A Lonely Life
It started off as a joke. We were visiting some friends, Italians, and complaining about the job situation. Not speaking Greek and struggling to survive on the Greek Island we now called home required a sense of humour. You somehow don’t expect in your late thirties to find yourself, after a degree and Ph.D., and working in industry and University, illiterate and in need of the basics, i.e., food.
Our hosts were sweet and aware of the difficulties of finding employment in the Greek system. Mario suddenly asked me. Would you consider cleaning? For a moment I was shocked at the thought but then found myself saying yes, I’d consider cleaning. He instantly phoned a friend of his and arranged for me to start work the following Monday. It was all done so quickly that even during the weekend it had a sense of unreality. I found myself laughing at the thought. Then Monday came and the joke became reality.
I arrived at the doorstep of a villa with an intercom on the wall beside an ornate door. Ringing the bell a Greek lady answered and ushered me into a beautiful courtyard. She was around my age rather nervous with a cigarette hovering constantly between hand and mouth. She explained my duties and I started. It felt better than I thought it would. After years of teaching students where you are never quite sure if anything has actually been accomplished at the end of your seminar, it was strangely wonderful to stand back and examine a transformed room and know the job was done! It amused me how relaxing mundane work was. No thinking was required. You just put your brain in neutral and pottered on.
The thing that grated was my boss. Greek housewives, in my experience, are enormously house-proud. They expect floors to be gleaming windows glistening etc. That I didn’t mind. What I began to resent was the daily lecture on how I should do things. Don’t use that sponge, use this one. Don’t use bleach, use the nice smelling fabric conditioner which when mixed with a little Ajax was an excellent bathroom cleaner, she informed me. Given the quite strong chemicals cleaning fluids generally contain I was wary of her zeal and stuck to my guns. Her total ignorance of the chemical reactions involved fuelled my resistance.
It was strangely comforting to find the daily disorder in another’s life and seek to put it right. It made me forget my own defects and laziness. Her chaos never actually disappeared. However hard I worked during my three hours two mornings a week, there was seventy-two hours for the mess to re-establish itself. Even in the summer heat the work did not overly tax me. I don’t work fast, that has to be admitted, but I do not stop. Of the few things I find intolerable boredom is top of my list. Fortunately in this maze of a house there was never any excuse to be bored. A miracle began to happen in my own home. Order gradually appeared! After years of failing to be an effective housewife I began to realise there are secrets to every profession. A systematic routine. That’s the secret to a tidy house. You tackle one part of the job, one room or even cupboard, whatever, with zeal each day as well as the general tidying up. By changing the target zone with a systematic eye the house retained its order. And the delight when it was time to do another cupboard and you discovered that it was still ordered and clean from its previous clean- up. The more that occurred the more I realised that success breeds success. Given the benefits to my personal life and the financial gain, why did I stop? It was simple. I couldn’t stand her unhappiness. My employer began to follow me around the house talking to me. Of her mother who embarrassed her by wearing bedroom slippers to Mandrake Harbour(the town centre) and compounded this crime by sitting on a bench eating a loaf of bread like a peasant. The humiliation this provoked in my employer seemed out of proportion to the actual deed. She also complained of a husband who shouted all the time. He was the cause of so many of her problems and what odds if he earned a lot of money. Any fool could do that, she told me. She could do it herself if she wanted and with a lot less fuss. Since all she seemed to do was drink copious cups of coffee, use the phone and spend money, I was curious to know how. But like so many discontents she didn’t know herself why unhappiness oozed from her. I reckon she had learned this skill early as she had mastered many of its forms. It was this I found intolerable. Her whiney unhappiness was like a cloud that obscured the simple joy of a shiny cooker. How could I gloat at the gleaming windows while the owner of those windows sobbed on my shoulder?
I took to singing to myself as I worked to dispel the tangible unhappiness of the house. Like an unseen mist it filled the corridors and the rooms with its sounds and smell. I sang anything, happy silly songs, and sometimes hymns anything that brought lightness to my soul. The singing brought things to a head. She clung to me now like a life raft. Following me from room to room trying to understand how I could be singing. I began to think that perhaps my happiness annoyed her as much as her misery grated on me. But she never complained about it. Just lingered close with her nervous twitching hands and raucous smoker’s cough. My singing is awful. I am tone deaf. It pleases only me, so I had an awful suspicion that my singing was a new torture in her life, like her mother and her husband, and like a true masochist she came moth-like. Despite my attempts to dispel the disorder, the unhappiness grew like persistent weeds.
It was the repetitive inevitableness of it that upset me. Every morning her four year old appeared sleepy eyed down the spiral staircase. She greeted him with “What would you like for breakfast?” To which he invariably replied chicken or steak or chips. At which she would remonstrate with him that he couldn’t have those for breakfast! He would shout and scream and his mother would shout and scream back and then leave the kitchen, banging the door to smoke her tenth cigarette of the morning, stamping up and down the hallway. At which her son would open a packet of chocolate digestive biscuits and eat two. This performance was repeated every morning with only minor variations. Sometimes he would demand fish or kebabs and settle for a bar of chocolate. But one thing never changed and that was the screams and shouts and his mother’s departure from the kitchen. I began to observe that as I continued cleaning in the kitchen the boy would sit contentedly eating chocolate for breakfast. Perhaps he had devised this method of banishing his mother from his presence. I wondered if it was possible for me to discover an equally successful ploy!
I just didn’t seem to have the knack. She took to bringing me coffee and insisted on me sitting down with her for a chat. Unfortunately one weekend I came in to discover she had a huge burn down one side of her face. While she had been making coffee the percolator had sprayed hot coffee over her face burning her badly. Now when she brought me my coffee I could not enjoy it. I felt guilty enjoying something, which she risked life and limb to make. I pretended to have gone off coffee, thinking this a clever move only to discover she continued to join me with her own coffee and cigarette for a chat. I sat without even a cup to distract me from her tales of woe. She was so lonely and so unhappy my heart throbbed with the pain of it. The odd day when she had to go out, how I flew around the house cleaning with gusto and laughing with the freedom of it all. The very air seemed lighter and heady. But these days were rare and eventually the responsibility of her unhappiness grew heavier on my mind. Feeling like the proverbial rat leaving the sinking ship I gave my notice. I took exaggerated care to give excellent reasons for having to go. Not for a moment would I have hurt the feelings of this tortured, lonely soul.
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