Shopping Malls and Other Sacred Silences
The bus is crowded with kids: from Malona, from Masari, from the other mountain villages. Most of them are leaning over seats, sharing videos on their iPhones, songs on their iPods. They speak Greek, but the songs they share are in English. We plunge northward together, headed to a shopping mall in Faliraki. It’s a new mall, built within the last five years. The kids in the village love it; they spend most of their weekends there, flirting and admiring the clothes from American stores like Gap and Abercrombie.
I am sitting with El Presidente. He needs to buy a new valve for his oxygen tank, which is clogging the aisle. Alan refused to drive us - “Oh no,” he said, “unlike you two, I have things to do. Actual things. Work things. Which neither of you would know anything about. The two of you can cry about your lost women together. I’m not sitting through a bloody sobfest.”
El Presidente’s enormous body pushes me against the window. Outside that window, the island slowly dissembles into shopping centers and surf malls and new villas. Billboards advertise mini-golf and hamburgers and glittering hotels. The further we go, the more the island resembles Florida’s Gulf Coast, or maybe New Jersey’s boardwalks.
He shakes his head in disgust.
“Who likes these things?” he asks. “Do you like these things? Do all Americans like these things? They ruin my island. This island was pure and beautiful and now it is full of trash. Tourists have ruined the great cities of Europe, American. And now they will ruin my home. Everyone’s home.”
He scoffs at the kids and their technology.
“You are killing your parents,” he bellows. “You are killing your parent’s memories. And in the pursuit of what? Garbage. Bullshit!”
The kids who speak English roll their eyes; the others pay El Presidente no mind.
“I am sorry, American. I am embarrassing. My Turk was always embarrassed to ride buses with me. ‘You do not know quietness,’ she told me. ‘You have one volume.’” He smiles ruefully. “I miss bus rides with my Turk. We would ride all over Istanbul together. Me talking loudly, her softly. In that way lovers talk, American. In their own language. Even the women I have been with only once - and there have been many! - had their special language.” He shakes his head. “But that language can vanish. Poof,” he flutters his hand. “With no warning. It is just gone. It is the language of nighttime and bed rooms. Of hearts. It is mysteries to many men. It is what we all search for.”
It’s my turn to smile sadly. Susanna’s favorite poem was Gilbert’s “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart.” She would sometimes recite its lines casually, in passing, while we were walking to my car or were in the shower together, when she was trying to wake me up from a nap:
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say. And the words get it wrong. When the thousands of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated, they seemed to be business records. But what if they are poems or psalms? What we feel most has no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds.
If, like El Presidente says, love is nothing more than language - a private language - then what are its artifacts? What registry do we leave behind? If someone were to come across our detritus, would they mean any more to them than Sumerian?
“I have not spoken that language in many years,” El Presidente says. “My heart is suffering from silence. I would like to find love once more. I lie in bed and dream about that, American. All the fucking in the world is not worth one of those conversations, the kind that comes after the fucking, when you have nothing to hide anymore. People accuse me of treating sex like it is nothing. No! I treat sex like it is the only thing: it is the door to that language. And I want to know every woman’s language. It is the only thing.”
He surveys the bus with disgust.
“These kids will not know that language, I fear. They will not hear it. There is too much other noise. Noise that means nothing.”
He sighs.
“Thank you for coming, American. Shopping malls depress me. I am glad for friendship at shopping malls.”
~
The mall looks like a mall: glass atrium, fountain filled with copper coins; well-manicured palm trees; and shiny faux-marble floors. The roof is a glass half dome. Sun streams in. Somehow, in here, the Mediterranean light is diminished, made mortal.
Music spills from the stores, mostly American, generic songs I recognize but cannot name. There’s a US Polo Association store, and a Vodafone. Two separate Starbucks are situated at each end; the mall’s footprint, I can’t help but notice, is similar to a church. There’s a Burger King and a Tommy Hilfiger, a Gucci and a Ralph Lauren. A few Greek boutiques sell tourist trinkets.
While El Presidente trundles off to find his the valve for his tank, I sit down at Starbucks and try to focus on Gilbert, whose book I‘ve brought along. But my mind keeps wandering off, caught on the currents of memory.
What language, I wonder, is in my heart right now?
My father is right. It’s time I start making decisions. In five weeks, I have to leave. And where will I go? If I go home, then that’s it - I’m accepting that this other way was too difficult. And there are things - my family, the weight of our past, our responsibility to one another - pulling me back to Philadelphia. I think about what my best friend, Dylan, told me before I left. I could get an apartment downtown. I could spend my weekends with Jackson and Luke. With time, I’m sure I could find a new woman. But would I be able to truly hear their languages beneath all that other noise - the career, the distractions, the pressures of modern life? Would I be able to separate it from all that?
