You don’t think about children, you don’t even
feel them or see them coming. When they appear,
they’re already there.
Like typos, almost.
No, no, and no again. I say this three times because only the third “no” of a Greek woman can be believable. Have you ever seen Kazan’s film America, America? At some point during the movie someone says that we Greeks tend to always refuse twice. We only really mean it if we refuse a third time. You don’t remember it. That’s fine, it doesn’t really matter. It’s not that strange to me, but it may be to you. A book could be born from the head, from the ribs, the liver, the kidneys, the rectum, the womb, from an egg.
But I’m happy to comply. Who sent you? Honestly, why don’t you just sit and write a nice little article about false pregnancy? It’s the most common disorder afflicting young writers. It used to be dystocia, now it’s false pregnancy. What does it mean to say, “The time has come to break my silence?” I can’t stand people who devise lids for silence. I prefer Harold Pinter’s and John Cage’s lessons on silence. The former never avoided talking about the other kind of silence, that of verbal diarrhoea, the disease of most theatre scholars, and the latter with his composition proved we can’t even zip it for 4’33’’.
You insist. Fine. Let’s go back and run the distance to dullness. Since I was a young girl, I knew I’d share the same fate with books: I’d be left on the shelf. Not because I thought I was ugly, but because, as my father used to say, beauty opens doors that intelligence shuts. Don’t forget that the Greek word for intelligence (exypnada) contains the Spanish nada. From an early age I had a soft spot for words that contained nada (kaminada, lemonada, klotsopatinada). Even as an adult, I remain a fervent nadaist (filenada, meanada, monada), a disciple repeating her Hemingwayesque prayer: “Our nada, who art in nada, hallowed be thy nada, thy kingdom nada, thy nada be done, on nada as it is in nada.”
I was expecting you’d ask about my parents. Both of them stuttered. My father pronounced the word “paternity” as “papalnerability.” My mother always talked about “mamatrifilial” love. I don’t remember much. When I was a child I was too busy playing hide and seek. I always found the best hiding spots, but could never have guessed that when I grew up I’d want more than anything to be found.
I guess a few of the symptoms should have alarmed me. I mistook my nausea for a kind of nostalgia for one of my favourite literary heroes, Antoine Roquentin. Yet, I used to lead a normal life, the life of a public library reader who satisfied her appetites with renewed passion every time. I don’t think my fondness of shared or used books hides anything immoral. Each time I bent over to smell their pages, it felt as if I’d buried my nose in the pollen of a lily. But what are the chances of conception if you suffer from allergies?
What can I say? Perhaps I should blame it all on my broken Latin. In class, instead of liber, liberi, I conjugated liber, libri and my professor blamed it on my wool-gathering. If I’d turned into a sentimental type . . . The truth is I used way too many exclamation marks. It was Giorgos Ioannou, I reckon, who had said that punctuation marks are the erection of written language, and, in my case, I don’t know, perhaps my writings were always under the influence of Viagra.
You can’t talk to my parents. My father’s not alive. He abandoned us many years ago, and due to his hot-headedness, according to my mother, he lost his own life as soon as he felt the cold steel of a question mark in his throat. What is it you want to know about my mother? She is possibly not interested at all in this type of growth. All my mother wished for, sir, was to teach me how to make decisions. Logical decisions.
Such a thing presupposed not only that I’d spend my whole life on the island of affirmation or on the island of negation, but also that I’d never visit Gombrowicz’s Sonland. Over time, I realized that my obsession with nada stemmed from an ennui born of mingling with people who knew only how to ask “yes” or “no” questions. I decided to become a mother, me-tera, non-terra—there’s that broken Latin again—I decided to swim just to hear a rhetorical question.
I don’t really want to talk about my relationship to the librarian. It doesn’t matter if he’s the father. The only thing I can tell you is that Captain Nemo—let’s just call him that, as he wishes to keep his anonymity—taught me how to survive just like Arion; astraddle on a book’s back.
How come you’ve met him already? No, he’s not aggressive. What did he tell you? “He didn’t Borgesitate to send you to hell”? Ha, ha, ha! Excuse me. He has his reasons to tell you that, he’s not mad, not mad at all. He was reading the Book of Imaginary Beings and you interrupted him. You see? It all makes sense now. He’s right. I might even be a descendant of the Gillygaloo. Wasn’t it my namesake who was hatched from an egg? Can you, please, hand me the book? On the top shelf. Can you see? The fifth from the left. Thanks.
Gillygaloo, Gillygaloo, Gillygaloo! Eureka! Listen:
The Gillygaloo rested on the slopes of Paul Bunyan’s famed Pyramid Forty, laying square eggs to keep them from rolling down the steep incline and breaking. These eggs were coveted by lumberjacks, who hard-boiled them and used them as dice.
The Gillygaloo rested on the slopes of Paul Bunyan’s famed Pyramid Forty, laying square eggs to keep them from rolling down the steep incline and breaking. These eggs were coveted by lumberjacks, who hard-boiled them and used them as dice.
Why did we break up? We had a heated argument over whether “Woman Man” by Zoé Karelli was a genetic or a grammatical anomaly.
I called my son Stear. Not a very catchy name, I know. It’s from a poem by Andreas Embirikos:
The scale tilts towards our will
set on our gauge
each time we roll the dice.
And look, we score once more
when the dice falls on the belly of a woman
who sleeps naked
in the sand after her swim.
This woman—legend has it—
alone
braved the sea
her naked body covered in swimmers’ goose fat
gliding the vast sea surge
filled with the angels’ sweet sighs.
From a girl with a shell, a girl in the shadow, on a beach, in a wheelhouse, I became a woman who gave birth to a book. It’s simple. I chose a Julius other than the one of my puberty to cross the Rubicon. After all those years, the cervical os dilated in book centimetres. The die was cast. In the end, I learned how to murder with quick-fire pencil strokes—“Et tu, matre?”
You wonder why? I just like the name Stear. It encloses the Greek ear like the words frear and delear. With a name like this you can live singled out like a passenger on the “Great Eastern.” Unfortunately, you can’t see my son. I “gave birth to him,” is synonymous with the phrase “the stork brought him to me,” “the dice brought him to me” only for some lumberjack to hard-boil him in the end. I had to kick him so he becomes the twin black yolk of a question: “Did the woman writer make the book or did the book make the woman writer?”
To answer your question why I wanted to become a writer, let me ask you instead: “Have you ever heard anyone challenge the maternity of a book?”
