Maria Mitsora: Brown Dog in November

Marita Mitsora

Brown Dog in November

Translated by Jacob Moe from the Greek.

I could always tell where the dark side lies, even as a fair little boy in shorts, back when I used to run countless circles around myself. By the time I grew up, the gray and the black had lodged in my mind's right side. There images of the women I have loved jumble in confusion as they struggle to the surface. At one point I had loved them all, as long as they enjoyed me tying them up with the threat of a tormenting caress. Who knows what else they had in mind, perhaps even a violent death. The repetition was my little game that made them fade away.

What is a small room inside a big room? As sad room, like an underground reservoir with barely visible walls moistened by the lost years gone by. That's where I used to live--and from one day to the next, years went by. Numerous dark corridors led to unknown beds and to those naked bodies. They enjoyed it, their entire bodies trembling, writhing at times. I liked it too, though their faces meant nothing to me. I chose them to be indifferent so their sharp breaths wouldn't catch me by surprise, so I could bind their elbows extra tight. Their pores exuded a warmth almost visible in the half-light. My sad little room was set apart from those dim spaces where the telltale smell of bodily pleasure hung, but i always knew I would return to it. And so I extended the ritual, giving all I had to their tight white bellies.

The conditions of submission and a contract of provisional but absolute surrender made me so well behaved and so gentle, my haste to forget them unforgiving. In cafés, at bookshops, at the pharmacy, even in taxicabs, I heard them call my name, "Nino", that slightly girlish nickname I used to introduce myself with. Instantly I knew they belonged to those stale, drunken, early morning hours, back when without much protest I had them all to myself, and though I could have killed them I granted them life. "Nino", I heard them call, sore with myself for not remembering them. I never lay down with a single one more than twice because I knew that afterward they would seem unforgivable. I proceeded like this calmly and sure -footedly until one night, passing by our old house, I was caught once again in Eleni's orbit.

Winter had mounted an assault in the previous 24 hours, chasing the leaves from the trees. The sky had turned white, and it dripped wet snow over buildings still steaming from the endless heat waves of summer. This change in temperature coincided with daylight savings time, this sudden succession of short days and those first frozen nights ruining my good disposition. Eleni was sill a safe distance from my life, but I could feel her streaming toward me, encircling me, transfixing me with the brightness of an obsessive thought. She was closing in on me--a blinding fountain about to suck me up. The image came to me--I too would soon find myself tied up for the first time in the strands of her electric storm.

What is white? The sky is white with dense white clouds. Who, really, is Eleni? The el in her name stands for an ancient ellipsis known to all. That's why I'm scared of her. Yet she is the only one capable of transforming the mechanical repetitions of my little game into holy madness and my little passions into true love, loosening my bonds so she may be redeemed herself.

My nighty jaunts thinned out. More than anything else it was the dogs I met on the street that lingered in my memory, it was them I kept talking to... I saw her/saw her, I kept seeing some of their sweet faces until I cup up my medications overnight, so I could focus all my attention on Eleni's traces.

There are many things I do not recall. When did the dream with the lions start repeating itself, the lions sprawled out all to wall? They were the wardens of my prison. And my sleep among them, my only safety. Could they belong to those nameless naked women who pledged their submission to me with such ease, waiting to devour me the moment I woke up? Around the time this dream surfaced a hushed voice began whispering all the more persistently. Was it Eleni's voice whispering about the dangers of those red manicured nails? It whispered, nearly commanding me to walk in the sun, to avoid the dark side. In the beginning it was entertaining to converse with her in hushed tones as we strolled. I asked her opinion on small matters, as if we were bound by an agreement of sincerity and detachment.

In an effort not to think constantly of her I began digging at those stone walls with the sharp railings of my memory, searching for something irrelevant to her curves, her body, or her voice. I paused momentarily on an image: as a child I had seen a horse struggling among cars, its hooves slipping on the asphalt. That horse was white. Late at night when I would return home, having escaped those red manicured nails, a dog would lie sleeping in the middle of the road, blocking the entrance to my apartment building. That dog was black.