Whenever I feel like I’m ready to head home, I think about this noise. I think about the silence of nighttime in Malona. In those first weeks, this silence terrified me. All I could see in it was emptiness. All I could fill it with was memories of Susanna. And the other week, when I found out about her and Joe, I found myself dreading this silence.
But a funny thing happened: I now find this silence calming. Running through the hills, or riding my bike, I feel like, for the first time, I am beginning to use the silence. I am using it to see clearly, to hear the language of my heart. The longer I’m here, the clearer that language becomes. And it feels like I’m just at the beginning of a story, and that there’s much more to tell. If I were to go home, this clarity would be lost, undoubtedly.
I’m not saying I can handle this loneliness forever. I still haven’t been able to write. There are still moments of terror, where I’m out in the dark and some memory of home - Susanna, or my brother - grips my heart and I feel like rushing back to the house, logging onto my computer, and filling that silence with the white noise of comfort. But I’m learning to resist that urge. I’m learning to confront those memories, painful as they may be. I’m learning that, perhaps, if you look at pain long enough, it’s possible to see the beauty inside of it. I’m not sure I’m ready to give this clarity up.
But then, I think: my brother, my nephew. The weight of that past is something I’m not yet ready to confront. That might be beyond even this clarity.
Whether I’m ready to or not, I’m going to have to make a choice - and soon. I will have to choose to go home, or I will have to choose to plunge deeper into silence, into the void. For now, I am still just passing through. I will have to choose to be more than that, one way or another. But right now, clear as my heart might be, I still have no idea what the right choice is.
~
One more thought on language, as I watch El Presidente slowly approach, his eyes drifting after the legs of every girl that walks past him:
The stories we tell are a kind of disappearing, like travel or sex or addiction. They remove the context of our past - the language that frames your narrative - and place it somewhere new. When I talk about Susanna, it’s no longer a private pain; it’s a narrative I shape and bend. The form becomes as important as the content; by turning her into a story, I make her unreal. It’s another act of disappearance.
Is it possible that, by wandering like this, by passing through, all I’m doing is avoiding the roots that inevitably sprout in a place? The roots of family and love? What is seeing clearly - what is hearing the language of another heart, like Sabina’s - if that language has no context in the larger thread of my past? If I cannot share it with those who know me best? Maybe this is what my father is trying to tell me: you can see clearly, but it’s not worth a damn if there’s no one to see with.
I don’t know. I really don’t.
“American, if I were you, I would be fucking every girl in this place,” El Presidente says, picking up the Gilbert. “And you sit here with a book. A book! When there’s delicious pussy literally surrounding you.” He shakes his head in admonishment. “It is no good to be alone with your own heart too much. You can go crazy talking with only your own heart. Just look at me! It is difficult to know the balance. Even I do not yet know it.”
He hands me back the book. He lifts his head and listens to the music blaring all around us, the cacophony of commerce.
“Do you feel at home with all this noise, American?”
“A little,” I say, honestly.
“That is scary. To feel at home with bullshit.”
I laugh.
“Come on,” he says. “Let us go. All the beautiful women in the world could not make this place less bullshit.”
~
The bus back to Malona is equally packed - music, laughter, the voices of kids flirting. The windows are heavy with condensation. In the steam, girls use their fingers to write their names and the names of boyfriends or crushes. El Presidente has fallen asleep against another window, his face imprinted against it. I stand, jostling against strangers, letting the white noise embrace me. A baby’s cries pierce the din. He’s my nephew’s age. His dark hair is matted sweatily to his forehead. His mother keeps rubbing his brow with cold water, but his face is flushed, tormented. He won’t stop crying.
The bus stops at the side of the road, in the middle of nowhere. A gypsy gets on, holding a plastic bag of oranges in one hand and a wicker basket of wildflowers in the other. It takes a moment, but I realize it’s the same gypsy who visited me on my second night in Malona, the one bearing oranges. Her face is little more than bone, her eyes like two smoldering coals. Her jewelry seems too heavy, and it has worn the skin of her chest raw. The baby cries and cries. The gypsy shuffles her way down the aisle. She sets down the basket of flowers, the bag of fruit. She bends, delicately, and strokes the child’s cheek with her gnarled fingers. She begins cooing to it in a language that is neither English nor Greek, is maybe known only to gypsy and child. Its cries soften to whimpers, and then it smiles, reaches out with fingers like primordial amoebas, runs them across the crevasses of her face. She keeps whispering, the two of them ensconced in their private tongue. This world is full of our dead languages. We carry them in our silences; we bear them within us like archaeologists, leaving words here and there like artifacts of a lost civilization.
