Читать книгу The Journey: How an obscure Byzantine Saint became our Santa Claus - David Price Williams - Страница 27

been born and kept his cards very close to his chest and his gold well out of sight, suspecting everyone. My mother died when I was born which had made my father somewhat reclusive, so I knew little of his business affairs. Whilst I was a child he remained single, but once I had reached manhood he changed. Having come from such poverty, I think he needed someone to appreciate just how well he had done over the years. So, when I was at the end of my teens, he took a much younger wife.

He was already quite an old man by then, but Calista, the woman he married, was almost the same age as me. She was a country girl from up the Valley and my father had been prevailed upon to marry her by his friend and kinsman, Eugenios, a farmer from near Pinara. She was no doubt very pretty, but I was concerned that she didn’t seem to have an idea in her head except how to present herself as the new wife of a wealthy man. She seemed solely interested in her hair and appearance and how much money she could spend on clothes, so I didn’t have much to do with her. She had rustic good-looks, curvaceous and coquettish, and I think my father thought he could dress her up and make her his mascot, his mannequin who would demonstrate that he’d made something of his life after all that struggle. He could afford to show her off as an emblem, a symbol of the elevation in society he’d achieved.

She wasn’t the least interested in befriending me. I was just an appendage that my father brought with him, something she’d

DAVID PRICE WILLIAMS