by Carol Mason
‘I’ve heard that story before,’ I tell him. ‘About how Athens got its name. It’s in all the tourist guidebooks.’ Why is it that when I meet a man I like, I get the urge to be contrary with them? It happened that way with Jonathan, when my friend who introduced us said he was a lawyer. Maybe that might have made other girls throw themselves at him, but not me. I was playing it ever so cool. The act didn’t last long.
‘Speak for yourself!’ My mam glares at me. ‘I haven’t heard that story before!’ Her gaze goes back to eating up Georgios. ‘I think it’s a charming story. It’s incredible to imagine that, thousands of years ago, the big powers of the day had the sense to see that war is a poor solution to any problem, which really does make you wonder if we really have evolved or just got more stupid.’
He looks at her, smiles. ‘I think we’ve definitely got more stupid.’ Then he looks at me again in the back seat, and there are touches of handsomeness to him, even though the face is too tanned and raw to be called anything as boring as good-looking. He comes to a sudden halt and swivels himself so he can more easily us both. The sun on his stubbly jaw makes it even more dark and shadowy, giving him a dangerous quality that contradicts his gentlemanliness and reserve.
‘You know, the ancient Greeks, they always think that the olive tree is immortal. It can survive almost any weather, and even if it dies, you will see new shoots quickly grow… The olive tree never lets go of life. It clings to the soil, to eternity, to its instinct to keep growing to the sun.’
‘Where did you learn such great English?’ I ask him. He has a big bump just below the bridge of his nose, as though it was once broken. I can see him as a boy: the first in there starting the scraps.
‘In school. And then I learn in travel. I work in America. I go often to London. All in business you know. The business of olive oil.’
‘That’s wonderful,’ my mother is oblivious to the temptress eyes she’s sending him. ‘I mean, your story about the olive tree. Maybe immortality of the olive tree was the gods’ gift to this earth.’
‘I think it was.’ His eyes hold my mam’s for a long, charmed while, and I’m thinking, Yeah ma, where did you get this sudden brilliance about immortality and the gods from? Then he shifts the jeep into gear again. There’s a violent scratch on his hand that runs almost the length of his index finger, which looks like it must have been painful, and I wonder how he got it.
‘How on earth do you collect all these olives?’ I ask him, astonished by the chaotic tangle of trees. ‘Do you have special machines?’
‘Machines?’ He waves the scratched hand out over his pride and joy. ‘No. This is all the work of hardworking men and women who have olives in their blood.’
‘Of course they don’t have machines!’ my mam throws a scathing glance over her shoulder, at me. ‘Didn’t you know that?’
I think I see Georgios smile.
‘But surely a machine would make harvesting more efficient? Then if you harvested more olives you could sell more oil and then people would make more money.’ I sound so practical, so North American. The words don’t belong here, in this place. It strikes me, with a surprising disappointment, that neither do I.
‘We harvest what the trees yield. But machines don’t make people more efficient. People make people efficient. People work hard when others work hard, when it is in their blood. Machines make people not able to appreciate. That is all.’
My mam’s gaze steals over his profile once his attention is back on the road. He glances affectionately at her, as though he feels he’s being watched, and I take a quick photo, capturing their profiles, and her smitten eyes over him. I do believe my mother’s in love!
They go on talking between themselves—Georgios seems to find her scintillating conversation—and I’m happy to tune out and just look at the view: the true Zante. But if I lived here, wouldn’t I get bored with this rhythm of life? Wouldn’t I pine for Vancouver traffic and frustrating one-way streets? Lattes at Artigiano’s? Speeches to write, and rain, lots of rain, and falling apple blossoms that litter Granville Street in the spring? ‘Isn’t Italian olive oil supposed to be the best, though?’ I ask him, picking up on their conversation now.
He briefly meets my eyes again through the mirror. ‘It is Italian oil that you buy in great quantity abroad. But here is a fact not well known: Seventy-five percent of Greek oil is exported to Italy—it is tempting for poor farmers to sell to the Italians for quick money. So the Italians buy our excellent oil, and some of it will be packaged as if it comes from Italy.’
