by Lena Manta
She passed the next day again by herself, without any news of him. She left for the club much earlier than she usually did and shut herself in her little dressing room, wondering how she would pass the time until she was due on stage. She undressed and put on her robe as usual. At least she could start getting ready.
She was so absorbed in her thoughts that she hardly heard the knock at the door. When she saw in her mirror that Stelios had appeared in the open doorway, she didn’t know what to do. He came in and closed the door behind him. Aspasia quickly stood up, ready to shout at him for his disappearance. Through her open robe, Stelios could see her beautiful body and was enchanted by the sight. He snatched her in his arms and without saying a word placed his lips on hers. When he sensed no resistance on her part, he lost all control. The small space around them suddenly filled with the energy of their hungry kisses and urgent embraces, and in the fire that burned between them, Aspasia felt the passion of love as she had never known it.
When it was over, she looked around, bewildered. There were bottles thrown on the floor and the room had literally been turned upside down. Stelios was still half-dressed, and when she saw him she was overwhelmed with guilt. She hid her face in her hands and burst into tears.
Stelios looked at Aspasia in amazement. He didn’t expect this reaction from her. This woman had hot lava inside her, he thought. It had burnt him, it had nearly destroyed him, and despite the intensity, he wanted her again. But she was crying like a baby in front of him, with a despair that moved him.
“Aspasia,” he said. “What’s going on, sweetheart? Why are you crying? Aspasia!”
“What did I do? What did I do?” she kept repeating, refusing to raise her eyes and meet his.
Stelios took her gently by the chin and made her look at him. Her eyes were bright red, her hopelessness written all over her face. “What do you mean, ‘what did I do?’ You did what you wanted to do. You wanted it as much as I did. So why do you feel such despair now?”
“Don’t you understand? I’m married! I had no right.”
“Sweetheart, the body doesn’t know anything about marriages and relationships. It speaks its own language. Don’t spoil it now.”
“Stelios, please leave,” she said, her voice breaking. “I need to be alone . . . to think . . .”
Stelios looked at her, smiling affectionately. “Fine. I’ll leave, but I’ll be in the club. I need a drink.”
“No! I won’t be able to perform tonight if you’re there and I see you.”
“All right. I’ll do what you ask, if only this once.”
After that he slowly finished dressing while Aspasia pulled her robe tightly around her with trembling hands.
She had never sung like she did that night. The passion in her voice moved the audience and a mountain of smashed plates stood at her feet by the time she was finished. After the show, she pretended she wasn’t feeling well and left the club early. She walked back to her room as a light breeze cooled her flaming cheeks. Her thoughts made her head nearly burst. She didn’t recognize herself anymore. She was ashamed but at the same time she wanted to run like a crazy woman to him and relive, moment by moment, again and again, all the passion that had poured out of her as soon as he touched her. The sudden thought of Stavros made her feel even worse. Her stomach was churning; she stopped and leaned against a tree to recover. How could she go back to him? How could she look him in the eyes after what she’d done? She went into her room exhausted but determined not to see Stelios again for as long as she was on Rhodes.
He was waiting, sitting on the balcony outside her room.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, almost afraid. “How did you get in?”
“Do you really think a small detail like that would stop me from seeing you?” he answered as he approached her.
Aspasia took a step back but he grabbed her and pulled her into his arms. His lips sought hers and when they found them, all her previous decisions were forgotten. Minutes later, they were lying naked on the bed with his body covering hers.
Aspasia managed to put her guilt aside. From now on, her body would govern everything. As the days passed, Stelios became the center of her world. She couldn’t wait to be alone with him, and whenever they were together, he would lose himself in her embrace. The little dressing room, which used to be filled with their laughter and conversation, was now filled with the sounds of their lovemaking. Her colleagues laughed knowingly as they passed by, especially when the couple’s passion became especially loud.
As the final days of summer neared, they knew their time together would soon end. And the nearer the moment came, the more insatiable their passion was. Each night after the show, they would practically run to hide in her dressing room. Even a chance touch led to erotic delirium. When her contract finally ended, Aspasia delayed her return home by three days so they could take a farewell trip together. She wondered at herself. She had been aware all along that this relationship had an expiration date, and, having accepted that, she had no regrets. Yet this acceptance sometimes made her feel depraved. If she had felt some sort of emotional attachment, this would have given her an excuse for what she’d done. As it was, she had none.
When she returned home, her children threw themselves longingly into her arms and wouldn’t leave her side. Stavros kissed her passionately and she responded easily. That night, in his arms, she felt as if she was coming back to a familiar and peaceful harbor. As the days passed, life resumed its usual rhythms. That Aspasia would work again was a foregone conclusion that they all accepted without discussion. She herself, however, decided she would only work Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and Stavros felt relieved because at least the children would have their mother with them a little more.
Spending the summer on his own had given Stavros time to think, and he realized that his feelings for his wife had begun to change. At first Aspasia’s departure hurt him deeply, but as time passed, the pain grew less, and he got used to the fact that she was away. When he took her in his arms that first night, he recognized the change in her. The woman he was making love to wasn’t his wife, not as he knew her. She was full of passion, but also of experience that he hadn’t taught her in all the years of their marriage. He felt he was sleeping with a stranger and his anger was stronger than the pleasure this other Aspasia could give him.
