Weather forecasts had predicted a three-day heat wave with the thermometer hovering around 40. In fact, it lasted over a week, registering 47 (116 deg. F) on July 27. During these days, the number of Athenians who were dying from heat prostration was recorded in banner headlines, none of which tallied. On the last day of the heat wave, the total number of deaths in Attica was verified officially by the government as 878, reverified as 1081 a day later, and ‘re-reverified’ as 1433 the day after that. In fact no one knows how many died.
Even the weather in Greece can be a political issue, and the conditions in the city’s hospitals during those days fanned it. When a child asked, “Why, Daddy, are all the banks air-conditioned and none of the hospitals?” and he could not answer that, adults themselves began repeating the question.
For days the terrible situation encouraged journalists and press photographers to give vent to their streak of the macabre: hospital beds loaded with the dying lined up in halls and corridors; morgues filled to overflowing; bumper-to-bumper processions of hearses; men struggling across railroad tracks with caskets, packing them into refrigerator cars; carpenters working overtime to compensate for the shortage of coffins; bulldozers opening ditches for mass burials; cemeteries with their gates closed and bolted, unable to handle more arrivals; sweating priests exhausted from performing last rites.
In spite of the thousands of mourners which the heat wave left, the city soon pulled itself together after that unforgettable breeze which blew up at 3 a.m. on July 28, vowing to face the future with its customary stamina and ever-deferred hopes for better days. These came almost at once – arousing a different sort of body-heat – with the arrival in Athens of Cicciolina, the ‘Little Fluffy One’.
In its patriotic attempt to give the touristy impression that Greece fills up with VIPs every summer, the press blows up huge photographs of visitors, unknown to most, usually sitting with their mouths full of Greek goodies at sloppy tables covered with empty wine bottles and barbounia bones.
But Ilona Staller was quite another kettle of fish, and she was splashed across the social pages, followed by shoals of gulping cameramen, like an apparition out of Jaws.
The porn-star known as Cicciolina, who is now an Italian Radical MP, made a clean breast of it as she stepped off the plane at Ellinikon. Clasping her teddy bear, Cicciolina announced herself thrilled to be visiting the country where democracy and culture were born. Looking like Botticelli’s Primavera above the neck with her coronet of flowers – and like his Venus below it – she brought a touch of spring to Athens’ stifling summer.
As a staunch supporter of peace and detente, she pronounced herself a great admirer of the prime minister. When she added, however, “I am against any form of censorship and believe that everything should be brought to the light of day,” political pundits feared for a moment that she.was making a not-so-veiled criticism of PASOK. But as, at this moment, she flashed her left breast to the cameras once again, it was noted with relief that she was referring to free love – an issue on which, at least publicly, the government has as yet no clearly revealed policy. She then went on to express her desire to meet ‘cicciolino Papandreou’ and join in the struggle against nuclear disaster.
Unfortunately, top government officials were all on holiday or had too heavy schedules – even for a working breakfast – to deliver a joint communique with Cicciolina. This was a pity bordering on rudeness, as she made a point of visiting the deserted parliament clothed in a PASOK-green dress discreetly buttoned to the throat, and waved a rose under the nose of a bust of Pericles in the foyer. She found the chamber pretty and very like the Italian one where “the Left sits on the left and the Right on the right.” Speaking further of positions, she added, cryptically, “I prefer those which are taught in the Kama Sutra.”
Cicciolina was very happy with her Greek visit. She spent a night at the bouzoukia breaking 3000 plates and dancing on tabletops. She was sorry, though, not to have met Melina.
“I would so much like to learn how to become minister of culture in my own country,” she sighed.
As soon as Cicciolina left, there were forecasts of a new heat wave in Athens. Although the government could now confidently announce that it had taken new emergency measures to safeguard their health, Athenians fled in panic for the mountains and the islands – and for appointments in Samarra, too: although the heat wave never came, more deaths took place on the nation’s highways.
