Do I Believe?
Mina Laksh
4 November 2007, 17:46My name is Tita. I am a woman. I am not Greek.
My husbands’ name is Papi. To me he is Zeus and well, he is Greek.
I live in a foreign land. Somewhere between two continents where the leaves are thick, the trees bulbous and the forest is lush.
I am an artist. Favour Frida Khalo but have never had the time to work on my art. It’s been like this after the kids arrived, after the cook got sacked, after the mother in law shifted in, after the dog died. And with that died my paint, my brush and my canvass. Still, I see the realms in visions and their paintings that I perceive.
At times I concede. At times I loose patience. At times I am alone.
The square black and white cushioned chair sank like a thousand eider downs. It was my desire, placed under a bookshelf that hung on a two toned wall of green and white. It wasn’t close to the main glass paned door but from its oblique angle where it now stood, you saw the green hedge that so often needed its trim with the half garden resilient with rose bushes and beans that occasionally got riddled with earwigs. (Otherwise poetically called skirt and blouse) This and more never went unnoticed.
‘Why do you sit and stare from that chair?’ Papi had once asked.
‘It’s my fantasy’ I had replied then.
Besides, I had never seen such green grasshoppers or such tiny earwigs. And the yearning of brush to canvass drew within my soul to examine these polychromatic brights. It was binding and had sometimes even become blindling.Colours of green to the grasshopper. Colours of purple and green and browns to the gecko that stared back from the veranda – something like answering my questions.
‘Yes, but you just sit and keep staring. scratching that head of yours!’ he woke my dreams.
‘I like it’ I came back to my morningness, ‘to crumble the scales and feel my scalp and sip my morning coffee and watch the colours. I had a mad aunt who scratched her head and swayed her legs to time. Except – hers was liced.’
I was amused. This might have shocked him. That bit about this fictitious mad aunt and her swaying legs. Besides, he had never understood the delights in imaginings. He was no fantasy type, no art enthusiast.
Papi was tough, contrary to many an occasion but most of the time zilch in many avenues: Art, the romantics, the Prosts, the Goddard’s never interested him.
Food. Sambucca and the essence that went into marinating any fish or mixing a kebab with the right fat to soften its juices, yes! That interested him. After all, Papi was a restaurateur’s son. A Greek from the Sardonic Islands. From the village Perdika where his father boasted of the best seafood.
The classics were read at school. He had to. He had read them all. And had come to think of Zeus as a brat. Apollo a two-headed stud because he represented the intellectual and also beauty and Delphi with Hades was a mere fluke – “the river of chance”, he called it. ‘An oracle cleanser’ he explained. ‘venture into it knowingly or you will get lost. Otherwise head for the Nile!’
His mother had an identity ready for all her five sons. ‘In Greece a man stands for Apollo and Zeus all in one. That is my son! All my sons’
It was no surprise then why my colours brightened in the sun and why my scales on my scalp lost oil and turned brittle.
Rosemary of Bodyshop had long since finished and Elida Gibbs; Timotei had taken its place. Its genteelness was supposed to cure head itch and dandruff. Nobody had comprehended that the friction between scalp and fingernail and the peeling of scabs (or scales) had triggered an electrifying sensation that made the thinking prowess work
A cigarette might have done the same but the electrifying grating against the scalp created a deeper strength that opened my awareness to beauty around.
For instance, I had never noticed the beauty in these earwigs before. Skirted and bloused they were. Half red. Half black with six legs on either side, two hairy feelers that must have been their nose and two forked hind legs that must have been their brakes. They ran like boys scuttling along a lined race with legs that forked out and curled as they headed along. At night they crawled indoors having chewed upon the garden. And in the mornings they were out amongst the flower pots or the damp green or by the marigolds that spelt gold.
‘Maybe the jasmine would be better here under the Papaya Tree’. I instructed the gardener ‘push the pot of Crotons closer towards the tap. NO, not there! Push it so that it’s under the kitchen awning.’
Getting used to an environment one had never known was like having a baby for the first time. Gardening to me was like that – childbirth. Too caring. Too fragile. And sometimes too new in its’ learning. But within all this there was so much more like the milk that sat on the table for minutes on end and lulled there until the congealed breakfast eggs were forced down the faucet after repetitive monologues. Left uneaten and now drowned for no better pipe to accept. And then, back again to new open-faced yellow-eyed buttons crisply laced for the nth time served.
I now believed that children were less difficult. They Loved air, loved jujups, loved popcorn at eight in the morning and loved slashes of nutella over yesterdays bread.
And now at dusk when the sun slept and the football pitch not far from the gate quietened as the compound began its sleep, the fluorescent bulbs through the avenue of neon trees glowed outside. The white light filtered through the drawn white curtains creating an unusual feel of neon blues. Moonlight resemblance. And within the walls of this home children changed into new Ninja Turtle pjs.
Whoever thought there was beauty in them. But advertising and marketing grip even the simplest of innocent eyes.
The boys were asleep, heads touching each other like babes in the wood. Their sleep easy duvets covered the lined coolness of used silk quilts whilst in the adjacent room reclined on a well-cushioned bolster was another boy watching a film.
