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For a few minutes they lay next to one another with their hands entwined, sunk in sweet torpor. Only their irregular breathing revealed that they were alive. Suddenly Melina jumped up. “How long have we been away?” she exclaimed anxiously. Sarantos fumbled for the watch in his trouser pocket. “An hour and a half!” he said. “Oh, we’ll get into trouble!” Melina replied and running, she plunged into the sea. Sarantos, still lying down, leaning on his bent elbow, observed her naked buttocks as their white roundness shone in the moonlight and he again felt passion stirring his private parts.
“Come to your senses, Sarantos!” he chided himself. “They’ll catch onto us and we’ll be in trouble.” He stood up and entered the water to wash off the sand that was sticking to him. They came out of the water, holding hands and exchanging kisses and then stood for a while to dry off in the summer breeze. They then put on their clothes after shaking them carefully.
“I’ll leave first!” said Melina. “Come later from another direction not to raise suspicions!” A final kiss and Melina started in the direction of the wedding venue. Anxiety had welled up in her. “And what if they looked for me?” she wondered. “What will I say? I’ve been away for almost two hours! And what if they connect my absence with that of Sarantos? I’m done for! Who’ll be able to stop their tongues wagging?”
When she reached the wedding party she discovered with relief that nobody was at her table. The couples on the floor were following the rhythm of a melodic slow dance, the lights were dimmed and the silver light of the moon illuminated the tightly clasped figures of the dancers. Mary and Anestis were tightly clenched and were kissing. When the dance finished and her friends came back to her table, no one asked her where she had been. It seems, she said, freed from her earlier anxiety, that they had not noted her absence among so many people, absorbed as they had been with eating the flavorsome food and drinking good wines and dancing. It wasn’t as if they did this every day. Besides, it was a unique opportunity to flirt with the girls or the boys they liked and they weren’t about to lose it by spying on the doings of other invitees.
Sarantos arrived fifteen minutes later and sat at the opposite corner of the table. He filled his glass with wine and whenever he could he stole glances at Melina, thinking over every detail of the past hours. She had opened the Gates of Paradise for him, she had offered him unique moments of such intense carnal pleasure that they had been almost painful for him and which the young man was sure he would never experience again for the rest of his life. This girl was not only the goddess of his soul; she was also queen of his body. She had offered him her body with a sweet willingness that became a fire that had burned him. She wasn’t a girl; she was a volcano whose lava of desire and her responsiveness, after setting him entirely on fire, had calmed his years-long desire to dominate her, to make her his completely, something that he couldn’t have dreamed of at the beginning of the evening. Sated with pleasure, he silently begged that the experience that had been a fantasy beyond his wildest dreams and ambitions would continue…
Mary went from table to table, talking and joking with the guests who were slowly beginning to leave, having eaten their fill and exhausted themselves by dancing without stopping. The last to leave was her own group of friends. She invited them all to come for a farewell meal at her house the next day. In the evening she and Anesti would leave for Italy on their honeymoon. The first night of their wedding would be spent at the seaside hotel where the reception was to be held. When the last of the wedding guests had left the couple went up the stairs hand in hand to their tastefully decorated room. They sat for a while on the balcony admiring the silver reflection of the moon on the sea which appeared to shiver at the contact, and then they went into their bedroom. Anesti took off Mary’s wedding dress with practiced hands and while kissing her passionately he removed her lace underwear.
