Traces: a Literary Novel with Old Family Photographs

By Giovanni Cafagna

In ‘Traces’ the European emigrant Odyssèas leaves his adoptive country, family, home, friends to be in Greece, his birthplace, for good. On August 15th he visits his beloved semi-blind grandmother Konstantina. Childhood memories emerge triggered by the landscape when suddenly an earthquake strikes turning quietness into madness, and the fear of dying swallowed by the earth freezes him on the spot. The wonderful story by grandfather Ioannis, Konstantina’s dead husband, about the birth of Greece and why earthquakes happen saves him. An inspiring storyteller and local legend, he could read the stars and predict the weather of the following year. In the bygone era of seasonal farming, such knowledge defied the unpredictability of Mother Nature. They called him the Lucky Charm. Konstantina wants to visit aunt Iannoula, her sister. She also hints that her time on Earth is up: grandfather Ioannis, in her dreams, told her he is waiting for her. Without grandmother though Odyssèas will be missing the guiding light to restore his childhood happiness. Suddenly cracks appear in his cast iron new life, which express the fallibility of human decision in the cycle of life and death governing the universe. Iannoula lives in Antirion, near the ancient mountain Paliovouna. If plumes of smoke rise from its top, it is the breath of Ephèstos, god of fire, resting on his way to brother Zeus on Mount Olympus. They cross the majestic Charilaos Trikoupis Bridge, named after the founding father of modern Greece, and from the car he appreciates the soothing sight of the setting sun. To Konstantina the bridge is a miracle, just like it was to cross the sea in a small fishing boat in the worst storm of 1943, with her family, and heavily pregnant. As the starry night appears while waiting for aunt’s famous food feast, in her garden everything looks the same. But is it? The differences between his memories and the present are evident in the decay that pervades everything. An old horse cart talks to him: I am not just an old object. I symbolize a significant event buried in your family past. As it does the dagger known as ‘Karapapa’ that belonged to Elefteris Paliokosta, the Devil of Corfu, slaughterer of Ottomans, hero of the siege of Tripolis of 1821, where 8,000 non-Greeks were either butchered or impaled. He couldn’t return home and settled instead for Gavrolimni, where changed his name to Karapapa, in honour of the trusted dagger, and a new family dynasty was born. War tragedies never stopped plaguing Greece though. After the September 8th 1943 armistice, the Nazi hunted Italian soldiers accused of treason. The starving Greeks hid them in basements and barns, despite they were enemies too. But the Nazi did not like instinctive generosity and innate compassion, and perpetrated some of the worst massacres of civilians in WWII. Meanwhile, the simmering civil war caused social anarchy, and the long running feud between the Karapapa family and Gavrolimni's other prominent family the Tsiligiannis descended into murder. After the food feast, and another call from the Sirens, Odyssèas enters the sea, and falls asleep cradled by waves, realizing he misses his previous life as an emigrant. He wakes up washed ashore on August 16th. Konstantina desires to visit the church of Agia Panagiotissa in Gavrolimni to light candles and pray. There isn’t much time, she adds. As Odyssèas drives her to destination, discovers more from her past: two men falling in love with the same woman; the devil’s music played at the village feast; the secret kept hidden in her heart that caused her to escape. Konstantina goes missing briefly and then turns up inside the church where she can finally join her beloved husband. Outside Odyssèas finds a special treasure left to him: old photographs, a dagger called karapapa, love letters, special documents, and a note with her last words.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Giovanni Cafagna
• Release date: Jun 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9780954197223

Giovanni Cafagna

I was born in Italy in a family of dual heritage: Italian and Greek. I studied graphic design and photography then philosophy. My business career developed in the image licensing industry first in Italy and continued successfully in London, where I have lived and worked since 1996. In 2014 I began to dedicate more time and effort to my artistic interests such as figurative painting, illustration, shooting documentary and abstract photography, and writing to the purpose of which I revitalized the indie publishing Peter Parker Media house that I had founded in 2001. My abstract photography has crystallized in a project called ‘Unnatural’, whose prints are available to purchase from the Bridgeman Art Library and several other e-retailers. Peter Parker Media was inspired by the 1950's golden age of photography essays, to create books that combine the powers of the written word and street / documentary photography. In the age of the internet and e-books, PPM attempts to create a new artistic language that breaks the mould of telling literary stories either with words or with photography, and fuses the two forms into one seamless narration.

Book preview

Copyright © Giovanni Cafagna

All photos, cover art and design by Giovanni Cafagna

Print edition by Peter Parker Media ISBN 978-0-9541972-1-6

A CIP catalogue record for the printed version of this book is available

from the British Library

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters and events are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments and events is entirely coincidental.

