“Ameriga!”
“No! I don’t want to talk. Go away! Goodbye! Goodbye!”
“AMERIGA!”
I had two options left: leave or ignore him. I wasn’t about to let him chase me away. So I ignored him. A few minutes later he silently picked up his towel and walked away.
Another time, I was walking along a waterfront when I ran into a Greek waiter from a café where I’d stopped earlier. A walking cliché, the barrel-chested, beer-bellied man wore a loud orange shirt open in front, a fluorescent blue tank-top underneath, and a huge gold medallion resting on a fluffy bed of Chewbacca chest hair.
“Yassas!” he said.
“Yassas,” I replied politely. I tried to keep walking, but he stepped in front of me, blocking my path, leaning so close I could smell the meat on his breath.
“Would you like to come out with me for a drink?” he asked, rubbing his chest hair and dipping his hand under his tank top. I guess this was supposed to make me weak with desire.
“No, thank you,” I said, and darted around him before he could cut me off.
Such men apparently presume female travelers are sexual adventurers who would naturally find it exciting to be stalked by rapacious predators.
Today I arrived on the island of Crete, where the people have a reputation for being religious, old-fashioned, and mistrustful of foreigners. I hoped that meant I’d be left alone. So when I explored the town of Xania this afternoon, I let down my guard.
I started along the waterfront: a horseshoe with a stone fortress at one end, a lighthouse at the other, and in the middle a lineup of wish-you-were-here cafés where outdoor tables yawned with boredom as they waited for the summer crowds. As sunset approached, I wandered into the town’s old neighborhoods, down narrow cobblestone walkways lined with narrow Venetian buildings. Xania still looks the part it once played as an outpost of the Venetian Empire. With peeling plaster and paint, crumbling brick and stone, colorful shutters and black iron balconies, the slender homes are dying the slow, romantic deaths of a Shakespearean drama.
I crossed paths with a tiny old woman carrying groceries. She wore a black dress and a black kerchief over white hair. Her short legs moved with nimble energy, though her progress was slow.
“Kalispera!” I said. (“Good evening!”)
Her eyes widened with surprise. She walked up to me and patted my cheek, chuckling. “Orea,” she said. (“Beautiful.”)
“Efharisto.” (Thank you)
As I continued deeper into her neighborhood, I saw more grandmothers dressed in black, sitting in kitchen doorways—knitting, chatting with neighbors, and keeping small children in line as they played in the walkways. Entranced, I sighed and relaxed my guard another notch.
“Yassas,” a few of the women said to me, smiling and nodding as I passed.
“Yassas!” I smiled and nodded back.
So it was that I thought little of making the same exchange with a pot-bellied grandfather standing at his kitchen door. Liver spots filled in the blank left behind by his receding hairline.
“Where you from, my dear?” His tone labeled him a perfect gentleman.
“Alaska.”
“Ah, an American. Welcome to Creta. You are in a hurry?”
“Why?”
“If you are not in a hurry, maybe you will like to come in to drink coffee with my family?”
As I considered his question, I cautiously surveyed the street: an old lady sitting across the way nodded in my direction, another woman down the street talked to a male neighbor. The neighborhood seemed safe enough, and I was excited at the prospect of enjoying the hospitality of a Greek family in their home, so I said, “Thank you. I’d be honored.”
“You’re welcome, my dear.”
He introduced himself as Constantino, “but you may call me Costas, my dear.” Costas shook my hand, opened his kitchen door, and bowed as he made a sweeping invitation with his arm, indicating I should precede him inside. He guided me through a messy kitchen, then upstairs through two stories of cheerful clutter, to the roof where he had a small garden of flowers and herbs. I saw no family members along the way.
“It’s a beautiful garden,” I said.
“Thank you, my dear.” He said “my dear” a lot. “You would like a soda?”
“No, thank you. I’ll wait to take coffee with your family.”