Mary responded with ardor to his kisses and caresses. The girl had waited, after all, for six whole months. She was young and her flesh had its demands. Her husband dragged her to the bed and before long, and without taking enough time in foreplay, he rushed to enter her. Mary screamed in pain and her passion dissolved. With effort and in extreme discomfort she put up with him until he had finished. When he lay down next to her, panting, the girl tried to rid her face of any signs of disappointment. The sexual act was in no way like the ones she had read about in “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” where every scene had tickled her senses and made her look forward impatiently for the moment when, she too, would experience something similar. How many times had she not thumbed through the forbidden book that she had bought secretly on a trip to Athens with her father and had been hidden in a steamer trunk carefully wrapped in a thick shawl covered with a pile of clothes? How many times when her parents were away had she not read, and read again, the passages describing the heroine’s sexual encounters, spinning her own erotic romances where her senses were awakened and her unquenched desires could only be tamed by the force and the art of an experienced lover! Tonight the scene that she had been nurturing for so many years in her imagination and had fed with her sexual urges had nothing in common with what she had experienced and which had been particularly painful for her, despite its brief duration. “Perhaps it was unpleasant because it was my first time,” she thought, and the explanation sounded convincing to her. “I hope the next time and the ones after will be completely different,” she said to set her mind at ease.
In a little while Anesti was back on top of her and deep inside her again. It wasn’t painful this time, but she found it impossible to follow his rhythm. He couldn’t touch some relevant spot that would strengthen her longing and her passion to allow her too to get somewhere, and after a while all this back-and-forth of male hips tired and annoyed her because she was unable to participate. She listened to Anesti grunting and soon after he fell by her side, satisfied, while she felt that she was suspended somewhere else and not a part of what had taken place, as if it were not her body that had been conquered. She bit her lip to prevent herself from crying and creating a situation with her husband. He put his arms around her waist tightly and went to sleep on her shoulder with a smile of contentment on his face…
Mary stayed awake for the rest of the night. A fear had been born inside her that had not been there at the beginning of the previous evening. Could it be that she was frigid and unable to experience satisfaction and that her body was incapable of reaching orgasm despite her strong desires?
She put aside this annoying thought and the next morning when Anesti woke up with an iron-hard erection, Mary concentrated on the stirring sight. She stroked Anesti everywhere on his body, she kissed and was kissed by him passionately and longing woke up in her for what was to follow. And what was to follow, followed, and Mary’s thirst was again not quenched this time either. She felt anger well up inside her, looking at her husband who was satiated and rid of his load, smiling with satisfaction while she was still in suspense and hungry, with a sense of pressure in her vagina that had not found a way out to release her. She wanted to shout out, to tell him something, to make him concentrate on her problem, but, seeing his contentment, she did not dare. “Next time maybe things will be different. I’ll get used to accepting him inside me, I will get used to his rhythm, and doing that I will climax too!” she thought, and hung her hopes on it…
But even this hope ended in disappointment in the times that followed, and they were many, as Anesti was brimming with youthful vigour and sexual release was a pressing issue for him. The fact that he wanted her and sought to copulate with her, excited Mary, but for her an orgasm had become a rarely stumbled-on treasure, or rather something belonging to an unseen world. The woman tried all possible positions since Anesti was particularly inventive, liking variety and whatever was different. The result was the same. Mary was driven to a frenzy by her desire to climax, with a fire burning her private parts that could not be extinguished by the entry of her husband’s organ, slowly or quickly, into her, or in any permutation. And the woman found refuge in the bath after their encounters, finding release by masturbating. “What do I need a man for if I can satisfy myself?” she asked herself cynically and in anger on occasion. Immediately afterwards she would repent for being unfair to Anesti. It wasn’t Anesti’s fault. His private parts were well formed and of generous proportions, and he was experienced in this field; even the frequency and variety he brought to their bed was enough to prove that he excelled in the sexual game. It was more than clear that the problem was hers. It was impossible for her to climax with a man inside her, even one who was dynamic and vigorous, and this realization almost brought her to a point of despair. She decided not to think about the matter in order for it not to become an obsession with her, and, additionally, to never tell Anesti about her inability to climax. She pretended to experience release, assuming a facial expression of ecstasy so as not to upset him, since, despite the fact that Mary discreetly guided him many times to do what she wanted and he followed her instructions willingly, there was never however a cure to her sexual problem…She would leave things as they were for it would be a pity to disturb the equilibrium of her otherwise harmonious marriage because of what, clearly now to her, was her own physical dysfunction.
