Music is pure emotion. My father was an opera lover. A man of poor origins…He came from a mountain village. My grandmother nursed him until he was four. There was only human milk available and they made use of it to survive. Then he came to Thessaloniki, he got an education, he became a lawyer, made money. He met my mother and married her. She came from a bourgeois family in Volos. Her ancestors were land-owners, never worked a day in their life. They’d go hunting for fox, drink excessively, and then stick pistols down their throats and pull the trigger, because life was unbearable.
How those two managed to live together is a mystery. My father loathed aristocrats, my mother loathed everyone. While she was teaching me how to make words, he taught me that money has no value at all. Just as knowledge has no value, unless you know what to do with it. At nights, he would go to the living room, which was forbidden to me and my brother. He would pour himself a malt, no ice, and listen to Verdi. Nabucco, Aida… This music marked my childhood. It felt good to be a kid, growing up in that house, with this beautiful music coming from the forbidden room.
The day after the military coup by the junta, my father took me out to the main street of my town. I was four years old but I remember. The streets were empty. There were policemen in the street, no cars, nor pedestrians. Only a father and his daughter, walking hand in hand. I could sense there was danger but it was okay. I held on to him.
I do not know how or when submissiveness is born. I only know one has it or not.
Today I perhaps took my last bike ride as a free person. I was thinking that I would not miss this town if I left. It was never my own. I have no home. I have been a stranger in a strange land for the longest time. I feel lost.
That is what Nabucco means to me. I need to return where I belong.
“Je ne fais pas d’une esclave une princesse si elle ne rampe pas pour quémander ma reconnaissance.” That is what you said. The thing is I do not really need to become a princess. But I do need to return.
I have needs, yes, but I am not easy, nor am I desperate. But it would be an insult to wait any longer. I don’t think that the Jews in the desert put their God to the test, to see if he was real. Besides, we are all proven to be what we really are, sooner or later.
These are things that are felt, are known intuitively and cannot be explained. Besides, we Greeks invented madness. There is no other way to live our life meaningfully and the Greeks knew that. If this be madness, I embrace it.
And if I am to become meat to you, this is not something dirty, not what most people imagine. This is a most noble thing. For this is the only way to protect ourselves from the word. The word keeps us imprisoned. The word is at the same time our enemy and our savior. The word will save us from ourselves and will lead us back to animality. The word will bring itself down, again and again. For it is unbearable to live (only) in the word.