“They will be here soon. Until then you must have a soda.” He scurried downstairs and returned with a soda. Then he went into the next room and returned with three coffee table books. “Here are beautiful pictures of my country. You look. I’ve been fishing and I need to wash. I will return.” He left, and a moment later I heard a shower running inside.
Suspicious, I decided to leave while he was in the shower. But first, I couldn’t resist walking to the edge of the roof for a quick peek at the view. A patch of ocean blue peered at me from a distance. On the street below, several more neighbors arrived as the workday ended, gathering in small clutches of casual conversation. This lent credence to his story that his family would arrive soon, so I relaxed and sat down.
A few minutes later he returned, his damp hair slicked back, a dollop of brown hair grease still on the edge of his hand—the quivering ooze slid off as he reached into a shelf and pulled out two scrap albums. He showed me old photos and newspaper clippings from the sixties and seventies, all featuring him, while he explained in halting English that he used to be an important politician. After listening to a rambling, incomprehensible discourse on Greek politics, I deliberately asked him to tell me about his family. He spoke vaguely of adult sons and daughters who were very accomplished and made him quite proud, but who didn’t live here.
“So you live here with your wife?”
“No, I live alone. I’m about to go out to have coffee with my friends. Would you like to come?”
Annoyed at his subterfuge, I began considering how best to extricate myself from this situation: should I politely take my leave, or run down the stairs without another word? He was at least sixty-five—not a hearty sixty-five, but a rotund, out-of-shape, slow-moving sixty-five, maybe even seventy or more—and if things turned weird I could easily knock him down and outrun him. Old and alone, maybe he was just lonely for company. I decided to bow out politely. He’d said he was about to leave anyway, so I took that as my cue to move toward the stairs.
“So, you meet these friends every day?” I asked.
“Sometimes. We play cards. You know cards?”
“Yes. I also see many Greek men playing backgammon in the cafés. Do you play backgammon?”
“Excuse me?”
“Backgammon? Do you play backgammon?”
“I don’t know this word.”
“It’s a good game.”
“And you, my dear, you are a good person.” He kissed both my cheeks. By Greek standards this was still within bounds.
Nonetheless, I said, “I’m sorry, I won’t have time to meet your friends. I’m meeting my own friends.” I couldn’t resist adding, with lifted brow, “It’s too bad I didn’t get to have coffee with your family.”
He didn’t respond.
I was relieved when we returned to the ground-floor kitchen, where my eyes fastened on the door. It was just two feet away. Before I could reach it, he leaned over and opened the refrigerator, right next to the door, blocking my way to salvation.
His eyes scanned the refrigerator’s meager contents. “Would you like anything, my dear?” he said—leering, I now thought.
“No, thank you.”
“I have some very nice fruit. You must allow me to give you something. Here!” He thrust a peach in one of my hands and a pear in the other.
“Thank you,” I said, staring stupidly at the fruit.
“You’re welcome, my dear.” He leaned forward as if to kiss me on the cheek again, but this
time he managed to crash wetly into my lips.
I pulled back in dismay and looked in confusion from his face to the fruit to the door.
As I was calculating how to take him down with a simple aikido move if he tried to block my escape, he said, “You can stay here with me and sleep with me, my dear.”
My face must have registered the dumbest of dumbfounded looks. “Oh . . . n-no . . . I, I cannot . . . ” I stammered.
Before I could say or do anything more, he opened the kitchen door, said, “Well, thank you, my dear, have a nice holiday,” grabbed me by the elbow, shoved me outside, and slammed the door in my face.
In a daze, I stumbled away, staring at the two pieces of fruit in my hands. Hoping to soothe my nerves with something sweet, I took a bite of the peach. It was hard and sour. I switched to the pear. It tasted fine, but my stomach began to sink and roll, and I felt the urge to vomit. Nauseous, I threw the fruit in the trash.
