Suddenly we’re in the country, dusty olive trees, massive, maybe as old as the myth of Oedipus and Jocasta. We pass Thebes. Thebes. The cotton fields of Thebes, blue beehives, apartment blocks, Tiresias in the road. We cross plains planted with wheat and tomatoes. Along the edges of the fields, women sit behind blue boxes mounded with San Marzano tomatoes for sale. There—broken towers, a blue tractor, a man in a blue cap, then jumps into view an Austrian chalet selling Asian antiques.
We’re en route to Delphi, with perhaps a few questions for the oracle. When Jupiter wanted to find the center of the world, the omphalos, he released two eagles at the far corners. Where they met was Delphi. Would that we had oracles, who gave absolute, if often ambiguous, answers to essential questions for twelve centuries. Our guide for today looks bored. At the front of the bus with her microphone, she lurches with every pothole. Already she has irked me by asking how many of us have heard of Delphi. Then she asks, “Have you seen a map of Greece?”
I want to shout, I was studying Greece before you were born.
“Don’t say Del-fie!” she admonishes someone who has ventured a question. “It’s Del-fee!” I want to smack her for condescending, even though I did pronounce it Del-fie. As soon as we leave the bus, we break off from her strident voice. We have our own books to consult, with the imagined tones of an oracle reading to us, not her sandpaper voice. Proper pilgrims, we have brought a small bottle to collect some water from the holy spring, although we have brought no propitiatory honeypies for the snakes. We are walking on the foundations of literature, up the steep, stony path in the fiery heat. On walls of Delphi were inscribed: Σ, sigma, meaning “energy” and “one’s own force.” They also carved Know Thyself and Nothing to Excess, all still valid, though I’ve always been a fan of excess, siding with Colette, who said, “It’s no good having any unless you can have too much.” Blake went farther: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”
The ruins—more extensive than I imagined—look like rocks picked up and made into walls and houses that are returning to their natural positions in the fields.
My grandmother, who died when I was eleven, waits on a rock outside the entrance. I spotted her on the bus, her very body, bosomy but thin and spongy, deer legs, white hair fluffed just right, and her little pointed chin and watery, sad blue eyes. She wore high heels to Delphi and could not climb up to see where the oracle held forth for all those centuries. Instead, she bought a hamburger and sat on a stone feeding it to the birds. The voile print dress is the same, and the bony ankles. I know she will smell of Shalimar, exotic and cloying. As we reboard the bus, she sits in front of me. I see that her hair grows low on her nape, as mine does. I expect her to turn around, recognize me, and say, “Why, Frances, my dear, after so many years,” but instead she swivels in the bus seat and says, “Darlin’, could you unhook my bra? I’m sure as hell not riding all the way back to the ship in the heat with this thing stranglin’ me.” My wafty grandmother, Frances Smith Mayes, whose mother was so importantly named Sarah America Gray. I oblige. And remember Apollo, god of prophecy, and all the gods who extract revenge if you come too close. Memory is like that, too. The layers unshuffle, about to reveal something, then show you only a wild card.
On the way back to the ship, I catch a glimpse of the Acropolis at sunset, far away, and lines by Kóstos Kariotákis rise in my mind: “And there beyond, the Akropolis like a Queen/wears all the sunset like a crimson robe.”
At sea, at night, women’s fantasies come alive. The deep rhythms of the sea must retrieve primal longings. By day, they lounge or walk or attend lectures and performances in muted linen pants or shorts and simple shirts. At the dances and candlelight dinners on board, our main delight is not the good food or the music. It is the fabulous sight of a large Dutch woman in blue taffeta with puffed sleeves and a little bustle. A bustle! A straight yellow dress with an Empire waist reminds me of the bridesmaid’s dress I wore at my friend Anne’s wedding when she fainted from the heat and the priest just kept on with the ceremony until she revived. The twins, with upsweeps and dangling rhinestones, have switched for this gala, to black lace numbers with fake red roses around the scooped necks. Ed and I are in our anonymous Italian black. Others, too, are in this minimalist mode, tasteful, fitted sheaths, the discreet powdery colors and simple cuts. There’s the Isabella Rosselini look-alike, with tanned perfect shoulders and arms, riding into the ballroom like Aphrodite on the waves, her cloud of pink chiffon drifting from her ankles. There’s the young daughter of hefty, blond South Africans in her sea-foam silk dress with billowing sleeves, who looks like an Annunciation angel except for the dragon tattoo on her shoulder.
