Of Bad Luck, Jinx, and Evil Eye

 

Of Bad Luck, Jinx, and Evil Eye

As he lays down at the couch he lifts the cross off his chest and kisses it. Again and again. “You know she would be 42 years by now. In August she would turn 43”. It was typical of him to keep up a mental calendar of all the dates. How old she would be by now, how many years, days and even hours had passed since the time of the fateful accident that took the life of his oldest daughter. Her cross is the closest thing to her he could still hold. In a sense, it’s her.  “I would be a grandpa by now ….. she was so beautiful” he says while rubbing softly the cross in his fingertips …. “You know she would love you very much” he continued tapping softly my hand and a cloud of darkness descends on him as he recalls the gruesome details of her passing and her funeral.

“The most cursed day of the year”, wrote an article on a Greek news paper “If bad luck follows you, you are jinxed, you should be aware of this date because anything bad that could happen it will today, the 8th of August of 1988”, a bold prediction I recalled in an instant once my husband mentioned the accident and the day of her passing, almost a year later. The article was not far from wrong. His life would be marked by sad and fateful events, untimely deaths and tragedies from the moment he was born. An unlucky person indeed.

My husband’s family comes from a small island in Greece, Zakinthos, from his mother’s side of the family and from Greeks of Pontos, today under Turkey’s occupancy, who escaped the genocide by the Turkish Ottomans in 1942.  His mother lived in a very close knit family where chastity of woman and work ethics of men were the most important values one could have. Life in the village was hard, a harsh farm life that was not exposed yet to automation or today’s tourism which in many ways assures an easy way of providing. His father, the son of Greek immigrants to Egypt and then Greek refugees to their own birthplace, was used to moving around and finding odd jobs to survive without keeping a trade that would support a family, while finding comfort on various ladies’ arms was a usual occupancy.  He was young and handsome and it was love at first site for her, an unforgivable mistake by her family and a way of means for him. The dowry was plenty but having being accustomed to a philander way of life it would not be sufficient for much long after their wedding. As the hard farm life could never suit him, and his wife’s brothers realized he had no intentions or capacity to fit in, once married, they moved to a suburb of Athens where a small piece of land was purchased later by his mother’s savings and whatever was left from the dowery.

The rumors have it that his mother was forced to hard work cleaning houses, even while pregnant to both her children, my husband and his older sister by two years, while her husband would be an absentee for many days even weeks at a time. She was left to make ends meet  and fell into deeper depression as the time went by until her life was of no importance to her any more, and her pain unbearable.  At the delicate age of a year and a half my husband, with his sister by his side, witnessed his mother taking her own life by hanging herself from a ceiling post of the house. There she would remain, with her two children reaching for her legs and dress crying for her to come down, until a neighbor realized she hadn’t seen her for a while. “She left us …. How could she do that to her own children? Didn’t she think what would happen to us? Why she didn’t care?” Questions that my husband will ponder from time to time not being able to comprehend her action knowing how much his children mean to him, how he would never leave them unless God had wished it.  His father claimed that she suffered from epileptic seizures and because during one of the episodes she almost killed the baby, my husband, with a knife she was holding, a thought she could not bear and so she took her own life. Not that anyone ever believed him. People talked of bad luck, of a curse and of evil eye that had targeted the family from the moment they left the island.

Without the mother to support the family his father gave away the children to the care of a distant relative of his on the mainland, but once he dropped off the children he never showed up to see them or give the support money he had promised to them.  Both children being still little they could not understand what had happened, they did not know these new people and were crying for their mother. The new relatives having no patience or compassion treated them with cruelty, punishing them for the smallest thing by making them sit on a hot stove and depriving them of food, among other things, most of which my husband did not fully remember but were related to him much later in his life. It was a few years before his mother’s family found out of their treatment and went to claim them, take them back to the island promising to give them a better life. But that while true for a while, did not last for too long.

