excerpt
Eteocles ends up in the back of a pickup with seven more
men who pass the time on the road singing traditional wedding
songs and drinking moonshine.
In the village the ceremony lasts less than an hour, but the singing
and dancing and eating go on for two full days. Eteocles flirts with a
fourteen year old village girl and dances a tango with her, and he is
proud when the girl gives him her own small water pitcher as a gift
to take home to Athens in September. Eteocles gets the girl’s mailing
address, and they promise to write to each other.
At the end of the party, at dawn on the third day, after everyone
has finally had enough drinking and dancing and singing, the family
of the bride and their relatives and friends take their leave and head
back home. The roosters are still calling to welcome the new dawn
in one of the villages they drive by when the driver of the pickup loses
control at a sharp bend in the road and plunges into an olive grove.
The passengers in the back are tossed out and land all over the
ground, variously injured, including Eteocles, who lands in a cane
field and gets two small but deep cuts on his legs, which bleed profusely.
He even loses consciousness for a moment, and when he
comes to his senses he sees the face of his buddy George leaning over
him. He has been shaking his pal to bring him to his senses. Meanwhile
one of Eteocles’ cousins has landed on his face against an olive
tree and is black with bruising. Eteocles’ uncle Dimitri, who was handling
the moonshine bottle, loses control of it, and as its contents
spill over his head, it feels like blood, and he cries out, “I’m hit, I’m
bleeding, I’m bleeding” as all the others laugh.
For Eteocles the worst part is finding that his precious gift, the
water pitcher, has been smashed. His glasses are broken too, but these
can be replaced, and nothing else is broken, as x-rays confirm when
his uncle takes him to the doctors.
Eteocles and his buddy George aren’t well enough to go to the
sea for a few days, and so they miss the date they had arranged with
the two tourist girls. The only consolation is that, when Eteocles finally
goes back to the beach and can only sit at the shore, since he
isn’t allowed to swim until his wounds heal, George’s sister Antonia,
who likes Eteocles a lot, comes and shares figs with him as he sits…
Libros Libertad 