White Vespa

Twelve



14 Sept.





Yesterday I hiked the trail straight down, into the caldera. Or what I took for a trail; I soon lost it in a maze of overgrown terraces and goat paths. The descent is abrupt, a foot down for every foot forward, but broken by terraces sometimes higher than they are wide. Not built by anybody planning to leave them behind. The terraces are so thick in olives, figs, and thorns that once I got off the lip of the caldera the floor of the crater below was rarely visible. Untended. Maybe not the people who built them, but somebody sure as hell left them behind. Fleeing from or running to, it’s come to seem to me that it hardly matters which. You arrive at a place you don’t understand and won’t understand ever as the locals do. It’s less constructed—for you—than the place you left, less encumbered. The rocks themselves seem less encumbered, as if gravity had given way; everything wants to float up. Only what it is, the new place shines, as if eternal. And for you it is. It has no history, no future, it’s only there for you as you walk by it, forever just so. If you keep on walking.

A camera works a similar magic. There’s more to the link between photography and travel than just having an album of snaps to show the boys back home, the proof. Photos rise up out of reality, things forever fixed. The photograph may yellow or rot, but the world within it lies in a dumb trance from which there is no waking. That moment and eternity pull together. And yet, tourists arrange their photos in albums, in stories, and read their guidebooks, “for context,” “the historical context,” to keep creeping eternity from dissolving their stories altogether, into a kind of rapture. They guard carefully against the very thing that called to them, set them traveling to begin with. But not me, no not me, I wanted the rapture, I wanted it bad.

When I broke out of the brush, the path was clearly a path and led directly to a road. Soon I was walking on blacktop, striding along, and the floor of the crater came up on the left, flat and barren and the smell of sulfur very loud. I stepped off the blacktop and suddenly wherever I walked there was a path. The place was riddled with paths, and I kept on, heading for the crater within the crater, the very throat of the volcano. I walked right down into it. Sulfur. Dust. The heat, the smell nearly dropped me.

I walked in the silence of the crater, walked home in a silence so deep I could hardly wade through it. The crows took a friendly interest in my progress, watching to see if I’d make it. Heat waves. A watery mirage always receding before me. I stayed on the blacktop the whole way, the long way, but free of briars. When I got back here I took a small, round watermelon up on the roof, a knife and a spoon, and ate the entire thing looking down into the volcano. I watched the early shadows push out from the crater walls in the west and spread like a tide across the floor, then climb the eastern walls, until they pushed the last of the light off the lip and up into the sky. The sky got orange and color spread back, and then all that was left of the sun’s light succumbed in the west. A few small lights flickered to life in Emborió, and across the crater, in Nikiá, quite a few more. The way a day ends. I carried a mattress up onto the roof and a couple of blankets, lit a mosquito coil, and settled in to watch the stars wheel westward.





Thirteen



17 June





Myles got off the Vespa at the foot of the Katarráktes, the less trafficked steps between Yialós and Chorió. The summer before, it had taken him some poking around to find where the steps started up, though the ascending ramp of the stairs is visible from most of town. Unlike the Kalí Stráta, the Katarráktes is not closed in by houses, but angles up a hillside out in the open. Myles rarely saw a tourist there; the stairs led to a quiet neighborhood of modest houses and if there were tavernas or bars or anything else a tourist was likely to walk to up there, Myles had never seen them. Of course, there were a few dedicated walkers, and occasionally Myles met one of them coming down as he was going up. But they tended to be good sorts and Myles didn’t mind seeing them there. He walked up the Katarráktes often, preferring to make a loop rather than take the Kalí Stráta coming and going. Besides, the walk across Chorió, high on the hill over the harbor, was one of his favorites, and he made it often with camera in hand. He loved the startling views of the harbor below, seen between houses, through doorways, and over rooftops. The interest of the shots varied day to day, sometimes hour by hour, as the boats, looking like toys from high up, arranged and rearranged themselves, tying up and casting off.

