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But Marizza, poor Marizza, wanted to marry Kosta, the mayor's younger son, and that was above their level. The mayor asked a fortune for a dowry. And Marizza, she had this affliction. She could not see his smile diminish. "The past week you had restless nights," she said putting the heavy glasses on. "You spoke of many things in your sleep."
Marizza's sight was very bad. So bad, that she had to wear glasses with very thick and specially made lenses. Some of the more misbehaved children smirked and snickered at her fat eyes and, he heard them, called her fish-eyes. The lenses could not show her otherwise than an ogling, puffed-eyed creature. Although without them, Andreas thought, the few times he had seen her, that she was quite pretty, even attractive with a lost sort of gaze that made you want to come closer and take her hand and guide her.
He believed it would have been preferable for his sister if the children had slapped her. Greater than anything she distressed to be ridiculed about her bad vision. He could not recount how her expression marred when they said this (normally she achieved to make a tenet of self-composure), but that time her look revealed regret sorrow misgiving and other discouraging sensitivities that he could not truly name. Her eyes started blinking, and to him she obscurely uttered, "The Mayor's son considers himself above all. But he can't understand. He has never understood."
Nevertheless, she had always worn the glasses. She was as good as blind not having them on. The searching eyes behind the glasses and the sensibility and knowledge she carried were what attracted Kosta. No one in the village equaled her in these two things. And all respected her for that.
To this day Andreas did not doubt that he might have skirted the danger, if he had had the wisdom to see his sister's deep-set loneliness, and love for her brother. How is it, he asked himself at a later time, that we have a nearly inexhaustible incompetence to enlighten ourselves, to snub fact staring us in the eye and blazon it fantasy? He pretended to himself that the children and Kosta were his sister's perpetual anxieties, the ones she regard greater than all else. Or rather, he thought they were the unique ones.
Andreas now sized up the white caps bopping not too distantly from where he stood. It will be a bouncy ride, he concluded. Nobody will be out there to see him or interfere. So it was as well. His own sensations and ideas were not shared by many of the islanders. Despite his discipline in the sea he too made blunders. He was entering the reality of alien grounds. So much proper it would have been to appreciate a simple folk he had lived closer to almost all his life. He thought he knew them. He lived as an islander, and he thought that his own appreciation of the islander life must not be any different. They grasped splendor and grace as he did. Beauty too. Decidedly when fishing over the billows they loved, the smell of salty wash in the cool air, the Aegean sky, the jumping of the bluefish, and all around, the silver-white gulls careening in the wind crying and singing to each other secrets and tragedies they have seen.