Melina Breaking Free. Dimitra Mantheakis

      CHAPTER 4

      Anesti’s and Mary’s wedding took place with as much glamour as the pharmacist’s family budget would allow. The wedding dress was a masterwork, white and plain in design, projecting the bride’s fine body and emphasizing the sweet charm of her face. Looking at the groom standing next to her in church, Mary banished the shadow that lodged itself deep in her eyes. How much she wanted to be madly in love with the man who was becoming her husband, how much she wished that his charming appearance would electrify her and make every cell in her heart and body long for him! Yet, however, there was nothing in her, beyond respect, a surfeit of liking for him, and the carnal wait. She had been unable to tie her heart to his with a bond of love in all the time that they had been secretly engaged…

      The girls who had shared passionate sexual siesta hours with the architect were also invited to the wedding with their families. Each of them, separately and secretly, was seething with anger and envy, because sexual passion, their imaginative games in bed and their limitless submission to every desire of Anesti, whether conventional or beyond socially acceptable limits, had been unable to tie him down. Their mothers were equally annoyed, considering that the groom had slipped through their fingers, taken from them by Mary the Bland, who, moreover, was penniless; but none of them betrayed the true feelings well-hidden behind the hypocritical smiles of joy that they put on for the bride’s happiest hour.

      After the bridal couple’s dance they went back to a table which was exclusively for Mary’s childhood friends. Paulina, Sofia, Dina, Urania, Iakovos and Sarantos once more voiced, with much gesturing of hands, their plans for the future to their school friends. Dina told them that she would pursue her dream to be on the stage now that she had graduated from high school. Paulina would become a dress designer, a field in which she had displayed talent, filling many albums with her sketches. Their problem was that in Athens things were still in a primitive phase regarding their chosen professions and would limit their career potential. They wanted to spread their wings to other places. Their burning aspiration was directed at New York which appeared magical in their minds. The problem was how to find a way to pay for the expensive tuition at the schools there. They would also have to overcome the objections of their parents, but that, for the moment, didn’t much bother them. They would overcome hurdles in their own way, come hell or high water! Sarantos told them to contact immigrant Greek organizations to apply for scholarships. Perhaps luck would be on their side and they could find the much-needed economic help they were looking for.

      “Isn’t Spiros Andreadis, the photographer’s son, studying to be an engineer with funds provided by the Church and by Greek emigrants? His father didn’t have a bean to send him to America,” said Sarantos, inflating the girls’ hopes. Urania had no professional ambitions to present to the others. She wanted to get married and to occupy herself with her husband and children as soon as possible. Sofia on the other hand told them that she wanted to work as a municipal employee at the town hall and her father had already had a discussion with the local Member of Parliament they always voted for, and he had promised he would assist in getting her hired. She was a pampered only daughter and didn’t want to distance herself from her family’s embrace for any reason...

      Iakovos didn’t have room for dreams beyond the narrow limits of the small family shop at this given moment. He had an unmarried sister and his mother to look after as he was the only male at home now that his father had become a mere visitor, coming and going to prison and from exile to exile. The only person who had nothing to say was Melina. Looking at the pretty dresses of the other girls her heart tightened. The dress she was wearing had been lent to her by Mary, as had been her shoes, otherwise she wouldn’t have been able to attend the wedding. She forced herself to swallow her pride not to hurt Mary on her wedding day. What plans could she make for tomorrow, to establish herself in a career and have better prospects? Jobs in the provinces were difficult to land and were only available to those with an ‘in’. She had nothing, except for poverty, privation and daily humiliation. Being a top student at school didn’t seem to offer her better prospects. She indeed had a will, but she did not have a way. It looked as if the rest of her life would be like this. She would be lost as a salesgirl in some shop, or as an assistant in a restaurant kitchen somewhere, if indeed she were lucky and managed to get even this, and never able to break free from a life of drudgery and her destiny. Tears welled up in her eyes and she stood up to move away not to be noticed by her school-mates and for them to start asking questions. This was not the time for compassion or for her to spoil her friend’s milestone day with her melancholy. No one noticed her leave the venue where the wedding was being held as she made her way towards the beach. She took off her shoes not to spoil them with the wet sand, borrowed as they were and having to be returned. When Mary said she could keep them and the dress as well, she had refused. She did not want charity. All she had wanted was to be helped out temporarily...

      She walked along the beach crying, unaware of the natural beauty of her surroundings. She had been overcome by the ugliness of her own life. At least she could be alone for a little while before going back to her stifling hovel to face the usual questioning by her parents who would bombard her with pressing questions if they saw her clouded mood, something that today fortunately would not happen as her younger siblings were home alone with their sick grandmother. Her eye had caught her mother secretly folding sweets in paper napkins and putting them in her worn handbag to take home to the younger children. Even this act made her feel shame and pain. She felt sorry for her family and self-pity at being an integral part of this humiliating situation; a state of affairs that had not changed in years, no matter what effort or physical exertion she had expended for them at what was a permanent grindstone for her. What was worse was that any hope that a better future would one day dawn, had died in her. And this was killing her; slowly, slowly, but steadily…

      She spread out her scarf and sat on a flat section of a rock that had not been wet by the waves. How much she longed to ride a wave that would take her far away to a world that was different from her daily routine, where there would be rays of light for her too; a chance to change the void she almost always felt inside her as a result of the pessimistic thoughts that wandered about inside her head not allowing the birth of even a fleeting smile of optimism to reach her lips! She leaned her head forward inside her folded arms, resting it on her raised knees, and cried, and cried, seeking release through the outburst brought on by the fathomless sorrow in her soul…

      She almost didn’t notice Sarantos’ hands as they gently touched her shoulders. The youth had discreetly followed her having noticed from her dulled eyes that his Melina was not well. And when Melina was not well, Sarantos felt even worse. Such was the pain and love he felt for his ever-beloved…

      Melina turned and looked at him with eyes that were full of stars from the reflection of light in her tears. Without a word he opened his arms and she huddled into his embrace. Sarantos began drying her wet cheeks with gentle kisses. Then, he started cautiously at first kissing the lips he had dreamed of kissing from the time they were children, and then progressed with passion as years of pent-up desire overtook him. Melina did not react. She clung to him, like a leach, as if to a savior. Tonight she wanted to belong to someone, even temporarily; she wanted to be special to someone outside her family. No one, except Sarantos, had ever been by her side, not a single youth among the many in the village had ever tried to approach her, to flirt with her, or even to look at her with interest and persistence, to show that he had noticed her. Lost in the maze of her complexes Melina had never realized how stunning, and at the same time wild, was her beauty, but at the same time so off-putting with the hardness of her eyes, her mask of indifference and the coldness of her face that made all those who admired her unable to cast a second, more direct glance for fear of provoking her, untamed as she was, to attack them verbally and to make fools out of them…

      Without her realizing it the girl had raised, on her own, a barrier between herself and her secret admirers, believing that poor and humble as she was she was unworthy of attention and not worth approaching. What idiot would want to accompany someone who was the very embodiment of wretchedness, to enter her house that was in a state of disrepair and to become witness to her family’s struggle to survive for yet one more day? These were Melina’s thoughts, her self-respect in tatters,