He liked early mornings and late evenings best, when the light softened, and when the big tour boats were gone. The big boats struck him as out of scale in the small harbor. Sometimes the light had a pearly quality, a wonderful milkiness, which he tried to capture on film, his camera steadied on his walking stick. He hadn’t gotten the shots he wanted, which was one of the reasons he kept going back. The shots were more difficult than they looked, but felt necessary, not only for The Lesser Dodecanese, but to Myles personally. He couldn’t have explained exactly why, but he knew it had to do with a woman he’d seen up there the summer before. He always remembered her at the same spot on the cobbled path, just where it passed over a breezeway between two small houses, now apparently occupied by a single family. He had been looking through the slot, at the brightness of the water behind that seemed to darken the slate walk between the two buildings, which was in shadow, visible under a flowering vine. He’d been looking very intently, when a woman, a naked woman, flew from one building to the other, from right to left. She’d been mid-leap all the way across, or so it had seemed, arms raised, one knee up before her and the other leg, propelling her, taut out behind, head up, small breasts riding up, dark hair trailing. There had been no sound, no giggle or slap of footsteps.

Swift, unexpected, and then gone. Myles knew the way it had happened had a great deal to do with how vividly he remembered the running woman. He’d noticed the pattern at other times: a deer bounding across a gap in the woods, a bird crossing a narrow window. They were like photographs, moments broken free of whatever it was that was going on. And they lodged in memory with a vividness altogether out of keeping with any reasonable explanation of their importance.

Myles stopped just there, every time he walked that path, peered under the vine that was flowering this year, too, but without any expectation of seeing the woman again. That, he was pretty sure, wouldn’t happen. Some things properly happen only once. Myles didn’t talk about the once that it had happened, either. He knew telling it would elicit a leer, or at least the suspicion that the moment had mattered because it was erotic. But it hadn’t been erotic; the only word he could put to it was otherworldly, and that wasn’t a word he liked to use in conversation.

After awhile he walked on. Just short of the Kalí Stráta he turned right, exploring the narrow alleys of residential Chorió, where the cries of mothers and children echoed raucously off the whitewashed stone walls. He was a little lost, lost in detail, but knew he would run onto the Kalí Stráta in the end. He crossed another alley and, looking down the narrowing perspective, saw two girls swinging badminton rackets, screeching. He recognized Váso from To Stenáki when she turned and charged toward him. Then, as suddenly, she turned around, put her racket to the ground, and lobbed something back toward the other girl: not a shuttlecock. Myles looked closely. It was a small rat. They were playing badminton with a rat they’d trapped in the alley! Then he heard it, screeching in a higher register than the girls. He shook his head, considering the possibilities: badrat and ratminton. But then the rat got by the other girl and raced into an overgrown lot, making a getaway at last. The girls howled and then fell to giggling wildly. It was a better game than badminton, apparently. Myles waved to Váso and she came over, sputtering in Greek, her eyes shining madly in her flushed face.





Fourteen



17 June





Paul didn’t smoke, but he often carried a pack of Camels around with him, just to have cigarettes to offer to smokers in distress. There were a lot of smokers among the young travelers he sometimes sought out. And a lot of them were in distress of one kind or another, traveling to forget or to keep from starting a life. Paul sympathized; he’d never started a life, never found a career path he was willing to put even one foot on. He didn’t have to, that was the difference. A cigarette was all it took to get a conversation going. Sometimes he even lit one for himself in a show of extreme fellow feeling.

When Yórgos stopped by his table at Vapori and asked for a cigarette, Paul gave him one, gave him two. He smiled when Yórgos tucked them into his pocket, looking suddenly furtive. It was a bad paper day. Either the news wasn’t interesting or Paul wasn’t interested. He put the paper down and looked down the alley toward the water, at the slow undulations of the boats as they rose and fell on waves Paul couldn’t see from his deck chair in the shade of an umbrella. He was fingering a small roll of fat that pushed over his belt at his waist, wondering once again if he ought to join the gym, to learn to sweat. He didn’t think so.

He looked at his watch. Almost tourist time, time to do something else. He didn’t know what. He wondered idly if he was bored, if this is what people meant when they said they were bored. He wasn’t sure. He decided he was more likely languorous. He thought that sounded better.

He watched the people walking by down on the paraléia, the patterning, first a couple, then three friends, then a lone walker. He liked to try to see people as if they were birds, or animals, and to take an interest in how they flocked together or herded up or went off by themselves. He was a loner himself, but he wasn’t thinking about that; he was just watching. Soon another loner crossed the mouth of the alley, and he forgot all about birds. It looked like Anne! A different haircut and years on her, but surely it was Anne.

He didn’t call out or get up. He sat there. How odd. She wouldn’t be here by chance; she’d have found out where he was and come looking for him. But why? Not for the great relief of having him to talk to, he was pretty sure about that. He was curious, and he felt a little more alive curious, so a little better. He called for his bill and considered the damage when it came. He was spending a lot of money on coffee! At least he had it to spend. Very likely Anne wouldn’t. He shook his head, poor Anne. She’d kissed off her inheritance a long time ago.

