Why I Killed My Best Friend (15 page)

Martha and Fotini bring me romance novels from the kiosk, which are always written by some Rachel or Betty or Nerina and have dramatic titles:
The Misunderstanding
, or
The Price of Love
, or
Fleeting Time
. They read them in a single day, bawling their eyes out, then have to wait until the next one is released the following Thursday. It's the picture on the cover that interests me: a woman, almost always blond, gazing over her shoulder, hand on her heart, at the man walking up to her from behind, a glass of champagne in each hand. Or the woman is walking off, suitcase in hand, and the man is running after her, his tie loosened and flapping in the breeze. Or they're dancing in the moonlight. Anna is nowhere to be found. I picture her with her hand on her heart, or packing a suitcase for a vacation with Angelos, or the two of them dancing in the moonlight. Barthes writes, as if he knew:
Countless episodes in which I fall in love with someone loved by my best friend: every rival has first been a master, a guide, a barker, a mediator
.

Aunt Amalia puts it more simply: “Your friend is a spoiled brat,” she says as she puts curlers in her hair.

Spoiled is right.

“She can't just stay out until all hours without ever telling me where she's going or where she's been. What am I supposed to say to her parents?” Aunt Amalia can't comprehend that there are parents in the world like Antigone and Stamatis, who you can call by their first name, or smoke in front of, or go to demonstrations with.

I roll over and pretend I'm asleep. Whereas actually I'm picking at the stuccoed wall, scratching into it with my nails. I, too, need to leave my mark somewhere.

A gentle breeze picks up, stirring the bougainvillea outside the window. Its shadow falls on the sheet, shaping human figures that kiss and part, kiss and part. Anna undresses in the dark and crawls into bed next to me. She wraps herself around me and starts to cry. Her tears trickle down my back, tickling me. With her arms around my waist it's as if the two of us are speeding along on a motionless motorcycle. As if we're headed at breakneck speed toward some interior spot, deep inside ourselves. Barthes writes,
Jealousy is an equation involving three permutable (indeterminate) terms: one is always jealous of two persons at once: I am jealous of the one I love and of the one who loves the one I love. The odiosamato (as the Italians call the “rival”) is also loved by me: he interests me, intrigues me, appeals to me
.

“Can you ever forgive me, Maria?”

I pretend I'm asleep. Anna sinks her face into my hair, sighs on the nape of my neck. Her body has an acrid smell, like the silver spoons my mother is always polishing.

“Please, Maria, talk to me . . .”

She sticks her knees in the hollows of mine and we're like two of those spoons in my mother's drawer—some of that metallic smell
rubs off on me, too. She doesn't relax her grip all night, I keep waking and drifting off again in her asphyxiating embrace. Only in the morning, when she gets up to pee, do I realize that what I was smelling was the smell of sex, her sex. The mussel.

Odiosamato.

I throw off the sheets and hurriedly get dressed. I don't want to be pitied. I throw a swimsuit, towel, my sketch pad and charcoals in a bag, and
A Lover's Discourse
. I sneak out of the house on tiptoe, borrow Fotini's bicycle and ride off, upright on the pedals all the way to Perdika. I've got a certain rock formation in mind. That's where I'll stay. I spread my towel in the cave, open the pad and start to sketch. I'm still there at sunset, drawing people with tiger tails, portraits of Medusa with snakes for hair, strange animals that don't exist in nature. When it starts to get dark, I lie down with Barthes:
The lover's anxiety: it is the fear of a mourning which has already occurred, at the very origin of love, from the moment when I was first “ravished.” Someone would have to be able to tell me: “Don't be anxious any more—you've already lost him/her.”

Him, her. Him, her, himherhimherhim. My teeth are chattering.

I'm not hungry, or thirsty, or tired. My gaze is trained on a little spotted insect slowly creeping up my towel. I've lived this scene before. I know what comes next. I reach out my hand, grab it, and put it in my mouth.

A helpless insect. Cold, crunchy. African.