Our eyes are drawn to the flamboyant, the ravishing variety of the species on show. Ed likes a three-tiered muu-muu with enough fringe around the hem to bind a five-by-six rug. Following her, on the arm of her handsome husband, a red-haired beauty who looks as though she has somehow been expanded by a bicycle pump wears white Lycra so tight it fits like a plaster cast over her blimp-sized buttocks. The neck is V-ed to the last possible moment, revealing generous slices of Cycladic breasts. Where did she get long white gloves with diamond-shaped cutouts? I’m drawn to the woman with hair piled high, then cascading into curls. She’s in voluminous ruffles splotched with red flowers and what might be banana leaves. At around three hundred pounds, she looks like a moving garden. The gentlemen hosts go to work, and the band saws away at tunes the dolphins must dive far under the waves to escape.
In Santorini the paint stores don’t have to stock a range of colors. Shelves of Aegean blue and stark white will do. White, white houses, white as bleached bones, with gates, windows, and doors of blue, a vibrating blue when fresh, fading through the seasons to chalky gray. The blue-trimmed domed churches are profoundly appealing, not only for their stark purity and isolation but because at a subconscious level they must remind us of the dome of the skull and the interior life. An occasional iconoclast has painted a door green or a fence lavender. Still, those are sea colors in shallows or at twilight. We are let loose for the day and have rented a car. Here I experience the legendary Greek light in the harsh landscape, which looks unbenevolent but also spaciously opens to the sun. The hills, almost treeless except for the fig, hardly intrude on essential sky and sea, and the lava-scoured land looks as plain as the sea. Few trees escape from the volcanic soil, except the fig. Stubby, but proof that this tree will have its way with rock or mountain or field anywhere in the Mediterranean world. Ed pulls over, and I get out to watch grape-pickers loading baskets with dusky fruit. The vines sprawl on the ground, as though unable to stand up against the hard sun. Even the middle distance shimmers in the heat, warping the lines of grapes. My head feels struck by the sun, the rays warping my skull. The Praxitilean ideals must have come from standing in a field in Greece, from realizing that finding the essentials of beauty is a reductive process. Take away the extras—but leave the hot wind, the hand cutting the grape, the sun filling your bones with arid light.
At sea, I am loving the days. Blue, blue, we’re skimming, sliding over blue. At times I see rivers running in the sea, angling across the choppy tides. The color of blue—immortal. Cheery orange and yellow tenders with names like Herakles and Perikles toot out to meet us as we approach an island, then tug or guide us into harbor.
On deck in hard sunlight, the worshipers reveal their quadruple bypass scars (one fresh, puckered red), knees swollen and purple, withered cesarean slashes. On California beaches I’m used to seeing the gorgeous. Here, alongside those at the peak of perfection, the ancient, the obese, the damaged shed their clothes and forget their vein-popped legs, horn-thick toenails, liver-spotted skin. Facing the human’s last or ruined or excessive forms contrasts sharply with the archaic statues of human perfection we are seeing in the museums. The man we call Mr. Good Morning, for his enthusiastic greeting, lets out a long toot every time he stands. His posture makes the letter lambda, Γ. My eyes are riveted by a scarecrow man who
se withered penis, so huge, hangs from the side of his wide-legged bathing trunks. I suddenly recall my daughter’s horse, Chelsea. One crane-legged man raises his drink and says, “Let’s party.” Yes, let’s.
Wanting to lose twelve pounds, I am especially drawn to the grandly obese. The loving mother with two frisky children lowers herself into the pool. Good for her, I think. The hell with people like me who feel as though a spotlight shines on them if they carry a bulge on the thigh, if the stomach is not concave. Her ankles merge seamlessly into Colossus of Rhodes thighs, overlapped at the knees as though a meltdown has begun. She has, remarkably, chosen a white suit. Backing down the ladder into the water, she looks like an albino hippopotamus; breasts, stomach, hips converge, hiding even from her the cleft of her sex. How light she becomes in the salt water. She frolics with her blond boy, her skinny girl, tossing them in the air, letting them splash with a shriek, until she hoists herself out with heavy effort. Luxuriating on a chaise longue, she falls asleep. The girl’s head rests on her breasts, in this life or the next the softest pillow she ever will feel against her face.
