Landscape 4: The Hands of Georgos

The hands of Georgos rested on his knees. His body was of the Doric order, not the gracious Ionian, not the rich Corynthian. The hairs of his thick mustache hung like dry straws over his wet lips talking. He posed a rhetoric question. 'Why?' I didn't answer. In the same breath followed with certain intonation and the emphasis on 'tell,' his own reply 'I will tell you why.' It was not a question. The skin of his fingers was like dried leather browned by the sun, weathered by the southern winds that carried sand crystals from the Sahara and preserved by the salt of the sea.
'We need nothing.'
'We have everything we need.'
I tried to reverse the order of these two sentences that seemed to hold the key to kingdom.
'We have everything because we need nothing.'
Georgos reached for his can of beer that stood close to the fire. He only drank his beer hot. His hand trembled, as he stretched it out far from his body, while his back remained straight. Georgos was eighty five years old, but when he spoke, his eyes sparkled and his words spat fire.
'I am the drunkest man in town,' he boasted.
'I have tomatoes, agurki, onions, grapes, figs, olives, lemons, oranges, many trees, I have many trees.'
I was going to miss Georgos. He would live a hundred years, Georgos was a tree of a man, the muscles of his arms like twisted heather, but every year another friend died, another branch broke off. How long can a man live alone with nothing.