++++++

One evening, heading downtown to find an open newsstand, I realized I wasn't sure about having seen that white horse after all. But I was certain there wasn't a dog in the whole city that didn't dream of shredding Eleni's silk stockings, rubbing its muzzle on the white skin between her thigh and loose panties. The dog turned over, exposing the scant fur on its belly. Eleni, invisible, was strong him and feigning ignorance. Surely she knew the stray dog's life I was bound to lead until she domesticated me once more with her voice. Quietly, the dog kept dreaming of us. I threw a stone at him and he shivered with the fear of a shouted Scram and eternal hunger. Then he recognized me—Eleni and me had adopted him on a walk during our honeymoon, bringing him home with us on the ferry. It was on the evening we had taken that walk to the gorge, the flanks of the gully filled with rhododendrons in bloom that shaded her perfect lips and the sky in the same colour. That night her breasts were the most wondrous thing I had ever kissed. More lovely than the full moon. Just like a game, I wanted to tie her to the railings of the old bronze bed in the rental house. Jokingly, I pretended I wanted to tie her tight so that I could then take my sweet time choking her, making sure she would never escape me. She slipped away and stopped laughing, her body instantly distant. Could she really have been scared of me? She was coughing, trying to catch her breath, glaring at my hands. I set her free and she turned her back to me. Soon, she seemed to have drifted to sleep. Listening to the exhausted breaths, I knew that in her sleep she had already abandoned me, already sweeping endless monastery corridors with an improvised broom of thorns. Outside by the cluster of cypresses, a pack howled at the moon, hungry for her breasts. With her eyes shut, Eleni smiled, and the dogs hushed at once. I calmed down too, as there would be no shadows left between us, no bad memories. When I woke up, Eleni had already left. A bewildering succession of summers have since passed me by, stuffed with pills they told me to take for the anxiety, for the insomnia problems and the tremors in my hands. Equinoxes have slipped away; so have lonely holidays in winter and spring. The divorced was duly filed in winter, around then I think, in the abyss of the late nineties.

Not all nights were the same. In the great cold spells of the November full moon, when everyone was sharing the same inexplicable dream of being sentenced to hard labor in the salt mines of uninhabited planets, I would walk for hours gazing up from one church dome to the next, pacing their courtyards in search of a little earth under my feet. I was trying hard to pledge myself to God, but Eleni kept breaking my train of thought... when she was in a good mood, I inhaled her deeply through both my nose and mouth--then she was my girl-- whenever she felt a crack of faith open for me. Whenever I couldn't sleep I would pace through dark alleys with stout dozing dogs. The ember of my cigarette led the way, and somehow I would always end up in front of the house where Eleni and I used to live. Our old apartment was lit up. From the gossip going around at the corner convenience store, I discovered that the young woman now lived there, the one I kept running into with a child in her arms. She kept avoiding my gaze but her aura was identical to Eleni's Hidden behind the angelica bushes, I waited on the chance that she would come down again, hoping to hear her voice. Black dogs/white dogs/brown dogs were sleeping in front of the building door.

The young woman with the baby in her warms walks on the sunny sidewalk, speaking to it softly. I follow her from the shady side until I see her enter the building. Soon her husband will be returning from work in his gray car. At night, when the apartment lights flick on, hidden again the angelicas, I will speak my mind loud and clear... You think you escaped me now that you've re-married, just because you have a husband and child? You think you can all go on a trip to a rhododendron-filled gorge in that gray car of yours with its roof rack? Stretching out on the sunny side, warming up, lying down and embracing like snakes in the grass? You, smiling--you wear your spit for lipstick so well--smiling: a slit in your coral lips because you don't know that I can shred your world to pieces with my teeth--if your little girl has your looks--if she yells at me, commanding me in your voice, "Don't bark Nino! Don't you dare bark!"