The gypsy finds my eyes. Her fingers stroke the child’s brow. Together, they whisper, speaking their own tongue, lost in their own world.
I am sitting with El Presidente. He needs to buy a new valve for his oxygen tank, which is clogging the aisle. Alan refused to drive us - “Oh no,” he said, “unlike you two, I have things to do. Actual things. Work things. Which neither of you would know anything about. The two of you can cry about your lost women together. I’m not sitting through a bloody sobfest.”
El Presidente’s enormous body pushes me against the window. Outside that window, the island slowly dissembles into shopping centers and surf malls and new villas. Billboards advertise mini-golf and hamburgers and glittering hotels. The further we go, the more the island resembles Florida’s Gulf Coast, or maybe New Jersey’s boardwalks.
He shakes his head in disgust.
“Who likes these things?” he asks. “Do you like these things? Do all Americans like these things? They ruin my island. This island was pure and beautiful and now it is full of trash. Tourists have ruined the great cities of Europe, American. And now they will ruin my home. Everyone’s home.”
He scoffs at the kids and their technology.
“You are killing your parents,” he bellows. “You are killing your parent’s memories. And in the pursuit of what? Garbage. Bullshit!”
The kids who speak English roll their eyes; the others pay El Presidente no mind.
“I am sorry, American. I am embarrassing. My Turk was always embarrassed to ride buses with me. ‘You do not know quietness,’ she told me. ‘You have one volume.’” He smiles ruefully. “I miss bus rides with my Turk. We would ride all over Istanbul together. Me talking loudly, her softly. In that way lovers talk, American. In their own language. Even the women I have been with only once - and there have been many! - had their special language.” He shakes his head. “But that language can vanish. Poof,” he flutters his hand. “With no warning. It is just gone. It is the language of nighttime and bed rooms. Of hearts. It is mysteries to many men. It is what we all search for.”
It’s my turn to smile sadly. Susanna’s favorite poem was Gilbert’s “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart.” She would sometimes recite its lines casually, in passing, while we were walking to my car or were in the shower together, when she was trying to wake me up from a nap:
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say. And the words get it wrong. When the thousands of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated, they seemed to be business records. But what if they are poems or psalms? What we feel most has no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds.
If, like El Presidente says, love is nothing more than language - a private language - then what are its artifacts? What registry do we leave behind? If someone were to come across our detritus, would they mean any more to them than Sumerian?
“I have not spoken that language in many years,” El Presidente says. “My heart is suffering from silence. I would like to find love once more. I lie in bed and dream about that, American. All the fucking in the world is not worth one of those conversations, the kind that comes after the fucking, when you have nothing to hide anymore. People accuse me of treating sex like it is nothing. No! I treat sex like it is the only thing: it is the door to that language. And I want to know every woman’s language. It is the only thing.”
He surveys the bus with disgust.
“These kids will not know that language, I fear. They will not hear it. There is too much other noise. Noise that means nothing.”
He sighs.
“Thank you for coming, American. Shopping malls depress me. I am glad for friendship at shopping malls.”
~
The mall looks like a mall: glass atrium, fountain filled with copper coins; well-manicured palm trees; and shiny faux-marble floors. The roof is a glass half dome. Sun streams in. Somehow, in here, the Mediterranean light is diminished, made mortal.
Music spills from the stores, mostly American, generic songs I recognize but cannot name. There’s a US Polo Association store, and a Vodafone. Two separate Starbucks are situated at each end; the mall’s footprint, I can’t help but notice, is similar to a church. There’s a Burger King and a Tommy Hilfiger, a Gucci and a Ralph Lauren. A few Greek boutiques sell tourist trinkets.
While El Presidente trundles off to find his the valve for his tank, I sit down at Starbucks and try to focus on Gilbert, whose book I‘ve brought along. But my mind keeps wandering off, caught on the currents of memory.
What language, I wonder, is in my heart right now?
My father is right. It’s time I start making decisions. In five weeks, I have to leave. And where will I go? If I go home, then that’s it - I’m accepting that this other way was too difficult. And there are things - my family, the weight of our past, our responsibility to one another - pulling me back to Philadelphia. I think about what my best friend, Dylan, told me before I left. I could get an apartment downtown. I could spend my weekends with Jackson and Luke. With time, I’m sure I could find a new woman. But would I be able to truly hear their languages beneath all that other noise - the career, the distractions, the pressures of modern life? Would I be able to separate it from all that?