He spent that night awake, at first sitting on the balcony while Aspasia slept. The thought that his wife had given herself to another man drove him crazy, and he couldn’t get it out of his mind. When he eventually returned to the bed, Aspasia was sleeping, still naked, and the image of her body in somebody else’s arms made him groan like a wounded animal. He wanted to hurt her, but at the same time he wanted to take her in his arms and make her forget whoever had touched her. He began to tremble and fell violently and frantically on top of her. Aspasia immediately woke up. She seemed to accept this new side of her husband that gave her painful pleasure and they both reached climax very fast.
Fortunately this change in their marriage wasn’t obvious to those around them, even Aspasia’s mother-in-law, who watched the situation with her ever-vigilant eyes. At night, when Stavros came to bed, he was violent and demanding; his lovemaking didn’t have any sense of love about it, but only the instinct of a wounded animal. Sometimes he reached the point of being crude. Still, the more he behaved like that, the more his wife seemed satisfied. It was true: Aspasia liked this side of her husband. Stelios had been completely forgotten. Stavros was her new passion.
Instead of being satisfied with this new development in his marriage, Stavros seemed to suffer more each day. This wasn’t his wife. This was a being insatiable for sexual pleasure and she displayed it in a way that seemed disgusting to him, even as they both abandoned themselves with no limits. He left home on a business trip to Tripoli and, in a hopeless effort to rid himself of his sickening obsession, he went to bed with the first available woman he found. But Aspasia still haunted his whole being. He came b
ack to her even worse, thirstier than ever, incapable of resisting her, while at the same time, he almost hated her for what he was certain had happened on Rhodes.
When the next summer came, Aspasia told her husband she had an offer to sing again on Rhodes.
“Will you go?” he asked, his heart leaping in his chest.
“Of course. Why shouldn’t I? The money we made was good. And the girls are just fine with your mother,” she said, then added, “Will you manage OK without me?”
Stavros looked at her with a blank expression. “As well as you do,” he answered. “Isn’t that right?” He ground his teeth in fury and his look darkened as he began to approach his wife. But, at the last moment, some remnant of decency pushed him to turn and leave before he said and did something he’d later regret.
When Aspasia arrived on Rhodes, Stelios was waiting for her with renewed interest. Instead of renting an apartment, she moved into his house. She also asked for and was given two evenings off from the club each week, so she could indulge in their affair as intensely as she wanted to. Stelios was delighted with the changes in Aspasia. Last year she had behaved more modestly. In fact, her inhibitions had tired him sometimes. But this year she was unrestrained and much readier to experiment in lovemaking, to give and take everything.
Back in Kalamata, Stavros felt at first as if he were recovering from a serious illness. Far from the influence of Aspasia, he began to regain his balance, but the thought that she was almost certainly with someone else still drove him crazy. With a great deal of difficulty, he persuaded himself not to go and see her. From time to time he thought that he was living a nightmare. He remembered how Aspasia was when he met her, and wondered whether that shy, wholesome girl was still hidden deep inside this other woman, who was only ruled by her passions. He tried to drown his pain at parties in Tripoli and in other women. He allowed another self to swallow him, a person he sometimes couldn’t bear, but the deeper he went into this other self the more her absence hurt him. His children were the only thing that brought back the old gentle, calm Stavros, so he tried to spend a lot of time with them, stealing a little of their innocence. Only then, when he heard their laughter, did he feel at peace.
As Aspasia’s return date approached, he was so anxious that he couldn’t eat or sleep. He hadn’t touched her for three whole months and he felt like he was losing his mind. When he met her on the doorstep, it took all his self-control not to snatch her in his arms. He accepted her conventional kiss and returned it, then waited patiently as she greeted the children and heard all their news, while his mind made plans. He wanted to take her away somewhere that very night. He felt ill from her absence and wanted to be alone with her in a place where he could feel free to let himself go.
Aspasia agreed without any objection when Stavros announced that he’d arranged for them to go away for a few days by themselves. That very night they drove to the first hotel they found and hardly came out of their room, to the point where the owner assumed they were newlyweds and strictly instructed the staff not to disturb them. When they returned home, Stavros now knew what was happening to him. Aspasia had chosen her road and either he had to follow her or go very far away. But he didn’t have the strength to leave. Apart from the suffering he would feel, he had to think of the children, who weren’t to blame for anything. And he had to admit that now that Aspasia was doing what she wanted, she had become a better mother. She devoted her free time to both girls, even though her weakness for the older girl was still obvious. She played with them, chatting happily, and she seemed generally more sociable.
