And my humility is laced with pride, without knowing if it's for my grandmother and what she teaches me, or maybe because the teacher cares about me. The mind throws sparks and then the sparks become words and the words come to the lips, flawless memories and bring tears to the eyes before whispering the story mentally, but with the same feeling and love.
"Mrs. Antigone, Grandma Garifallia says that a Russian pantygera is loaded with dreams in her holds. She fishes for them in distant unknown seas with silk nets, woven from Alisachne's hair. You see and don't see her captain, of course, but he sees you and knows you. When she passes by the shores of Crete, she sells dreams to Ostria in exchange for a mantinada. A dream and a mantinada, that's how the account goes. And Ostria, who is everywhere and nowhere at the same time, manages every time and arrives at the sea market with new mantinadas. Then she returns, where you don't expect her, secretly opens the children's bags and folds the dreams between the leaves of the reader!"
And then the bell rings and... And then laughter and children's voices and... And then a pause, let's listen to Ostria like then, like in the old days, and let's give her a mantinada together:
"But you can't stand cinnamon,
Moscow, you don't knock,
You don't come to me, carnation.
"What do you smell?"
“The journey into imagination for the cautious is futile,” the teacher once emphasized, after the excursion we had taken to Karfi and seen the sea and Crete from above. “It’s all a waste of effort,” Nikolis would say every now and then, pretending to be a boy from the last desk, and we would turn our heads to see the grimaces he made and burst out laughing.
"Set sails! Set sail, let the mind soar, life needs imagination, out there another world is waiting to reveal its secrets to us, let us explore it, let us travel barefoot and careless in imagination, our heart gives us permission, the heart that beats magically tiki tac, tiki tac, tiki tac...", her singing voice circled the room and then she opened the window and left. She traveled to meet the breeze of love in the midst of the weather. Black and white and colored, all beautiful signs in those first days of life.
"Imagination may not be reality, but if it were a place, it would be the one we would want to take ourselves tomorrow, tomorrow...", I remember her words.
"Is there right and wrong in imagination?" I had asked her one afternoon, when we also went to school in the afternoons.
"Imagination is not a school, you open a window in the mind and you pass into a new experience, to a mountain, to a sea, to a desert, to the plain, to the moon, to a city, to a corner of the yard, to the map of geography, to the eyes of someone you love. And there there is no wrong or right, no control, no one will grade you," that's how he told me.
I thought to myself that there, in the imagination, infinity would not fit. I couldn't digest it, even though he had told me that it was the refuge of love. I hadn't stopped fearing it. However, for better or worse, I had planted pansy seeds in a small pot, some tiny seeds that Aunt Margo had given me, and I was waiting for them to sprout and bloom, believing that in this way I could capture infinity, if it happened to fall from the traveling cloud, yes, that tilted eight into my hands! So I thought about it with relief but not out loud. From within myself, more secretly than secrets. I brought my arms and hugged my shoulders, searching for the wings that he had drawn for me. I smiled with satisfaction. I had touched something, I felt something, and I smiled a second time with gratitude.
And how could I have known then that I would carry it, this infinity, for a whole life with my grandmother's dowries and not withered and dusty like the things thrown away in the warehouse that await only their natural end and nothing else, but I would even wear it like jewelry...
Painted ships and birds in the sketchbook and stars and autumn leaves and trees and little houses and colored buttons and ribbons and dates and smudges, how beautiful smudges are! No, it is not possible to reconstruct that past. But it always remains familiar, mine, like a house that I visit whenever I feel a scratch in my soul and it is there and comforts me and welcomes me. It even preserves the smells that I loved, yes, and there in the small crack in the outer wall poppies always grow.
That's where I hide when we play, behind the ivy. I forget myself looking at the poppies. A perfect hiding place. Only the teacher knows. One time when we were playing hide-and-seek I forgot myself there in the leaves and it wasn't the ivy's fault with its chatter, no. It was something else. It came and found me.
"Why is the little girl with the glasses and curly hair still here?" She asked, pretending to be indifferent, without being angry that she was looking for me.
"So red, ma'am, so red!" I said happily. I had been left admiring the poppies and more. I had also noticed the black cross they have in the heart, but the vivid red color blew my mind and I had no desire to question that black cross. Red was important, at least until autumn when the cyclamens would bloom and I would return to my favorite purple.
In the mirror, a memory of rust on white paper and the teacher somewhere in the background writing on the blackboard and the white chalk creaking and breaking, and then taking the big sponge to erase everything and then clapping her palms to remove the dust, blowing her breath into her fists and small grains of chalk rising into the light, who knows where their own magical journey was headed.
Ostria had arrived and was the first to open the large window wide one morning. The teacher, before leaving her bag on the desk, went and closed it, but Ostria was stubborn and opened it again. But the teacher insisted and closed it again. She hadn't had time to turn her back and it was the same thing again. It had seemed funny to us, one of her many games to make us laugh, she had her bag still hanging in her hand. However, far outside you could see some strange clouds rising like towers on the horizon. Grandma had said that morning that if it suddenly rained it would be full of dirt and the still snowy peak of Dikti would turn red.
"Let's leave the window open, let's please her," Mrs. Antigone admitted her defeat and "with one, with two, with three, let's take out our own paper windows to see how many words can fly out today, if they are said correctly," she added.
Goes on…
Tomorrow, in the name of love
Life of Diktao
