Excerpt
than a meter in diameter around it.
Their mother walks to one of the corners of the room, takes a
few pieces of wood, and adds them to the bucket. Slowly flames rise
and light up the house a little more than before as their mother gets
busy finding food for her husband, a few black olives, a small piece
of bread, a glass of water from the water pitcher, and he sits with them
around the fire and eats, making strange sounds as he chews his food,
as strange as the music of the wind outside their house, a strange
music that sounds sweet in their ears, for it is the sound of their father,
a sound they haven’t heard for years, the perilous years of the
civil war in Greece.
This is Eteocles’ first memory of recognizing his father. He is old
enough to grasp the concept of what a father is and that this man
who had come in from the cold is that, though only later will he understand
that their father has returned from three years of service in
a civil war that has devastated their motherland. Years when brothers
killed brothers and fathers killed sons only because they were of a
different political affiliation, years of endless pain and suffering that
most Greek families lived through. And only later would be understand
how this war had been infiltrated, guided, and supported by
external influences from countries that thrived on discontent and
flourished through war and destruction. Still, Eteocles learns all these
lessons early enough in his life to carry the scars for ever.
That same year Eteocles gets his first shoes. His father brings him
to the village shoemaker, old Papaderos, who measures his feet and
two days later comes to their house with the boy’s first shoes under
his arm. It is a joy but also the first pain of conformity, as his feet,
which have never been enclosed in shoes, learn what it means to be
bordered, enclosed, protected, conformed. The shoes feel very tight.
The shoemaker says they will stretch, his dad says okay, his brother
is jealous, and his mom smiles at the sight of her younger son’s feet
in the red shoes with the thick leather soles, the nails under them,
and one flat metal part at the toe and heel of each shoe. They hurt
him a lot at first, something he never forgets over the years, but his
feet get used to the shoes after the blisters heal and eventually he feels
no more resentment than the village donkeys and horses …
Libros Libertad 