets. Here the houses were so old that the balconies leaned downwards ready to collapse. There would be no Anna for him. Those were ridiculous dreams not brought on by him but by that strange ache that haunted him when he drank.
It was three in the morning when he knocked on Achillia’s door. The ace imagined Achillia bent over the back of a chair, pants around his ankles and hands curled around the chair’s feet, shouting and swearing as the ace took him with the force of a piston. He knocked again and heard the shuffle of slippers across the floor. He drew in his breath and waited for the door to open.