CHAPTER 5
The day after Mary’s wedding Sarantos, not being able to get a moment of sleep because of the excitement of his unexpected and epic coming together with Melina, went to wait in a café on the edge of the town square since Melina would have to go by there to go to the street market.
Sarantos knew that every Saturday Melina bought vegetables for her family. They didn’t shop in the town greengrocers’ shops except on exceptional occasions because their financial difficulties made it necessary for her to buy provisions from the street vendors’ stalls. Today was Saturday and Sarantos hoped that the girl would not sleep in as a result of last night’s wedding and the late night. And his hopes were not disappointed. At ten thirty he saw Melina approaching from a distance carrying her shopping net, and his heart skipped a beat in excitement. He stood up quickly and crossed the main street to accidentally – supposedly - find himself in her path. When she approached him he greeted her with an engaging smile, full of love and tenderness. She blurted out a dry “Good Morning” and moved as if to continue on her way. Sarantos was upset and started to walk alongside her.
“Are we going to get together later, Melina?” he asked her. She stopped and turned to look at him with such a frozen look that one would have thought she was addressing some undesirable, and said to him. “No, Sarantos, we won’t meet today, nor in the future.”
Sarantos was stunned. “But Melina dear, last night we…” he didn’t manage to finish the sentence.
“Last night we both gave in to the madness of the moment, Sarantos,” she replied to him. “What happened was a mistake and can’t be repeated. Besides, you know that I am not in love with you and last night’s happenings were only physical. I don’t want to have a relationship with you and I would like, if you too have no objection, for us to forget everything and go back to the day before yesterday when we were just friends. I don’t want anything more than that,” she said, and turning to her right she walked away, leaving him stunned in the middle of the street. Sarantos almost collapsed from shock. He could not believe what he had just heard a few moments earlier. How could a woman abandon herself unconditionally with such sexual frenzy, and as a virgin at that, and the next day be able to utter such harsh words? “But what have I done to her to make her treat me like a stranger, like an enemy? I neither forced her, nor did I do something without her consent, nor did I insult her. She knows that I have adored her for years. Oh God, what can I do now? What has bitten her to make her throw me aside like used goods, talking to me about friendship and other nonsense?” he asked himself in desperation. Tremors ran up and down his spine. His kneed buckled, unable to hold him upright. Breathing as if someone were choking him he collapsed onto the first café chair he saw and ordered a coffee to recover. He was so agitated that he scalded himself drinking it, hot as it was, spilling half of it onto his trousers, his trembling hand unable to keep the cup still.
This unexpected rejection was strange, unheard of, but primarily illogical he thought, if one took into account what had taken place the previous night. Sarantos tried to find an explanation, repeating her words over and over again in his head, but could find none. And suddenly his wounded pride made him angry.
“If she wants to lie down with everyone for a night and then not to say even good morning to them, it’s her problem!” he thought, so primed with anger that he felt his cheeks burning as if they were on fire. He immediately regretted his cynical silent words, the result of the humiliation he felt at her harsh and unexpected rejection of him. For a second he thought of approaching her again to ask for an explanation, even to beg her, but her words – like knife stabs – came back to him. “I am not in love with you. Last night was physical.”
There was no need to talk to her again on this subject. It was closed forever for him, following her declaration. Any attempt to approach her would humiliate him even more and would ridicule him. He wanted to have a friend at that moment to share a few words with him, Iakovos for instance. But he couldn’t share his thoughts because he didn’t want to expose Melina. He loved her deeply, you see, despite the deep wound she had made in his heart…
He got up from the chair after cleaning his trousers with his handkerchief and a little water and with slow steps, like that of a convict, started off for home. Entering the yard he saw Eleni, his mother, digging among the geraniums. When she lifted her head and saw him she was surprised by his appearance. His face was deathly pale, his tall proud bearing was gone and instead she saw his hunched shoulders, his brown eyes looking dark, huge, and full of sadness. Eleni wiped the sweat off her forehead and ran to put her arms round him.
