Lily Michailidou: I saw in his eyes…

The eyes are the gates of vision.
When they open we see the world above
and the shaky structure of our lives.
when they close we inevitably find ourselves
in the world below, the shadow-world.

That afternoon I went out for a walk in the park, beneath the dome of trees that stretched over a great distance. I wanted to forget, to forget myself, to prolong time in a new visual landscape, far from the bustling city, its excesses and its addictions. Only in this way could I fit into the time allotted me.

I saw him from afar leaning his back against a perennial eucalyptus tree that stood majestically between the pines, beside the little river that flowed only after heavy rain had gone before. It had gone before, because it was flowing swiftly and consolingly for the gardens around. Inevitably Heraclitus’ fluid time flowed into my mind; another consolation. His hands were playing with something that I couldn’t make out, most probably his cell phone; an essential device of the modern age, I reflected, without which we feel deficient. Interknitted reflections like the sails of a windmill, from sunrays that, through the eucalyptuses’ thick foliage arrived broken, fell all around him painting a colourful mosaic; a last breath of spring in winter.

I walked towards him. He turned his head and his eyes embraced me. An electrical current passed through my body, I felt dizzy, turned my gaze away in order to recover. I recalled my grandmother who used to tell us that when someone is born during a storm, a bolt of lightning breaks away and, like a magnet, penetrates his eyes, and from that moment his gaze electrifies. Was that what happened I wonder?

I continued and sat down on a bench facing the lake, which was covered by a greenish-yellow layer from which protruded twigs and dead reeds. He came and sat beside me. I felt his aura inundating me. He reached out his hand and took hold of mine. We didn’t speak, but simply stared at our hands, comparing their colour, the length of the nails, the size of the fingers.

I had an overwhelming desire to look at him again, to focus on his greenish-blue eyes, to see from close up what it was that made them special. What was concealed inside them? I turned resolutely. A warm current ran through my body cells, plunged intensely inside me, till a side of winter came between us and lessened the intensity.

And then I saw a swarm of words coming from his eyes; bold and unruly words. They reminded me of our schooldays and the rebelliousness of youth. I saw him, a young boy on a bicycle, crossing trails and rivers that led to youthful hiding-places.

I saw a village, in a valley between mountains, tiny churches and paths that crossed in groves with olive trees, orange trees, tangerine trees and bergamot.

I saw a mother in a home for the elderly. Home for forgetting he called it. All of those there gradually forgot where they were, why they were there and who it was visiting them. Only his mother still had her wits. She waited for him every Saturday, together with some other old women who were waiting for the bananas. Amid the innate objects were the agitated breathing of the inmates, the listless aged bodies, the dry sobbing.

The areas were functional, but full of intensity and reversals. Some were discharged for good, others remained though the spirit had already left them. Gaps of memory that most of the female figures embroidered daily with their sewing of mats and covers, without knowing who they were intended for. His mother was not impatient with time, only with death, which wouldn’t come to take her. However, she persisted, in darning the holes in her days with stories and psalms and accepted all the strange, ugly and inhuman things around her because she lived among them; she couldn’t do anything else, she had no other choice.

I saw a father, brave and handsome, whose life reached as far as the Great War. He survived the war, the famine, the civil war, but was broken by the pit. The years were hard and unyielding like iron, as also was the need, and the earth sucked dry those people who succumbed to that need, working day and night, dissecting its innards.

I saw the years before and after and those in-between, and I was on the outside; and life seen from the outside causes anxiety and concern.

And then, in the socket of his eye, I noticed two tears waiting, something of a portent. The irises shone like the deep shades of the sea at dawn. “When we’re small,” he said, “we live carefree and successively like time, but as we grow older, we make the mistake of living as though we were surrounded by eternity…”

On the banks of the stream, the night flowers still had their eyes closed. As the twilight began to spread over the park, they woke and smelled sorrowful.

The next morning, I heard that his mother had gone quietly, like a sunset.

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Translated by David Connolly