By his sixth year of age, one of his uncles with a lot of land and a big animal farm realized he could use him for free labor and took him in his house where his abuse continued for the next 8 years. “I was made to wear the same boots for years until they could no longer hold my bend toes and broke open. Before I went to school in the morning I had to first go and milk the cows, feed them and then go to school in the same clothes and boots that were still dripping of cow manure but I had no choice. It was either that or go barefoot. When I came back from school without any break for food I had to go cut more grass for the cows, pull up water with the sickle from the well and water and feed the horses. My dinner most of the times was a single hard-boiled egg, that my grand mother had hidden for me, and bread dipped in condensed milk. She looked out for me as much as she could, but my uncle did not provide for much, food or anything else except beatings. My grandma would yell at him to go hit his own children and not the orphan and she would try and hide me when I was in trouble, which seemed to be very often.  Homework was never done and I hardly finished sixth grade with a grade marked “Almost good” (something equivalent to Passing) only because my teacher was feeling sorry for me”.

During his years on the island many times he would be the scapegoat for his cousins’ mischiefs, the one to point the finger at, the orphan that no-one would come to support or help out when he was in trouble.  He remembers an incident that has scarred him the most when one of his cousins stole a very expensive lighter. They were playing close to the local coffee shop, where older people would go to smoke, play chess and checkers and gossip about the latest doings of their neighbors. The man went to his uncle who gathered all the children together to search their pockets for the lighter. “My uncle found the lighter in his son’s pocket grabbed it and continued pretending to still look for it until he came to me. After he dipped his hand in my pocket he yelled “Here it is!! We found the thief! He is the one that stole it.” He was called a thief in front of everyone, a good for nothing, a trump with no future ahead and someone none should trust to be around - just like his father… He was warned not to say a word or else ..… and he knew nobody would believe him even if he stood up to defend his innocence. All alone, with nobody to hug him for comfort, with nobody to soften the pain from the belt or from the punishment when he would fall asleep from exhaustion and didn’t get to finish his chores, with nobody to tuck him in and kiss him goodnight.

At 14 he decided he have had enough. He was watching for years the ships that anchored on the island and the dream he was building, to run away one day to a far away land where life might be easier, had come to fruition. With the help of an other uncle who favored him, he easily got fake papers due to his big stature, and got hired by one of the commercial ships with international routes. He worked as a novice doing odd jobs on the ship until he was 17 when he “jumped off the boat” to Texas to find a relative he knew of to work for. With one set of clothes that he washed at night to wear again in the morning he worked without any complaints doing anything he was asked for. It wasn’t a lot of money but enough to get by.  Needless to say, he was taken advantage one more time, where a whole month’s salary was stollen because of one minor mistake that he had to “pay” for it. In the meantime one of his first cousins had moved to New York from the island and helped him find a job in a parking garage where he worked 12 hour shifts and he started saving little by little. That is when he met his first wife, citizenship being a secondary focus, and at 21 he had already a daughter he did not intend, but honored and celebrated her coming, and adored her from the moment he laid eyes on her.  With the birth of his second daughter five years later he pushed himself to work longer hours with 18 and 20 hours shifts and he was able to buy a house of his own. 

My husband is by nature a forgiving person, despite all he endeavored, kind hearted, and funny, a trait that comes out when he is not thinking of all his misfortunes. In 1978 he decided to find his father who had deserted him as an infant and bring him into his life. He travelled to Greece and found out he had two half brothers that not only they knew nothing about him or his sister but not even of their existence. From the beginning he formed a bond with them and specially with the youngest one, who he became very fond of.  They kept contact and spoke on the phone very often. In 1987 the last call he received from Greece was not from his brother but about him. His father in tears barely being able to speak on the other side of the line had just told him that his younger brother had lost his life in a motorcycle accident. The guilt almost whore him down thinking that he somehow he gave him bad luck by bringing him into his life  and he volunteered to pay for all the expenses for the brother he had come to love so much. Little did he know that less than a year later he would make another trip to Greece building one more grave for his own flesh and blood. This would be a family grave, so in time he would lay next to his daughter for eternity.

