by Sara Alexi
There are no small parcels today, but there are many delivery notices. He has a ball of elastic bands he uses to group the letters together, all those for a given street in one pile. The elastic-band ball grows smaller as he sorts and bigger again as he delivers. Most of the streets and lanes in the village do not have names and the houses do not have numbers. Once, many years ago, someone came up with the idea of numbering each house in the village, starting with one and just going around assigning consecutive numbers, but since then so many houses have been built in between that they have given up that system, as it stopped making any sense. Cosmo knows which letter goes where by name. He knows where everyone lives, and he does not need addresses.
He is quite enjoying himself this morning. The exertion first thing in his orchard has given him energy rather than draining him and he feels ready to meet whatever the day will bring. He is even ready to face Maria with the letter.
‘No!’
The sound that escapes him echoes round his small kitchen and back again.
‘Nooooo.’ The second sound is more of a whine. He puts his finger on the corner of an envelope he has spotted and slides it out of the stack. Sure enough, he is not mistaken: the handwriting is the same and it is addressed to Maria.
For a moment all he can do is stare. Two so close together is unusual, but not unprecedented. Did the first one say something different? Did the writer give an address, expecting an answer?
He dances up to the stained and creased envelope that he has put on the shelf with the coffee and sugar. Today was going to be the day he delivered and read it to her. He had made his mind up, he was ready, he really was, and with the energy his early-morning activity had given him he felt he could accomplish anything. But now? With two?
‘Damn you, whoever you are!’ He addresses the letter. ‘You play with people’s lives and you haven’t even got the courage to sign your name!’ With a sneer on his lips, which would be hidden from any onlooker by his overgrown moustache, he shoves the new envelope behind the coffee jar, so it is only just visible. He puts the stained one with it and tuts and huffs his disregard as he sorts the rest of the letters, standing at the table as if there was some hurry.
Once he is out on his bike, the two letters sit in the front of his mind. His is still huffing to himself and his postbag is digging into his back. He grumbles even more loudly as he heads to the school, where he begins his rounds. Across the road from the school, a cluster of tall cypress trees casts a welcome shade, and today there is something moving beneath them. A young man he thinks he recognises is talking to a girl, who is leaning against one of the trunks. The man’s hand is on the trunk above her head and she has tucked hers behind her back so she can push herself off the trunk and let herself rock back. The youth leans forward slowly as if waiting for a rejection, but when it does not come, he becomes bolder and kisses the girl full on the mouth.
With a screech of brakes and a swerve Cosmo just misses the streak of a black-and-white cat that races across the road in front of him.
‘Panayia!’ he exclaims, but the image of the tender kiss he has just witnessed has not been erased by the drama. All those years his mama insisted that she should be enough for him – how could she ever have thought that? In his twenties he had not believed her and he had courted – well, sparked up friendships – with a couple of girls, but his mama had been so condemnatory, finding fault with both the girls and their families and generally making both him and the girls feel so uncomfortable that it had been simpler not to make the effort. It wasn’t as if talking to them came easily anyway. He couldn’t hide his shyness and it seemed he had little to say, so in a way it felt like his mama had given him the easy way out. He had an excuse not to make the effort. As his youth passed and she repeatedly told him how lucky he was to have a mama as devoted to him as she was, he almost believed her, and apart from the occasional biological urge he was content – or at least, he considered himself so. But age brings wisdom, and her death has delivered clarity and a new perspective, and he is beginning to believe that she was wholly wrong and selfish in maintaining his single status.
‘You were a selfish, self-absorbed woman,’ Cosmo says out loud as he pulls up outside Sakis’s house with a whole handful of letters. Saying these words out loud feels surprisingly good. He stops and straightens his back.
‘Selfish, self-absorbed woman,’ he says again. A grin forms on his lips, but in his chest, anger bubbles. He stuffs the letters harshly through the letterbox and returns to his bike.
None for Anna across from Sakis today. Anna. Now, she is a woman who never liked his mama. She never said so outright, but she said on a number of occasions over the years, ‘No matter how much you love your mama, she is not enough. A man should have a wife.’
She would twist her thin gold band around her crooked finger when she said this. But Cosmo, in turn, twisted the logic and doubted whether this rule applied to him because he was in fact unsure that he did love his mama. Mostly she just irritated him, and at other times she reduced him to feeling slow, lazy and incapable. So useless, who would want him as a husband anyway?
‘You are a fine man, with a good heart. Find yourself a girl,’ Kyria Anna repeated. But Cosmo knew that it wasn’t the inside of someone you see when you are thinking of courting, and if there was anything ‘fine’ about him it would certainly take some discovering.
He hitches his jeans over his shrinking hips. Well, he is less tubby than he was, and with his shaven chin he looks better than he did. It has even crossed his mind to shave off his moustache.
He first stopped shaving in his early twenties when he noticed his double chin.
‘Too much pastichio,’ his mama commented, but she continued to pile his plate high and admonish him for his ingratitude if he did not eat the lot.
‘A decision made, then,’ he tells himself. The moustache must go and then he will see better who he is.
