Dimitra Mantheakis - Melina Breaking Free

The three months that remained until June and the summer holidays went by quickly. The group of friends finished primary school and sat their high school entrance exams. Sarantos fought all this time to convince his father to allow him too to go to high school. Eleni, his mother, stood by him and supported him as much as she could. In the end and after interminable discussions that almost always ended up in arguments and swearing by Mitsos, his father, the mother and son managed to get his much-desired approval.

The exam results were announced and the inseparable group of friends went on successfully to the next step of their education. Each of the children kept deeply hidden in their hearts aspects of their family life, painful or happy, as well as their worries and troubles, not because of a desire to hide something, but from pride and a wish not to become objects of pity for their peers. The children were still young and they did not know that nothing would remain hidden for ever under the relentless provincial sun.

The years went by and the boys became men, almost, and the little girls of yesterday filled out and became women, each one metamorphosing with an individual style and each one harbouring her own private dreams and secret ambitions. Melina, had her mind fixed on redemption from the privations of poverty only through the panacea of money, as she had visualized it over the years in her mind, Urania, getting to know love by slipping away from the supervision of her head master father, Paulina, hoping every day there would be a miracle and that her mother’s sexual desires would cease, Dina, hoping that her taxi driver father would reform and would no longer frequent gambling dens and places of ill-repute, shaming her mother and sisters, Mary, desiring a house that would no longer be turned into a gambling nest by unwelcome visitors, Iakobos, looking forward to expanding his business to become a successful and important merchant to allow his mother and sister to stop wearing themselves out at work while his father was exiled for years on the prison island of Makronissos. Sarantos dreamed of conquering his great love, Melina, who though she must have caught on to his unrequited love from the way he showered attention on her, did not include him in her personal plans. She didn’t want any poor person near her, no matter how much she liked them. The constant humiliations caused by the wretchedness and hardships that her family had lived through, for years and years, had wounded her deeply and irreparably.

The members of the group may have been at different stages of maturity now that they had reached the age of seventeen, and they may have dreamed and planned their futures, but they didn’t know if their parents would give them the go ahead, either for further studies, or to follow a professional path in the capital, far from their small town. Conditions prevailing in their families, their worries, the hardships, and the delights or disappointments of their childhood years were deeply etched into the very depths of their being, irrespective of the fact that none of them had ever chosen to confide, even in their friends, despite the love that they shared for one another, in order not to compromise their family members more than the adults had exposed themselves to the judgment and criticism of their community. It was obvious that final decisions regarding their future would depend exclusively on the disposition and the economic capacity of each family at the specific and critical moment.

At that time, Mary, the strong-headed one of the group, was already under siege, so to speak, by a young neighbour, Anesti, who had studied architecture at Bologna in Italy and on his return to his country after an absence of seven years wanted to establish himself professionally and to settle down. He wanted a hometown girl with whom to create a family after all the affairs he had with girls belonging to a variety of nationalities at the overseas university. Pleasing in appearance, he was soon targeted by mothers as a potential husband for their daughters who were much attracted by the title “educated abroad”, as they said to their friends. Three or four matchmaking proposals did not tempt him in the least even though the brides had a respectable dowry. None of the girls attracted him sufficiently for him to give up his freedom.

He met Mary one afternoon at his house when she had come to visit his sister Niki. Mary in no way resembled the slightly-built child he remembered from the sixth grade of the local primary school. She had become a tall, slim, perfectly proportioned young woman with a pretty face. The only thing that brought to memory the cheerful young girl of the past was her long, carefully-groomed red hair that had always been her trademark characteristic.

In the beginning Mary did not take much notice of the young man’s discreet approaches. Later though, influenced by repeated compliments voiced about him by several girls who had set their sights on him, she started noticing him, finding him to be very much to her liking. In two months they were in a relationship and Anesti, who had fallen in love with her, felt he was walking on air. Mary, it was true, didn’t feel the same way for Anesti. She found him interesting, she liked him, she was flattered by his choosing her from among so many rivals who wanted to lay claim to him, but that was as far as her sentiments for him went.

The next month Anesti asked her father for Mary’s hand. The pharmacist replied that Mary would have to finish high school first, but the young man was impatient. He tried to impress on her father that his daughter would not need any qualifications as she would become his wife and the mother of his children. He did not want Mary to work and if in the future she were to become bored at home, she could occupy herself at his office which was not short of architectural assignments for houses and shops. But Mary, even though she was a very bright student, wanted to get married to escape the restrictions of life at home. She would be able to go out with her husband whenever she wanted, to stay out late in clubs, to travel and to run her house the way she wanted to as its only mistress. Her mother, her ally, had two more daughters to marry off and considered Anesti to be a godsend present for their family because he didn’t demand a dowry. Their finances were unable to allow them to live well and at the same time to provide money and homes for all three daughters, according to the social custom. The pharmacy provided for their needs, but left no room for savings, let alone any investment in property. The help that they received from their sister-in-law was for exclusive use by Penelope for her personal needs and she selfishly did not share this money with anyone else.

Despite her mother’s logic and Mary’s own wishes, the pharmacist’s inflexible resolve for his daughter to finish high school, and then to do whatever she wanted, prevailed. Anesti gave in. He wanted to have good relations with his future in-laws, and, in any case, the waiting period was limited to just a few months. The two families agreed to keep the engagement secret in order to avoid problems for Mary at school. The engaged couple limited their meetings to visits to relatives’ homes and no one suspected that there was anything more than mere friendship between them. The young architect satisfied himself with a few snatched kisses and Mary’s lack of experience and her innocence thrilled him. He was not in a hurry to possess her. In a little while she would belong to him, would be his wife and he would have the opportunity to teach her, step by step, everything that she did not know in the sexual sphere, a prospect that built up sweet anticipation in him.

In the meantime the other hopefuls did not give up their dreams since they were unaware of Anesti’s commitment to Mary. Without their mothers’ knowing they phoned him, offering to meet him. It was plain that they wanted to use their physical charms to tempt him and to make him see them differently, with the prospect of their becoming a permanent fixture at his side as his wife. Anesti was a male and was not about to reject the voluntarily offered fruit brought before him. When the village shops closed at lunchtime and all their fellow citizens went home to eat and to have their siesta he remained behind at his office after telling his staff to leave. He would leave the door unlocked and wait. Taking a hundred precautions, each of the young women would slip into his office and from there it would be ‘Showtime’. After two or three trite exchanges of conversation Anesti would make his move. He was surprised by the fact that the girls’ reactions were all the same, as if they had agreed on a common game plan. “Don’t Anesti! I haven’t been with anyone before. All I’ve had was an innocent flirtation before now!” and other similar phrases to convince him of the attraction of their virginity. Anesti saw things from a different angle, so much from their willingness to submit, as from the experience he discerned from their behaviour. Two out of four visitors may not have “gone all the way” but they were supremely familiar with everything else in the repertoire of sexual acts. The other two, from the first half hour, and after receiving the exciting caresses of the experienced man, gave themselves without resistance and begged for him not to pull out. Their screams of passion were so loud that Anesti, to avoid getting into trouble, had to seal their mouths with his hand for their cries not be heard by a neighbour or a passer-by outside.