Anesidora

My aunt Anesidora was born in Metsovo, in the mountains of Greece, sometime in May, 1937. Her father, Pekka Paananen, a painter, had been passing through on his Grand Tour when he fell in love with Amalthea Rammos, a precocious young local born of Greek and Italian blood, built from hips and feist and luscious, otherworldly dreams. She bore him three daughters and two sons, though one of the sons disappears from this history shortly after birth.

The family fled Metsovo with their children, and their visceral pacifism, and their whispers of hope, when Mussolini's troops crossed the Albanian border in October, 1940.

There are no extant journals that I know of describing their flight from war, nor any information about their crossing of the Atlantic.

Anesidora re-emerges in Montréal in 1941, now known as Annie (though her mother frequently referred to her, in letters, by Nessie). By then, her parents were also re-christened: Peter and Mae.

A festival at Mount Royal, the Greco-Québec Fête d'Été of 1946, a single photo tucked into a King James Bible, pencil underlining Romans 8:24-25, photo dated July. Tall for her age, and sinewed like twine, Anesidora is in knee-length shorts and a T-shirt with floral frills about the sleeves and collar, mouth ajar, a hungry fixation in her eyes. Or, depending on the timing of the photograph, perhaps the fixation was rage.

The men ran last that day, according to the meticulous records kept by the Mount Royal Greek Orthodox Church, host of the Greco-Québec Fête d'Été for over four decades. I am indebted to Nomiki Eliopoulos, the church's archivist, who took on the research into Anesidora's participation in the festival as if it were her own personal genealogy project. Without her zeal, an important page in this history would be blank.

Anesidora had already placed second in the children's flat race that morning, by the time the gun fired to send the men racing up the mountain. There are only rumours and apocrypha among the written documents of the time attesting to how many men Anesidora had passed, as they slowed their paces during the second half of their ascent up Mount Royal. These tales vary widely. The common element, though, is that one of the men disliked being passed by a nine-year-old girl; he swung his ankle out in an arc to smack her shin and send her sprawling onto the rocks at the side of the path.

I don't know whether she was hurt. I don't know whether she finished the race. Certainly her name does not appear in the list of men finishers. (Her father Peter placed fifth out of over 100 runners scaling the mountain. His most impressive win, though, was in the men's 400 metre run, from which he took home the silver medal.)

Anesidora's childhood is obscure, apart from attendance at a string of public schools in New Liskeard, Ontario. Some of the school records were lost in the great Sinkhole of 1958, so I was told by a local school board office administrator.

She appears again in wedding photographs dated May 5, 1955. Aunt Anesidora spent the next four decades of her life married to anthropologist Robert (Bob) MacDiarmid, Scottish national recently arrived in New Liskeard by way of Ceylon. MacDiarmid was nearly 40 at the time of marriage, more than two decades Anesidora's senior. He was known in the 1960s for compiling an ambitious, flawed spark of a dictionary, the Encyclopedia of Indian Languages, which purported to provide both literal and idiomatic translations of large swaths of the Anishinaabemowin, Ojibwemowin, and Cree languages, as spoken and signed in the nations of northeastern Ontario. Toward the end of his life, much of MacDiarmid's work was discredited. He died of a head injury on the sidewalk after being struck by Sony Discman tossed from the window of a passing minivan in 1996.

Anesidora never bore her husband any children. Childless seemed the natural, inborn state for my aunt Anesidora when I met her for the first time in 1984 or 1985 or so, on a visit to New Liskeard with my family. She didn't need her own, for she was always thronged by the unjarred esperance of others' children. The neighbourhood children, and even a few adolescents, swarmed around the middle-aged woman as she stood wide-legged in her front yard, in pants and a rainbow spattered blouse, flinging paint at a wooden board hitched up on a homemade easel, telling stories about the colours as they swirled onto the surface, and all over the grass, and onto children's faces and clothes. She would weave tales of Ultramarine Blue and Thaline Green, as though they were living friends of hers, as she licked the brushes clean. I don't know how linseed oil, metallic pigments and traces of turpentine interact with the ovaries, but I have often wondered if childlessness was really not her innate state after all.

Aunt Anesidora's paintings were vortical landscapes, recognisable, despite their fantastically jarring colours, as forests, lakes, sunrises, sunsets, but always with crude stick-figure people populating them, crawling toward the vanishing points with outstretched hands. She called her own style "ana-realist", though toward the end of her life she changed her tag to "hoffnung", which, she said to me a few weeks ago (perhaps by then because she was senile), described her life's work more precisely than "the shit the ten cent galleries wanted for their dollar store labels." Her output was prodigious, and the "ten cent galleries" provided her a modest physical subsistence beyond the meagre CPP and OAS benefits.

Anesidora was fierce and caustic and she tore me to pieces on many occasions in my adult life, with fire breathed from her soul, and that enigmatic Spanish question mark curled onto her lips. I could never quite bring myself to not forgive her. I never made the mistake of confiding in her after the first time, though. "You young men, you're so stupid with your unrequited love. Grow a vagina and act like a woman, you snivelling coward. You don't even know what hope tastes like. Go out and live and fail and hurt and stop singing your falsetto arias about love." She was wrong to sneer at my youthful livings and failings and hurt, but I won't ever know what cruelties she had suffered to churn her soul's intestines desiccate her empathy. And somehow, she was not only wrong, but right, too: it tastes sweet and sour, it burns like scotch bonnet, and the more I taste, the hungrier I am for more.

Aunt Anesidora kept a jar of glaze that she would dab onto her paintings, once the surface skin of the oil paint had dried. "This brings out the shine. This is the seed of life right here. You don't just smear this on any old thing. You dab a little onto a work of art, and you watch it bloom." She grinned and licked the glaze off the cotton swab. "Pfffffth! Fuck!" she spat strands of cotton from her tongue. "They don't make proper swabs any more. Everything is cheapened. Fuck. Pfleabth!"

When I cleaned out her room at the Villagia nursing home in Ottawa last week, I came across the jar of glaze. It was labelled with Sharpie on the glass: "Hoffnung".

I kept a few of Aunt Anesidora's paintings for myself, as well as the ones my family members had requested (I'll send them along soon).

And I kept the jar of glaze for you, my dear friend. Use it wisely.

R.I.P. Anesidora MacDiarmid

Yours sincerely,

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