My aunt's, my mom's, and my home at sea: 'Voyage to Cythera' (1984)
An exiled communist's return to Greece makes me miss three old houses.
Voyage to Cythera (Taxidi sta Kythira) (1984), dir. Theo Angelopoulos, Greece
On clear weekends, we would drive over the bridge to visit my aunt and her family at their strange palace on Staten Island. I haven’t been there in maybe twenty years, and I definitely couldn’t find it on a map or by walking around the neighborhood, but I can see it near a park with a big fountain and a bandstand, behind a wrought-iron gate.
Its architect took a cleaver to the plans, cobbling a squashed estate with weird levels and corners I could never get into. After passing through the front door, you had to climb a wide staircase to get to the elevated living space. That staircase glared at me, hiding with big hands the countless secret rooms the house sat on top of. Among them, the living room curled up in a foxhole. To watch TV you had to take another staircase down, this one bending around dark wood and bookshelves heavy with DVDs and my uncle’s comic book and horror movie memorabilia. (One night, at their second house, my uncle showed us a book bound in skin, his Necronomicon, which sent whispering demons flying from a CD player.) A half-story which you could only get to by ladder perched over the living room. On it slept a table-and-chairs set with legs so short my knees would touch my chin if I sat down, which I always wanted to do but never had the courage to because the furniture seemed mummified. The house must have sat at the foot of a mountain because, out back, a retaining wall one hundred feet high flanked a pool full of moss. A net held the wall together, preventing the hundreds of blocks of wired-up pebbles that made it from crashing through the patio.
My mom told me that she named me Tyler because she once heard her friend calling for her son, “Ty!” and she loved how cool it sounded. At my aunt’s I whipped around a kitchen corner, pattering on cold tile while the phone rang and my mom shouted “Ty!” and I didn’t answer her because I hated that name.
Alexandros (Giulio Brogi) rolls a ball to his son, calling out, “Spyros! Spyros!” and the ball almost tips off the balcony and into the city below. Early morning and the soft purple sky like a bandage: Alexandros’ father Spyros (Manos Katrakis) has come home from a thirty-two-year exile and dances among the graves of his old communist friends killed during the civil war. His wife and children pull the newspaper off the windows of their old house (Rizospastis, Aug. 4, 1950, “The World That is Dying”: “Sometimes the sewer breaks and the stench of corruption and sensuality of the present stinking regime is hopelessly released making every honest man spit and gag…”) and his friend Panagiotis (Giorgos Nezos) lights a fire. I’ve been watching a lot of Mad Men recently. Betty Draper’s interior designer tells her: people sit around the fire even if there isn’t one.
The house is one big room with one big round table. When they all sit down for dinner, Spyros’ wife Katerina (Dora Volanaki) slices a round loaf of bread into equal pieces and leaves one for the house. Everyone else in town has since moved into the valley and stands to profit by selling their land in the mountains to make way for a winter resort. During dinner they heckle Spyros from outside because, despite the fact that he hasn’t lived there for a lifetime, he has refused to sell. I hold my breath when his daughter Voula (Mary Chronopoulou) smokes a cigarette at a gas station and stomps it out on the ground.
The authorities have forced Spyros to leave the country again, but because it is Sunday and everything is closed, they have no other choice but to put him out in international waters. He bobs around on a floating dock in the pouring rain, with his little black umbrella like an English businessman. Meanwhile, the local dock workers host their annual feast: dozens of workers, sailors, and a magician eating fire take cover in the bar, drinking ouzo and singing folk songs. Katerina boards a boat to join her husband at sea.
We spent Christmas Eve at my grandma’s brother’s house growing up and his house was also endless. My cousins rolled balls down long hallways trembling with portraits my great-aunt had painted and the adults drank sambuca in their coffee in a room full of mirrors. We didn’t sing, but we ate, drank, and my mom’s cousins breathed fire while we watched The Parent Trap on VHS in the kids’ room.
Last Christmas my uncle’s new girlfriend brought her karaoke machine to my mom’s, where we’ve been having Christmas since my great-uncle died and his sons stopped speaking. We sat in the living room, where my mom likes to show off how she decorated her fireplace mantle for the season, every season, and sang Madonna and Scorpions. Even my brother sang, holding his glass of wine and swaying in his slippers, despite practically fleeing when the speaker came out.
When my brother and sister move out, my mom will have no reason to keep paying for all the space in a wilting house she can already hardly afford. When the Flemmings sold their house across the street with its giant yard like an orchard—Kelly, who sat on the curb in front of our house when we moved in and became like my older sister, gets married this summer—someone knocked it down and put up three million-dollar-plus houses, each alone as deep as three normal houses. My mom’s house is very old, hard to maintain, next to the park and the woods, down the street from two schools, and perched on a ridge, so I am sure someone will knock it down too.
Daybreak eases Spyros and Katerina into an embrace, floating on the dock in their damp coats and shining eyes. She looks at him like a prince and, when it’s time, he slips the rope off the dock and it floats away.
When I wake up in the morning my apartment doesn’t always feel like my house and I have a very hard time getting out of bed. At my mom’s, I amble down the stairs, make myself coffee, sit on the big leather couch, and can read for an hour without thinking about what to do next. Here, my head fills with water and I can’t read, I can barely open my eyes, and the coffee tastes worse. A few days ago the weather was so clean and beautiful that the clouds fizzled out of my living room, but I missed my mom’s jasmine plant and the lilac bushes outside. I am getting seasick floating a little ways off shore like this.
What will happen when my mom’s house is gone? A big group of old men waits on a sound stage for Alexandros to take his seat and when he does they approach him one at a time to perform their line: “It’s me!” Creaky and warm voices over and over again, “It’s me!” “It’s me!” “It’s me!” It’s me! It’s me! It’s me!
See other films from: 1980s | Greece
Cross Dissolve is my blog about film, how it makes me feel, and how I see it reappear in my life—how movies and living dissolve into one another. Please subscribe if you enjoyed today’s entry. Thank you for reading!
Love, Tyler
"My mom told me that she named me Tyler because she once heard her friend calling for her son, 'Ty!' and she loved how cool it sounded. At my aunt’s I whipped around a kitchen corner, pattering on cold tile while the phone rang and my mom shouted 'Ty!' and I didn’t answer her because I hated that name." -- This single paragraph is a beautiful piece of microfiction by itself. <3