ten days. That was in the early nineties. At that time, Takis’ mother, Aphrodite, lived in the apartment that I eventually occupied. On that first visit, Takis warned me about his mother, telling me that she was both senile and quite xoxotropos (phonetic spelling), meaning cantankerous. “You might hear her talking to herself,” he warned. “Pay no attention to her.”
By the time that I moved into the apartment that was once the village bakery, and later Takis’ mother’s apartment, Aphrodite had passed away at the age of ninety-three. Little remained to remind me of her presence, or of her times, except a large, antique credenza that was obviously too heavy and too fragile to move down the narrow staircase. Arriving in Greece with little more than mt clothes, I was happy to have such a unique piece of furniture to use, and we polished the wood to a sheen not seen in decades.
I also painted the place from floor to ceiling, repaired cracked stucco, installed shelves and cabinets, replaced clouded glass, and made other cosmetic improvements. As the months passed, the venerable building became our home. Then one day I found an old faded photograph wedged behind one of the drawers of the credenza. The photo was of a middle-aged woman dressed from head to toe in black and standing at the foot of the very staircase that led to our apartment. The distant background in the photo also revealed that the building that now stood across the road had not existed at the time, and the view extended all the way to the sea. With a magnifying glass, I examined the face of the woman quite closely, and I soon became convinced that the face in the photo was a familiar one–a face not unlike that of my friend and landlord. I