“CAPTAIN”, tratto da “Chat-Line”

Ever since he was a little boy, Manolis Lagoudes had had just one ambition – to wear a uniform. But life had decided otherwise. Family circumstance had prevented him from attending the military academy and he had studied at secondary school with only modest success. His brother had all the advantages, and was now an assistant manager at a small dairy product factory not far from Kavala.

 

After a humiliating apprenticeship, and without ever passing the accountancy exams his father expected as a mark of social acceptability, Manolis was now working in his uncle’s export company. He had learned English, or at least the sloppy surrogate of the language that enables merchants the world over to discuss invoices and terms of delivery. In Greece, it’s fairly unusual for people to know foreign languages. But Manolis had never renounced his cult of the uniform. He had begun to purchase specialist journals and had taken out a subscription to an American magazine that arrived every month. He had even invested a sum that would have stretched the budget of a successful professional to purchase in instalments "The Great Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Uniforms", in which leading experts in military history presented the uniforms of Europe’s most famous military forces. But ever since his uncle had had an attack of "we must get up to date"-itis and had given in to his secretary’s entreaties to get an internet link, Manolis had discovered a universe beyond his wildest dreams.

 

He would stay behind in the office after work, masquerading his passion with a commitment to the job he had never actually possessed. "Papers to sort" was the excuse with which he appropriated both his employer’s admiration and the sublime thrill of transgression. He would wait until everyone else had left – his uncle lived about ten kilometres away and was unlikely to come back later to check – and then boot up the computer without switching on the lights in case he could be seen from the street.

 

On the chat program, Manolis had created his own plausibly named channel - #uniform. But he had a long, long wait, and had inevitably fallen asleep in front of the screen after two hours of fruitless wanderings along the intricate ramifications of the web, before he had any takers.

 

Then it came. The faint ring of the virtual doorbell woke him from his dream of a field carpeted with butterflies rising into the air when he clapped his hands, and a huge bridge in the background. At last someone, or rather one – just one – of the hundreds of millions of individuals who populate the over ten thousand Ircnet channels, was calling him.

 

Manolis reacted with the anxiousness to please and indecent servility of a restaurant owner greeting his first customer for weeks. His soldierly nickname shone out like a beacon in the screenglow-soiled night.

 

Captain: halloooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! come in, my soldier….

 

Naturally, he would have to get into character. So his greeting to the visitor, whose age, sex, domicile and origin were as yet unknown to him, was informed by a military savoir faire that even the junta colonels would have found exaggerated. Manolis had selected the title of Captain as his chat nickname, even though he had been rejected for military service on medical grounds. The atmosphere he wanted to create was that of the official receptions he used to listen to his grandfather describing. Before he died, the old man would tell him about banquets and formal dinners in Athens. The inflexible etiquette demanded that the highest ranking officers endure the torment of mercilessly tailored uniforms and stiff collars that cut into the underside of the jaw. At dawn, after the dancing and the incessantly emphatic speeches portending darkly dramatic decisions, the officers were expected still to have both their military bearing and the freshness of a newly blossomed flower. For many war-hardened generals, those evenings were the most heroically endured moments of their military careers.

 

The interlocutor had an odd nick – Tiger, a code name that hinted to Captain at clandestinity and secret missions. Disappointingly, Tiger was just a teenage basketball fan from Manhattan who supported the Chicago Bulls and collected the T-shirts and uniforms of his favourite players.

 

Tiger: u wanna trade basket champion’s tshirts and uniforms?

 

And he reeled off the latest news about Michael Jordan, 196 cm, coloured, guard, the undisputed number one player in the world, thirty thousand points in the NBA, twelve invitations to All Star Games, and eight times the League’s top scorer. He told Captain about the slightly unconventional tastes of Dennis Rodman, 203 cm, power forward, a strange-looking individual with the habit of dying his hair a different colour for every game, tattooed from his head to the soles of his feet. And then about the great, great Scottie Pippen, 200 cm, small forward, an unshakeable pillar of the squad whose generosity had earned him the eternal, undying gratitude of all Bulls fans. Tiger even offered to send him his photo collection so that Captain could admire the audacious chromatic excesses of Rodman’s hairdresser.

 

Captain could hardly believe how idiotic the request was. He wondered whether he had failed to understand the teenage jargon but finally realised Tiger's misapprehension. He was overcome by a pressing desire to kick the basketfall fan in the groin with a Hungarian hussar’s riding boot.

 

But Captain controlled his impulse, not so much out of respect for his guest – he’d have been very pleased to incinerate him, along with his pedestrain, lavishly bemuscled heroes – as for two other, only apparently contradictory, reasons. First, he had still not outgrrown his initial, reverential awe of the Web, and felt obliged to behaved in a dignified, discreet fashion, as if in the presence of a higher authority. Second, he wanted to get his own back with the ingredients from one of history’s most spectacular defeats. Feverishly, he reviewed past and present campaigns, from the devastations of the goatskin-clad Attila to the modern era and the extravagant victories of Napoleon, when even the primmest of ladies sighed at the sight of a uniform, opening and closing rhythmically in welcome like shellfish before the incoming tide.