Day 1 - August 15th

«δεῦρ' ἄγ' ἰών, πολύαιν' Ὀδυσεῦ, μέγα κῦδος Ἀχαιῶν,

νῆα κατάστησον, ἵνα νωϊτέρην ὄπ' ἀκούσῃς.

οὐ γάρ πώ τις τῇδε παρήλασε νηῒ μελαίνῃ,

πρίν γ' ἡμέων μελίγηρυν ἀπὸ στομάτων ὄπ' ἀκοῦσαι,

ἀλλ' ὅ γε τερψάμενος νεῖται καὶ πλείονα εἰδώς.

ἴδμεν γάρ τοι πάνθ', ὅσ' ἐνὶ Τροίῃ εὐρείῃ

Ἀργεῖοι Τρῶές τε θεῶν ἰότητι μόγησαν,

ἴδμεν δ' ὅσσα γένηται ἐπὶ χθονὶ πουλυβοτείρῃ.»

The Sirens’ call (Odyssey, Book XII)

‘"Come hither, as thou farest, renowned Odysseus, great glory of the Achaeans; stay thy ship that thou mayest listen to the voice of us two. For never yet has any man rowed past this isle in his black ship until he has heard the sweet voice from our lips. Nay, he has joy of it, and goes his way a wiser man. For we know all the toils that in wide Troy the Argives and Trojans endured through the will of the gods, and we know all things that come to pass upon the fruitful earth.’

Cit. from Homer. The Odyssey with an English Translation by A.T. Murray, PH.D. in two volumes. Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1919

Chapter I

Earthquake

Odysséas is walking slowly through the narrow streets of Agiá, the borough in the eastern periphery of Patra, where he returned to live at the beginning of summer, after twenty five years abroad. Typically for him, he is wearing his shades but has forgotten to take his hat. He can feel his hair burning. The blazing sunshine is inhibiting his ability to think rationally, drowning his mind in a nebulous state just a few steps away from complete nothingness. Nonetheless it is a pleasant state of mind for Odysséas; it lifts up his physical, emotional and even spiritual being. His body, built on Mediterranean genes, thrives on the challenge of surviving the stifling heat. It is after all the best remedy for the cold wetness of the northern European weather that for twenty five years had incessantly penetrated his thick skin, and settled into the marrow of his heavy bone structure like dampness stains the tired plaster of a Victorian brick wall. Emotionally, he feels the relief brought by the Greek sunshine helping cleanse his nervous system of the metropolitan neurosis that had grown and stuck to it, and thrived parasitically, like a colony of lichen established on the dark side of a tree trunk, sucks the life out of its carrier. Spiritually, when Odysséas gazes at the ebony darkness of the starry vault in the fresher nights of summer, he can feel his soul linking up with the remote stars permanently cast in the infinity of the firmament, and their ancient lights becoming cosmic voices able to soothe his pain at having renounced Greece for such a long time. For twenty five years Odysséas had yearned for the velvety touch of the cobalt sea on his skin; missed the breathtaking depth of the intense blue sky above; desired to gaze upon the striking beauty of the seamless horizon that is created when the powerful sunlight melts sea and sky, and which in the night mutates into a dark canvas filled with dots of light arranged in perfect shapes that never cease to inspire human imagination. Odysséas had never stopped thinking of the scents of nature that trigger the sensation of being the child of once upon a time magnificent ancient world that thrived on the land of Greece. It was a real society of endemic warfare and slavery where a combination of natural selection and social structure had given birth to special minds, recognised and elevated above the masses, capable of producing structured thoughts that in the centuries to come had given artists the instruments to interpret nature; and pushed scientists to go beyond the evidence of nature itself, to form languages and logical axioms, which nowadays underpin modern technology. Back in the country that had adopted him, and that Odysséas has finally left for good, such considerations constantly distracted him. He remembers times when the distance between Aristotle’s syllogism and Google’s algorithms seemed much shorter to him than the two thousand and four hundred years separating them; and the magnitude of the progress that he felt humanity had made in between overwhelmed him, as if he were watching millions of footsteps on a sandy beach deleted at once by the sweeping crawl of the ebb. Greece was and will always be a magical place, regardless of the recent economic woes; and Odysséas had missed it so much. He is back now though. He can read this thought very clearly, as if it had been carved on the stone tablets of his mind by the lightning of Zeus.