Whenever I feel like I’m ready to head home, I think about this noise. I think about the silence of nighttime in Malona. In those first weeks, this silence terrified me. All I could see in it was emptiness. All I could fill it with was memories of Susanna. And the other week, when I found out about her and Joe, I found myself dreading this silence.
But a funny thing happened: I now find this silence calming. Running through the hills, or riding my bike, I feel like, for the first time, I am beginning to use the silence. I am using it to see clearly, to hear the language of my heart. The longer I’m here, the clearer that language becomes. And it feels like I’m just at the beginning of a story, and that there’s much more to tell. If I were to go home, this clarity would be lost, undoubtedly.
I’m not saying I can handle this loneliness forever. I still haven’t been able to write. There are still moments of terror, where I’m out in the dark and some memory of home - Susanna, or my brother - grips my heart and I feel like rushing back to the house, logging onto my computer, and filling that silence with the white noise of comfort. But I’m learning to resist that urge. I’m learning to confront those memories, painful as they may be. I’m learning that, perhaps, if you look at pain long enough, it’s possible to see the beauty inside of it. I’m not sure I’m ready to give this clarity up.
But then, I think: my brother, my nephew. The weight of that past is something I’m not yet ready to confront. That might be beyond even this clarity.
Whether I’m ready to or not, I’m going to have to make a choice - and soon. I will have to choose to go home, or I will have to choose to plunge deeper into silence, into the void. For now, I am still just passing through. I will have to choose to be more than that, one way or another. But right now, clear as my heart might be, I still have no idea what the right choice is.
~
One more thought on language, as I watch El Presidente slowly approach, his eyes drifting after the legs of every girl that walks past him:
The stories we tell are a kind of disappearing, like travel or sex or addiction. They remove the context of our past - the language that frames your narrative - and place it somewhere new. When I talk about Susanna, it’s no longer a private pain; it’s a narrative I shape and bend. The form becomes as important as the content; by turning her into a story, I make her unreal. It’s another act of disappearance.
Is it possible that, by wandering like this, by passing through, all I’m doing is avoiding the roots that inevitably sprout in a place? The roots of family and love? What is seeing clearly - what is hearing the language of another heart, like Sabina’s - if that language has no context in the larger thread of my past? If I cannot share it with those who know me best? Maybe this is what my father is trying to tell me: you can see clearly, but it’s not worth a damn if there’s no one to see with.
I don’t know. I really don’t.
“American, if I were you, I would be fucking every girl in this place,” El Presidente says, picking up the Gilbert. “And you sit here with a book. A book! When there’s delicious pussy literally surrounding you.” He shakes his head in admonishment. “It is no good to be alone with your own heart too much. You can go crazy talking with only your own heart. Just look at me! It is difficult to know the balance. Even I do not yet know it.”
He hands me back the book. He lifts his head and listens to the music blaring all around us, the cacophony of commerce.
“Do you feel at home with all this noise, American?”
“A little,” I say, honestly.
“That is scary. To feel at home with bullshit.”
I laugh.
“Come on,” he says. “Let us go. All the beautiful women in the world could not make this place less bullshit.”
~
The bus back to Malona is equally packed - music, laughter, the voices of kids flirting. The windows are heavy with condensation. In the steam, girls use their fingers to write their names and the names of boyfriends or crushes. El Presidente has fallen asleep against another window, his face imprinted against it. I stand, jostling against strangers, letting the white noise embrace me. A baby’s cries pierce the din. He’s my nephew’s age. His dark hair is matted sweatily to his forehead. His mother keeps rubbing his brow with cold water, but his face is flushed, tormented. He won’t stop crying.
The bus stops at the side of the road, in the middle of nowhere. A gypsy gets on, holding a plastic bag of oranges in one hand and a wicker basket of wildflowers in the other. It takes a moment, but I realize it’s the same gypsy who visited me on my second night in Malona, the one bearing oranges. Her face is little more than bone, her eyes like two smoldering coals. Her jewelry seems too heavy, and it has worn the skin of her chest raw. The baby cries and cries. The gypsy shuffles her way down the aisle. She sets down the basket of flowers, the bag of fruit. She bends, delicately, and strokes the child’s cheek with her gnarled fingers. She begins cooing to it in a language that is neither English nor Greek, is maybe known only to gypsy and child. Its cries soften to whimpers, and then it smiles, reaches out with fingers like primordial amoebas, runs them across the crevasses of her face. She keeps whispering, the two of them ensconced in their private tongue. This world is full of our dead languages. We carry them in our silences; we bear them within us like archaeologists, leaving words here and there like artifacts of a lost civilization.
The gypsy finds my eyes. Her fingers stroke the child’s brow. Together, they whisper, speaking their own tongue, lost in their own world.
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