Are you sure this is the place? Isabella insisted.
The driver then nodded, Yes, this is the place, without doubt. I wondered then if he, like Stefano, had chanced to drive by that morning, if he too had seen the roadblocks and the police car, perhaps even the body, or what was visible of the body, the legs under the tarp, the feet askew. That road is the fastest route between the two villages, a dozen people must have driven past that morning alone.
I turned to look for Mark and Isabella, they had not gone very far, they were perhaps twenty feet away. They stood side by side, looking out across the stretch of blackened dirt. The horizon was cluttered with telephone wires and abandoned shacks and rusted oil drums, a cluster of squat concrete buildings. Mark and Isabella were still, they were not touching but they were physically close, in some ways more intimate than I could remember seeing them since their arrival in Greece, than I could remember seeing them in recent years.
And yet it did not seem to be a moment of reconciliation, much less one of closure, they looked like an elderly couple who had gotten lost in a foreign place and who could not rely on each other to find their way out, a terrible fight could easily follow, one of them walking off into the distance without looking back, the other remaining by the car, waving a map helplessly in one hand. How has it come to this? What am I doing here? They looked at the black dirt and the charred or wilting vegetation, they might have hoped that it contained clues, but there was nothing, it was a place like any other place, there was nothing they could hope to learn from it.
I watched as they stepped, wobbling—Isabella reached out to steady herself on Mark’s arm—off the road, onto the verge. They suddenly looked much older, as if the place and not just Christopher’s death had aged them, and for a moment I could have believed that it was haunted, that a malignant spirit had drawn the life out of them, there were many such stories in Greece, it was part of their tradition. This was, I remembered, what had brought Christopher to Mani—regardless of what Isabella said, it would have been about a woman, Christopher never could keep his cock in his pants, the cult of death had drawn him here.
Almost as if he had come here to die. He was not suicidal, Christopher would never have killed himself. But he had come to Mani searching for signs of death, for its symbols and rituals, its obscure leavings, he had looked at this landscape and converted it into a pattern of rites for the dead and dying. How could his own end not have factored into his speculations about death in general, how could its possibility not have occurred to him? It was impossible to contemplate his final days without seeing the pall of death, even his philandering—an irrepressible habit formed over a lifetime—began to look like a vain protest against the end that was impending.
After a certain age, it is a question of mere decades, two or three if you are lucky, hardly any time at all. And feeling this presence of death, how would he have regarded the state of our marriage? Even if he did not regret the separation, he might have been susceptible to the feeling I now had, that we were old to be starting again. Christopher was eight years older than me. What had he seen, when he stood here, in those final moments? Perhaps nothing—perhaps it had only been an ordinary place, the circumstances entirely normal, until the blinding crack on the back of his head.
I looked around me. The feeling had passed, it did not seem like a place where someone we loved had died, it didn’t have that intimacy—the way the bed where someone we loved slept, the desk where someone we loved worked, the table where someone we loved ate their supper, had that intimacy, immediately and without effort—rather it was only a desolate stretch of road, desolate but not desolate enough, in the distance you could see the village, crossed with telephone wire, there was garbage in the burnt shrub, at our feet there were crushed beer cans and cigarette stubs.