Paul stood up, brushed the wrinkles out of his khaki shorts, dropped his newspaper in a basket, and started to walk. His room was close by, on the hillside more or less above Vapori. He occupied the lower story of a restored old house, down an alley off the main steps and then sharply up two flights of stairs. The hill was steep enough that he could see water out the windows that faced the harbor, though he wouldn’t call it a view. But his rooms were quiet and private; the upstairs flat was occupied only on the occasional weekend. Rooms is to exaggerate. There was a bathroom in the back, but the entire rest of the apartment was a single room. There was a sink and a gas ring, but no kitchen. Paul didn’t care: except for the odd piece of fruit, he preferred to eat out. The furniture was outsize, an enormous bed occupied one wall, and there was a large wardrobe on the wall across from it. There was also a full-length mirror on a stand, an antique, and Paul kept it turned so he could see himself in bed or turned slightly away, so he could see out the window on the same wall as the bed. That way there seemed to be a window on the far wall, where there was none. There were only two chairs. A table. The room was bare of ornament, but perhaps because of that it had a stagey look that Paul liked very much.

He worked the key in the door and went in, went directly to the bed and sprawled out on his back, still wondering about Anne. He was amused. He could imagine any number of dramatic scenes she might create for him. He was looking forward to what was coming, whatever it might be.

It was past noon and the room was very hot when he woke up. He rinsed his face at the sink and then pulled his suitcases out of the bottom of the wardrobe. It didn’t take him long to locate the envelope of old photographs. He shuffled through them quickly until he found the one he was looking for: a little girl bouncing on the back of her horse, heading for the barn. Even in the picture you could see she wasn’t riding well, wasn’t maintaining contact with the trotting horse, but she looked happy, such a little princess. The horse had been called Pie, short for Shoofly Pie, a name Anne had picked out of a favorite children’s book.





Fifteen



19 June





It was Yórgos who arranged for the boat. Myles met Jim on the old stone bridge at the end of the harbor and they shopped for a picnic, bread and wine, féta and olives, a round of dried figs and a few bananas, a small box of Greek sweets. They knew they were buying too much but bought it anyway: too much is good for a picnic, creates that feeling that comes from plenty. Benevolence. They were not counting on fish, though Yórgos had promised he’d catch some, so they could have it fresh.

The boat was small but bright, a lipstick red with turquoise detailing. The captain greeted them dourly and started the engine as they stowed their groceries and day packs. The engine sparked to life in a small cloud of blue smoke and began its rhythmic thudding, the deep bass sound of an old inboard. Yórgos untied the boat and scurried to the prow to pull up the small anchor. The boat turned sharply toward the mouth of the harbor and the captain powered up the engine enough to raise a wake. From the water, the town loomed all around them.

Yórgos and the captain looked out, where they were going, but Jim and Myles looked back.

“God this town is theatrical!” Jim exclaimed. “I still ain’t over it. It feels like we’re on stage, like the whole town is looking at us.”

“The town is, the people don’t notice,” Myles said, but he was fiddling with the Nikon on his lap, twisting on a wide-angle lens. “The houses with a view are oriented toward the water, look to us.” He glanced up, then lifted the camera and looked through the viewfinder.

“Surely someone sees us?” Jim said, and he tried waving his hat, but no hat was waved in response.

“Well, maybe, maybe not. But whether they’re looking or not, the real center of Sými town is out here, on the water. No matter where you are when you’re in town, you’re at the edge of things.”

“Eccentric?” Jim asked.

“And aren’t we?” Myles said.

“I think you more than me!”

“Aha. Well, okay, I won’t take offense. But maybe that’s why I like this place so much; everybody’s got to be eccentric, walk around the center of things.”

“Watch it, Myles, you’re starting to sound like one of my kind, a regular explainer.”

They passed the clock tower. Yórgos waved to a friend and shouted something. The water was glassy, an unstill mirror for the morning sky. The only breeze was the artificial breeze of the boat passing through quiet air, the only sound the low thud of the inboard.

“Funny,” Myles said, “but seriously, life feels marginal here. You’re always looking out over water, away.”

“Something like the empty center in those Japanese brush paintings?”

“Maybe, maybe that’s it,” Myles said, not sounding convinced.

