Excerpts from
A.P.O.L.L.O
By Pablo Henrik Llambias
The tram pitched in gentle
movements across the rails as it shot through the tunnel at high speed. We had
found a corner seat. All around us hundreds of Athenians sat and stood tightly
packed. Some talked to each other. Others stood with magazines or newspapers.
We sat there lost in our own thoughts.
The tram stopped below our house and the doors opened. We got out and pushed
our way through the crowd trickling through the many small and large exits that
led from the platform up to the house. The tram disappeared noiselessly behind
us.
We found our way to a wall along the
platform, opened a small hatch under a wall lamp and slipped through. In the
darkness that met us on the other side the house’s system of passages began.
We crawled upwards through long, dark
stairwells, softly intoning the jingle that guided our footsteps. We passed
residential areas with corridors full of washing, rubber boots, old newspapers
and tricycles you can easily fall over as we sang our route. We forced our way
through impenetrable markets where the smell of raw meat, flour and fish
mingled with the stench of excrement and live animals,while we adapted our
lyrics to what we saw. We wandered through empty, silent passages and areas the
function of which we had never known, and whose inhabitants we had never met,
until the song was almost at an end and we entered the section where we
ourselves lived.
In silence, we edged our way along
our own corridor. The smell of food from the many various galleys met us on our
arrival. In our sleep, simply by following the smells, we would be able to find
our way to the covered up wall where the door was to our own living quarters.
With our eyes shut, we would be able to let our fingers roam behind the
motheaten carpet hanging in front of the door and then press the pad there. The
spy-hole would recognise our fingerprints and allow the door to slide slowly
open. We would enter a tiny, square room, exactly large enough for one person
to stand, and the door would welcome us. It welcomed us and slid down gently
behind us.
From the small room, two small
openings led to the complex that made up our living quarters. Just opposite the
entrance door, an opening led to the cabin. The cabin was a narrow strip with a
shelf along one side of it: the bed. Above the bed and up in the ceiling there
were shelves and hooks for our belongings: hens of ceramics, paper, rugs, etc.
On the opposite side from the bed a
wall with hooks with all sorts of things on them. Behind the hooks and the
things hanging on them you sensed the existence of cupboards.
To the left of the small entrance
hall you could look into a room characterised by zinc and a chaos of implements
that filled all its surfaces - ceiling, walls and floor. Not even the small,
narrow tables lining the walls were free of objects. The galley.
We went out into the galley to find something to eat. As usual, we took care
not to stumble over the threshold. The light went on automatically as we
entered.
‘Greetings, Epimetheus,’ said the
light. ‘We can see we’ve had a good day.’
‘Yes, we have,’ we said.
We opened the food cupboard to find
something to eat.
‘We can see that we’ve had a really
good time. Is there a young girl, perhaps? A young girl that has caught our
fancy?’
It spoke with a voice like our
grandmother’s. That was not something we had programmed it to do. It had just
happened along the way. It had hit upon the idea itself.
Each home
was equipped with a light. In principle, the light and the spy-hole were one
and the same, although, to make a pleasant change, it could vary its voice to
fit the task being carried out. If we crawled into the latrine, grandmother
would talk to us there, too. Grandmother had been dead for many years. But that
didn’t mean we couldn’t miss her from time to time. Of course, it did not take
the light very long to work that out. So now it spoke to us with a voice
roughly halfway between grandmother’s and our father’s. Being reminded of them
made us feel happy. When we felt sad, we said that in a way we were also happy.
Sometimes we cried. It did us good to cry. The light said it was healthy...
Translated by John Irons
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