 

His thoughts moved onto to Cyprus, and the struggle against the hated heathen Turks. Without the excuse of any plausible connection, he considered subjecting Tiger to the enemy’s tribal marriage rite. His grandfather had told him – and as he stifled a yawn, it seemed to have all happened in a time that had nothing to do with the here and now – about a new year’s party at the officers’ mess. But when, how or where was lost in the uncertainty of a nostalgia that mingled half-remembered stories with personal conjecture. The old man had told him (Manolis was prepared to swear) of a lamb that had been brought into the room shortly before midnight, and two uniformed servants in the train of the most exuberant marshal in the history of Greece since Alexander the Great. Although one of the ladies remembered the pagan nature of the Turkish ceremony to propitiate nuptials, no one could resist the temptation to cut the animal’s throat in the middle of the glittering room. Every officer – soldier and man, or man and soldier, without knowing which came first and which second – crowded into a circle round the executioners, one holding the legs and one offering the neck to the blade for a clean, elegant killing. All burst into smiles as the scarlet flowed, then extended a finger to dip it into the dying beast’s artery and moisten their foreheads. An hour later, the party was an orgy of blood, a whirl of red masks embracing and kissing each other with wishes for the new year, prosperity, love and good resolutions, as the first of January announced itself in the pale light of an unusually warm dawn.

 

Captain struggled to find the right words but it was more than he could do to translate his burning anger into English. Then after a few expressions which he hoped were particularly offensive, ransacking his store of internet slang, he launched into an attack of lavatorial fervour. Not coded insults, but the robust invective of a Piraeus sailor, going on in capital letters for three four five lines before he realised that Tiger was no longer there.

 

The internaut's face was glistening with perspiration. He rested his forehead on the monitor more out of exhaustion than anger, and the blue-tinged light glowed brighter where the drops of sweat lingered, making his words shimmer in an aura of abrupt misgiving.

 

Shut in his ever angrier self-obsession, he wondered what possessed him to risk having to face an emotionally disturbed colossus with dyed hair. What an idiot! Him and all the others created in the likeness of the mad divinity he represented!

 

Manolis was so exhausted that he nearly failed to notice there was a new visitor. Ladywow made a much better impression than her rather vulgar nick. Another American, this time from Ohio. She told him straight away she hoped she had found what she had spent a long time looking for. She adored all things military, the ceremony and the uniforms, and since she started surfing the web – she didn’t say so but they way she tapped the keys revealed a very professional touch – she still hadn’t found anyone with whom to share her noble passion. Implicit in the introduction was the weight of an unasked question that Manolis’ enthusiasm would soon answer. This was the place, all right. A safe haven that would defend her, its garrison deployed against the feeble-minded fatuity of the web.

 

Ladywow: r u a soldier urself?…. really?

 

Sure thing, Captain was a soldier! And to corroborate the rank whose prestige must be above suspicion, he explained that he was a hussar, a light cavalryman fashioned by Europe’s most exclusive military academy. He was a linguist, too, because they didn’t just study strategy there. Ancient history. Literature. Consultancy work and conferences were his daily bread. Lady Luck, which a short time before appeared to have turned her back on him, now enticed him with a conversation more intense than he could have hoped for.

 

Ladywow: a hussar u said?

 

Captain: sure… i can explain to u where this name comes from

 

So Ladywow had to pretend to be interested to know that the name comes from German husar and from the Hungarian huszár, which orignates from the Serbo-Croat gusar or husar, meaning “thief”, and is in turn derived from mediaeval Greek chosários, or “corsair”, formed from the decidedly vulgar Latin cursarius. One would tend to imagine a sort of privateer and in the beginning – that is, well before the aristocratic associations the word now inspires had accrued – the predecessors of the noble hussars were actually mere bandits who lived degenerate lives of plundering and highway robbery.

 

Carried along by the flow of his story, Manolis told a story that the quagmire of his obsession had fossilised long ago, punctuating the words with the classic JJJJ smiley emoticon. He got right into the feel of things by breaking off the conversation for a few seconds, rooting through the downstairs cupboard, taking off his suede slip-ons and hauling on a pair of military-style boots that were hidden away like the improbable relic of a saint.

 

You see, for example – he continued, now back at his desk – a hussar always wears his uniform because no fashion threads or formal clothes can match the social cachet of his uniform and boots.

 

Captain: see, if u wanna be a real soldier, the uniform must become part of your body…. u’ve to wear it anytime, anywhere, in any season….

 

With the help of his encyclopaedia, open at an illustration of a hussar officer, Manolis carefully described what he has never actually worn. He even told her about the shape and size of the buttons, one of which he pretended to be ceremoniously restoring to the confining custody of the buttonhole it had slipped out of.

