context: The text mediates on the slow disappearance of my grandfather— on the erosion of memory, the quiet architecture of death, and the way the living learn to look at absence.

The photographs come from a car journey through Attica with Pappous, my friend Athanasios’s grandfather, where the freedom of the road and the absence of a common language led us to a purest form of attentive presence.

a bow.

My grandfather’s eyes took on that look—both hazy and deeply serious—seen in those whose delayed consciousness considers the sills of death; those who see without being able to look. The surface of his once-brown pupils, now moist, grew paler as he spoke without making sense. The words spilled out in confusion like beads of sweat from his drooling mouth, rolling down his neckline, along his chest, staining that pearly body marked by illnesses bruises, leaping across scabs and scattered hairs. The states of his affections, tender as they may have been, were crushed beneath suffering. Little by little, the flowers of his life withered. One after another, he cast them away. They passed through his rough skin as they detached from him, stripping him of his memories, his joys, the knowledge he had once built. His skin oozed the kind of sickness that urges eyes to close. To close from pain, from emotion, to close forever. This man—so inscrutable, who had closed so many books—was preparing to close himself.

Some doors seal themselves in the marble of a tomb yet to come. My grandfather had already imagined his tomb, imagined the porous Chazelles stone flecked with shells, its place near the entrance of the cemetery. He had purchased a burial plot the year before.

One day, I passed by it in my car. With the engine pinned down by the cold, I had to stop and step out into the winter. I walked through that clay-coloured light licking the mist of the hills, through that marble dust embedded in the hollows of tree trunks. I followed the short fence. There was a pallor of absence in the brown shades of the wet earth. Frozen shapes clung to the roofs of the cars. I looked through the window of one of them, to glimpse my grandfather sitting in his car; transparent and young, wrapped in a checkered scarf, his cap flattened against his skull, his grey, overly thick hands guiding the steering wheel like a ballet. As he tried to start the engine, his spectre melted into the cockpit. Just as, when I was a child, the unresolved mystery of a car moving so quickly on its own had astonished my young mind, the choreography of driving dissolved in an instant. At last, I reached the gates of the white cemetery. I opened my eyes wide—dry eyes. Dry from dust, from cold, from indifference. My eyes held no roundness; life had torn it from them. I stayed there. From time to time, I closed them. Then, I could feel all that life that grows among the dead. It is the birds chirping, the moss blooming on the gravestones, the breeze tapping gently against the stone, the smell of wood burning in winter. The stillness was flat. Through my gaze, my grandfather’s gaze settled on his plot. It looked a little faded and should have been cleaned. The earth had been disturbed; a few ferns were growing patiently.

When we no longer know much, time runs out for any of us; possibility wears away, the chance to defeat the days before they defeat us. When the sight of the visible becomes unbearable, the stutter of our souls turns from the peaceful beauty of the cemetery in winter, to go and fall asleep beneath the branches of time.

Sunk into the sheets of death, stripped of the strength to strike, my grandfather whimpered. His body sank into the whiteness, his gaze turned porous—two small round windows that spoke for him, for he could barely open his mouth to chew the sandstone of words I could not understand. His life was closing gently, like the gate of a garden in winter. The frost that swarmed in the morning began to fall away. The sun rose, its warmth making the hinges creak as they turned, leaving a sprinkle of rust upon the snow. Timid flowers budded once more, lifting their beaded heads in the early morning light.

***

My grandfather had thought about his tomb. Before his death, my father found the technical drawings he had made during his lifetime. He had chosen its dimensions, the material, the colour. The Chazelles stone, imprinted with shells, would be his final dwelling. What did he think as he projected into the future the image of his own death? Beneath that imaginary headstone, did he see the rough ropes that would lower his final bed into the earth? Visions are never so smooth. Did he reckon the fire that burned, casting its warmth onto others; or the four ropes that did not slide quite in unison, jolted by the four pallbearers? The coffin swayed as it descended toward the bottom, dropping in jerks. My extinguished grandfather likely shuddered, but no one saw it. The pipe laid upon the shroud would have slipped to the side, the cap would have sunk deeper onto his skull, consuming his face. Just as the worms would consume his entire body. Once the coffin is closed, its inside belongs to no one. A dead face survives only in the minds of those who saw it adorned for the last time. The pores of his skin would widen beneath that headstone, the one my grandfather had drawn as his final face. We do not ask the dead to stay, but we do hope to recreate a simulacrum of what their life once was, afflicted by the suffering of a heart conscious that the dead exist only within us. Humans speak, they hold ceremonies because they know nothing. They try to freeze that dark, crisp air—crystal breeze hanging above time. All those feet, shined with brilliantine, gathered around the vault, aligned in the mist, already almost in another realm. The nest of the dead man—growing purer as moments passed—he who had always loved his enclosure, his walls, filled itself with the tears of his lineage.

