“No!” Anna says. “You can’t think that way! Revolution has to effect actual political change, otherwise you’re just letting off steam. Why don’t you go to a soccer match if that’s what you’re looking for?”
I have the sneaking suspicion that she chose us, rather than us choosing her.
“It’s over.”
There’s no need for Mom to say more, I understand. Aunt Amalia—whatever was left of Aunt Amalia—is gone. I pound my fist on the table. It used to be where I drew. Now it’s covered in paper: books, photocopies, proclamations, articles about the Zapatistas. With a single motion it’s gone: I sweep the telephone, my pencils, the papers all onto the floor. Suddenly the table is empty and clean. All that’s left is the marks from my X-Acto knife.
“What happened?” Mom shouts. Her voice is coming from the floor, through the tiny holes in the receiver.
“Something fell,” I say, stretching out on the floor next to the phone. Something fell, yes. I can see Amalia now, falling from her balcony in slow motion so as to escape the spies with their burning eyes. I picture her in a long cotton nightgown, though I know she was wearing her black and white dress when they found her. In the movie in my head, she’s a cartoon hero: she bounces back up into the sky as if the sidewalk were a trampoline, bursting into a fit of laughter. The tears won’t come. My emotions just lie there on the floor, amid the piles of paper: overturned, indefinable.
At the funeral, Dad leans down to dust off his shoes with his hand. Mom blows her nose into an embroidered handkerchief. Antigone is wearing huge Jackie Onassis sunglasses. Anna cries for us both. If there’s an afterlife, Stamatis, too, is surely hovering overhead in a velvet armchair with wings, pipe in his mouth. Camus stands a little ways off, next to some other grave. He’s pretending not to know us, and smoking like a chimney.
“He loves you,” Anna says, wiping her eyes.
Merde, there goes another one. She’ll steal him, too.
“Antigone is completely nuts. She’s going on vacation on a yacht.”
“Aren’t you happy she’s happy?”
“Are you serious, merde? Happy with the CEO?” Anna makes a face. Happiness is meaningless if it’s not the kind she approves of. Her mother has fallen in love with an upper-echelon executive of a multinational corporation. We see them in magazines hobnobbing with members of the administration. Antigone is always looking away—“out of guilt,” Anna claims. The executive has a baby face and white hair and is always wearing a tie. You’d think they grabbed him right out of grade school and threw him into the thick of it. I’ve never met him, but he’s left his mark everywhere. The bookshelves in the living room, which were always in utter disarray, are somewhat more presentable now. A woman from northern Epirus comes and cleans the house in Plaka twice a week. The lithograph by Tasos has given way to a painting by Kostas Tsoklis. Antigone travels with her new man to Mexico, Buenos Aires, Morocco. They come home laden with rugs, copper pots, maté gourds.
“There was a time when she would have walked her shoes to pieces to meet Subcomandante Marcos. Now she slips into heels, neat as can be, and goes down to breakfast at the Intercontinental.”
“You’re too hard on her, Anna.”
“Am I, or is she insensitive? Who would have expected it? She’s no better than your mother these days.”
“What do you mean? My mom doesn’t have a boyfriend, and hasn’t bought a new outfit in years.”
“I mean that these days Antigone cares about what people think, what people say.”
Antigone used to have a false braid! Wasn’t that caring what people thought? I wish I could say something. I wish I could find a way to offend her, the way she offends me.
The crickets are shrieking.
“Listen to this,” Anna says. “One must deliver politics from the tyranny of history, in order to return it from the event.”
She’s re-reading Alain Badiou on the rocks of Amorgos. She’s found a walking stick, too, like a present-day hermit. This year she’s wearing a blue kerchief over her hair, and new espadrilles. A cheerful worker all in pastels.
“What does that mean?”
“That in practice, communism is entirely active, kinetic, anti-state.” Everything that comes out of her mouth is a quote. I go on cutting up a peach with my penknife.
“Want some? It’s juicy.”
“Why are you avoiding the conversation?”
“I’m not avoiding anything. I just like dealing with tangible things—the sun, a peach. When you were going through your environmental phase, you liked things like that too.”
