Yannis Mavritsakis, El chupacabras of the schoolmistress with the golden eyes
STRATIS VRANAS: I missed you, dear. You and the teacher. My sweet teacher. With all her innate grace and forceful nature. Desperately beautiful. So much beauty is almost
an insult, should be outlawed. A little less beauty would make things bearable, more understandable. The one thing that consoles me a little is the certainty that she, too, found her way to the land of invertebrates; a safe road, nobody misses it, no one has ever been lost in this journey, now the teacher with the golden eyes has turned into a teacher with no eyes at all, the eye sockets that were once crammed with the brightest of images are now teeming with flatworms and larvae. So, Leonis, how do you like our island? We’ll often have spectators here in our great solitude, or else what kind of solitude would it be without spectators to attest to its frightful magnitude, no, don’t imagine anything too grand or organized, just ordinary passers-by who chance upon our black waters aboard all sorts of vessels, from brightly-lit cruise ships and liners to fishing boats, canoes and inflatables, the sail past, look on, some even wave to us from afar and then leave, they always leave, disembarking is forbidden on our island, this island was made exclusively for us, we are its lawful owners and sole inhabitants, it even has a sign with our names, Stratis Vranas dash Leonis Drivas… Or Leonis Drivas dash Stratis Vranas, if you prefer, the sequence does not matter, it does not imply any precedence or evaluation, although I must admit that your name sounds better, Leonis Drivas, a well-built name, a name of stature, worthy of a protagonist, maybe if my name was Drivas and not Vranas I should have another place in the story, a totally different fate, if I was called Drivas the painter in the whole affair could have been me instead of you, the teacher with the golden eyes would fall in love with me, not with you, think about it, what if everything was determined by the name, by the combination of these few sounds, imagine if simply by transposing two consonants and removing the “r” your name was not Drivas but Vidas, or, even worse,
Katsavidas, you wouldn’t stand a chance, indeed, I think such a name would be disastrous.
Read by the playwright himself