: : Two Candles Amidst the Sea
in the memory of Manos Eleftheriou and Michalis Makroulakis
The day after tomorrow marks eight years since Manos departed for the other, the unseen side of the moon. I will probably die because of my heart, he used to tell me with a low, half-broken smile. They fitted me with a heart device, but what can machines ever do when the heart is tender? And so he was called back. Cardiac arrest. What remains is the poems turned into songs, the keepsakes, his beloved Syros and that shy sorrow of his for all the impossible things we failed to offer our home and our souls. Songs are an illness, what did you think? Go find other loves, my light, if you wish.
It was Michalis who used to tell me we should do something for Manos. Let’s make an exhibition together. Small but beautiful. You make a little candle, I will make a flower and we will present
them in Hermoupolis, the town Manos loved. It was set. We spoke of it also with Giorgos Altouvas, but time did not wait for us. Michalis would complain that his eyes no longer saw as they once did. And how could he serve Painting properly, she who is a noblewoman and
demands everything for herself? He would say he was growing old and could no longer bear it, such an unrepentant lover of beauty and youth he was. And so he withdrew, proud in his final days, silent and invisible, until he too was gone.
Since then, whenever Giorgos visited Piraeus he insisted we ought to make the exhibition, for both of them, together. He prepared everything. This summer Hermoupolis celebrates its bicentennial. Let’s commemorate it and them by gathering some of your works in Vatis Hall that they both used to love. We spoke to Iphigenia as well and her eyes lit up, as if she had been waiting for this all along. Giorgos came again, caretaker of all things, making sure everything
would be as it should be. And here we are again in Syros. With Michalis and Manos keeping company within mind and
heart, beloved, embraces that once were nests, that once had eyes, that once had mouths, and still go on speaking to you. They speak, they call out, and it is as though they sigh…
Iphigenia recited a line from the poem Our Soul, Sometimes: “… then someone came, dressed in the sea…” and so the sea and the field became one, beside the two little flames for Manos and Michalis.
Across them stands the shrine, crowded with flickering candles; a
gathering of souls that had once been faces, bodies, lives, the city, the entire land, homeland and motherland alike, origin, history, gestures unrecognizable, yet bearing marks that remained strangely familiar, an eternity present and alive.