Late at night when I am alone on deck, I see the woman again near the rail in a red caftan, arms spread, dancing alone. A pleasure to the eye. At sea, she is goddess of the waves. Her heart is working overtime. Is she sleeping in the same bunk-width beds everyone else is?
We love Náfplio, named for Náfplios, the son of Poseidon, on the coast of mainland Greece. Long shady esplanade along the sea, a sand-castle-type castle just offshore, pastel houses, and boisterous people. By chance we find the museum of the komboloi (worry beads). I’ve watched men fingering those beads in the cafés. The museum is Aris Evangelinos’s lifetime collection, displayed in a small house. He also makes and sells them. He has stories to tell. His fierce black eyebrows shoot up and down. “The beads are nonreligious in Greece,” he explains; “they are a friend, they are for the comfort of touch, for the clacking noise they make, for the color.” He holds up an antique komboloi made of amber. “In Muslim countries, often you find three sets of thirty-three beads for three prayers. The Hindus call them mala, meaning ‘prayer book.’ But in Greece they are companions to life. Friends. Many men are buried holding their komboloi. If you wear one around your neck, the evil eye knows to stay away from you.”
His collection includes beads made of snakes’ backbones, black coral, olive pits, ebony, flower seeds, mother of pearl, thread knots, yak horn, rare green amber, aromatic wood, ivory, and amber powder. Some are incised, limned with secret symbols. I pick out a bracelet-size komboloi of pale yellow onyx. I’m a paperclip-bender at my desk. I’ll try picking up this instead. We buy his book, and he signs it for us. At lunch I open it and read, “To my friends Frances and Edward with love, Aris.” Such moments make travel a deep pleasure.
Náfplio elicits the word charming. The major industry seems to be the benign production of gold jewelry. I look in several shops, admiring the hammered Byzantine crosses, rings of many-colored semiprecious stones, and coral pins. You can imagine living here, strolling along the water, sitting in the piazza listening to the wandering minstrels with their open guitar cases spotted with coins, which is what I do until time to dash to the ship, already sounding its bellowing horn for departure. Ed goes off to mail some cards, gets lost, and barely runs across the gangplank in time.
We like getting dressed for dinner as we slip out of a harbor every night. Our mood as we enter the dining room shifts to celebratory. We’re having great dates. I begin to remember that I was quite good at flirting. Ed becomes more romantic, swooping out of his jacket pocket a small blue-velvet box. Inside I find gold earrings with round sapphires—the very ones I’d coveted in a jewelry shop. And I thought he was off looking for stamps. They will remind me of the color of the sea. After dinner we walk all around the deck. The stars are enough to break your heart, so intensely present, close enough to reach. They do not seem like the same stars that hang over the rest of the planet.
At sea, in the night, Ed dreams again of water pouring into the cabin. “Remember the old Paul Newman movie? When he’s in a cistern and the water starts to rise and someone covers the top with steel and the water keeps coming up?”
“No. Why was he in a cistern?”
“I don’t know. Anyway, the water comes almost to the top where he has only a tiny space to breathe.”
“How did he get out?”
“That’s not the point. The point is the feeling. I can’t take this.” I too sometimes wake in the night feeling as though I am inside an egg.
Out on deck early, I spot people thrashing in the water. Suicides? Two at once? Crazies on speed? Just then a life preserver is thrown from our boat, and the two swim toward it. Soon two crewmen haul them out of the water into a dinghy. Later I hear that they are two Afghan or Albanian or Kurdish refugees, now recovering in the ship infirmary. Rumors buzz around the decks. A nearby sailboat picked up three men in the night when they were dumped by the person they’d paid to take them to safety. Were there seventeen originally? One refugee said so. If so, twelve have drowned and possibly we have sailed over their bodies.