“Or in Auden’s poem about Brueghel’s Fall of Icarus, do you know it? He says even great events, the crucifixion for instance, happen, ‘Anyhow in a corner.’”

“Maybe that’s part of it, too. Or maybe the houses just conform to the shape of the land. Maybe it’s economic, money here literally came from the sea. Sponges built these houses, of all things.”

“Maybe,” Jim agreed.

“But it doesn’t matter how or why. It’s just so. The center feels like it’s in the harbor, that we walk around it.”

Jim nodded.

“But the curious thing,” Myles said, “is that we feel the center distinctly. It’s got a sensible pull. I don’t know. I just feel oriented here in a way I don’t most places.”

Myles put his camera away and grinned, shaking his head. He hadn’t taken a single picture. His wide-angle lens wasn’t wide enough. To get much of the town he’d have to wait until they were no longer centered. The staginess of the town seen from the water wasn’t something he could photograph. He thought he’d need a Cirkut camera just to begin.





When they got to the straits between Sými and the bare island of Nímos the captain looked back, hunching his shoulders in a question, pointing first through the narrow straits and then out to sea, along the shore of Nímos. Myles pointed through the slot. The water was peacock blue in the channel, bright green over the submerged shoals on either side, and clear in the shallows. They skirted the rocks, holding close to the shore of Nímos, following it on around and away from Sými. When a small cove came into view Myles pointed at it and the captain ran in close. In the shallows, Yórgos leapt into the water and held the boat while Myles and Jim clambered out with the supplies, their packs, the food, and a small grill. As soon as they had their footing, the boat backed away and headed for Yialós. Yórgos waded ashore last, carrying a small bucket with his hand line and some bait.

While Yórgos fished what he thought the likely places, Jim and Myles picked their way over the rocky outcrops, stopping occasionally to crush the island vegetation in their hands. Spices. It was surprising, very surprising, just how many of the island plants were aromatic. There were spice markets, for tourists, in town, but Myles had assumed the spices were shipped in, like the sponges now, from somewhere else, but perhaps not.

When they got back to the one small tree where they’d left their packs in the shade, they found Yórgos already had started the charcoal for the grill. There where nine little fish in Yórgos’s bucket, three each. Smiling, he said, “Mr. Myles, these are tasty ones.”

Jim pulled a snorkel and mask out of his day pack and offered it to Myles. He had his Swiss Army knife out and was poking around in Yórgos’s bucket.

“I want to be sure these things get cleaned,” Jim said.

Myles laughed. “Okay then, I’ll swim. When’s lunch?”

“Don’t push your luck.”

Myles looked at the charcoal, thinking lunch would be awhile. “I’ll be over there,” he gestured. “Just give a shout.”

Myles found a rock he could dive from; he wanted to get in quick: the water would be cold. He plunged through the surface and it was cold so he swam a few strokes underwater, to be moving while his body got used to it. When he surfaced he spit in the mask, rinsed it, and adjusted the snorkel. Then he put his head down and floated out over the submerged rocks. He was still cold, but his attention was elsewhere. His dive had carried him away from the shallows, and he paddled to where the bottom fell away quickly; he felt suspended between nothing and nothing. The warmer he got the less he moved, until he was just adrift, weightless, hanging over the peacock blue of the deep water.

He felt bemused, as he often did when he swam with a snorkel. Then he realized he was thinking about the new waitress at Two Stories, about Anne, her saying she wanted her picture taken so she could see what she looked like. He doubted he could help her with that; some things we want we don’t get. And how we look is just too mixed up with how we think about ourselves to ever come into clear focus. He glanced up. A needlefish rode just under the surface, a silver streak under the brightness of the surface itself. The surface, he thought, was very like a mirror, had that mercury shine, but unlike a mirror in that you couldn’t see yourself in it. Maybe, he thought, that made it a better mirror: no illusions. Anne, anyway, hadn’t been fooled by her mirror into thinking she knew what she looked like. That said something in her favor.

He swam down, deep, to where the water was cold and his ears hurt, then came up fast, watching the unruffled shine of the surface as it got close, pushing his head, at last, right through it.

He pulled the mask up on his forehead and looked back toward the low profile of Nímos. Squinting against his myopia, he saw Jim materialize out of the rock of the island as he strode up the rise from the other side. Then he was walking down, gesturing to Myles to let him know lunch was ready. He waited while Myles swam ashore, and they walked together back over the rise and down to where Yórgos knelt over the grill, tending the fish.