***

On the day of the funeral, I arrived late at the church. My father had sent me to fetch the papers for the service, that he had forgotten in the car. I headed toward the funeral home; I couldn’t find it. I wandered through the village, stirred by a hazy memory of the funeral route and a sort of muddy nausea. The procession had followed the exhaust pipe of that modern hearse, and my memory was sifted through smoke—I lost my way. I found my father’s car only after retracing my steps several times, and I do not know how long I stayed there. Back at the church, I found the door closed. The ceremony had already begun. I lifted the heavy wooden door. Made up with drapery, with colours glowing, with incense and wax; a swarm of eyes turned toward me, momentarily distracted from the enormity of that coffin collapsing beneath its bouquet of flowers; a single marble gaze stretched across the walls.

“No flowers, no wreaths.”

Is it the beginning of an absence or the end of a life? We refused the trimmings of the procession. Those plucked flowers, seated within the circle of a wreath, are nothing more than bodies without souls. Under the pretext of fixing his contours, the lone bouquet sank into the wood of the coffin. Like a fall that never ends, the ceremony passed through the echo of its silent guests. High above, beneath the vault of the church, I made out something like a branch sliding from the top of a tree, vanishing toward the ground, settling— a shard of sharp silence that caught fire. The stone showed me its first yellow leaf; a sketch upon the wall. By withdrawing from the gaze of others, life carries away its disillusions. Funerals portray the passing day of a man. Something distant and deep occurs, stirring the bellies of its guests. They see reflections of their own bitterness in the polished wood. They hear the muffling of their emotions in the church doors. Above all, they feel time keeping watch like a moon at the bottom of the sky, its shadow brushing against that of the sun. Yet in the boiling wax, the angels say, in the clarity of their own language:
“This flame that burns, a bud perhaps of a fire to come, must remain upright and continue to live, bound to its intimate candle, until the fatal unravelling of its waxen crutches.” I looked calmly at those long cylinders, mixtures of flesh, fire, and diaphanous smoke. A candlestick sinks, streaming down its silver. The staging of funerals is meant to teach us the way in which we will one day melt and slip away from this world of which we will become the absentees. We will leave on our pedestals that round, dusty mark that will speak of our departure.

My grandfather’s burial cast me back into that July night, years earlier, under a Greek sky. We were driving very early, at the hour when night wrestles with dawn. I stuck my nose out of the car window. The sky seemed so dense, so full of stars that nausea overtook me. Black stars bounded across it, bristly like celestial demons, suave and proud. I saw the faces of my absentees there: the devil who haunted my nights, the angels who smiled at me, and others I never remembered. But as water always flows, even without the presence of time, it was another face that appeared in the sky— the one that taught me that if stone has a heart, it must lie deeper than any other. Sly syllables, his features in the celestial vault, his blue eyes of love; a vision of a sweetness that fascinates and a pleasure that kills.

When the ceremony ended, the last rose remained. Unpicked, vulnerable and strong. The final day of life. Standing on the coffin, at the centre of its bouquet, the flower—frightened by age—distilled its corolla. I saw it struggle not to yield to the day’s oldness, defying the rust of the leaves. Its fallen gown took flight in the ardour of the sun, eaten away by the day. In that flight toward the sacred earth, a stone-borne journey beneath the dome of that church,
a crack opened within me. I confused sky and soil with the bodies of the mourners. The scattered gold of trembling stars, the Italian constellations and those of the wax, the face of death and that of love.

Our longings returned to me.