‘The scheming Eye-ties!’ spits my mother.
Those C brackets make way for a broad smile, and he laughs like my mother is the best thing since feta cheese. ‘Well, they have a reputation for having the best olives, so they use that. And who can blame them? Everybody has to earn a living. Mediterranean life is not always easy. But when it comes to quality, there is no such better virgin olive oil than Greek virgin olive oil.’
I gaze at the back of his darkly tanned neck, the way the shiny black hair burrows into it, as my mother and him start talking about the Euro. And I wonder if he’s married, has a girlfriend, had a girl in his bed last night. Another mad thought goes through my head—if Jonathan were to send me a lover, well, he could do worse than pick this one for me.
Come on Jonathan…Get to work.
‘So I take it you don’t care for the Italians too much then?’ I say to him.
He shrugs. ‘But I live and I let them live, as the saying goes.’
‘Live and let live,’ I repeat for him.
He holds my eyes in the mirror again. And I feel a flutter of something go through me.
‘So when does the harvest start?’ my mam asks him, running her smitten gaze down the length of his muscular, arm. The jeep rumbles over rock and throws us about. My mam hangs on to the handle above the passenger door window, her cheeks, and her smile, vibrating from the motion.
‘Early spring its fruit is changing from green to red to black. When the tree is three quarters black, we pick—this happens in October. Then we press instantly to preserve the freshness and virgin character of the oil.’
We reach the top of the hill and I look back on a carpet of olive trees that glistens a silvery green, and plunges to a pea green sea that dances with sunlight and rolls its frothy skirt up to a sliver of powder-white sand that’s fit only for a lone and lucky shipwrecked man. Where are all the tourists? The beer-bellied brits, and topless women, and screaming kids? Spectacularly not here. We seem to have turned back the clock to a time when Zante was inhabited by only olive trees and gods.
He stops the car, shuts off the engine, and suddenly everything is motionless, windless, waveless and serene. The sudden temporal stillness and quiet fill me with a sense that I believe in something, though I’m not sure what. High up in this celestial place I feel nearer to the sky than I do to the ground. The sky looks bluer up here, a gleaming painter’s palate of cyan: bottomless and cloudless. I bet anything is possible in life and death, if you were up there, looking down here.
Georgios shifts in his seat again, rests an arm on the steering wheel and looks at me. ‘When you consume olive oil, Angela, you consume the place where the olives were born, the climate that nurtured them, the character of the soil, the character of the person who looked over it, and cared how it was handled and pressed.’ He grips the top of my arm. ‘Olive oil is all about an emotion. I tell you this as a passionate Greek who has the olive juice running in his veins.’ He completely un-suggestively runs his thumb along a vein on my arm, and my skin tingles in its wake.
How about a little self-fulfilling prophecy Angela? Who says I need Jonathan’s help?
He plucks a handful of olives from a branch. ‘Try,’ he offers his hand out to me, those black-brown eyes all a-twinkle.
I pick one and bite into it. ‘Ergh!’ I spit it past my mam’s head.
‘Good heavens, Angela!’ she says, startled. And he laughs a broad laugh.
> ‘Oh, ha ha ha.’ I beam at him. ‘You knew it was going to taste horrible.’
‘You have a very outspoken daughter,’ he says to my mother.
‘With foul table manners.’
He smiles at her. ‘It is not true that these olives are good from the tree. With these we have to cure in oil or brine before they are eaten.’
‘Well you’ve totally spoilt the illusion,’ I tell him, and my mother chuckles. ‘Why didn’t he give you one?’ I glare at her.
‘Maybe he’s trying to poison you so the two of us can be alone.’
He starts the engine up again. ‘What Greek food have you eaten since you got here?’ he asks us, and I feel a lunch invitation coming on.
I think of the meal we had last night: the moussaka, from one of the touristy tavernas on the strip. The maitre d’ fawning all over my mam and her hat. ‘God it looks like something the dog passed,’ I said when I looked down at my plate.
