The Depths Under the Depths

The bus trundles up the incline shaking on its aging suspensions. It’s one of the old ones, with windows that slide down and a small ashtray set into the headrest of the seat in front. I sit in the back and watch the wind blow in at every turn to ruffle the hair on the gently swaying heads of the few passengers. From time to time, I feel the grinding of the changing gears. All around us, down below, the plains flow towards the horizon, interrupted by the low mountains that still don’t have new names, although most people think we should keep their old ones. We crest the last ridge. The bus comes to a stop at the parking lot with a hiss of the pneumatic brakes. The driver calls, “End of the line!” and turns off the engine. I grab my bag and get off the bus. The wind up here is strong, but there’s something missing. A man in a cheap blue shirt half untucked comes towards me waving an armful of postcards, rosaries with blue beads, wooden carvings of seagulls painted white with black wingtips. I give him some money. He gives me four postcards and a rosary. I put them in my bag. Not many people come, it’s true, even though those who do say there’s no doubt. That there’s absolutely no doubt. The path starts at the other end of the parking lot, stone steps that wind upwards. The rest of the passengers have already started the climb. I had my own doubts, but I threaded them on a piece of wire one next to the other, and among them, here and there, I placed the small misshapen, pearls of hope: that I would find here my brother’s reflection, or his echo, or the sort of wake that remains on the sea three days after the ship has passed, or nine years, a day like today, which marks the ninth anniversary of his death.

I start up the path after the others. On my left there is a slope of broken rock, dried earth, straggly yellow grass. On my right a low fence of stacked stones separates me from a drop of hundreds of meters, straight down to the plains, which already bloom in sporadic clusters of squares and rectangles.

My mind is often a fishing boat that sails the blue depths, where my brother used to reside. The fishing boat – what did we call it, the one with the many masts, the numerous sails, how many decks – four? six? nine? – , along with the sea we started losing the words that enfolded it like a silken veil, and now we are left only with tatters: fishing boat, wave, the deep.

(but what did we call the depths that lay in wait under the depths?)

The new fields have already been allotted. The necessary applications were submitted, the necessary lots were drawn, and the courageous – or foolhardy – have already reaped the first few crops. Most, though, stay inside the previous limits, and in the summer visit the former beaches, they wear their bikinis and swimming trunks, and buy ice cream. The girls bury their painted toes in sand that each year must be replenished. Some people claim that if you lay down to sleep at night, on the beach, you will hear right there on the cusp of dream the waves softly caressing the sand. They also think that the sea will come back as suddenly as it left, led by a huge wave with white crests higher than the mountains, which will sweep in to fill once more the sea’s former dominion, and more besides.

After a while I reach the top. Beyond a flat expanse of concrete, perched over the precipice, lies the house. The house that once was the sea, because it becomes clear, once you come here, and walk, as I have, from room to room, and sit on the roofed terrace, that the house is both the structure and the scope of its majesty. It is both the sea and what remains of the sea. It is both the house and its ruin.

The entrance resembles the double doors of the old mansions of Andros or Hydra. We enter without knowing what to expect. What will confirm, that is, the building’s hypostasis. No one speaks, no one laughs, in part because no one feels the slightest unease. Only a relief, the same feeling one used to have when entering cool waters. A woman that in the bus was sitting a few seats to the front walks next to me. We pass from the ballroom to the drawing room, and enter the hallway that leads to the kitchen. I can’t say whether I am following her, or she is following me. A door leads to the dining room, and from there we step out onto the terrace that borders the building on three of its four sides. Monstrous caryatids line the terrace and support the roof. The woman walks through lances of sunlight that fall between the statues at a slant on the flagstones. She seems composed only of long legs, long arms, and the fabric of her dress. Around her neck nestles a long scarf, white with a blue motif, that on her looks like the sail on a beautiful new species of ship.

(before long the scarves will turn beige with green motifs)

She turns to look and the sun illuminates the black tresses that frame a face old fashioned but turned modern by some obscure and personal method, such as the coloring of a surface with hand-painted, precisely spaced Ben-Day dots. What can she be thinking of? Has she come in pursuit of an adolescent memory or is she one of those that never laid eyes on the gentle madness of a summer storm as it enters the bay? Does she yearn to feel again the anticipation of the cool hand of the sea, as she stretched her body before the dive into the blue, the green, the grey – really, who can say now what was its true color?

I realize that the house is both the sea and nothing like it, in the same way that the bird differs from the dinosaur. It could be the end result of an indefinite number of evolutionary steps, which, although obvious, we managed to miss. The sea, pacific, atlantic, unrelenting, evolved beneath the mask of its blue and restless mantle, in the same way that all the steps were taken, the obvious steps, that made of my brother a drowned memory. Now, in retrospect, I can see them clearly. I could make a list, a diagram, a map, whatever is needed, but it would be of no use to anyone except me – the brother left behind, unevolved.

I have come here to find my brother, by which I mean I have come to find the resting place of my brother, who followed until the end – his own end – a sinking ship, back when the ships were still under the jurisdiction of the sea.

Inside me I feel like a wave, that is, like a circle that doesn’t know how to complete itself, only collapse in a spiral of foam. I’d like to be able to ask him: how does one renounce the citizenship of a simple family, a simple house, to defect to the strangest land there ever was? How does one choose to leave behind the obedient streets, the tame squares, the docile parks, for the invisible and unmappable avenues of the Aegean Ocean? What was it that he saw in the ocean and the seas? An endlessness, maybe, that is now absent from the plains and the mountains. He once told me that the sea was the only place where he felt safe. I wish that now I could tell him, as I stand between two statues of marine monstrosities, that there’s nothing more inaccurate than the metaphor of the sea as sanctuary. In days of old, men used to believe that the ideal world was a world without the sea. Now that we have finally attained it my mind is often the Plakes in Amorgos, a short flight through the golden sky and a blue deep and soft as a hand wrapped in silk.