This rescue is a brutal reminder of the scrappy courage of those caught in the crosshairs of world events not of their making. And also a reminder of privilege and luck. We stared down into the water where two flecks were adrift. How surreal their night, landing in the sharp water and treading until morning. Death was right there in a lungful of salt water, a passing shark, or the failure of the body to keep on moving. Suddenly they are saved. Then we necessarily move on through the day, gnawed at (for years) by the image of the two faces looking up.
My talk is late morning. I see in the daily program that it has not been listed among the day’s activities, and at eleven I face an audience of five. Unsettling, because I am on board as a guest in exchange for speaking. We have an intimate little chat, and then everyone is back to sunning and reading on this day at sea. The entertainment director says not to worry, but I feel as though I’ve slipped into a theatre without a ticket.
All afternoon in the deck chair, I try to describe to my notebook the colors of the water and sky. How to translate sunlight into words? Beneath my vision of this sea, the green waters of Angel Island wash, weekends at anchor in Alaya cove with my first husband and daughter on our sailboat, Primavera. Often we were the only boat. After four, when the last tourist ferry departed, the deer came out, dozens of them, to drink from the sprinklers on the caretaker’s lawns. We rowed the dinghy to shore and walked around the island for the sunset views of San Francisco, which looked like a fabled city rising white out of the ocean. The always-improbable span of the Golden Gate seemed like some link between memories rather than a practical bridge that is constantly being repainted. Those Primavera evenings were close to sublime. In the tiny galley I made dinner, then we watched for falling stars on clear nights or slipped early into the nifty beds below, where we were rocked all night like newborns in the treetops before the cradle fell.
I kept those evenings to hold against days when my mind felt like a kerosene-soaked rag. Now I’ll have these, too. The natural world saves me.
Everyone heads for the buses bound for the monastery where monks had to lower themselves in baskets from the sheer mountain. I get vertigo and claustrophobia just thinking of that, and Ed refuses to board a bus so soon after the long trek to Delphi. We are docked at Volos, close to where Jason and the Argonauts set sail. Dozens of cafés and fishing boats line the harbor. One taverna displays fifty or so octopuses on a clothesline. Take your pick. At the dusty archaeological museum, we discover the grave stele with faint paintings revealing the faces of those long gone to more dust. And we see necklaces they wore, with wrought charms of inlaid sapphires, rubies, and etched-gold portraits. Back out in the heat, we decide to take a taxi to the village of Μακρινίτσα (Makrynitsa), where thousand-year-old sycamore trees cast their immense shade over the plaza. They’re as impressive as California redwoods. We visit the little Byzant
ine church. I’m used to lighting thin candles in churches by now, standing them up in sand. One for my aunt Mary, sick in Savannah. One, always, for my family. Protect them, please. One for all those I love, and one for the conviction I once had that red and yellow, black and white, Jesus loves all the little children of the world.
I buy a jar of pickled caper leaves, something I’ve never seen before. I’m tempted by dried foot-long stalks called “tea of the mountain,” opaque dark honeys, dried mint, and oregano. Ed nudges me on. Working donkeys with men on sidesaddle plod up the hilly streets.
At a taverna under the trees, we skip the rabbit in sauce and the boiled goat, so heavy in the heat, and order instead spiced feta to spread on delicious rough bread, savory eggplant with tomatoes, and—because the platter at the next table lured us—fried potatoes, golden and light. A man at that table has finished his lunch, and his wife chats with people at adjacent tables. He takes out his komboloi and seems to go into another world. The plying of his gold beads sounds soft like water over rocks. He fingers his red “god” stone, then each bead, rubs the red one all around, and starts over, looping the whole circle around in his hand before he starts again.
Leaving—we sail at five—we find no taxi. Oh no, we’re told, taxis only come here; try the next village, only two miles. We set off in the heat and after-lunch torpor—easy to write, but we’re walking down an oven-roasted paved road in August, temperature easily over a hundred degrees, with steam coming up off the asphalt. Hot wind in the aspens sounds like waterfalls, but the stony streams are dry. We’re winding slowly downhill, thank Zeus, to another village—where there is no taxi. My sandals rub blisters across all my toes. My heel is bleeding. Finally we get on a bus and slowly inch down to Volos again, getting off near the harbor and walking another mile to the ship.
A Year in the World Page 28