Excerpt
“All good. I got a few shares for you today, and I hear this one
could be something serious, and not too long from now. Are we still
good for tomorrow?”
“That’s great, thank you. Yes, tomorrow, do you want to come by
the house?
“Yes, I’ll see you there early afternoon.”
“Good.”
Eteo put away the phone while his eyes focused on a kid no older
than ten years and his father, who looked Vietnamese, trying to
throw a crab net over the deck into the water. With the boy holding
the rope, his father tied a piece of chicken to the bottom of the trap
with a string, then tossed the net as far as he could. Eteo heard the
splash of the apparatus hitting the surface before sinking slowly to
the bottom. The boy was happy, but his father looked even happier
because he had managed to toss the net farther than ever before.
There were lots of other people on the dock this afternoon, some
chatting, others silently observing the beauty of the flashing water
and the small swells rising and falling against the piles under them.
Eteo started his walk back toward his car with his mind running back
to his childhood years again. It was strange how often on his daily
walk he thought about his early life in the village, as if this solitary
walk was his allotted time to reconnect with his roots, to rediscover
the young child who had become the adult he now was here in this
far-off part of the globe thousands of kilometers away from that starting
point in a village of no more than two hundred inhabitants, all
of them small farmers looking after their olive groves and grape vines
and summer vegetable fields. Their way to survive, to make ends
meet, to raise their children, to school them, even to send some of
them to high school or the rare exceptions, like Eteo, to university.
In fact, Eteo was the only one of twenty or more cousins who had
graduated from university. He owed that to his father, who while his
children Eteocles and Nicolas were still in elementary school vowed
to take the family to the city in the hope of educating them properly,
and indeed Eteocles had been educated to the highest level one could
attain in the Greece of the sixties and seventies.
Libros Libertad 