Musical Chairs

Why pay for a newspaper when epiphanies are free?

A cappuccino each was in front of Marlena and myself as we played chess on a tiny-checked tablecloth in a tiny-table cafe in a tiny outdoors plaza under a waxing gibbous moon. Zephyrs of evening were ending the heat of the day, just as zephyrs of familiarity were ending the awkwardness of that dinner with Maria and Tassos. As different as we were in most every other regard, in chess we had found a common ground. She always won the game. I always won the memories.

It was hard to concentrate during this match in the little cafe. Two men behind us were clattering through a hot backgammon match with furious hurls of dice. A tot of a girl two tables away burbled the cafe-thing-names she was learning on Mommy’s lap. A guitar and two Cretan lauto trioed in front of us, fingers like nightingales. The slithery sounds of a shaken tambourine. Teaspoons on a tin can. A quivering Greek love song in a voice like a sobbing mouse. The music was like porcelain and everything seemed in miniature. The balcony above was decorated with painted gourds like Christmas ornaments on an outdoor vine. Cruettes of vinegar and oil awaited the first salad. Indigo glass ashtrays. Fresh-picked flowers. Table lamps with amber-coloured oil. Potted ficus and oleander between the tables. Square stone pavings. A string of lights on a wrought-iron balcony.

The two young musicians’ voices and cheer-laden mandolin echoed off the chasmy clapboard walls of the old Turkish houses three floors high. Climbing vines and wooden doors. Stone quoins on the corners. Thick-walled windows with flower pots on the lintels. Gloomy dark interiors beyond shutterless windows.

A precious little girl twirled a flower under her nose as she listened to the singers. 'The musicians may look young,' Marlena observed. 'But in their music is the mature youth of men, past the wild-seed fantasies of death and the maiden.' 'I remember my own discovery that I had ventured out onto the long plateau of adulthood,' I replied. 'After youth’s monster had danced, the demon in me died.'

She looked at me, then at the chessboard, then back to me. 'Your move,' she said.

The musicians had strong vigorous beards and strong vigorous hands, legs crossed at the ankles. They gestured with their fingers the same way they sang with their eyes. Songs of lissajous sliding harmonies and scales, halts and slithers and major chords dwindling to minors. A voice from one of them sounded like the dying gasp of a sheet-metal shop, yet sang lustily of life despite its woes.

'So young,' Marlena said, 'yet already singing about their future.' 'If they do their investments as well as they are doing their music, the economy of Crete will be in good hands.'

She frowned at that. Better stick to philosophy, I thought.

‘Douglas, in the time I have known you, you have never used a curse word or said something bad about anyone. That is unusual in a man.’

‘I don’t look for what is wrong in things, I look for what is right.’

She said nothing, but for once her eyes lingered on me instead of brushing me off.

So intent were the musicians on the posh plucks that gave the laouto their mournful air that they were startled at the end of a song when I softly applauded and Marlena in her garments of teal upon blue rose to present to them from the vase on our table a single yellow rose.