Why I Killed My Best Friend (22 page)

Oh, Dad, if you only knew how badly I want to be out there with them right now, throwing rocks, smashing storefronts! If only I could talk to you about my view of activism, my way of understanding revolutionary initiative. They cram us all into the chicken coop of parlimentarianism, feeding us crumbs, while outside are vast fields, thousands of untouched acres of free thought.
We sit here side by side on the couch, taking turns with the remote control, and yet we're living on different planets. You still belong to Africa, to the oil companies that exploit people who look like Kayo. Meanwhile, I dream up posters, dream of marching against them—against you. I dream of violence, too. Sometimes a little violence is just what's needed. But if I go down into the streets with a stick, I won't be your daughter anymore.

I'm twenty years old. Anna sends me a vibrator for my birthday—she's completely out of control. Kayo sends me a plane ticket to Paris.

“Where will I stay?” I ask over the phone. “Anna's place is a total bachelorette pad these days.”

There's a brief silence. “You'll stay with me,” Kayo says.

With him.

Kayo's apartment is on the outskirts of the Marais. A large, sunny studio with a double bed and a fold-out couch. The first night we sleep together in the bed, in an asphyxiating embrace, fully dressed. In the morning he kisses me gently on the face, all over, everywhere but on the mouth, and in my despair I bite his shoulder, hard. We stay in bed all day, suspended between sleep and waking. Like a couple. Almost. Kayo tells me about his mother. I've heard about her before, of course. He says he'll make me croque monsieur the way she used to, and then a dessert she used to make, too. Why do women do that to their sons? Unconsciously, perhaps, but they still do it: they create a romantic idyll that will take the place of each failed love story in their lives.

Kayo's mother was white, his father was black; they were together only briefly, and weren't married. And yet Kayo was a miniature of the man his mother had loved, with bits of herself grafted on: dark skin, but her light eyes. Large hands, but her delicate fingers.
Robust features, but a girlish melancholy in his gaze. She bathed him every day, dressed him in white shirts that smelled nice, did her best to make sure no one ever spoke badly of her son. If he had been white, would she have scrubbed quite so obsessively? Kayo says yes. His mother was a clean freak, he says. A germaphobe. She was always scrubbing the bathtub and the kitchen floor; she had a remarkable collection of cleaning products, room fresheners, floor polishes. She washed her hands every time she touched money.

“That's romantic,” I say when he gets to that part of the story. “A distrust of money.” Kayo nods his head in satisfaction. He scrubs his mother's memory the same way she used to scrub their house. He remembers her frozen in postures of generosity: shining his shoes; ironing the collars of his shirts; dusting his bedside table. She died young, of a heart attack, in the act of mopping the floor. Kayo found her fallen on all fours, a monument to cleanliness.

Anna calls us in mid-afternoon, while we're eating our croque monsieur. “Maria, did you hear? A Turkish patrol entered Greek territory. They've opened fire on one another up near the Evros. A Greek soldier was killed.”

I spit out the bite of food I just took, hang up and call Christophoros's house. His mother is in hysterics. “They won't tell us anything, they've got them all on alert. Oh, child, the Turks are going to get him!” I can hear his father blustering in the background, “It's all Papandreou's fault. You can cut off my hands if I ever vote for him again!” I sit on the floor and cover my face with my hands because I no longer know who I am, where I belong, who I want.

Anna comes whirling in like a tornado. “But you dumped Christophoros! What use is there in feeling guilty now? There's an entire value system in play here, Maria. You can't feel guilty, you're not responsible for anyone's fate.”

“But what if something's happened to him?”

“Nothing's happened to him. It's just the exaggerations of the mass media. They say all this stuff on purpose, to make us afraid, to control us. Haven't you learned anything at all from Orgapolis?”

Kayo hugs me from behind. My whole body is suddenly on alert, just like the Greek troops. I forget Christophoros, the Turks, Orgapolis. At Kayo's side, I exist in the only space I can properly call political: the space of desire.

I travel back and forth. Athens, Paris. School of Fine Arts, Orgapolis. Christophoros, Kayo. I'm not sleeping with either of them, of course, since one is in the army, the other in a world of his own. Besides, the AIDS epidemic has broken out, and sex is seeming more and more like a germ, an ordeal, a wound. Kayo is earning tons of money from underwear ads and he pays for my plane tickets. He says it makes him feel calm to lie beside me, though there are plenty of nights when he doesn't come home. I'm not only jealous, I'm scared of AIDS, too.

“We'll shrivel up into sexless old ladies if we have to ask every person we sleep with for a résumé first,” Anna says. She's sitting on Kayo's sofa with her shoes on the cushion. That's her idea of making herself at home. If Kayo saw, he'd have a fit.

“You don't think we should go get tested, just to be on the safe side?” I say.

“And if it turns out we're positive, we'll stop having sex, is that what you think?”

She squints at me. She's adopted an ostensibly free-wheeling air. When she looks at me like that, I feel like slapping her. Instead, I just stare at my knees.

“Well, I'm going to,” I say, and the issue ends there.

As soon as I get back to Greece, Antigone takes me to get tested. She's gotten involved with a committee that deals with AIDS and
she knows where to go. “It's such bad luck for you girls,” Antigone sighs as we walk under the harsh lights of a hospital corridor. “It's going to rob you of all your spontaneity.”

Mom thinks that God sent AIDS. She's almost happy about it, because it means she won't have to keep tabs on me herself. She's putting me in trustworthy hands—patriarchal, punishing hands that grip me by the neck as the needle enters my vein to draw its blood. Another Maria, sick and ailing, shuffles down hospital corridors with sunken cheeks, missing teeth, lesions from Kaposi's sarcoma all over her body, pushing a pole with a bag of fluid hanging from it. That other Maria says to me, “You've done nothing with your life, you're useless. You faint at the sight of blood. All day long you cut up pieces of paper and stick them back together again. The only way you'll ever get out of this rut is if you find some idea to fight for, if you start to think about other people's problems.”