 

Ladywow seemed genuinely impressed. But she went no further than to make an ambivalent expression of sentiment that Captain interpreted as adulatory in the extreme. The conversation was thus transformed into an obsessive monologue, interrupted now and then by barely hinted-at noises of assent, in evanescent, line-long repetitions of a single letter.

 

Ladywow: mmmmmmmmmmmmm

 

In a delirium of excitement, intensified by the pale light of the new day, Manolis tapped out typos and historical nonsense, confusing long-forgotten battles with Saddam Hussein’s chemical warfare in the Gulf, the mounted warriors in the Heroes’ Square in Budapest – whose names he mentally recited in quick succession: Árpád Álmos Elôd Ond Kund Tas Huba Töhötöm – with Napoleon’s generals, or US marine camouflage jackets and the anonymous overalls of the former Yugoslavian army with the stiff fez of Italy’s fascist militia. He failed to notice that Ladywow had said nothing for ten minutes, drowned out by the welter of war-inspired whimsy.

 

Manolis wondered why, and for the first time asked himself who his interlocutor was and what it was she wanted.

 

Captain: milady?…. are you still there?

 

Ladywow: stop talking…. fuck me u bastard…. i always wanted to be screwed by a general…. talk nasty to me like to ur soldiers.…

 

Feverishly, Manolis consulted his dictionary but there are some words that are not included in his standard school reference work. In any case, it didn’t take him long to figure out her meaning – an invitation to fornicate, in which his uniform would merely be an accessory to a squalid scene from a red-light film. The dirty talk that Ladywow – he could see now that the nick was very appropriate – was demanding left Captain flabbergasted. It was a sort of anti-morality, entreating him to humour the shameless sensuality of a middle-aged housewife (?) from the other side of the world and betray his chivalry towards women, abjuring the dignity of the mission represented by his impeccably pressed uniform.

 

Could it be true? Was there only trash and triviality in this machine that could hold the world, only whining teenagers false prophets with fuchsia hair and appalling women with souls as dead as a juggernaut, that week after week is loaded, emptied and reloaded with meaningless merchandise? Could it really be true that grandfather’s day was gone forever and that his formal dinner dances had slipped from memory into folklore?

 

Manolis stared in disbelief at the lines on the screen. He looked at the words as if he was seeing a hostile message on a notice. Everything was unbearably ugly, including the new day that was peeking in through the room’s rough curtains. Then he broke off. He wrote nothing more, left the chatroom and switched off the computer without realising that the woman had already gone, showering him with insults to which his shock had made him immune.

 

In less than three hours, he'd have to be back sitting at the same desk, in the same smoke-reeking room, looking at the same computer screen which he only wanted to have fun with but which instead had made fun of him.

 

More than anything else, he felt a sense of emptiness, of irredeemable wickedness, weighing him down. The final defeat that quenches even a great man's spirit.

 

"I'm unhappy", he mused distractedly as he slipped the nylon cover over the monitor, as he had seen the secretary do each evening. But then he cheered up at the realisation that he hadn't eaten for many hours, putting the depression down to his long-suffering empty stomach.

 

He went outside. At that early hour, the streets of the provincial Greek town were deserted. But at the end of the alley that skirted the company yard, Manolis saw a man sweeping the pavement. He recognised him vaguely as a near-destitute who did occasional odd labouring jobs for the local authorities or anyone else who would pay him. Manolis made his way towards the solitary figure - the man had his back to him and was working with a concentration worthy of a higher task - keeping his eyes fixed on the cobblestones. He realised he was still wearing the greased and polished footwear of an anonymous cavalryman. So he took a deep breath, as if invoking a silence he would like to be absolute. Not the merest heartbeat or the faintest squeak of his boots.

 

All that could be heard was the swish of the sweeping brush, becoming louder the nearer he approached, as if he were in a film.

 

As he lashed out his first kick, he had a feeling of difficulty. The street-sweeper, who had neither seen nor heard him, pitched forward, turning a somersault in the violence of the impact before falling on one side.

 

Then it all got easier. There was an enthusiasm in his efforts. A certain joie de vivre. The thrill of a lightning war won with the weapon of surprise. The boots hammered home to the same rhythm Manolis applied to the keys a short time before, the toe pounding into stomach groin face face face face …. especially the face …. (wasn't it an echo of his grandfather's old story about the lamb that had its throat slit?), until the workman (or perhaps he could simply call him "an old man"?) lay motionless under the daylight that had scarcely begun.

 

Manolis was sweating. Battle is first and foremost fatigue. The thrill of seeing the enemy's scattered limbs. A sense of the sacred. The devastation of the body.

 

He passed the sleeve of his jacket across his forehead, looked around, and walked on for a few blocks.

 

His car was always parked some way away from the office but if anyone were to ask him why, not even he would know the answer.