“What’s wrong, my son? Are you ill?” she asked him.
Sarantos shook his head in negation.
“Come, tell me what is happening?” his mother said, drawing him to the wooden bench in the shade. Sarantos was so bound to her that he knew that she would listen to him with her heart and mind. He told her in a few words what had transpired with Melina and the developments that morning. Eleni listened without speaking. When he finished recounting his story she said to him.” My son, I have known Melina from when she was born. She is neither superficial nor a girl to indulge in casual sex. She has been through hard times in her life and both you and I know of these difficulties. Perhaps she is afraid of committing herself because she hasn’t got the strength to continue living in poverty and misery. And you, Sarantos, even if you married her, couldn’t change her life for the better. You haven’t got the means to do so. I know that you have been in love with her from the time you were a child but it seems that for Melina that is not enough. What is most likely is that she has exhausted her reserves of strength and doesn’t want to take you on board only to dump you later. Don’t bear a grudge against her, my son. Don’t let your pride blind you and lead you away from the reality of the situation. Of course she wanted you when she came to you without any reservations, but she didn’t want what would follow. Give way to your anger and justify her! It seems that the girl could not do anything else!
Tears involuntarily ran down Sarantos cheeks as his mother spoke. Eleni wiped them away and kissed him gently on his brow.
“Mother, I can’t stay in this town any longer. You must understand that, I am finished. There is no room for me here anymore!” Sarantos murmured.
“Relax, my boy, and together we will find a solution. Let me think and we’ll discuss it again. Go and lie down now and we’ll talk later.”
Sarantos, obedient as a child, walked off towards his bedroom. She remained alone and ruminated over her son’s confession. She understood his hurt as memories came back to her of Sarantos as a little boy, still in shorts, when he would often say to her when they were alone, “When I grow up I will become a judge and marry my Melina!” And Eleni would laugh at the seriousness of these childish declarations, but she herself had looked on the young girl as her future daughter-in-law. She couldn’t understand how any woman could ignore this strapping young man with his handsome face, good character and the charm that his presence radiated. And Eleni was objective in her judgment!
She herself had leaned on this mutual understanding and love for years, on the love coming from her son, to face her own martyrdom. The moment had now come for her to stand steady as a rock in his own moment of emotional turbulence because she knew of the lifelong love of Sarantos for Melina and she had seen the depth of his feelings for her. She feared that her son would wither away because he would not be able to avoid seeing Melina, without questions being raised, because they were both in the same tightly-knit group of friends. She was sure that his wound would bleed however much he tried to come to terms with the fact that his dreams had been shattered. The wisest thing would be for Sarantos to distance himself from the town. But where should he go? They had no relatives or friends in Athens, and there wasn’t enough money to send him away to study as the young man fervently desired. It was then that she remembered Paschalis, her cousin, who was well established in Australia with flourishing businesses, who, on many occasions when he travelled to Greece had told her that he would gladly invite the whole family to come to Australia. But Mitsos, her husband, wouldn’t have a word of it. He didn’t care about his children’s future and about better living conditions. He was very happy to continue emptying bottles of wine, playing cards at the café with his friends, and exerting himself in the bedroom…
Eleni sprang up resolutely. She knew what she would do. She would write to Paschalis. But there was another matter to be settled. She needed to find money for the expensive boat ticket, which under no circumstances did she want to request from her cousin. She would ask for the money from her father, explaining the reason to him, in a roundabout way. The truth was that the previous year when her teacher father had retired and offered her half his golden handshake compensation, Eleni out of pride had refused the money. She would go straight to her family’s village now to settle the issue, if indeed the offer that had been made the previous year was still valid and her father had not used the money for something else. She would talk to Sarantos only when the matter of his ticket funding had been settled as well as the issue of his living expenses for his first few weeks in Australia.
