Valia fell into a foul mood for weeks, disappointed, angry, scowling: Achilles had ruined the Asproyerakas family—and they hadn’t been a great clan to begin with. When she and Lucky went for walks down along the bay, she preferred not to speak about what happened at the Achillion. A sunset glow sputtered from the long thin clouds suspended over the harbour, and the cliffs of the northern shore, vividly outlined, were revealed as from the fists of a giant.

7.

Business disappeared at the cafe. The booths were empty. Achilles was disgraced. Only one customer the morning after Penny and Valia and Lucky left. There were few sounds gloomier, to Achilles, than the echo of a dry cough in an empty shop. He used his free time to cook his favourite dishes for himself: savoro, and beef stifado bulked up with prunes, and in the morning he made patsas, which he scrupulously prepared, removing every speck of waste from the tripe. People said you couldn’t taste the shit, even if a little went into the soup, but Achilles always could.

He was both superstitious and religious but observed the rituals and dogma of superstition more frequently than he did religion. The basis of any particular superstition, in his case, could be highly idiosyncratic, incongruent with any Greek canon of irrational beliefs: he believed that monkeys brought bad luck, for example, and that even to lay eyes on a picture of this animal might result in bad fortune or illness to you or someone in your home. With vivid enthusiasm, his mother once told him that monkeys were unlucky and he found this wisdom as portable as a recipe. He couldn’t leave his mother’s notion behind in Ithaka, where no one shared the opinion. He wasn’t surprised to learn that King Alexander of Greece died of a macaque bite in 1920.

Superstition haunted you like the dead, and as a natural part of this discourse the monkey became extra-animal, supernatural, spectral, powerful, familial. Superstition was the dead talking to you.