THE SUN IS SETTING in Sparta in July. Tourists of many nationalities overwhelm the town, and Greeks are visible only as they work in souvenir shops and restaurants. Hardened and sunburnt from walking most of the way across the Peloponnesus, eating little, and sleeping on stony ground, Jules is happy that now he carries no weapon, there is no need of weapons, and the war is over, even if not a hundred percent in France itself, where the OAS is in its last death agonies. He is walking east on Sparta’s main and more-or-less only street. The sun is setting behind him, bathing everyone he faces as they pass in the deepest, richest light he has ever seen. Coming toward him, caught in this light, is a girl of twenty. She’s tall. She wears a white leotard top and beige skirt. A camera strap crosses her body. Her posture is royal, her back straight, hair deep red and alight in the sun, her eyes green. Deeply tanned like everyone else in Sparta, she seems to Jules to be so extraordinarily beautiful – as, he comes to know, twenty-year-old young women almost always are and sometimes remain – that he falters as if he had tripped. Seeing this, she smiles. He begins to take stilted little steps so that he won’t fall. This amuses her even more, and she suppresses a laugh. Her teeth are shockingly white, her beauty dizzying, but her expression is neither patronizing nor haughty. Rather, it is kind and warm, as if they are equals and have known one another for a long time.
But Jules cannot believe that he is fit to approach such a magnificent woman, and against every impulse he forces himself to walk on. He returns to his pension, agitates for an hour, and charges out, hoping to find her, but he doesn’t, even though he walks up and down the main street many times. He tries to imagine what he might say to her, and decides on no formulation, because he knows that if he meets her he will be too stunned to remember what he had decided.
Unable to get her out of his mind, as the cicadas grow louder and the night grows cooler in Sparta, he says to himself over and over again two lines in English from a poem by John Betjeman about an infatuation during a tennis match and after, and perhaps forever:
Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn
Furnished and burnish’d by Aldershot sun ….
He likes Betjeman’s poems. He likes Voltaire’s: “Les ‘Vous’ et les ‘Tu’”. Both men know love so well that they capture it in the imagination even as it eludes them, as now in Sparta it has eluded him.
GREECE IS FULL OF French, German, and American tourists – the French and the Germans because the exchange rate is favorable; the French because they want nothing to do with Franco; and the Germans because, to the discomfort of everyone else, they have pleasant memories of Greece in the war. The Americans, whose exchange rate seems always to be favorable everywhere, have come in droves even prior to the release of the movie Zorba the Greek and subsequent sales of books by Kazantzakis. Bouzouki music is popular around the world, which delights Jules, who despite the opinions of snobs in his faculty has great admiration for Mikis Theodorakis. For them it’s perfectly acceptable for Beethoven and Liszt to assay upon traditional dances, and Smetana to use an ancient folk song for Má vlast, but not for Theodorakis to reawaken the soul of Greece – perhaps because he was, presumably, making so much money. Five years later, in Itea, during the dictatorship of the colonels, Jules will witness the arrest of a merchant merely for playing Theodorakis’ music in his shop, but Greece is happy now, at least on the surface.
Two rooms have been reserved in an Athens pension on the assumption that by the time the four friends reached Athens someone would have become close enough to Sandrine to share one with her. But because she’s gone and Serge and Alain are in one of the rooms, Jules finds himself the sole occupant of the other. Except for a terrazzo floor, it is all white. Two single beds with white sheets and no blankets are the only furniture except for two chairs and a small table on a terrace overlooking a minute plaza at the juncture of Aristotelous and Kamaterou streets. The bathrooms and showers are off the hall.
Jules walks into Serge’s and Alain’s room, puts down his knapsack, and sees them sitting on their beds, feet on the floor, heads bent in dejection.
“You look depressed,” he says. “Did Sandrine come back, or is it because you anticipate that I’m going to insist that you share in paying for my double room – because I am.”
Serge and Alain are cousins. They shake their heads in unison. “That’s not it,” Serge says.
“What is it then? What happened?”
“We’re leaving tomorrow, flying back.”
“What about the car?”
“We sold it at a loss. It doesn’t matter.”
“Why?”
“My sister has cancer,” Alain tells him.
Jules has never met her, but he feels part of the blow. “I see. I’m sorry.”
“We don’t know where Sandrine is. She’s not here. You’re on your own.”
“That’s nothing. Don’t worry. I hope your sister gets better.”
Alain looks up. “She won’t. That’s the point.”
The next day, they’re gone, and, no singles available, Jules is paying for a double room. He goes to the Acropolis, and because it’s as mobbed as the Eiffel Tower doubles back and decides to return either very early or very late to avoid the crowds. The heat is exhausting. He sleeps until evening, when his room is slightly cooler, especially in the breeze of the fan above his bed. Awakening, he hears conversation on the terrace next to his. Half asleep, he staggers to the threshold between his room and its terrace. A partition of wavy glass divides his outdoor space from the one that had been off the room of Serge and Alain. Through it he sees two indistinct forms moving as gracefully as fish in an aquarium. They aren’t fish, but two women, speaking in French. One has an extraordinary, bell-like, clear, and musical voice. Jules is a musician and sound is half his world. He falls in love with the voice just as he has fallen in love with the girl in Sparta. He can hear in it high intelligence, care and modulation of thought, essential goodness, vitality, enthusiasm, freshness, charm, and innocence. The other voice, while not unpleasant, is unentrancing.
The beautiful voice says, “I had no idea. How can you love him? We spent three hours with them. I’ll bet he’s in the Piazza San Marco right now with two other French girls.”
“Not Gianni.”
“Not Gianni!” the beautiful voice says, gently mocking.
“No. He’s wonderful, beneath the surface.”
“I’m not sure that the surface and the subterranean are not the same. And the surface counts, too. In Gianni it’s as slick as oil on ice,” says the beautiful voice.
“It’s because he’s Italian. Bella Figura. When he spoke to me privately, he was different.”
There’s a pause. The woman of the beautiful voice, knowing when to choose her battles, asks, “When are you leaving?”
“The boat from Piraeus leaves tonight at nine. There’s a bus, but I’ll take a taxi to be sure.”
They disappear from behind the wavy glass, and Jules, still groggy and suddenly crazy and daring after his nap, runs to the railing. He looks around the partition. The girl he saw in Sparta, now in one extraordinarily quick motion, like a move in ballet or martial arts, lifts her blouse from the hem and rockets it above her head and into the air. There she stands for a moment in the light, in a white brassiere that seems to glow in contrast with her flawless, suntanned skin, her body as beautiful as her face, before she pulls on another blouse. Jules falls back into the darkness of his terrace so as not to be seen. Never has he felt the fusion of desire and necessity as he feels it now. But all he can do is sit on his bed in the shadows and feel his heart beat.