The winter passed very quickly and Stavros waited for the moment when his wife would tell him she was leaving again, but something else happened instead, and it changed everything. Completely out of the blue, shortly after Easter, his mother passed away in her sleep—as peacefully and discreetly as she had always stood beside him in life. Stavros again lost the ground under his feet; his world was shattered and for the first time he felt enveloped in loneliness. Aspasia also seemed to be at a loss. Her mother-in-law had stood by her all these years, a calm strength always ready to help, a rock to lean on. Her loss now seemed very strange to her. The children were the ones who were most upset at losing their grandmother, who was a second mother to them in every sense of the word. They were too young to understand why she’d left them so soon. For the first time in so long they became a family again. They clung to each other for comfort and their spirits came together.
Aspasia didn’t want to admit that she was bored again. At first she thought she was just feeling tired. Later she realized that the past had awoken again in her, and the need to escape came back with urgency. She was angry with herself because nothing seemed to satisfy her anymore. Even her husband seemed predictable, and therefore boring, to her, and the girls drove her crazy all the time. In the afternoons she felt as if she would go insane shut up in the house. At night, when Stavros had fallen asleep in her arms, she would get up silently and go out onto the balcony for some air. She’d look at the lights of the city and know that somewhere among them were the lights of the clubs, where she longed to get up on stage with a microphone in her hand. She’d look at the sea and know that crossing it held adventures that she was greedy to live. Sometimes, when logic took over, she’d ask herself what sort of stuff she was made of, and why what she had wasn’t enough. Her girls were growing up; they were beautiful and she was proud of them. But motherhood only satisfied one piece of her and the rest, the larger part, made demands. She could see there was no way out, and however much she persuaded herself to calm down, the other Aspasia became more demanding, more impatient, readier to leave.
Stavros knew that his wife would have to leave again. This time, the offer came from Crete. He couldn’t believe his ears when he heard Aspasia announce that everything was arranged, and that she had even hired a woman to look after the house and the children while she was away. She was completely honest with him. She made it clear that she couldn’t bear it anymore, that she was suffocating, and that unless she left she would lose her mind.
“And the children?” he asked. “How will they feel with a strange woman looking after them?”
“The children are growing up,” Aspasia answered, her mind made up. “They have their school, their lessons, and Sophia will cook for them and look after the house. In three months I’ll be back.”
“Why, Aspasia?” he complained.
Aspasia answered him honestly. “I don’t know, Stavros. Really I don’t. I tried, though. You saw that I tried, but I didn’t manage it. I think this must be the way I’m made. It’s not that I don’t love you and what we’ve made together. But if I don’t leave I feel as if I’ll go crazy. The house stifles me, the girls tire me, and you . . .”
“And me? What am I to you, Aspasia?”
“Do you want the truth?” she asked. When Stavros nodded his head, she continued, “You’re my husband and when I leave you I love you more than ever. I miss you and I count the days till I’m with you again, but if I have to stay with you for a long time, I can’t wait to leave again. You suffocate me too. Let me leave, Stavros. When I come back I’ll be much better. If I stay I’ll hate you.”
She stopped talking but continued to look at him. Stavros’s eyes filled with pain.
“Go, Aspasia. It’s not your fault, it’s my fault that I didn’t understand what you really wanted when we married. Now I have to pay for my mistake. Only please telephone the girls regularly. They need you.”
Aspasia pressed her lips to his. Now that she knew she would leave, she was in love with him again.
Stavros pulled back and looked at her. “What’s this?” he asked grimly. “My payment for letting you leave without a quarrel?”
Aspasia didn’t answer him. She smiled and began to undress, and Stavros stretched out his hand to stroke her breast. Then, as if the touch had burned him, he pulled back and ran out of the room as if he was being chased. Quite unexpectedly, as she stood there alone,
half-naked in the middle of the room, the stern face of her mother appeared in front of her. She heard the words Theodora had said to her before she left the village:
“I know your restless spirit, your sharp mind, and your passion for singing. You have to calm all those things, my daughter, and be satisfied with what your husband’s love offers you. And if the trials are very strong, remember that here, in this corner of the earth, is the river. Dive into it to purify yourself again!”
Aspasia didn’t know if one dive into the river would be enough to cleanse her. So many things had happened. She didn’t want to think about what her mother would say if she ever found out what she’d done. So she drove those thoughts away and began to pack her suitcase.
This time, her farewell with the children pained her. Stella didn’t say anything when she heard that her mother would leave again, but her eyes were very eloquent. She was thirteen now and understood much more than she let on. As for little Theodora, she avoided her mother’s kiss. Instead, she clung to her father, who also kept a cool distance from his wife. From the day that she announced she was leaving again, Stavros systematically avoided Aspasia. He came home late from work and slept in the sitting room. However many efforts she made to pull him into her arms, they came to nothing. Still, it was quite clear what it cost him to refrain from touching her.
Aspasia’s sadness lasted as long as the journey to Chania, which was her destination. When she got there she forgot everything as the city itself enchanted her. She never tired of looking at the beautiful buildings. The sea seemed to gently embrace the shore and the streets were full of people. The club she was to sing at was among the best and most popular. The house she was staying in was small but lovely, and all the people were warm and friendly. From her balcony she could see the harbor, the best gift of all, because the view of the sea always calmed her.