Anna and I have decided on a major change: we're going to cut our hair. September is hot this year, and besides, we can't very well start high school with braids and ponytails. Aunt Amalia takes us to a fancy salon in Kolonaki. The hairdresser's name is Gino. He looks like a rooster, with a coxcomb of dyed orange hair. A red-haired girl hands us a book with pictures of different hairstyles to flip
through. There's a bob we both like, with bangs and wisps framing the face.

“No,” says Gino. “It's not right for you girls. You're young, do something daring for once!”

He rests his scissors high up on my neck, and with one fell swoop my hair lands in a heap on the floor. I look like one of the convicts Foucault wrote about in the latest issue of
Actuel
—the ones who try to obliterate the deep division between innocence and guilt. Anna looks like one of Genet's prisoners. Her face looks naked, almost debased; her enormous, questioning eyes are more prominent than ever.

“What did he do to us?” she whispers, throwing me a sideways glance in the mirror.

The red-haired girl finishes us off with an assortment of gels and sprays. We leave the salon looking like aliens, hair stiff with hairspray. Aunt Amalia takes us to her apartment, which Anna and I call “the antique store,” because it's full of old furniture and taxidermied birds. She makes us spaghetti with meat sauce, but neither of us can eat a thing. We lock ourselves in the bathroom and cry.

“Girls, for goodness' sake, don't make such a fuss!” Aunt Amalia shouts from the other side of the door. “Just wash it a few times and it'll be longer.”

We wash it, we pull on the ends, but our hair doesn't get any longer.

“How are we going to show our faces at school?” I ask.

“What's Angelos going to say?” she says.

That's not my problem. From the morning they found me at the far end of the beach at Perdika, shaking with cold, feverish and delirious, I swore I'd never give the two of them another thought. Angelos was dead to me. Anna is still alive, of course, of necessity. She's my best friend. Odiosamato.

And as always, she finds a way: she manages to do her hair in a way that looks good. A few wisps tucked behind her ears and she actually looks cute. I don't. I push my hair back, it falls forward. I brush it forward, it goes wherever it wants. Then one Sunday when we're hanging out in Monastiraki, by the flea market, my gaze falls on a pair of army pants in a shop window on Adrianou Street.

“Aren't they a little too punk?” Anna says, making a face.

All of a sudden I flash back to Raoul and Michel, the anti-racist movement, the Sex Pistols, the squatters in Berlin.

Why not?

In the army pants I feel stronger. I put three pins on my leather jacket, all of Siouxsie and the Banshees. I walk around singing “Christine” under my breath, as if it were my own personal anthem:
She tries not to shatter, kaleidoscope style, personality changes behind her red smile, now she's in purple now she's the turtle, disintegrating . . .
What exactly is kaleidoscope style? Or purple disintegration? The weirdest boys in school come up to me during break and want to talk to me, all because I'm wearing my leather jacket over my uniform.

Anna, in contrast, is going through an annoyingly pink phase. She says sex is allowed now, since it'll help us mature. If I push her on it, she quotes Barthes: “In no love story I have ever read is a character ever tired,” she says proudly, as if she thought it up herself. And yet she herself seems tired, tranquil, predictable: she waits for Angelos after school, sits with her legs to one side of his motorbike seat, folded just so, as if we were back in the '50s and she were Grace Kelly riding off with her prince. They have sex every weekend. As for me, I'm there in the bathroom, alone. I'm dating a guy named Pavlos, we're still at the hand-on-the-chest stage, but I tell Anna all kinds of stories that I lift straight from the pages of
Erotic Harmony
. Pavlos has a motorbike, too. But he understands my fear of exhaust pipes and never offers me a ride. He just pushes his bike in the street as we walk side by side, and the whole school makes fun of us for it.

Pavlos is an active member of the socialist party's youth movement. Ever since the Rallis administration resigned, he's been slapping PASOK stickers on parked cars. He wants to convert me.

“There's no way I'm turning PASOK,” I tell him.

“But it's totally obvious, don't you see? Papandreou is the only solution.”