Without saying anything to anyone after what had happened that afternoon, she boarded the bus for her village. Half an hour later she walked into her parents’ house. They were worried to see her in front of them without any warning. Usually she visited them on Sundays with her children. Mitsos never accompanied her because he couldn’t stand the sight of her parents. They had similar sentiments for their son-in-law whom they considered a good-for-nothing, and for the big, or rather unforgiveable, mistake on behalf of their pampered daughter, whom he had, in their opinion, turned into a spineless little woman without any character. Eleni took her father aside and said that she needed the money, asking him if he still had the ability to help her.
“The money is for you, my child. We are old and don’t need it. Tomorrow morning I’ll go to the bank and withdraw it. Only, I want us to meet somewhere out of doors so that I won’t bump into Mitsos and have some sort of argument develop”.
They agreed to meet the next day at noon outside the main church. As agreed, her father gave her a bulging envelope, wishing her “May everything go well for the boy!” Eleni, overcome with emotion, kissed him gratefully and went back home. She called Sarantos and told him what she had done. Sarantos was visibly relieved as she spoke and his reaction calmed Eleni. She had harboured a fear deep inside her that his statement “There isn’t enough room for me here!” that her son had blurted out were merely words of disappointment, bitterness and of the moment. She immediately sat down and wrote to Paschalis. Sarantos went to his grandparents while waiting for a reply. He didn’t feel like meeting his friends or, of course, Melina, who would be with them…
Fifteen days later Eleni’s cousin wrote back saying that they were eagerly looking forward for Sarantos to come and they were already preparing the guest house for him to have his own independent space. Eleni bought the ticket for her son’s long trip. Her soul mourned her coming parting with Sarantos, but above all and everyone was his peace of mind, his own mental stability. His departure was at the end of the month, in ten days time. Sarantos returned to the town from the village and informed his friends of his decision to emigrate. Everybody was saddened by the news. Melina, at the other end of the table, cast him a sorrowful look, without making any comment, something that Sarantos interpreted as only regret at the departure of her childhood friend. Her face was very serious, in fact so expressionless that the young man could not discern any other emotion there.
When the day came for Sarantos to leave, his grandparents, his family and all his friends went to the bus station to see him off. Mitsos, his father, was noticeably absent. He had provoked great arguments, swearing and shouting that now that he needed extra hands to help him in the fields his son was running off overseas. Eleni for the first time raised her voice and warned him that if he continued like that she would take the children and also leave with Sarantos. Mitsos cowered, but was constantly drunk and refused to wave him off at the bus and didn’t condescend to say even a simple “goodbye” to his son. When the boy was walking across the yard towards the street gate of the house he shouted “I don’t want to see you ever again!”
Eleni begged Sarantos not to respond, saying that it was the wine that was talking, not his father…
Eleni and his sisters hugged him with deep sorrow in their hearts, trying to hold back their tears. All of his childhood friends wept as they said goodbye. They had no idea when, or if, they would see him again. Melina, standing at the edge of the pavement, and half-hidden by the others was waving her hand. As the vehicle started off Sarantos, overcome by emotion, looked back at his beloved friends for the last time. His eye caught Melina’s face, pale and drawn. Large tears were running down her cheeks. Or was it his imagination?
In a little while the bus disappeared round a bend in the road leaving behind clouds of dust and the bitterness of parting.
CHAPTER 6
Leaving the bus terminal the youngsters decided to have a coffee at the village square to wind themselves down from the emotionally charged moment. When they sat down Paulina said “We’ve grown up and our group has started to scatter! First Mary got married and we see her once in a blue moon, now Sarantos, and who knows who will be next…”
“Probably you with Dina,” said Iakovos. “Did you hear anything back from New York?”