The rest of his morning is uneventful and he returns home earlier than usual. He has time for a bite to eat at Stella and Mitsos’s, and then he will continue clearing the weeds in the orchard, if it is not too hot.
He is about to put his empty postbag on the back of one of the kitchen chairs when he looks at the hooks by the door. Her coats and aprons occupy more than half of the hooks, and without thinking he rips them from where they hang and throws them in a heap on the floor, and then takes a large black rubbish sack from the kitchen drawer. He stuffs the lot in, ties up the top and tosses it out of the back door. Then he casually takes his postbag and hangs it on one of the three empty hooks.
‘Ahh, there.’ His satisfaction elongates the words. He steps back to admire the view and rubs his chin. His fingers creep up and play in his moustache, which brings about his second burst of activity. The kettle is put on to heat water, his shaving bowl is brought, his razor is found and a mirror is stood on the table, resting against the pale-green wall.
‘White.’ He decides on the wall colour as the kettle comes to the boil. He pours the water into the bowl, and begins the process of ridding himself of his thirty-year-old moustache to see who it is hiding. It takes longer than he expects, and more concentration than he anticipated, but after a great deal of close-up work in the mirror he sits back to take a good look at his whole face.
‘Oh.’ He does not recognise himself and he stares some more. There is no trace of his baba in his face, and his mouth is too generous to be his mama’s. His eyebrows are rather bushy, but apart from that it is a nice face.
‘Why have I been hiding behind all that itchy, scratchy hair all these years?’ he asks himself, and he smiles at the stranger in the mirror. The stranger smiles back and he decides he likes the stranger. The stranger has an honest face that looks as though it has humour, and there is kindness in the eyes, which is accentuated now the harsh line around the mouth is gone.
He runs a hand through his hair, which touches his collar at the back. Perhaps it is time for a haircut too, and maybe, what wi
th his belt being on the last notch, he needs to buy new trousers.
‘Yes, indeed,’ he says to himself.
But then, in the reflection, on the shelf, he notices not one but two letters addressed to Maria, and the stranger’s smile is gone. He knows in his heart what they will say, but why two, why so close together? He could deliver them and refuse to read them, but that would be just as unkind as reading them. They are not going to make her happy and she will know it too, so maybe delivering them but refusing to read them is the answer. He can even say he will not read them because they will make her unhappy, but why say what she knows already? He could just slip them under her door and say nothing. Yes, that is a good solution.
He stops looking at them through the mirror and turns to take them down from the shelf. If these letters had never come, how would he have courted Maria? His insides shrink and a small voice lets him know that he would have been no braver. The things he would have had to say would still have been left unsaid. His stomach lurches: has he used these letters as an excuse, a simple reason not to face doing what he found hard to do, a veil over his own cowardice?
Chapter 9
He stands open-mouthed at his own thoughts.
‘Is that the truth, eh, Cosmo?’ he addresses himself. The second letter is not sealed well either, the glue on the aging envelope long gone. It takes no effort and leaves the envelope unmarked as he flicks it open. The yellowing, lined paper with the water stain in the top corner seems so familiar, like a toothache that won’t go away. He reads,
There are days when I think I might have the nerve to tell you of my love, but if you have not noticed me all these years then it is not meant to be.
He stops reading. It is the same as all the others; the writer doesn’t even vary his language or his sentences any more. In the first few years the letters carried more hope, more promise that the writer might actually declare who he was, offer her something more real, but as time has passed they have all begun to sound just like this one – accepting that his love is unrequited and therefore requiring no answer. But indeed, how could Maria reply when the sender never puts an address, never even scrawls his name at the bottom?
‘What is the point?’ Cosmo asks. Some insect scratches in the roof beams, breaking the silence.
It was not intended, of course, but one thing these letters have done is stop him declaring his own love to Maria. Or rather, not so much the letters, as Maria’s reaction to them. But it was not these letters that made her withdraw so deeply into herself: it was that first letter from a different author, the rejection letter itself. That was such a devastating blow to Maria that it is possible she will never recover, being as delicate and defensive in her nature as she is. But it is the love letters that have shredded his hope, acting as they have like a dripping tap, reminding poor Maria of the first.
Cosmo shakes his head. He can still feel her pain on hearing him read the rejection letter. Her face first became hard, emotionless, then slowly cracked and distorted at the words as he read them until she was unrecognisable in her distress. She crumbled before him, her beautiful young mouth twisted into an ugly grimace, her brow contracted into a hundred lines, her eyes expressing the pain that her heart was feeling, and it broke his own heart to see her in such agony. He hated himself for being the messenger, and although of course he did not know it at the time, what he saw in her face was a glimpse of how time would distort her beauty to reflect her changed feelings, from soft and beautiful to bitter and hard, her face twisted by her outlook. Poor Maria.