I felt like a little girl who’s been attacked by the local child molester, a grandfatherly neighbor no parent would ever suspect. I’d been thrown off my guard by the friendly neighbors and by my memory of the guileless, avuncular kindness of Zeph. But it’s not as if Costas were the first sex-addled skirt-chaser I’d ever encountered, only the oldest. I had recognized the risk. It’s just that keeping my guard up is fatiguing and the temptation of apparent kindness is great.
I suppose any woman who travels alone is flypaper for freaks. Which makes me even more eager to see Sean, not only because he’s not a freak, but also because his presence by my side might keep them away—and because I’m hungry for a taste of kindness that I know is real.
en route from patras, greece to brindisi, italy
I was supposed to leave Greece yesterday and head to Rome to meet Sean. But the day before that I endured a fourteen-hour nightmare of buses and trains, missed connections and ridiculous layovers just to get to Olympia for the express purpose of visiting the site of the original Olympic Games. When I arrived I discovered the site would be closed until the next day—today. I refused to leave without seeing the Olympic Ruins. I’d worked so hard to get there and I might never get another chance. So I sent Sean an e-mail saying I’d arrive in Rome a day late.
This morning, I visited the Olympic Ruins with an Englishwoman from my hostel. We felt fortunate to see the site, considering it was once off-limits to people like us: women, that is. “Get this,” Julie said, referring to her guidebook, “women were not only forbidden to participate in the original Olympic Games, they were not even allowed to watch. It says here, ‘Women who tried to sneak in to see the games used to be thrown from a nearby rock.’” The greatest pleasure our day afforded was guessing which rock was used for this misogynistic tradition.
“Maybe that one?” Julie suggested.
“No, not big enough. They’d only break an arm or a leg.”
“Maybe that was the idea.”
“Nah, I’m sure they meant to kill ’em.”
It took a lot of imagination to make the site interesting. We spent fifteen confounding minutes just trying to figure out how the perfect little squares and circles on my tour map related to the tumbled, crumbled rocks and columns scattered around us. The gymnasium and the wrestling school, the Temples to Zeus and Hera: they were all in utter . . . well . . . ruins.
Among the sights we could find, our favorite was the one with no columns, walls, or foundations, ruined or otherwise. It was little more than an arched entry, leading to a dirt field surrounded by grassy slopes. This was the stadium where the Ancient Greeks held the first Olympic footrace: the 200-yard dash, known as a stadium. For more than three hundred years the stadium was the only athletic event at the Olympics. The starting and finish lines are still there: two long lines of stone embedded in the dirt. We giggled as several tourists sprinted down the track.
“It’s much too hot to bother,” I said, as if I were above such ridiculous behavior. However, I did ask Julie to take a photo of me posed in the “ready” position at the starting line.
“It’s best you don’t run,” Julie said. “You wouldn’t want to be thrown from a rock.”
She was right, about it being best I didn’t run. I needed to save my strength for the Olympian challenge to come. I didn’t know it, but I was about to run an unexpected footrace.
***
I left Olympia yesterday afternoon, taking a bus and a train to the port town of Patras. From Patras, I planned to catch the overnight ferry to Brindisi, Italy, and from there a train to Rome. But when I arrived at a travel agency in Patras, a man informed me, rather rudely I thought, that I was two hours late for the last ferry to Italy. My eyes filled with tears. This might seem an overreaction, but my delay at the Olympic Ruins had already pushed my thirteen days with Sean down to twelve. Missing the ferry would knock that down to eleven.
“But I called ahead and they told me the ferry to Brindisi leaves at ten,” I said.
“That’s every second day,” the travel agent said with a pompous show of indifference. “Tomorrow there is a ferry at ten.”
“Is there no other ferry to Brindisi tonight?”
“No. There is one, but it’s leaving now.”
“Maybe I could still make it.”
“No. There are procedures. There is paperwork. You will never make it. That ferry leaves now, and it is never late.”
Dejected, I sank into the nearest chair. “Are there any other options?”