(the dive into the water like a white brain exploding downwards from the surface)

I take one step and then another. The scarf has disappeared around a corner. The sun falls on the statues and paints in shadow the outlines of monsters on the flagstones of the terrace. The caryatids stand here in a row. They remind me of a breakwater. I look into their myriad eyes, between the tentacles, next to their gills, in order to find, if possible, an echo, my brother’s last breath. The sea is now the dry bed of a monstrous river, now that the sea is just dirt and packed earth. The sea is now a broken vase, breast dried of milk, a glass of water emptied for the last time. And if the water’s gone away and now exists only as the azure memory of an unruffled expanse on which the sun smashed itself to pieces, then am I the sail on my brother’s mast, or is it the other way around?

At least back then the boat’s prow would cleave the wave in two, and in this division – half the sea, and another half – there were moments when I thought I could see the face of my brother, or his hand, or his open mouth, and I told myself that it was only fear or excessive affection that prevented me from bending down to kiss him, or draw him up on the deck, and I left him there in the arms of his blue mistress. Now that the Aegean Ocean is just the crumbling stones of a ruined house, my mind is often the low and narrow passage that leads into the Kastro of Folegandros, and from there to that high balcony where Mr. Glass once composed music, from where I could see my brother wandering alone in a catacomb built under the catacombs, since the crew of every shipwreck numbers a single person: the one we lost and can’t stop mourning.

But aren’t the ship’s bows the same shape as the waves – don’t the ships have the same number of decks as the Ionian Ocean, both the visible and the hidden ones that plunge straight into the depths, since every ship in reality isn’t just a ship but a shipwreck-in-waiting, or an object that resides in the space that lies between a ship (the shipwrecked’s ideal, always female, always blond) and the shipwreck (the seaman’s ideal, always female, always dark-haired) – and isn’t my brother one of those people, maybe the only one, that was consumed by this great nautical desire?

A soft wind whistles down the length of the terrace. On the lances of sunlight hang long curtains of sparkling dust motes that move like kelp in clear water. I am alone. My brother is nowhere to be found. Maybe he’s somewhere else.

He could still be in Sarakiniko, where we climb up the long white curve of rock, the visible thigh of a hidden stone woman. The other children perch there like rooks in a row, daring each other to dive first. He says, Let’s go, and I say, I can’t, it’s too high. He says, Let’s dive together, and you won’t be afraid, and I say, Okay, on three. We count but only one of us jumps and screams all the way down. The sea swallows him with a white sigh and I wait for him to come up. Nothing changes except the beat of my heart that quickens in fear. My brother does not come up. I wait some more but he’s nowhere to be seen. And I know it’s not just me, because right before he surfaces in a seemingly impossible distance, whooping with delight, as I let myself slowly unfold into a life where my brother has drowned and I am an only child, this girl next to me turns and looks at me with an expression of perfect horror.

My brother could still be at the bottom of the pool, where he dives down, turns on his back, and lays there watching the headless bodies above him move. I am one of those bodies. From time to time I put my head in the water and look at his white cap and the goggles that moderate the ecstasy on his face. On the way home I ask him and he says, I don’t know, I guess sometimes they remind me of a dance performance from the next world. I want to ask him more but he turns to look at me and in his eye I can see the levels that multiply like invisible sapphires between him, there at the bottom of the pool, and the rest of us, swimming above him.

Or he could still be standing in the middle of my living room, when he comes to visit before his last voyage. He stays a few days and from a distant seaman he becomes once more my brother: he wears only white t-shirts and jeans, smiles a lot, never touches meat, only fish. He stands in the middle of the living room and looks at the trees in my backyard. The wind passes through the branches and moves them in fluid arcs. Sometimes they look like waves, I want to tell him, but I don’t. He says, Can I have a glass of water? He drank water the way grown men drink whisky – with the exact opposite of indifference. The last memory I have of him is the blinding white of his t-shirt as he stands there in sunlight, his face marred by the diffractions of the glass, drinking water.

I walk from room to room in search of an exit. Behind me, on the terrace, the scaled caryatids preside over their old dominion, but they preside alone. My brother is nowhere to be found. I try not to lose heart. It could be that all things, big things or small things, will start departing the world. Maybe the sea was just the first in a vast series of departures that is to come, and become, like the sea, ruined stone houses overlooking the plains. And let’s hope that the dead, too – or only the drowned – are still numbered among the things of this world, and that at some point they too will start to leave. I’d like to request that my brother will be among the first, and that I will be notified, so I can travel to the stone house that will be my brother to lay my hand on the cool stone of the wall – and be still.

But first of all, what was really the sea? A mirror of the sky, and at night it should have been of the stars, too,

(although never)

the spring that moves the world’s gyres or only the oceans’, an endless avenue lined with the diaphanous lions of our closest horizons, a cylix filled with monsters or only with anemones, the dense medium through which fly those other birds we call fish, the second house of my brother, the depths, the depths, the ceaseless knitting of a glittering, heavy cloth that, like a century, never ceases to shift, a generator of hurricanes, typhoons, or a staircase that coils around itself and admits only those ships that want to descend to the limitless basement we call

(the abyss, we used to call it the abyss)
the second house of my brother?

NOTES:

The Depths Under the Depths was first published in Greek in 2017 on Book Press.