Why I Killed My Best Friend (18 page)

“Anna, can I talk to you for a second?”

“What is it?”

“Why did you hang this here? You always hated it.”

“I don't hate it. It's grown on me over time.”

“Then why did you put it in the bathroom? To humiliate me?”

“Oh, that's right, works of art belong in the living room, over the sofa. Maria, I don't even recognize you anymore! The bathroom was always our favorite room.”

Yes, it was, back before you betrayed me. When I could still undress in front of you. Literally and metaphorically.

We chew discretely, silverware barely clinking. Aristomenis—Menis, Anna calls him—laughs loudly and deeply, as if he were gargling. I'd like to be able to call him a stuffed shirt with no personality, I'd like to find some flaw. But I can't, apart from all the wealth he's accumulated, and Anna has cast even that in a revolutionary light. As for his stuffed tomatoes, they're excellent, with parsley and raisins in the stuffing.

“I soaked them in wine first. Are they too soft?”

“They're perfect.”

“Well, then, eat up. Why are you two looking at me like that?”

Probably because you're a rare bird, as men go. You're the man Anna always dreamed of, since grade school, though deep down she always thought you didn't exist. You cook, you garden, you fill the house with the smell of pipe smoke, a smell she adores. As an architect you support her and shelter her, literally: you've built a sturdy house, one that has quelled her fear of earthquakes. I'm sure you could care less about soccer, don't tell cheap jokes, don't look down on minorities, don't ask her why she's late, where she's been. You don't have a beer belly, and you seem to take no pride in your wealth. You're considerate to her friends. You were once very handsome, but your looks have faded a bit, just enough for her to feel safe with you. You're distinguished but unconventional. You don't puff yourself up, but you do believe in yourself. You also believe in a theory—an entirely irrational one, in my opinion. What matters, though, is that you believe, and that you've swept
her up in that belief, so that she's finally able to reinvent herself. In short, you're a man made for Anna.

At night, Kifisias Avenue looks like an amusement park under construction. Mountains of cement, detours, floodlights illuminating the road works. Bulldozers parked on the shoulder, enormous billboards advertising the performances of pop singers at clubs on the coast—and in the background, Malouhos's glass buildings. A surreal landscape. Like a Dali painting.

“You find our theory perverse, don't you?”

“What can I say? It's a theory,” I answer. Over dinner we locked horns a few times, though politely. I told them their ideas struck me as a patchwork of beliefs adopted by two people who were deeply bored.

“Molotov cocktails, marches, human shields—I've done all that, Maria. I'm too old for that now. Besides, we're living in the heart of the capitalist system. If we want to see results, we have to fight from the inside. We have to fight as actors on the stage of reality.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that human relationships are now based on inequality, on competition and work. Communication is bought and sold. The city has become a factory.”

“And you're the factory boss, the industrialist par excellence.”

“Isn't it important for the industrialist to have an awareness of the situation? To not get mad when some group of anarchists smashes his car?”

“First of all, anarchists don't smash cars. What you're saying sounds like Bakunin to me, with a sprinkling of the nightly news. Anarchists have contributed a lot less to the violence of this world than nationalists, socialists, monarchists, fascists, and conservatives, not to mention organized crime. Anarchists never had a Robespierre, or a Stalin, or a Pol Pot.” I smile to myself in the dark. It's
like one of our Direct Action meetings from years ago; I sound like Camus.

“But they did have a poetics of destruction. They had Nechayev. Do you remember what Kropotkin said? ‘I hate these explosions, but I cannot condemn the hopeless.'”

“At any rate, we're not going to rewrite history on Kifisias Avenue.”

“Let me put it another way: if you build nice, human offices, it means you believe in the value of labor. If you put people in a space where they'll feel and act like sheep, you've got greater chances of provoking some kind of response.”

“Of course, self-destructing capitalism! Just what the Marxists said, after the war.”

“What I'm talking about isn't Marxist. It's straight out of Proudhon: ‘
Destruam ut aedificabo
.'”

“Can you explain that for us commoners who don't know Latin?”

“ ‘I destroy in order to build.' ”

“You know what I see in what you're saying? The people of Athens as guinea pigs. It's not enough that there isn't a decent sidewalk in the whole city, you go and shut them up in aquariums, too. You turn them into fish. And then you expect those fish to sing the anthem of a new revolution!”

“They've been promised Europe, right? And Europe has been brought to their doorstep. A semblance, of course, no one's actually importing the Eiffel Tower. French cheeses, clothes, ethnic restaurants, a false tolerance. At first it's all well and good. You take a number at the bank, you don't have to push and shove anymore. You conserve energy. And why? So that you can work even harder. You buy a car on monthly installments. Then a second car, again on monthly installments. You buy a television with Dolby surround sound, the whole house quakes as you watch the war in Yugoslavia,
or a dozen people with handkerchiefs over their faces overturning cars and setting them on fire. You curse them. You're afraid they might set your car on fire, too. You keep working like a slave, buy a weekend home. You pile the whole family into your new car. You're looking for some kind of asylum, a pseudo-retreat, far from wars and banks. But there's so much traffic that you can't just zip down the highway to get there. You curse, pass, weave, practically get yourself killed. You're with me so far?”

We've gotten stuck, too, in the nighttime traffic on Kifisias, directly across from one of his buildings. A line of turtles, impatient turtles with turn signals and horns.

“I don't see where you're headed with this,” I say.

Aristomenis combs his eyebrows with his fingers, as if it were actual hair.

“If you live that way for ten, fifteen years, what do you think will happen?”