‘Don’t say that!’ She looked horrified. ‘No dog could do something that awful-looking.’ She pointed to the grovelling maitre d’. ‘I bet it was him.’
‘Well, last night we had moussaka that tasted more like –’
‘—Angela!’
He laughs. ‘After the harvest, you should see the feast of food we have!’ He swings a glance at me. ‘Stay for the harvest. Both of you.’
‘We’re only in July now! That’s quite a long way off!’ I laugh.
‘You know, Angela, there is no better place than Greece to spend some time and reflect on life and the things you have to worry about in your mind.’ It’s the knowing way he’s looking at me that makes me shiver.
‘What makes you think I need to reflect on life?’
For a moment he hesitates. ‘Well… doesn’t everybody?’
‘You love your country,’ my mam changes the subject.
‘Of course. In Greece there is much to love. But you love your country too, no?’
Oh, no, here we go… I see her elongate her proud-to-be-British spine. ‘Oh, I do! I love England. Because the English are good at so many things.’ She turns and deliberately looks at me. ‘They put on fantastic concerts and celebrations, unlike some other countries I could mention. They turn out the best musicians, and they make excellent television programmes!’ She cocks another quick glance at me to make sure I’m listening. ‘And they have a good sense of style, and good fashion in their stores, and good food in their shops, and they’re direct no-messing people, and when they like you, it can be a wonderful thing, although they’re never so nice and polite that it’s irritating. And they’re not afraid to let their hair down, and have a drink at lunch time. Unlike some cultures, but I won’t go there.’
There she goes: shitting on Canada again.
He smiles at her. ‘And you, Angela?’ he says to me, looking over his shoulder again.
‘Angela doesn’t live in England. She lives in Canada.’
‘I know,’ he says.
I feel myself blanch. ‘What do you mean, you know? How can you possibly know that?’
‘Because…because you have not the same accent as your mama. You have North American sound in some of your words. And because I travel in America many times with business so I know.’
‘But you said I sounded Canadian.’ I narrow my eyes at him. ‘You were quite specific.’
‘No, he didn’t!’ my mam jumps in. ‘I said you lived in Canada and Georgios said he could tell!’
Oh.
He throws the scratched hand in the air. ‘But Canada. America. They are one of the same are they not?’
I grin. ‘Ooh! I’d like to hear you say that to a Canadian!’
‘They are! It’s one big melting pot over there. Everybody melting in the mire together.’ My mother pulls a face.
He looks at me again, curiously. ‘The man you were married to was Canadian, no?’
My stomach lifts and drops. My tongue practically sticks to the roof of my mouth. I can barely speak. He is still studying me. ‘What on earth made you say that?’ I ask him, determined to find out what’s going on here. Finally, even my mam thinks this is weird, because her eyes rivet on him, then they rivet on me, as though she’s feeling left out of something. She’s not the only one.
He stops the car, reaches for my left hand, rubs his thumb over my wedding ring finger below the knuckle. ‘This track in your finger. Tell me a man alive who does not look to a woman’s hand to see if she is married?’
‘Angela is a widow. Her husband was a lawyer and he died two years ago.’
‘Thanks for that, mother.’ I glare daggers at her. I finally took off my wedding ring before I went on my date to the pizzeria with the very nice Roger whom I scared off. The groove still hasn’t gone from my finger.
‘Two widows, then,’ Georgios says.
‘That makes us sound like a real barrel of laughs, doesn’t it!’ my mam chirps. ‘Two single girls is how we prefer to think of ourselves.’
And before I dive over the seat and throttle her, Georgios says, ‘Would you two single ladies like to have some wine?’
He turns his head one more time to me and his eyes go quickly to my wedding ring hand once more, before he starts his vehicle up again.
Seven
The mill has an exuberantly earthy reek to it—even more pungent to my nose after the several glasses of floral restina and the pretza he fed us. It’s dark in here and cold. The floor is damp. The walls are damp. The place is like a tomb with olive oil seeping from its pores, or a musty wine cellar or a cold stone church.