The phone rang again and on the other side of the line there was no voice. He stood frozen as he could hear only crying and broken words that made no sense, and right away he knew. He knew he should have never left her out of his sight. He knew he was the only one that could keep her safe as he had done many times in that past that almost cost her life. “The evil eye is upon my daughter” he had said believing that people were envious of what he had managed to achieve in only a few years.  In a tragic moment at around 1:30 in the morning of the 8th of August, his wife and her sister with his two daughters who had recently arrived for vacation in Greece, decided to cross a very dangerous intersection in the commercial center of Athens. An intoxicated driver with his lights off traveling at over 80 miles per hour took the life of his first daughter and her aunt. Screams came out of his frozen lips and the next thing he knew was being in the street outside of the house screaming.  This time he could not forgive, he could not be kind to the one person that was supposed to protect his child with her own life, his wife.

Their separation was almost immediate following bitter arguments, a lot of bickering, police involvement and the family court where they finalized their divorce in the summer of 1989.  I had just met him a little earlier, following the invitation of a friend who worked on the same floor I worked, to meet his friend who had separated with his wife, had lost his daughter, and having explained to me the whole situation .. a few times over, I accepted with great skepticism to meet him during the Easter celebration. I was not interested, considered he had an extra baggage, his 3 year old daughter then, and I was looking for some time to myself as I had my heart broken too and needed to vent and be free of bondage for a while. As things worked out, we were one thing by September and living together.

The following summer we travelled to Greece and I met his uncle who he worked for when he was little, having forgiven him, since life back then was tough and in reality he did not treat his own children any better, except that my husband was sleeping in the horse carriage shed and they were sleeping in the house .. but there was no love any way so it didn’t matter to him. His grand parents were there too, ousted by the new wife to make space for her own children.  His uncle apologized for all the mistreatment and expressed his admiration for the kind of person he had become. He was very hospitable and all too proud of him as if it was his “care” the reason my husband had turned out a such a nice person. We did not see him again after that. A feud with a neighbor ended his life with two bullets on his back, of all the nights that peace should be held, the night before Easter. The coward, hidden behind his uncle’s and his own children and in the midst of a crowded gathering that celebrated the resurrection of Christ, spread death and hatred that would last for decades becoming a family feud bringing more death as the years went by.  He loved his uncle and despite all that he suffered he never held any animosity towards him so his death was another blow of pain, another link in the chain of death that surrounded him, with his father being the last in 2009 but of natural causes. He had the chance to visit his father and his new family many times, usually in the summers on vacation, and stood always by his side if he needed anything and it was a shock to him that in his will he did not leave a single item for him. Even a cheap watch would have made him happy, not for the watch but for the simple satisfaction that he was thought of, considered a son. Now, his other half brother has become another Facebook friend that is texted during holidays and birthdays and exchange wishes to one another as to be considered thoughtful, I guess.

We were lucky to have two children together along with his second daughter from his first marriage and I find many times myself secretly hoping the chain of death will not come into a circle linking past, present and future.  With my side of family deaths from cancer, I’m hoping his bad luck stopped when I met him.  Besides that’s what he claims, but I can think of a few instances where had I not been alert tragedy would have found its way again. As we sit in our living room, him laying on the couch with the cross in his hand, I think about our life together, all the ups and downs, our struggles due to his drinking from his loss and because his ex-wife would use his younger daughter as a tool for granting demands. 

    My glaze falls on all the picture frames with images of our loved ones, living and dead alike, spread out like chapters of a book.  The people we lost, are frozen in time as we grow older, all except one that has been kept alive in memory but still aging along with us. Her father kisses her good night and sighs “I lost my little girl …. I lost her to people’s jealousy .. their evil eye — Good night my love”. 

There’s no kiss back. Only the laughter he still hears of the little girl that once sat on his lap, said I love you, kissed him good night and promised never to leave his site.

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