Anna’s gaze drills right through me. “My environmental phase?” She suddenly leaps to her feet. I’m afraid she’s going to pinch me, but she walks right by, preparing herself for one of her theatrical dives. She slices into the water; a few moments later her head appears in the distance like the head of a pin. I reach for her book and scan the phrases she’s underlined: “the emigration of victory,” “with that orphanhood of the real,” “in order for the impossible to obtain its historicity.”
What precisely is she looking for? As the years go by, I find Anna harder and harder to comprehend.
Her hair is done up in a loose braid, her shoulders smell of vanilla-scented moisturizer. She has her back to me in bed, as if we’re a quarreling couple. She’s gathered the sheet up so that it’s dividing her part of the bed from mine, the way she used to divide our desk down the middle at school. This year we rented a room, we’re too old for campsites. We want our own bathroom.
From the other side of the wall come the sighs of a man and woman having sex. The regularity of the sounds seems almost silly when you’re not involved. We eavesdrop; we both miss being in a long-term relationship. These days I see Camus only rarely, and Kayo remains an untouchable dream. For a moment I imagine that the cries are coming from Camus and Anna. It’s not hard to picture them twisted into revolutionary poses on his tattered mattress. Is something going on between them? I’ll never know. These days Anna is careful.
I pull her braid. She throws a pillow at me. Scratches, elbowing, tickling. We dissolve into laughter, fall to the floor, our faces bright red. Anna mimics the couple’s sighs and we laugh until our bellies ache. Our friendship is like a balloon: we blow and blow until it bursts in a flash of disappointment, then we mend the holes and start all over again from the beginning.
“Want to go get something to eat?” I say.
Whenever we’re very sad or very happy we head for the fridge. These days we don’t make up by peeing, but by eating. We order double portions at all the tavernas on the island. The owners treat us like walking advertisements: two toothpicks who eat for five. We wipe our plates clean with chunks of bread and sigh.
“No one knows me the way you do,” Anna says, wiping her mouth with a paper napkin.
We’re in our classic posture of reconciliation: face-up on our towels, Anna’s head on my stomach. My head is turned toward the rocks, my eyes are closed, my lids burn in the sun. I hear footsteps and half open my eyes: high up on the rocks, a man is standing with his hands on his hips. He hisses at us as if we were cats.
“Get lost, you fool!” Anna shrieks. She sits up and puts her hands on her hips, too, ready as ever for a fight.
The man starts climbing down in our direction. He’s moving quickly, practically at a run, aided by the downward slope. The sun is at his back, which makes it hard for us to see him clearly. It’s not until he’s just five meters away that we can see he’s a foreigner, probably Albanian, and of that indeterminate age of men who work hard under the sun. He has a sunburnt forehead, bright green eyes, and an enraged look in his eyes. He seems to think I’m the one who shouted at him. He rushes at me and grabs my wrists, the way my mom used to when I was little.
“Who did you call a fool?”
“Let me go!” My wrists hurt.
“Let go of her right now!” Anna shouts. “You pig, you jerk!”
The man is beside himself. He grabs
me and drags me to the very edge of the rock; my head scrapes against the ground, my back is bleeding. Anna rushes at him, leaps onto his back, clings to his shirt. The man elbows her hard in the ribs and she falls onto my towel, as if she were a pesky lizard he’d flicked off his arm. He heads for me again, threateningly. His shoes are caked in tar and sand.
“Who did you call a fool?”
His hands—thick, callused red fingers—are curled into fists. I close my eyes and see three stocky men at the mouth of a cave. They have stockings over their faces. Behind their backs stretches a beach with rusting suya grills. The air is thick, humid. It’s the rainy season in Nigeria.
Someone kicks me hard in the nose. Hot blood gushes. Instead of fainting, I open my eyes wide: the man is standing above me, ready to kick me again, this time in the ribs, and maybe spit on me, too. His nostrils flare with rage. Anna rushes at him again, this time with her walking stick. She takes aim as if she were a pole-vaulter and plunges the stick into his gut. The man loses his balance and falls off the rocks into the sea. He growls, swallowing water with loud gargling noises, then shouts something incomprehensible, struggling against the waves.
“Run!” Anna shouts.
We start running up the hill like madwomen. At the top we stop to catch our breath beside a bicycle with a rusted chain—it must be his. I turn back toward the sea. My heart feels as if it might explode.
“Anna, look!”