Georgios guides us through the olive pressing process—mostly talking to my mam because she’s the one hanging on his every word. I’m just boggled by the olive press that looks like a mediaeval torture chamber. ‘From our latest harvest. We call the early harvest oil agoureleo or ‘unripe’ oil. The Greeks believe it is the best.’ He reaches into a big drum, and his palm fills will a liquid the colour of dull emeralds, that glints and sparkles in the shaft of sunlight from a nearby window. ‘Taste.’ He holds his hand out to me. I back off. He laughs. ‘Please. This is not a trick.’
‘I don’t trust you.’
‘I gave birth to a thoroughly wimpy daughter. I don’t know where she gets it from.’ Mam ventures an index finger into the oil. Then she licks it. ‘Delicious! It’s almost peppery. Very rounded. Very sharp.’
Sharp and rounded?
‘You have a good palate,’ he tells her. ‘You should be in the olive business. You want to taste an egg fried in this. It will be the best egg you have ever tried.’
I stare at the well of oil in his hand, then I dip my finger in. It all feels a little too intimate for my comfort zone. I wonder if I’d find something sexual in something as innocent as him scratching the back of a raggedy-looking kitten. I think I probably would.
‘It’s good,’ I tell him.
He licks the rest off his palm, and Mam and I look at one another, and think the same thought, share the same smile.
‘My grandmother used to tell me that a small handful of olives can fill you up as can a large beef steak. When I come to America, I cannot eat in these American steak housing places.’
‘No, I know what you mean. The food can be pretty crass. Just honking great portions of things.’
‘It’s awful!’ my mam chimes in. ‘Order a piece of beef and you get half the cattle-ranch, belly-up on your plate. And when you ask for a sandwich, instead of getting one slice of ham you get thirty! No wonder they’re all enormous!’
‘They’re not all enormous!’ She is such an exaggerator. ‘Canadians aren’t enormous.’
‘Well you wouldn’t call them svelte.’
‘I could never live there, in North America,’ he says.
He stops beside the door, with his back to me. His hand reaches out and touches the wall; he runs it appreciatively over the rugged, ancient stone. ‘Or maybe it is wrong to say never. Only, I think maybe… if I fell in love with a woman who lived there. Then possible.’
I will not meet my mother’s eyes.
There’s something promising in the strong white afternoon sunlight as we step outside. The arid heat. The sound of crickets humming like faulty electricity lines. The parched-earth, barren beauty of the place. It’s all very Under the Tuscan Sun. Or how about Under the Grecian Sun? I lean against the cold wall, close my eyes and absorb the scents and smells of a very alluring way of life.
‘So you’d give all this up for love?’ I say to him.
‘Maybe. Or maybe I would do my best to get her to come and live here.’
I open one eye and look at him. ‘That sounds pretty sexist if you ask me. Maybe she’ll have a life she won’t want to give up for a man.’
Or maybe she won’t. Maybe she’ll just run away and live like Diane Lane, or Sylvie in La Dolce Vita.
‘Maybe,’ he says.
But he looks at me like he’s really not convinced.
~ * * * ~
‘I don’t quite know what to make of him.’ I tell Mam.
She is flopped out on top of her bed in her petticoat. Her face has caught the sun. There’s a finger of red running right down her nose, making her look like a rather glam Hiawatha Indian, and a triangle of it on her chest, which makes her look like a burnt English rose.
‘Why do you always have to make things of people, Angela? I don’t think there’s anything that needs to be made of him. He’s nice. He’s a gentleman. He’s comfortable to be around.’ She looks across at me. ‘He’s a charming, delicious full-blood and I’d have a bit of the rumpy with him as sure as Bob’s your Uncle.’
‘Do you think he does this with all the tourists?’
‘What? The rumpy?’
I tut. ‘No! Not the bloody rumpy! I mean, singling one or two out to work his charms on.’