Page 204 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

two years ago. I can’t help but see the wariness, the effort, the impatience. I

can’t help but see two people together out of a sense of genetic duty, doomed
already to bewilder and disappoint each other, each honor-bound to defy the
other.
From the bedroom window upstairs, I watched Mamá leave for the ferry port
in the town of Tinos. A scarf tied under the chin, Mamá rammed into the sunny
blue day headfirst. She was a slight, small-boned woman with the body of a
child, but when you saw her coming you did well to let her pass. I remember her
walking me to school every morning—my mother is retired now, but she was a
schoolteacher. As we walked, Mamá never held my hand. The other mothers did
with their own kids, but not Mamá. She said she had to treat me like any other
student. She marched ahead, a fist closed at the neck of her sweater, and I tried
to keep up, lunch box in hand, tottering along behind in her footsteps. In the
classroom, I always sat at the back. I remember my mother at the blackboard and
how she could nail a misbehaving pupil with a single, scalding glance, like a

rock from a slingshot, the aim surgically true. And she could cleave you in half
with nothing but a dark look or a sudden beat of silence.
Mamá believed in loyalty above all, even at the cost of self-denial. Especially
at the cost of self-denial. She also believed it was always best to tell the truth, to
tell it plainly, without fanfare, and the more disagreeable the truth, the sooner
you had to tell it. She had no patience for soft spines. She was—is—a woman of
enormous will, a woman without apology, and not a woman with whom you
want to have a dispute—though I have never really understood, even now,
whether her temperament was God-given or one she adopted out of necessity,
what with her husband dying barely a year into their marriage and leaving her to

raise me all on her own.
I fell asleep upstairs a short while after Mamá left. I jolted awake later to a
woman’s high, ringing voice. I sat up and there she was, all lipstick, powder,
perfume, and slender curves, an airline ad smiling down at me through the thin
veil of a pillbox hat. She stood in the middle of the room in a neon green
minidress, leather valise at her feet, with her auburn hair and long limbs,
grinning down at me, a shine on her face, and talking, the seams of her voice
bursting with aplomb and cheer.
“So you’re Odie’s little Markos! She didn’t tell me you were this handsome!
Oh, and I see her in you, around the eyes—yes, you have the same eyes, I think,
I’m sure you’ve been told. I’ve been so eager to meet you. Your mother and I—

we—oh, no doubt Odie has told you, so you can imagine, you can picture, what
a thrill this is for me, to see the two of you, to meet you, Markos. Markos