He shrugged in that now-familiar Greek way: shoulders near the ears, elbows akimbo, hands palms up, lips pressed into a grimace. The Greek shrug has dozens of meanings based on the shape of the grimace and how emphatic the gesture. It can be used to show indifference, acceptance, confusion, anger, disdain . . . This guy was giving me the disdainful one.
“Thank you,” I said stonily, and walked out.
After nine months of traveling, I’ve learned never to trust anyone who says, “It’s not possible.” I walked a few doors down to the next travel agency and straight toward the first person who smiled at me. A woman. I wiped all traces of desperation from my face, figuring the key was to calmly declare what I wanted as if it were the simplest of requests.
“May I help you?”
“Yes, I’d like to take the next ferry to Brindisi,” I said, smiling serenely.
“Tonight?” she asked.
“Tonight,” I echoed.
She made a quick phone call, hung up, and explained, rapid-fire, that I might be able to catch the last ferry if I hurried. “But you must buy your ticket quickly!”
“How much?”
“Ten thousand drachma.”
I slapped ten thousand drachma on the counter. She slapped down a form to fill out. I slapped down my passport. Then, with the speed of a stock show auctioneer, she gave me complicated directions to the ferry, which I rattled back verbatim: “Left out the front door, to the train station, through the gate to the dock, turn left, go just past the duty free shop to the port police, give them this ticket with the passport, then ask which way to the ferry?”
“Yes. And you must run!”
I flung on my hefty pack, rushed out the door, and started to run—possibly faster than I’ve ever run in my life—with a thirty-five-pound load bouncing up and down on my back. People gaped as I ran past. Sweat poured down my back and chest, my calves and lungs burned. I grew dizzy and spots jumped across my vision. This was no short sprint, and I was no Olympic athlete. I was surprised at the immensity of the ferry terminal. More than half a dozen mega-ferries and a number of other boats lined the long docks. Don’t slow down! I know it hurts, but don’t slow down! I thought. You’ll suffer even more if you miss the ferry. Sean’s waiting for you.
I flew through the port gate, darted left, wove in and out of people and port vehicles, shot past the “Duty Free” sign to the port police desk, where I waved my ticket and passport at
. . . no one. The police weren’t there. I rushed across the building to a small bar and shouted hysterically at the two or three bewildered people standing there, “Port police? Where are the port police? I will miss my ferry!” My eyes were wide with panic and oxygen deprivation. The middle-aged bartender said, “Port police, six hundred meters, that way!” He pointed in the direction from which I’d run. I would have to backtrack. “Drop your pack here. You’ll kill yourself.”
Afraid to lose the time it would take to remove the pack, I simply turned tail and kept running. My ferry sat a tantalizing fifty meters away. Workers were loading trucks into the gaping aft-end, and the line of waiting trucks was rapidly shrinking. I pumped my legs harder.
Suddenly I realized I hadn’t asked the bartender what kind of sign to look for. I tried to run into the grocery store next door to ask directions again, but the glass doors wouldn’t open. It must have been the exit, but I couldn’t see any other doors, so I banged on the glass, startling a lineup of cashiers and customers. The closest cashier rushed toward me and opened the door.
“Port police?” I frantically waved my passport at her and pointed at the nearby ship. “I will miss my ferry!” She pointed at the building I’d just left, the building with the empty police desk and the bartender who’d told me to head the other way. “There’s no one there!” I moaned.
She shook her head insistently, took me by the elbow, and guided me back to the building, where the bartender heaved a sigh and said, “The police are not here. I told her to leave her pack! It’s six hundred meters that way.”
He then rushed past me, through the front door, and urged me to follow. He jumped on a motorbike parked just outside and started the engine. I unbuckled my pack and, without pausing, let it fall from my shoulders to the ground as I leapt onto the back of the scooter. I grabbed the bartender’s waist and we took off, speeding down the docks, dodging passengers and vehicles from another boat. “I’m afraid I’ll miss my ferry!” I shouted merrily and giggled, picturing how we must look.
They Only Eat Their Husbands Page 30