Odysséas reaches the rail line that crosses the borough, lost in his reveries. The automatic barriers are closed. The 12pm train to Rion announces its passing, with a sequence of three short, powerful screams that blast out from its horns. The solidity of the sound shatters the crystalline silence of the afternoon. He stops to look at the train disappearing into the distance. It is a familiar moment, which like the summer heat holds the power to make him realize how much he missed Greece, and especially this anonymous corner of the world, the borough of Agiá where nothing ever seems to happen, and yet so much has in the time since he emigrated. As he contemplates the changes around, the automatic barriers begin to lift, and the cars’ engines growl impatiently. Before the barriers reach their resting position, the cars have already accelerated and sped away fast, adding a noisy tail to the dying echo of the train’s horn. Odysséas resumes his walk while the tranquillity of the Greek summer afternoon returns immediately with the two archetypal sounds of his childhood memories: one is the rhythmical and sonorous snoring that seeps through the slates of the green Venetian shutters of the houses, whose old square shapes stand defiantly among the new taller buildings like pebbles amid giant boulders. The other is the vigorous chirping of crickets, coming from the patches of burnt grass that crown the feet of the few mature olive trees surviving against the odds in the concreted landscape, laden with fruits that nobody cares to harvest anymore. The sun is hotter than ever. The handkerchief clasped in Odysséas’ hand is drenched already and useless for mopping up the large drops of sweat flowing down his neck and temples like rapid rivers cascading over steep cliffs. Still better though, he thinks, than wiping it off with the slippery skin of the hands and forearms. Besides, it will only be a few more minutes before his final destination is reached.

When the front door of the house of auntie Eleni, his mother’s older sister and first born of grandparents Ioannis and Konstantina, is just a couple of steps away from Odysséas, a tremor that lasts no longer than a couple of seconds suddenly makes the ground skid mightily sideways, causing his body to plunge towards the front of the door as if he were a light feather pushed by a violent gust of wind. Instinctively Odysséas reaches for the iron handle and tries to hold on as tight as he can. But there is just the time for an eerie pause before a second tremor that lasts longer than the first rises and shakes the ground backwards and forwards. Odysséas’ head begins to spin; he feels as if the Earth has just moved a few degrees off its orbit. Then eeriness returns with another brief pause before a third, more powerful quake gives out a clamorous bang that deepens the sensation in Odysséas’ mind that a chasm is splitting the universe into pieces, whilst a canyon is opening right beneath his feet. Panic begins to grow untamed. His stomach feels bloated with the sensation of imaginary food stuck mid way in his intestines pushing his guts up against his lungs, and making regular breathing extremely difficult and painful. Soon he is gasping for air, as if his whole face were immersed in deep water. His nostrils are filling up rapidly; his mouth shuts tensely to lock the remaining bubbles of oxygen in his lungs; his teeth grind sending shivers down his spine; and his eyes shut behind the double filter of the sunglasses. Through the contact of his feet with the ground, Odysséas anticipates the fourth tremor approaching loud and clear from hell beneath, with the inevitability of history repeating itself. When the quake strikes with a dense, smashing noise of rocks exploding in a thousand pieces, it reaches its destructive peak quickly. He can’t see it, he doesn’t want to, but he knows that the mighty tremor is deforming the square shapes of the buildings like the hallucinogenic polyhedrons created in the multi faceted world of a kaleidoscope. Silence is, once more, no more: the gyrating world becomes filled with loud noises of doors windows banging open and closed, glass breaking, vases falling from window sills and garden walls, then rolling and eventually breaking in hundreds of pieces scattered across the front porches; metallic objects of different types are clanging like bells struck with giant poles; people in the houses are awake and shouting ‘get under the table!’ at each other. Odysséas is holding on so tightly to the metal handle protruding from the front door that his fingers have become bright red, swollen, and feel as though they are about to explode. Lasting less than thirty seconds but feeling longer than a thousand years, the ravaging monster chewing its way through the solid mass of Mother Earth has split the continent plateau a few millimetres more, and left evidence of its destructive power in the trail of debris around Odysséas’ shaken body. Then there is silence again. The earthquake is over and he is still alive. It could have been far worse; I survived once more, he keeps repeating to himself. As panic recedes into calmness, Odysséas’ inner hearing, heightened by his state of temporary deafness, turns towards the syncopated sound of his heart beating in overdrive, and to the painful throbbing of his jugular. He can hear the blood being pumped out of his heart at high pressure and running through the arteries and veins, turning and twisting and filling the tiniest, remotest capillaries in his body. His glasses have slid half way down his nose. Odysséas opens his eyes just a little, but can only stare intently at the closeness of the frosted glass panel that fills the upper half of the front door, an infinite and nebulous sky that has suddenly attached to his nose. Then the voice of reason talks again: it’s gone, it says; it’s gone, it shouts; wake up from your blinding stupor, you fool. To realize that he has survived the passage of yet another earthquake is like imagining the protection of an angel who has spread his wings over a small fire to extinguish it, before the young flames can grow to be a bigger, destroying monster. Odysséas turns and casts a worried look around. Buildings have not collapsed, they have suffered only minor damage; the new cracks that have appeared in the plaster here and there are nothing to worry about. His heartbeat finally returns to peaceful pulsation. The crickets hidden in the bushes have already restarted the cacophony that binds them into a colony. The loud snoring coming from the neighbouring houses is back too, albeit slower to pick up momentum. Typically, in the aftermath of an earthquake that has caused only a massive scare, anger at the sudden interruption to their afternoon naps generates an urge for revenge in the locals, running riot at the back of their minds. But the lack of anyone to blame or shout at, causes their anger to be taken out instead on the flies with large green dotted eyes, which hover annoyingly close to nostrils and ears, and get squashed with ridiculous pleasure.