I call Papandreou “Dr. Dolittle,” Pavlos calls him “a charismatic leader.” We usually part ways having fought. On October 15
^th
, during the run-up to the elections, PASOK holds a rally in Syntagma Square and Pavlos climbs a utility pole. I see him on television, waving his plastic flag as if it were a banner for the revolution.

“How'd he manage to muster such a crowd?” my father shouts, slapping his palm against the table.

“Do you think he'll get elected?” I ask.

“Absolutely not, I'd see the world end first.” Dad remains unrepentantly right-wing.

And yet the world does end. A hundred and seventy-two seats in parliament, 48.6% of the popular vote. How could I forget that moment? The day PASOK wins the elections, I lose my virginity.

Now that's what I call a “rendezvous with history.”

We can see everything from the roof of our apartment building. We can hear the honking of horns, the rhythmic chanting—“PA-SOK, PA-SOK”—and the slogan, “With you, Andreas, we'll make Greece new.” Dad is seething, Mom just shrugs.

These are dark days, they're agreed on that. My parents are a couple, and exhibit the fundamental weakness of all grown-up couples: they respond to things nearly identically. If Anna and Angelos
stay together, which will pull the other toward his or her way of thinking? Will Anna move toward the right, drink coffee, and swap cheap romances with Martha and Fotini? Or will Angelos become an activist and follow her to France? Both scenarios seem equally unlikely.

The downstairs buzzer rings twice.

“Who could that be, at this hour?” Dad says.

“It's Anna! I'm going out.”

“Two girls, out on their own in this chaos?” Mom's shrill voice follows me out the door, fading as I run down the stairs.

It's Pavlos, and the double ring on the buzzer is our signal for emergency situations. He grabs me and twirls me in the air. “We won, baby!” he shouts. I'm not a baby, I've got on my leather jacket with the punk pins, but I like the way his eyes are shining. He wants to go down to Syntagma to be in the thick of the celebrating crowds. I climb onto his motorbike for the first time—today I'm not scared, the atmosphere is electric. Other drivers call out to us, make the victory sign, all because Pavlos has a flag in one hand. Everyone is shouting, “The
pe
-ople
won't
forg
et
—
what
the
right
has
done
,” and honking their horns to the rhythm. That's something I can shout, too, it's a leftist slogan. My heart is pounding; I finally feel as if I belong somewhere.

The rhythmic chanting of “PA-SOK, PA-SOK” imprints itself on me, working its way inside as we drive down to Syntagma, like a refrain by Siouxsie and the Banshees, or the jingle from a Coca-Cola ad on TV. It's as if the word “PASOK” has come to mean love, or peace, or justice, simply because there are so many of us, and we're pounding together on the horns of our cars, and we all want for something to change. As if I'm not myself, no longer the same old Maria, I feel my mouth open and that same cry pouring out: “PA-
SOK!
” A shock indeed! Pavlos drives the motorbike up onto the sidewalk, turns around on the seat and takes hold of me in
an entirely different way, pulls up my shirt and bites me low on my belly. His eyes shine in the dark.

“Let's get out of here,” he says.

He spreads a sleeping bag on the roof of his building, behind the water heater. It's warm here, the cars down below are still blasting their horns, and we've put it all on pause. We've switched gears from a major revolution to a minor one, though actually I couldn't say anymore which is which. It hurts, a lot. I feel like my vagina isn't there, doesn't exist, or that Pavlos is excavating it as he goes, digging blindly and insistently with his gyrations. A narrow space, all membrane, fights back. I clench my teeth and tell myself that millions of women all over the world do this all the time. To make the torture end, I wrap my legs around his waist and pull him closer, willingly abolishing the slight distance between us. There's no sound, no pop of a champagne cork. But I know: I'm not a virgin anymore.

It's nothing like my experiments in the bathroom, the circular motions, the absolute happiness.
Erotic Harmony
is perfectly clear about this:
It can take a little while, even a long while, for a young woman to learn to enjoy lovemaking
. It says nothing about the breaking of the hymen, the relief of that moment. The passage from humiliation to freedom.