‘Must you have this on’? I asked.
The film was noisy. The song even more, and in Greek it sounded like a religious ode, programmed like a jukebox that never shut itself up! The woman was a flounced lean thing running away from her idyllic man through Eucalyptus trees. He was chasing her crying out in pain, ‘My love. My love’. She, a worn out alabasterish plastic mute was running towards her oracle.
I walked into the bedroom and asked Papi ‘Have you noticed those grasshoppers?’
Looking into the meshed window ‘they look stuck on. They are so still. If I were Breson, I’d have massacred them and stuck them for a collage’.
It made no difference. Nobody had heard. Naturally, the volumes were up. This had the alabaster woman, the other had Casablanca. Mother in law was none the tamer with her slight deafness. Then for the first time noticing me dip my fingers into a jar of eye cream he asked, ‘Does it really help?’
‘What?’
‘The eye cream’ he answered back ‘You spend so much money and time on it.’
I was massaging my eyelids in outward movements. ‘It does. Estee Lauder has to be real to sell’. and I continued my strokes. Then I slipped into the sheets. He too.
‘Do the boys have the night’s drink? Their water?’
‘I thought you had put it on their table’.
‘Did you lock up? And check the garden lights?’
‘I thought you had done that’. and he turned to face the window that still had the grasshopper plastered on.
Temporarily defeated I climbed out of my soft sheets and began to shut the garden lights, lock the windows, and take the night’s water to the boys.
In the kitchen when the light was turned off there was a stillness of dull grey tones, blacks and whites. The beige fridge was the only exception. It upset the tonal values when the light from within its cool cupboard let out a stream of clear yellow. When that happened the kitchen came alive with a cinematic occurrence of sudden shades merging into a frame.
The gas range had a glass-smoky top that clamped shut when the hobs were not in use. A mosquito mesh protected the two sliding windows behind the gas range. And out in the garden next to the kitchen window stood a very young Papaya Tree.
I began to shut the fridge with my bottle in hand and as I turned to leave I faced the window when a sensation of being not alone. gnawed. It enveloped and closed in. The relation was apparent . And as I began to lose my alertness that there was a garden light which half lit the gas range, the kitchen shelves, the sink and the worktop this totality turned zero.
Instead, jutting from where stood that Papaya tree now stood a wrinkled face. Folds, just folds, overlapping like wrinkled folded skin covering a thick throat. A mouth stretched. Sometimes pulled, sometimes profiled. A head of tight peppery curls saying something, moving its mute jaw glued to its own existence and staring back at me. Plain staring and smiling.
I accepted. I turned and at the junction of comprehension I gently moved out, unperturbed. Not yet. Then, unbeknownst to myself I felt the dampness round my knees as I began to touch down, not so really ready to sleep easy.
I noticed Papi nearby, eyes shut and snoring. His solid hand outstretched on my pillow. Then somewhere, between reality and half sleep, I recollected and strongly admitted to myself that it had been a face. A kind face.
A week later stretching over the gas range trying again to slide the glass panes together I noticed a grasshopper clawed onto the crisscross wire mesh unmoving.
It mesmerises. I admire them when they sleep so still. The wire mesh against the glass turns surreal. Almost dreamlike as “decidedly” glued grasshoppers and occasional geckos latch unmoving in their sleep wonders.
Then as the glass glides to a clamp a familiar sensation begins. This time it’s a chill that shrouds me. Wrapping me in its starchiness. In its cellophane wings. Its crispness hard over my own stillness and my gentle outstretched hands. A mixture of greens, browns, purples singe me, of colours so forceful and bright that I cannot heed nor comprehend why.
I begin to unframe my being and assume it’s a painting clinging to me. This mesh, almost dreamlike of sleeping geckos and sleeping glued grasshoppers. A painting where pain and self-portraits glide into air, on a bed of nails screwed into a knot with magnetic currents and hinges to bind a body together. In my mind I begin to check the insects on the mesh. I begin to try to unlatch the sleeping gecko but the night is high and the stillness of their limbs are too taut to disjoint. My assessment reels on myself. Like a portrait which now becomes a rebirth of my idol Frida. Only this time there were my two hands sliding the two glass panes that got screwed with magnetic nodes electrifying a dozen transmissions and becoming aware that looking back from where the tree stood was also the wrinkled throated peppery head staring and not smiling this time.
I accept. I have noticed and I have not ignored.
Back in my room .I remember the face, the hypnotic feel and the painting of wild colours. I wonder, ‘Have I lost it…myself? Or have I lost my Diego?’ And then ask again ‘should I repeat her love words to my Zeus, my Papi.Will it then release all…’
So I repeated, “Papi is my urine –Papi in my mouth – in my heart, in my madnessness, in my sleep.”*
Mine was asleep. Not listening. Snoring. His hand outstretched on my pillow while the peppery face – a friend now, watched from its many distances as I stretched my hands under the double bed and pulled out a slim bottle of Sambucca and drank it all the way.
God save Zeus!
