The Popular Cinemas
Here, too, the main thing is to make a start, to overcome certain reservations. Then one becomes acclimatised and realises how much better they are than mere idle walks or those dull pastry-shops. However, it was a long time before I could make up my mind to attend one of the popular cinemas. I’d often go and roam around them, watching the people going in and spending hours devouring the photographs, when suddenly I’d think of some objection and drop the matter. Something inside me, perhaps a sense of guilt, would stop me; a feeling that I might lose face. Others are prone to this as well. I’d see it in their eyes, when we came face to face in there. Some evenings I’d make up my mind once and for all, but on reaching the Vardaris neighbourhood my feet would turn to jelly. And yet I couldn’t take the loneliness much longer. My friends had changed, become insufferable; let alone that they would disappear at night with various excuses.
Of course, we were forbidden the cinema by our catechism. We had our clubhouse, where we could spend the evening pleasantly. Whereas the others questioned this restriction, I found it easy to conform, having neither leisure nor the price of a ticket. I hadn’t been to the cinema since I was a child; I used to go alone to our neighbourhood cinema, invariably in the cheapest seats. But I suddenly stopped going after someone made an indecent gesture at me in the dark. Even today, when I sometimes go to that cinema I feel uneasy. This was perhaps the main reason for my lack of resentment at the restriction. Later I began going now and then to the first-run cinemas, but I found the crush of people intolerable. For a pleasant evening, more than a good film is necessary; one needs the right ambiance, to be able in any case to exchange a word with one’s neighbour and not receive hostile glances from sour faces every now and then. This is not to say that all popular cinemas share this atmosphere. The suburban ones are worse than the first-runs; they are generally full of children. fat women whose husbands are busy drinking in the taverns, and infuriating old ladies. It looks really desperate when the lights go on during the interval.
The genuine popular cinemas are found on the big commercial streets, near the markets and the lorry depots. Women avoid them by and large, and yet they’re full of men each morning. They’re packed on weekdays, particularly towards dusk. Then the builders, the scrap-merchants, the drivers, the petty clerks and soldiers start arriving. They can smell Out an educated man immediately; I find this most annoying. Unfortunately, it seems that a sedentary life and too much reading have stamped me indelibly. I feel a kind of reserve around me. When the film is a comedy, the mood is good and one can easily begin a conversation. Gangster films, on the other hand, with their killings and violence, rivet you to your seat, create an atmosphere of fear and suspicion. The truth is that love films provoke shouting and obscenities. I shall never forget the storm that was unleashed when I saw Louis Malle’s “Les Amants”; they went berserk.
I always carry with me a sports paper, even if I’ve already read it. As soon as the lights come back on, I pretend to be absorbed by it, because certain glances make me feel uncomfortable. Sometimes I head for the smoking room; the toilets are next door to it, their walls covered in graffiti. I lock myself in there in a panic, waiting for the lights to go down. From the spelling and the degree of degeneracy one can tell if they are the work of an educated man. The graffiti of the educated are the most vulgar and childish. I would very much like to do a survey of the graffiti of the illiterate, which are often primitive and original. At the university, the walls of the toilets are covered with imbecile political slogans.
The smoking room is crammed during the interval. I can tell most people’s line of work by their clothes, hands and faces. The majority are young, with sturdy bodies and honest faces. On an entirely different wavelength from mine; we do not share each others’ circles. Many have moustaches, which suits their dark complexion. In Europe, it is said, they shave them off. I’ve never travelled in those parts and have no wish to, but if all foreigners are like those undisciplined scarecrows who wander around Greece and spoil it, then it’s just as well. The working class is masculine, producing handsome men who quickly run to seed; hard work improves a man’s looks before crippling him. On the contrary, the middle class has the beautiful women which are its keynote and from which spring the famous hostesses and mothers. Sometimes I stare at a group of workers and wonder if they could have ever been brought up inside a middleclass household; surely their hearts too would have been scalded, they’d have been withered prematurely. But to be honest, workers envy the middle classes.
At dusk, I am happy if I have in my pocket enough cash for a ticket and a pack of cigarettes. I fear neither loneliness nor anything else. In spring and autumn, when the sky grows dark above the western ranges and I can sense a storm, I run for the cinemas as once upon a time I used to run for the air-raid shelters. Nothing can penetrate them. I emerge later to find the streets full of water and mud; one indignity less, I tell myself. These cinemas invariably run a double bill, so when I know I shall be there a long time, the first time round I concentrate on dialogue, the second time on the photography and the third time on minor details. At other times I withdraw completely into myself, and make interminable plans for an active and balanced life; it grieves me to be unable to pull out pen and paper and record them. Meanwhile my neighbours are constantly changing. I could never repeat the plots of the films I have seen, nor can I remember titles and names. At first I kept a notebook and recorded them, together with my plans and decisions. Now I hardly notice even the title of the film; it’s usually false as well. It often happens that I walk into a film I’ve seen before. I quickly start to fret, as one does over a face: I’ve seen this before, I’ve seen this before. Then I abstract myself and wait for the next film. I watch the hall, an enclosed and filthy space. I feel surprise at how used I’ve become to such dirt. When I was a child, I had walnut-leaves sprinkled on my bath-water; the water was sweetened by the iodine. There is essentially no emergency exit, a death-trap. God forbid anything should ever happen. The policeman hovers perpetually at my shoulders. From time to time there is an incident, someone gets his face slapped. Nothing to do with me. Sometimes it occurs to me that had I kept all of the ticket stubs and summed them up, I’d go out of my mind at the thought of the time and money wasted in those places. Almost a lifetime.
Translated by John Constantine Stathatos
Page(s) 11-13
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