The test comes back negative, but I decide it's time for me to get involved on a personal level. I start to design posters about AIDS. A pair of tigers tear one another to shreds inside a pink condom; the end result is too pop for words. I photograph a condom centered on a placemat, fork on one side, knife on the other, with “Bed and Breakfast” as a caption—but it looks too much like an advertisement. Finally I come up with a decent idea: dozens of I.D. photos of couples kissing. We'll go into photo booths in pairs and everyone can kiss everyone else, boys kissing girls, girls kissing girls, boys kissing boys, to fight back against the conservatism that's been spreading as fast as the virus.

On my next trip to Paris, I tell Anna about my idea. She makes a face.

“It sounds like a Benetton ad.”

But when we pull the little curtain closed in the metro station at Saint Michel and the flash goes off, Anna parts her lips and our
tongues touch. She's learned a thing or two since the last time we kissed.

My legs are trembling when Kayo and I shut ourselves in the booth.

“Like it or not, you've got to kiss me for real.”

There are all kinds of tongues, square ones, round ones, wet, dry, warm, cold, lively and lethargic ones—but none as ethereal and inventive as Kayo's. He's on the rotating stool, I'm in his lap, the flash goes off four times and our tongues touch, chase one another, rest, rush at one another again. He starts to pull back and I bite his tongue, hard.

“Why'd you bite me, Maria?”

Because I didn't want you to leave. I want you to know how it feels for your whole body to ache with desire. I worry that art and activism always have an ulterior motive. In this particular case, it's Kayo's kiss.

We print as many copies as our meager funds will allow in a cheap print shop where Orgapolis prints its materials, too. We go out that night and put the posters up in the metro; we take turns standing guard; we're quick and methodical. It makes me sad that I don't have any real friends in Athens so we could put them up there, too.

“We'll come and help,” Kayo says.

They don't, of course. I always go to them, they never come to me. It makes me feel that Athens is small and lacking, as if everything is happening elsewhere. And that reminds me again of how Anna tricked me, left me behind.

“Mom, I decided to move out after all. I found a two-bedroom place on Stournari Street.”

She turns toward me, her hands covered in soap suds.

“Where on Stournari?”

“Just on the other side of the square, Mom. Right around the corner.”

Whenever we talk about it, something always drops from her hands—a knife, a glass. The way she sees things, if a child wants to move out, it means the parents have failed.

“I was thinking we could buy a bigger place, so you could have a little more space, a studio to work in . . .”

“Mom, it's done. I signed a lease.”

She turns her back on me.

“I've already made it clear to you, we can't afford to pay your rent.”

“Don't worry, I found a job.”

“What kind of job?”

“I'm going to wait tables at Brutus.”

That's when she drops the plate. “My daughter, a waitress?”

A waitress with a tough shift. Nine at night to two in the morning, every day, in a closed space full of smoke and loud music. My clothes stink of tomato sauce and garlic, my mouth tastes like an ashtray. I feel sort of like a character from an old movie, with a white apron and a cigarette dangling from my lips, accidentally blowing smoke into my own eyes as I serve plates of pasta. The fatigue I feel on the way home after my shift is incredible—as if I've been out marching all day, at a demonstration whose goal is simply to save myself.

My social conscience has shriveled up again. I should really be thinking more about others. We're supposedly on the verge of war with Turkey again, this time over the Sismik, a Turkish geophysical survey ship exploring the area between Limnos and Mytilini. Antigone has put all her trust in Leonidas Kirkos and his new leftist party. Anna, meanwhile, has entered a new phase. Just as I had anticipated, the fear of AIDS found its way to her, too: she found
out that Basquiat's lover, the one she slept with, was HIV positive. She goes to get tested in a state of hysteria. The results come back negative, but she replaces sex with communist ideals, just to be on the safe side. And we're talking hard-core communism. Near the very end of the spring semester she decides to drop out of art school, because “art isn't interested in the needs of the working class.”

“Come on, Anna, really?” I say over the phone. “There
is
no working class anymore, there are only working conditions.” Anna heaves an angry sigh on the other end of the line. Our mobilizations, she says, should serve the greatest number, and our creativity should be poured into the production of awareness-raising materials that people can take with them—flyers, posters, newspapers—rather than isolated works of art intended to be hung on the wall.

Anna disappears off the face of the earth. Kayo tells me she's spending all her time at factories, with the workers—she calls him at some point to say that union leaders have set up tents for striking workers outside the factory where she's spending most of her time, but they haven't yet taken over the building. How on earth, she says, can you call for strikes and passive resistance all day long and then go quietly home to your nice, warm bed at night? What kind of armchair revolution is that?

Around the same time I wake from my lethargy, too. When the PASOK wiretapping scandal breaks, I start to record conversations with people I know and edit them at a studio in the suburbs. I dream of setting up two megaphones in Syntagma where I could play these conversations between six and seven every morning, when people are on their way to work. At that time of day you're still half-asleep, but the things you hear get recorded in your subconscious. Returning home at the end of the day, shop clerks and civil servants would start to think again about the recordings, and thus about the wiretaps, would wonder just how much the state
apparatus is hiding from them, how much it knows. I'm hoping that Anna might finally be proud of me. I've done the closest thing to political art that a person can do in 1987, in an atmosphere of mass complacency that even these continual political scandals can't seem to disturb.

“That's not political art, it's narcissism. The only truly political art is when you take to the streets, when you stop believing that the problems of an artist are different from those of a blacksmith,” she says over the phone.