The awkward awareness that the geographical position of his body has just shifted with the position of Greece on Earth pushes Odysséas to reminisce about the past, out of which the memory of the first time he experienced an earthquake resurfaces powerfully. He was seven years old. He was playing amongst the olive trees at the back of grandfather’s farmhouse. Suddenly one, just one, long terrible tremor rose from hell, right beneath his feet. Odysséas lost his balance, fell back and hit the ground hard with his backside. The excruciating pain that followed drove his body into a foetal position. He cried and sobbed, oblivious to the ants that had begun crawling over his tiny young legs; and blind to the enormous branch that had just been torn from the trunk of a nearby tree and fallen to the ground, missing his head by just a few inches. In the evening, grandfather Ioannis told him one of his famous stories: Greece, he said, is God’s last miracle. On the sixth day, before going to sleep, waking up on Sunday and declaring that the seventh day must be the day of rest, God found some spare rocks. In a whim of infinite spontaneity God tossed them to the sky. The rocks rose higher and higher and hit the stars that had just been put in the firmament, which scattered around like marbles roll freely on a flat surface, and formed the constellations. Odysséas listened to grandfather’s deep, reassuring voice with all his attention. God was pleased with the new shapes created in the night sky. But it wasn’t the end of the journey for the rocks: they returned to Earth and fell straight into the Aegean Sea to give birth to Greece. Greece is truly God’s last miracle, Odysséas thought. Grandfather continued: The rocks that remained above the sea were exposed to the burning power of the sun: not much could have grown on it without hard work; but there was abundant space on them for men to build strong temples that would last many centuries. Where the rocks settled in the dark, volcanic molten depths of the Aegean Sea, terrible active volcanoes agitated restlessly and relentlessly, spitting enormous rivers of lava. God put them there as breathing holes for Mother Earth to let her anger out; and, when she does, the rocks that make Greece move, and men call that earthquake. Grandfather Ioannis had a unique ability to tell his stories by evoking unscientific yet powerful, solemn images that to Odysséas seemed inspired by the epic heroes and immortal gods carved in the friezes of Greek temples.

After experiencing his first earthquake, and with grandfather’s story chiming in his head like church bells, Odysséas’ childhood became filled with fantastic visions and simmering fear. Just a glimpse of rough sea, with the lines of angry waves advancing and retreating, crossing, twirling, chasing and crashing onto each other, driven by the powerful force of the currents agitating beneath and winds sweeping across the surface so strongly that even the seagulls cannot fly forward nor sideways but only stay still as if they are painted in the sky, made Odysséas fear that an earthquake was about to strike again. And if the earthquake struck again for real, Odysséas’ imagination, for days and nights afterwards, played endless sequences of the world folding in on itself, swallowed by the largest canyon ever seen; also images of people running away from the crumbling edges of the disappearing cliffs, trying to survive yet knowing that eventually there would be no more places left to run. Then, during early adulthood, after life experience had given Odysséas enough knowledge of the world, and built self-awareness into the rawness of the child’s consciousness, he finally put his childhood’s vivid imagination and underlying fears into perspective. He then began to realize that grandfather’s original story was intended to spark further considerations. The unexpected whims and the ruthless, destructive violence of Mother Nature are just one side of the same coin; the other shows the beauty of the infinite hues and forms, which are visible in her peaceful landscapes. The conflicting and contrasting aspects of the two sides demonstrate the existence of an equilibrium engrained in the universe that perpetuates the progression of life and death ad infinitum. Such progression though is not just made by the mere sum of its individual moving elements, the small life forms that are born and die every second. The universal movement is the expression of the combined force of all the parts becoming and evolving constantly together, the pan-energy in which both general and parts are necessary to keep the equilibrium delicately tuned, and make the cycle of life and death visible to the human mind as eternally as the human spirit can possibly conceive it. It is such awareness of the delicate balance between life and death that gives humans, unlike any other life forms, the power to cultivate hope.

Chapter II

The old yellow hovel

No further than two hundred metres from auntie’s house, there is the rail line that slices the borough of Agiá horizontally. Where the tracks cross the road that cuts the borough vertically from sea to mountain, there is a derelict yellow hovel that stands humbly next to the automatic barriers. To the locals, the hovel is a memento of old times when life and trains in Patra ran at a much slower pace; and of a man called Spyros who had been in charge of opening and closing the barriers manually for nearly thirty