My voice sounds distorted, I’m holding my nose with one hand to stop the blood. Her eyes turn instinctively to where I’m pointing: the Albanian’s body is floating, face-down. His printed shirt has ballooned out like a parachute over his back.
The sun is hot, but our inner temperature has dropped.
“Are you sure he drowned?” She keeps asking the same question every five minutes, as if any second now he might come back to life, swim to shore and crawl from the sea like a creature out of some horror movie thirsting for revenge. Deep down we wish we were in that kind of movie. We wish he would crawl out of the water and attack us again; we wish he would give us a second chance.
Sitting on the bed, we take turns tending to one another’s wounds and crying. My back is badly scraped, and my nose won’t stop bleeding. The worst was when we had to go back down to the shore and gather our things, clean the blood from the rocks and get rid of the stick. The whole time we could see the Albanian, floating, out the corner of our eye. Motionless, his shirt filled with water, like a deflated raft. Blood was flowing from somewhere, diffusing steadily into the sea. He had probably hit up against the rocks.
“We’re murderers, murderers!” Anna hisses. Her eyes are wider, bluer than ever.
“It was self-defense, he attacked us!”
“How was I supposed to know he couldn’t swim?”
“The real question is, what do we do now?”
We don’t sleep at all that night. At the smallest noise in the hallway we’re sure that they’ve found our fingerprints. That they’ve come to arrest us.
“I saw this strange image,” I whisper in the middle of the night, nestling my head against her shoulder. Anna is drenched in sweat, her hair practically dripping. The moon casts a macabre, yellowish light on her eyelashes, her cheekbones, the dimple in her chin. “Right before he kicked me, I saw these men in a cave. They were holding me hostage. It was so strange . . . as if . . .”
Anna sits up, wrapped in the sheet. “What happened next?”
“There was no next. That’s all I saw. Three men with stockings over their faces.”
“But what then?” Anna hugs me, and a shiver runs through me.
“I told you, that’s all I saw!”
“Remember, try to remember,” Anna whispers, gently stroking my hair, as if I were a child.
Gwendolyn is ironing, I can see her clearly. The tropical rains have started, which is why she hasn’t set up the ironing board on the veranda. She irons as if she were dancing, shifting her weight this way and that, in the big basement room where the cleaning supplies are, next to the storage room. Yes, Gwendolyn—her heavy, square body with its smell of salt and humidity; her unruly bun, with tufts of hair always escaping, the softest thorns I know; the whites of her eyes flash each time she raises her head to look at me. Lying on my stomach on the floor, I’m drawing our house with colored pencils. I put banana trees all around. They’re not there in real life, but my picture looks happier with all that yellow. Every so often my eyes drift shut, and I doze on my papers while Gwendolyn’s iron slides back and forth over the ironing board with soothing regularity. The room smells like my father’s shirts, my mother’s embrace. I slowly sink into a dream that’s a faithful copy of my drawing. Suddenly a window up on the ground floor breaks, jolting me awake. Gwendolyn freezes in place, standing there with the iron in the air.
“It’s the wind,” I tell her in English.
“Shhh,” Gwendolyn hisses.
We hear footsteps overhead, furniture being moved. Did Mom come home from Mrs. Steedworthy’s? But she wouldn’t ever come in through the window. Dad usually stays at work until late. And the hobgoblins in fairytales who sneak into stranger’s homes to get warm never break windows, they just slip in on tiptoe. Gwendolyn grabs me and shoves me into the storage room, behind Dad’s wine rack. “Not a peep out of you,” she says. Only in her anxiety and confusion, she trips over a crate of soft drinks and the whole tower of them comes crashing to the floor. The noise on the ground floor stops. Gwendolyn rushes to the telephone; two men come running down the stairs and overtake her. They have women’s stockings over their faces and are holding knives. They’re not very sharp knives, but Gwendolyn starts shrieking anyhow. I come out of my hiding spot to help her; no one would hurt a little kid.
