Eleni Xenou
It’s around ten in the morning and there’s not a trace of shade anywhere. The sun is scalding, striking the concrete hard and bouncing back with even greater fury. I regret not bringing my straw hat. I always forget it, perhaps as a subconscious rebellion against the abrupt shifts in temperature. The remaining stretch of Konstantinou Palaiologou is now closed off too; people exhale loudly, trapped in the gridlock with no way out. It’s as if someone is doing it on purpose, deliberately weighing down daily life, disfiguring it day by day, brazenly toying with the limits of human endurance.
I turn onto Rigenis Street. I’m not heading anywhere in particular; just walking, observing, like a tourist. My intent is to see the same things differently, to catch a detail I might have missed, or maybe notice something new that’s been added. Either way, what I’m really after is to sharpen my powers of observation, to make them resilient to high temperatures and, more crucially, to the arid circumstances that lie ahead.
I pass the Asian grocery shops already open, perfuming the street with the scent of fish and hot spices. I pause outside a watch shop wedged between them, stubbornly resisting the times. I’ve seen it before, but never really examined it the way it deserves. And though its shutters are down now, the hundreds of watches crammed into the display, piled atop one another, in all shapes and colors, men’s and women’s, wrist and pocket, “call out” for my attention. And by that I mean they demand I notice their persistence in remaining unwound, wholly out of sync with the tempo of the modern world. I look at them for only a few minutes and then move away, uneasy. Something about those frozen hands has unsettled me, something I’m not yet ready to confront so early in the day. So I opt instead to climb the steps to Solomou Square, and from there descend again to the plaza for an iced coffee under a tree.
At the café, there are only a few people: two sweaty, middle-aged tourists with flushed cheeks, sipping cold juices and peering at digital maps; a young Italian woman seated in the back, speaking on the phone to her boyfriend, half-naked on the screen; and another young couple that seems to have just met, scattering droplets of flirtation across the large windows, behind which the old town looms, breathless.
I order a cold cappuccino and wonder whether I should stay inside to drink it or seek shade beneath a tree outside. But a quick scan tells me that even the trees are failing to break the sun’s grip. I stay put in the café’s artificial coolness, watching the passersby moving through this summer morning like dazed beings flung into a present too hollow to generate narrative. I wonder what each of them sees around them, and that question draws me closer to the realization that reality is permeable, susceptible to whoever happens to be perceiving it. I swat the thought away like an irritating insect. I’m not in the mood to get lost in introspection. I only want to observe, to hear, and to see from that place the poet describes, “with the soul in the fingertips, in the eyes, the nostrils, the lips,” and whatever comes, let it come.
The middle-aged tourists buy two small bottles of water and head toward the bus station. The young Italian has long since left, backpack slung over her shoulder, while the flirting couple remain sunk into their armchairs and insinuations. I finish my coffee and leave one last ice cube in my mouth, a small comfort at the thought that once I open the door, I’ll return to the cement heat. I quickly put on my sunglasses and just before I head toward the steps, a group of pigeons bathing in the fountain catches and holds my gaze.
The sight, the way they wet their feathers, dip their little heads and shake them out, circle above the water only to return to it again, is so harmonious it feels like a correction to everything off-kilter. I stand still, watching from a distance so I won’t scare them off, and at the same time I sense that these graceful arcs are having a calming effect on me, perhaps because they restore me to that unwound version of reality, the one with different rhythms, much like the watches in the shop window.
*This literary piece was translated from its Greek original.