He puts the letters one behind the other, back behind the sugar jar, and sits heavily at the table. That day, the day the rejection letter arrived, had been like any other. He had been doing the job for nearly two years by then, and with the cockiness of youth he thought nothing could surprise him or catch him off guard. He had read letters telling old men that their sisters had died, then watched them crumple and cry like children before listening to every memory that could be recalled of their poverty-stricken childhoods. He had read letters to women from defiant daughters engaged to unsuitable men and heard a tirade of language that shocked him. He had read of births and joined in with the listeners’ delight, read of children moving abroad and sympathised with those left behind, and read of businesses going bust and become wiser for knowing the details. What had he not had to impart in the brief time he had been employed to deliver the post? That day had been like any other, quieter if anything, and so he arranged that Maria would be his last call. This took away all time constraints, so if he had the chance he could stretch out his time with her; maybe one coffee could become two.
With the energy of youth, he knocked on her door with a little embellishment, a quick rhythm, and she opened it with a smile. It is funny how these meaningless moments become forever impressed on the mind when they are the forerunners to events that should never occur. He knew her smile was not all for him. Not much can be kept secret in a village and the news that Maria had started to walk out with one Nektarios from Saros had spread quickly, and Cosmo had watched her blossom under this man’s attention. Of course, this made it impossible for her ever to be romantically involved with him, Cosmo, but he had never really expected that would happen anyway. He was just pleased for her. It was generally agreed that she was beautiful, and since the rumours started she had begun positively to glow. It was whispered by the old women that Nektarios was from a good family and that he would soon propose. Maria walked with her back a little straighter and held her head a little higher. There had been a softening to her features as well, as if a weight had been lifted from her, and there was a contentment about her as if her future, away from the uncertain life that is a farmer’s lot, felt assured for her.
It had seemed inevitable that someone from outside the village, someone worthier, would gain her love. After all, what did the village boys, or even Cosmo himself, have to offer? Nothing. But he hoped that maybe they could continue to be friends, if friends indeed they were at this point.
He was also aware that if this rich boy did make his offer then Maria was bound to move to Saros to live in the family house – or perhaps his parents would buy a new home for the couple. Would Cosmo even see her again?
Such were his thoughts as he made his trill of a knock and she invited him to read her letters to her.
‘How were your rounds today?’ she asked, holding the door open. She was alone today. Occasionally her mama was there, but more often than not both parents were tending the olive trees or working in the polytunnels where they grew aubergines and cucumbers.
‘Much the same. I can smell something good.’ He hung his bag on the back of a wooden chair and sat at the well-scrubbed kitchen table.
‘Biscuits.’ Maria took the briki from a nail in the wall and filled it with water from the tap. She lit the single-burner gas stove on the old marble counter by the cracked and stained marble sink and set the little pan on top to make coffee. He watched her long, supple limbs as she reached for the tin of coffee on the high shelf. How many times had he watched her do that and fought the urge to stand and offer his help, to stand behind her and reach past her? If she turned in such a position their faces would be so close.
But he remained seated and the coffee was made without his help. The biscuits came straight from the oven and as she broke the first into two pieces it crumbled and steamed. Maria passed him half and blew on her fingers to cool them. He wanted to take her hand and blow on her fingertips for her. He almost saw himself doing it, but her eyebrows were raised, questioning, looking towards his postbag.
‘Two today. One a phone bill but the other – well, here, you can see.’ He passed her the letters.
‘Oh,’ she said at the sight of the flourishing hand that had addressed the second letter. She delicately tore open the envelope and after a brief uncomprehending glance handed it back.
‘Who is it from?’ she asked, a little smile playing on her lips.
‘Er …’ He turned the sheet ove
r and then looked at the second sheet. Oh, Kyrios Nektarios.’ He added the polite form of address, joining in with her charade.
The talk about Nektarios and Maria was on everyone’s lips. For the village, it was a Cinderella story. He was from one of the richest families around, and with Maria being just a poor farmer’s daughter from a village their possible engagement had spread like wildfire, bringing disappointment both to the girls who had been hopeful that they might catch Nektarios and the boys who were pining for Maria.
Cosmo then looked at the postmark – Athens – and just a tiny knot started in his stomach.
‘Oh.’ Maria wriggled on her seat at the sound of Nektarios’s name and tried to veil her excitement. ‘Do please read it.’
Her face lit up and Cosmo wondered how it must feel to have the power to affect someone in that way.
He smiled too, ignoring the intuitive tightening in his gut. He liked imparting good news and happy tidings. People treated him as if it was he who had made wonderful things happen.
‘Dearest Maria,’ he started, clearing his throat. ‘Our courtship has been a wonderful rush of nothing but good feelings.’ He glanced at Maria, who was looking past him, away into the distance, her eyes shining and alive.
‘How fortunate we have been that we have stepped out together so often and so freely. Your parents have been very generous with your time. It was always such a pleasure to spend those hours with you, but I did wonder, on occasion, at how free they were with such a perfect treasure.’
His eyes flicked towards Maria again, who, although still looking into the distance, now wore a small frown.
‘Read on,’ she commanded.
‘You knew of my impending trip to Athens, and now I am here. With my future before me, it is amazing how my perspective on life has changed. If you were here I feel sure that you would understand.’