A third man grabs me and hefts me onto his shoulders as if I were a sack of flour. He’s so scary, with his nose and lips smushed by the stocking! His eyes are squinted partway shut, his cheeks are swollen. The men argue with Gwendolyn in African, probably telling her to hang up the phone. Gwendolyn is crying. I’ve never seen Gwendolyn cry before. The men growl, their voices distorted by the stockings. One of them is carrying Mom’s jewelry box of carved wood. Another grabs a few bags of rice from the storage room. The third has me. We all pile into a van. Gwendolyn runs out into the rain after us. The man who had me over his shoulder shoves her and she falls to the ground, in the muddy water. I watch through the window of the van as she gets smaller and smaller, until she disappears altogether, along with our front gate. The men make me lie down on the back seat so that no one will see me. The van—a wreck, smelling of burnt rubber and sweat—bounces around in the mud for a long time. Eventually I forget about the three strange men with stockings over their heads. My eyes wander to the torn cloth on the roof of the van and I listen to the sound of the rain. I start to laugh. I’m thinking about how mad Gwendolyn gets when I say, “Gwendolyn, listen! It’s God peeing!” At some point, the sound of the struggling motor stops. I raise my head. We’re on a deserted beach with a cave at one end. They tell me to go into the cave and sit there. Their English is terrible. All they know how to say is, girl, here, sit here.
“Are you alone?” Anna asks.
“No, there’s another little girl.”
“A little girl?”
“She’s very small. She’s expecting me to save her. But I can’t. They cut off her arm and her head and throw her into the sea . . .” A wave breaks inside me, then another. My eyes fill with tears.
“It’s not another little girl, Maria, it’s your doll!”
My doll! Bambi! She has silver hair and a necklace around her neck, a bronze chain that gave Gwendolyn the idea for the story with the two friends. Bambi is no ordinary doll: she talks nonstop. Whenever my parents or Gwendolyn or Unto Punto come into the room, she plays dead, but when we’re alone she purses her tiny red lips and whispers that I’m her savior, that my love broke the spell of her boring doll’s life. I cover her with a blanket my mother made out of an old woolen shawl. I kiss
Bambi’s pink cheeks and tell her, “Don’t worry, I’ll protect you.” Bambi comes with me into the storage room, nestles in my arms at the dinner table, sleeps on my pillow. She has straight hair, like Anna’s, blue eyes, and dark, shiny eyelashes. And she’s naughty. She always wants us to do naughty things, like climb up onto the roof of the house, or climb the trees in the garden, or hide in the laundry room and jump out to scare Gwendolyn. Sometimes she overdoes it. She says, “Pour your milk down the sink, it’s gross! Blech!” Or, “Grab one of the goldfish by the tail, let’s see how long it can last out of the water.” The goldfish flops around while Bambi begs me to hold it just a little bit longer. But I’m good to the fish, good to all God’s creatures—I toss it back into the water and wipe my hands on my school uniform. Bambi has a uniform, too. Mom made it for her out of leftover fabric from my white summer school smock. Bambi is always getting dirty, just like me. “Oh, Bambi, what have you gotten yourself into this time?” I say. “Come here, I’ll clean you off.” She likes to roll on the grass, in the dirt, and sometimes goes for a swim in the goldfish pond. Then I have to dry her uniform with the hair dryer. I kiss her on the forehead and forgive her. I always forgive her.
Yes, Bambi is with me when I’m drawing on the floor, when Gwendolyn pushes me into the storage room, when the men with the stockings on their heads shove me into their van. And she’s with me in the cave, too. “Let’s get out of here,” she says to me. “These are bad guys! Quick, let’s run away!” We take off our shoes—Bambi’s are red patent leather with a little strap, mine are black and full of sand. We run across the muddy beach, under the rain, toward freedom. Neither of us realizes that the men are running after us—until they grab us and whisk us up into the air. It’s easy as pie for them, bad guys always run faster than good guys. My bad guy, the one who slung me over his shoulder, grabs Bambi, pulls off her arm and tosses it into the sea. “Don’t, don’t!” I cry. Then he pulls off her head. I rush at him and bite his arm, but instead of behaving, he throws Bambi’s head far off into the waves. Then he hands her back to me, headless, missing one arm, as if he were the judge in Gwendolyn’s story, and I’m the jealous friend who wanted the necklace. “That’s what we’ll do to you if you try to run away again,” he says to me. And to scare me even more, he pulls the stocking off his head. He’s white! The very worst bad guy is white! I would have preferred him to be black, it would be more like Mom’s stories, about how being poor makes black people so crazy that sometimes they do bad things.
Why I Killed My Best Friend Page 22