ΜΑΥΡΑ

 

“I miss all those old nonnas wearing black, with their cute headscarves, walking back from the shops with their little shopping carts. You just don’t get that kind of authenticity in the area anymore,” the lady exclaims to her friend as she took a sip of her latte, holding a yoga mat in her other hand, while watching a thin, black clad, hunchbacked old woman limp slowly from the supermarket. Unlike so many of her past incarnations, she is not wearing a headscarf today and that must have been the source of her observer’s consternation.

Also, she isn’t a nonna, because as she approaches me, she cranes her neck, like a turtle peering from its carapace, and recognising me, hails me in greeting:

-           -Ω Κώτσιο!

-           -Ω θειά, I respond.

-           -Τι κανς μωρ μάνα’ μ;

-           - Καλά είμαι. Συ τι κανς;

-           -Τι να κάνω η μαύρη; Από τότες πού’ φκε ο συγχωρεμένος, λιάζω το σκατί μου και το τρώω…

I was very young when that happened and yet I remember it distinctly. She would have been in her late thirties, wearing the same black clothes, throwing herself upon her husband’s coffin, rending her hair and scratching at her cheeks until she drew blood, as she railed against fate, against her husband who had the misfortune to have his life taken away from him in an industrial accident, against God himself who in his infinite mercy had saw fit to create orphans and widows. I remember her headscarf getting tangled in her thick plaited hair, the colour of pitch as she tore at it in defiance. When she finally ripped it free, she thrust it up at the sky in fury. «Να!» she screamed at the heavens and then all went black as she collapsed. Over the years, I bore witness to that same lady’s features begin to harden, to dry, eventually to shrivel, encased in her armour of perennial black, but losing none of her bitter rage.

My great-grandmother was in her early thirties when her husband was killed. These, as she would explain, were the “black” years. She was breastfeeding her baby when she was told the news and from the shock, she would relate, her milk “turned black,” and the baby died. This was during the war, far before my time, and yet the memory of my defiant neighbour become conflated with that of my great grandmother, who wore black until the day she died at the age of 104 and who I would see in the mornings, meticulously combing and plaiting her hair only to cover it with a tightly tied black headscarf. First, she would fold the square over to create a triangle. Then she would take the two ends of the triangle and cross them over her throat, up over her head and tie them firmly on top, so that her neck could not be seen. When asked how she was, she would respond sarcastically in the same words as my neighbour: «Τι να κάνω η μαύρη;» For, encased in the garb that rendered her femininity and fertility at naught, that is what she was. Black. Nothingness Personified. The epitome of Uncreation.

Sometimes, at the social gatherings which our widow neighbour would not attend out of propriety, for what widow had the right to express joy in the company of others, I would catch fragments of sentences referring to her as «η καημένη», for, consumed by the black, she no longer had a name and I imagined her, burning in grief and indignation in her shroud of black all these decades. It was then that I finally realised what the word «χαροκαμένη», another word employed to describe widows, actually meant: to be literally burnt by death. To a crisp. To no longer be human but instead, through pressure, through decay, through pain and absence, to lose any humanity left to you and instead, to revert to the basics of all and any carbon-based life forms; to become as incendiary as anthracite, capable of igniting at any moment. Black, black as pitch, black as my great-grandmother’s coal black eyes.

In 1927, Professor Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland created the Drop Pitch Experiment, to demonstrate that some substances which appear solid are highly viscous fluids. Pitch was placed into a sealed funnel and after it had settled, the neck of the funnel was cut, allowing the pitch to start flowing. Since that time, only eight drops have ever fallen. I imagine the pitch, as black as the widows’ clothes, as dark as my great-grandmother’s mandila to be their congealed life force, impenetrably thick and unyielding, its viscosity, a measure of their resistance to deformation at a given rate. At night I see again my recurrent childhood nightmare: the mandila wrapped like a black viper around the light fitting in my room, venomously dripping pitch down onto the white sheets below. My aunt maintained what I had seen was the head covering of Agia Paraskevi but my great-grandmother, alone in her room, counting her dead among the shadows knew better. In the shadows, the fall of pitch cannot be seen, let alone be counted. I recognise it as Bengt Ekerot, Death in the Seventh Seal and I challenge it to a chess game. But they don’t play chess in my village.

The first ever shirt I bought for myself was black. I wore it proudly on my nameday and when I went to kiss my great-grandmother she pushed me away sharply and spat:

-          - Τι ειν’αυτό που φοράς;

-           -Ε;

-          - Αυτό το μαύρο τσόλι.

-           -Πουκάμισο είναι.

-           -Να το βγαν’ς. Τι το περάσαμαν; Δε θα ξαναβάνς μαύρα.

I dared not to again, at least not in her presence, this being present continuous, which is why eventually, I threw it away. It is also the reason that I discarded the black cushions I received as a housewarming present and regifted the black t-shirts a well-meaning friend gave my daughters one Christmas. Although my great-grandmother had lost the power of speech a few days before she died, she still took pains to illustrate her point. The priest had arrived and was hunched over his portable communion case, preparing the chalice. Slowly, she raised her gnarled hand, took hold of the fabric of his anteri and looked at me, the fabric and the communion chalice. “See,” her gaze said, in rage. “This is what black signifies.”

I wore black at her funeral and wanted to continue to do so but my great-aunt told me I was too old to expect that acts of such blatant gender transgressive idiocy would be tolerated. Instead, in accordance with tradition, I refrained from shaving for forty days, observing with horror the preponderance of blonde and white hairs sprouting from my chin. In this, as with everything else, my great grandmother had the last laugh.

Kyria Koula has been a widow for fifteen years now. Approaching a hundred, her mind is as fresh as a drop of morning dew. She lies on the bed in her nursing home, clad in a robe whose kaleidoscope of colours would put Joseph’s coat to shame. “You know when my husband died, your «συγχωριανές» took me to task for “removing the black” after forty days. But there was no way I was ever going to wear black longer than that. No way. I was very young when they came to the house to announce that my father had died. At first, I failed to understand. It was only when, amidst the shrieking my mother and my aunt’s began to pull the bedsheets and pillow cases from the beds, remove the tablecloth from the table and the curtains from the windows, that the shock hit me. When they took all these things outside and dyed them black. Imagine living in a house with black curtains, black sheets, black table cloths and having to wear black clothes. I got sick. Yes they judged me. But I cannot abide that colour. When I die, make sure none of people wear it to my funeral.”

“Which colour should we wear instead?” I dare to ask.

“Red!” she exclaims triumphantly.

Try as I might, I cannot remember if we buried my great-grandmother in her black headscarf. I have this sneaking suspicion that we didn’t. It was the only time that her absence of shadow would have signified her own absence, rather than that of my long-departed great-grandfather, obtaining in death, her own shadow, rather than that of another that she wore all her life.

At the funeral of a friend, his life tragically cut short after an unexpected illness, my black-clad neighbour approaches to offer a greeting. Glancing at his widow, her eyes red raw with tears, barely able to stand, she shrugs in sympathy:

-           -Ούι, κρίμα η καημένη. Και δεν της πάνε τα μαύρα.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 23 November 2024