A Start
Okay, I know I said I was going to do the Westport post next, but I'm not sure what I want to say there.
This post is just going to be a description of the absolutely heinous circumstances in which I find myself, before they all go completely cold in my mind. They’ve already started to congeal to the point where waking up to 13 foot ceilings no longer impresses me and all I can focus on is petty jealousy over whether or not the oscillating fan is pointed in any way at me rather than solely at my bed partner - no small matter in 37 degree heat, but a sign that I am losing the run of myself nevertheless.
I can see the Acropolis from my bed. That’s not that hard to do in Athens I suppose, the rolling terrain affording a plenitude of views of the thing, which is quite high, from a variety of places. But were I want to walk there, it would take me approximately 7 minutes to reach the entrance to the tourist path, passing a monument to the spot where Byron slept in its shadow during the war of independence about 3 minutes in. New Romantic indeed.
I’m not really sure what strictly constitutes a pied-à-terre, but I am absolutely certain that this apartment is one of them. It consists of two airy rooms, with a kitchen and a bathroom shunted into what I am certain must have been the space for a large staircase to the upper floors during the time when this was all one unbelievably grand house. The whole thing is decorated in an eclectic but stately manner, with heavy mid-century furniture in varying classifications of dark wood. There are a few scattered 19th century landscapes and a mid-century still life on the walls, and bookcases in every available space. These are filled with the digital humanities texts supplied by Despina’s mother’s research, as well as Greek history and some literature and theory from which I have been borrowing. I’m currently two-thirds of the way through “Discipline and Punish” which seemed like -and was- a great idea when I’d only been here a week, but has been hell on earth as my anxiety about my situation has caught up with me. Love too read about prisons and the surveillance state on the brink of deportation. But like, the cute, fun brink of deportation where you get to go to the beach and have awkward, accusatory conversations about privilege with the people housing you for free!
Behind the bed, a closet door opens into the only air-conditioned room in the apartment, which contains a family archive. If you don’t know what the fuck a family archive is, it is a room of first editions and editorial proofs of books written “about the family,” which is not a wild logical leap from the words used to denote it, but which concept boggled MY tiny mind nonetheless.
Despina and I met on Tinder in America about two and a half years ago. Her parents live near my mother’s house in Providence, and before coming here all I knew that they were sort of intellectual people who may or may not have been researchers, and who for some reason own a building in Athens in which I would be staying. What I did NOT know was that Despina’s grandmother, who lives in the first-floor apartment above this one, is the granddaughter of the second democratically elected president of the third Hellenic democratic republic of Greece, Konstantine Tsatsos, and his wife Ioanna, both of whom were heavily involved in the resistance to the Nazi occupation during the Second World War. Also in the family, and a former occupant of the apartment that I am writing from at this moment, was Greek poet and Nobel prizewinner George Seferis. I haven’t read any of his poetry, but Kate and I have decided after some research that he had at least one gay friend while he was here and you know it’s disappointing but that plus a Nobel prize will just have to do for qualifications, really.
Unfortunately, Henry Miller, in his “Colossus of Maroussi” has officially published the first internationally accessible description of this apartment, which establishes this blog post in an illustrious tradition at the same time that it… renders it kind of unnecessary. I’m not sure if the hat seller across the street, who sits smoking all day long in front of our lace-curtained windows, chatting shit with a litany of equally grizzled men, comes from a long line of somehow-always-retired hat sellers that have always sat in front of these windows, past whom the Greek intelligentsia have slunk to-and-fro in varying states of drunkenness since Miller’s time. But I like to believe that we share the experience of being woken, kept awake, and concerned for the coloration of the white curtains, by these fine examples of Greek septuagenarian life.
Part of me wants to be funnier about the whole thing, but probably I should preserve whatever sense of respect I currently have for it, for now - I leave on the 16th for a 5-day stay in a hotel that was gifted to me in sort of wild but par-for-the-course Covid circumstances, and then I travel on the 9th to Piraeus for a stay on the beach before heading to Paris. Ideally I would not be moving around so much, but also, ideally I would not be in exile, so we must make do with what we are given. I have loads more to say about this apartment - or, rather, the apartment upstairs and Despina’s grandmother (of whom I am completely enamoured) - but I am reaching the end of my fervour for recording facts today, and I have to steel myself to spend about 500 euro I absolutely do not have on some idiotic legal documents. See you soon!