“You'll have a few accidents? They'll raise your insurance premium? You'll start to have panic attacks. Get a divorce. Retire. Fly into a rage if someone dents your car. Have you ever seen an old man cursing to high heaven over a scratch on his car? He's got one foot in the grave and he's hoping against hope that he'll die first, so he won't have to witness the demise of his beloved car.”

“I'm not talking about my generation, Maria. I'm talking about kids in their twenties. Where will they be in ten years?”

“Up there.” I point to the top floor of his building. “I know those kids well. Most of them dream whatever dreams their parents told them to. A masters degree, a good job working for the European Union, lots of money. They're just kids, and you know what they're most afraid of? Unemployment.”

“No, they'll get tired of being afraid. They've got brains, and they're already bored. Sooner or later they'll reach the limits of
that situation. And the situation is already starting to reach its own limits. In five, ten years at the most, everything's going to burn.”

“That's what you want? For everything to burn? Who are you, Nero?”

“What interests me is rage. Resistance. I want people to understand deep in their bones precisely how this system of exploitation functions. Only then will they go out and start to smash things. You know what really sets our era apart? The utter delegitimization of the state.”

“Education isn't going to set people free, it's freedom that will educate them. You're going about it backwards. Revolution isn't something to be organized by the chosen few.”

“Who said anything about the chosen few?”

“You did! You're talking as if you were the secretary general of the executive committee for the coming revolution.”

“I won't try to convince you.”

“No, convince me. Try. Convince me!”

Aristomenis sighs. He drums his fingers on the leather steering wheel.

“Where should I begin?”

“From the beginning.”

In the beginning, then, were the mountains of Epirus, blanketed in untouched snow. In the beginning was a simple, honest life. A barter economy, spontaneous regional cooperatives, an anarchic utopia regulated by human need: I'll trade you my eggs for your wine, that sort of thing. When he was fifteen he left for Athens, went to live with his bookseller uncle. He was happy to have traded the open horizon for a top-floor apartment in Pangrati. School during the day, afternoons at the bookstore. In the evenings he would go up onto the roof and look down at Athens unfolding beneath him in a sheet of grayish white, like snow that's melted under the
wheels of a truck. The apartment buildings that had sprung up all over the city seemed to him like so many bumps on a person's head. He wanted to make bumps, too. He was fascinated by how a life can take shape around a lighted window, a window constructed to embody that life and to project it out toward the horizon. In a book about architecture he came across some strange houses with low concrete roofs. The architect's name was Frank Lloyd Wright.

The first things you read that really influence you can create a kind of metaphysical obstinacy: you keep trying to prove that your life has something in common with the life of a person you admire. So what did Aristomenis and Frank Lloyd Wright have in common? Their love of nature, of harmony, of simplicity—their admiration of a snail's shell. The daydreaming, the shared ideal of a decentralized city. Their indifference to money and material things. Their persistence, their single-mindedness, their ability to commit landscapes to memory. The idea that decoration is simply emphasized form, and that form and function are one. And also, as it later turned out, their chaotic, tragic personal lives. Of course if you begin with this notion of convergence, sometimes you actually shape your life, even unconsciously, to accord with that of your idol: in response to Wright's religious beliefs, Aristomenis developed a confused metaphysics of the natural order of things. In response to Wright's undisguised arrogance, he developed an equally undisguised imitation of arrogance.

He got his undergraduate degree from the architecture department at the University of Athens, then went to Paris on a scholarship from the Institut Français. At the height of May 1968 he got involved with the situationists and abandoned his master's thesis in the middle—“work” was practically a curse word, a blight brought by consumer culture. He got used to committing acts of vandalism and sabotage, the only legitimate responses to the society of the spectacle. He took the slogan “free your passions” literally and
discovered the joys of sex. At the end of that amazing period he felt poor and deeply alone. He spent his days drinking and drawing his own versions of Piranesi's fantastic prisons. A phrase from the committee for the occupation of the Sorbonne—
Humanity won't be happy till the last bureaucrat is hung with the guts of the last capitalist
—sent him back once more to the source. How had Frank Lloyd Wright put it?
Bureaucrats: they are dead at 30 and buried at 60
. And how else?
Democracy is the opposite of totalitarianism, communism, fascism, or mobocracy
. How else, again?
Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of better architecture
. That was it, the idea of architecture as a saving grace, as ideology and political essence. Aristomenis set to work, struggling to balance his romantic nature with concrete action. On the one hand was Pamela Reed's theory of self-transcendence and the Goodman brothers' “communitas”—an intellectual return to the villages of Epirus, to a society in which production isn't divorced from consumption. On the other was the slanted drafting table where buildings took shape at a feverish pace, combining form and function.

His personal life was chaos. His first wife left him for a right-wing French politician. His second was an eccentric, final-stage anorexic who might as well have used their fridge as an umbrella stand. He was so wrapped up in his work that he didn't realize how bad things were until a few weeks before her death. He fell into a deep depression. Then he started to work even harder than before. The only kind of woman he wouldn't drive insane was one with whom he could share his ideas. At the house of a friend of his, a professor, he sometimes ran into the professor's daughter: a young woman who spoke in quotes, who slammed doors and went bright red with rage. Startlingly beautiful, with a dimple in her chin and one half-white eyebrow. The professor died and the daughter fell apart, revealing in the process her inner beauty, another landscape for Aristomenis to commit to memory. After all, that was where
his talent lay: after a visit or two to a site he could imagine the ultimate result, the building that didn't yet exist, the building he would create.