Eventually we must have slept, because the alarm woke us in the early hours. Clemmie dressed quickly. I got up and, too stupid even to make her a farewell cup of coffee, stood clueless and useless as she threw the last few items in her backpack. The purr of a car engine announced that the confounded taxi driver was true to his hour. Clemmie gave me a sisterly hug and a kiss on the cheek. It was absolutely the last chance to say something, and Blatchley will never, at the last, remain silent; so I cleared my throat and, with a nervously hoarse tenor which belied my bantering words, I said, “Well, enjoy your grave-robbing. I don’t suppose I can persuade you to stay and do my ironing and child bearing?”
She froze for an instant, and then turned to me and took me gently by the ear lobes.
“Sorry, Skip,” she said softly, “No can do. You are awfully sweet, but I couldn’t dilute the bloodline... my family hasn’t had an oik in the gene-pool for centuries!”
“Quite right too!” I said, with what flippancy I could muster, “Your elitism does you credit! Well, you have a good time, Clemmie. Dig up a pot for me, would you?”
“You’d only break it, you ox! I’ll look for a sword, or a bloody great big axe... that’s more your style!” Then she hugged me, and kissed me very gently on the lips.
As she climbed out of the hatch, I realised that she had left tears on my cheek.
CHAPTER SIX
THE LITTORAL TRUTH
Dynamic inertia and the rigours of cafe society... what not to do when in Greece for Easter... beware of Greeks bearing gifts... an inviting prospect... a visit to the butcher... the sage counsel of Kyrie Manolis... advice on the spitting of pigs... a helpful hint for persons planning armoured invasions of France... a late surge... porkrastination... entroparty... the littoral truth... the monolithic muleteer.
One of the enduring pleasures of living in Poros is doing absolutely anything at all.
If that seems like a fatuous statement, then go there and try it yourself. It doesn’t matter a jot what you do... you might fancy a hair-cut, or a cup of coffee; you might want a light-bulb, some alka-seltzers, or a bottle of gas for your cooker; you might need to take money from the bank, a letter to the post, or an unsatisfactory partner to the ferry. You always end up having fun. Even if you go out to buy flowers for your mum’s funeral, you’ll probably have a smashing time. The reason for this is the waterfront.
Almost everything you want to buy or need to do in Poros is located on the waterfront, known as the paralia. It is a wide street, with nothing but flowerbeds and lampposts on the open quay side. This open aspect ensures that each and every one of the cafes, restaurants, hotels and shops which line the other side of the road enjoy stunning views over the waters of the bay to the surrounding hills. The architecture of the paralia is a charming mixture of classical and traditional buildings, quite grand in some places, quaint in others and everywhere picturesque. Immediately behind the first row of buildings the land rises steeply to become the massive chunk of rock upon which the houses of the town are built. There is very limited motor access to the high part of the town, and few people bother to walk up and over when they can walk around on the flat, so all life circulates around the paralia.
Whatever you do, you end up passing along this waterfront, which means that you will see everyone and everyone will see you. Even if you have only been there two days, you will be greeted by every waiter and merchant who has served you; and as your acquaintance grows you will be hailed with metronomic regularity. As your familiarity increases you will be stopped at regular intervals for a leisurely greeting, a snippet or twenty of gossip, and then gradually you start to receive invitations... to stop and talk, to take coffee, or to join a party at a kafeneion.
As you become even better known you will be offered sweets or cakes by people celebrating their saint’s name-day. People will stop you with news from your home country, or to ask your opinion of news in Greece; you will be advised of apartments for rent, new businesses, impending weather changes. You may be offered things for sale, ranging from fresh fish through hunting puppies to real estate. I have returned from a walk along the front with invitations to barbeques, parties, weddings, christenings, funerals, football matches... and very, very often I have not returned at all. As for sport... show the merest hint of an interest in soccer or basketball, and your progress around the paralia probably wouldn’t match that of an arthritic snail traversing a glue-spill.
If you are at all sociable, this is a very pleasant atmosphere in which to live. You don’t need to plan a day at all... just invent some nebulous reason for leaving your house or boat and venture forth. The chances of you not being diverted... into conversations, cafes, trips to the beach, lunch appointments... simply do not exist.
For holiday purposes, this state of affairs could hardly be improved upon, of course, but if you are living in the town it can make it a little difficult to achieve objectives. Every time you set out with any sort of goal or deadline, you end up hours late, unsure of what you had originally intended, and so full of caffeine that you keep trying to climb the lampposts.
You may, for instance, go out purposefully early in the morning with every intention of getting some money from the bank and buying some screws to fix the wonky shelf above your bed; you return home pleasantly inebriated at about midnight having been inveigled into four cafes, wandered over to Galatas for an ouzo, gone to the beach, started lunch with four friends at three p.m. and finished it at eight-thirty with eleven, and spent the rest of the evening back in the cafe watching the world go by and setting it to rights. You then roll into bed, muzzily wondering who paid for it all, as you never got within two hundred yards of the bank, and wake up cuddling the shelf which fell on your head in the night. So you get dressed and go out for some screws...
Living in Poros is very pleasant, but as your acquaintance grows... and not only with the locals, for many of the visitors return very regularly... it gets harder and harder to get anything done. People for whom this is a tribulation don’t come back; people who enjoy it stay. This, of course, continually purifies the laid-back demographic of the island, the bloodstock being constantly refined and sieved of purposeful elements. Charlie Darwin could have saved himself all those iguanas and got the job done in a fraction of the time it took him to get to the Galapagos if he had only studied the natural selection extant in Poros cafe society... if, that is, he had ever managed to sober up long enough to have a quick think about it!
* * *
From my earliest days in Poros I recognised the siren song of the waterfront, but I never comprehended its true puissance until the Great Inaugural Pig-Roast. It happened like this...
I handed over Mucky Duck in Samos on Easter Sunday and booked myself a night-time ferry ticket back to Piraeus. This was a great mistake... Easter is the largest event in the Greek calendar both spiritually and socially, and you need to hunker down somewhere and enjoy it.
I had a general awareness of this, but I didn’t think much of it at first; partly because my own attitude to Easter was conditioned by the much more muted British celebrations, and partly because the ‘Big Week’ before Greek Easter is one of mourning and deep religious observance... bells toll, melancholy scriptures are read through the church loud-speakers and sombre, candle-bearing processions wind silently beneath half-masted flags: Many people keep the Lenten fast, some businesses close altogether, and no music is played... to the uninitiated, it doesn’t seem much like the precursor to a fun festival.
As a result of this atmosphere, combined, no doubt, with a sizable portion of self-pity at Clemmie’s departure, I made no effort to participate in the feast but spent Easter Sunday morning working on Mucky Duck. I handed her over to the clients at midday, and then spent the afternoon wandering around Vathi, the main harbour of Samos, waiting for the ferry and trying not to think of Clemmie, who was still just across the straits in Ephesus and tantalisingly close. I found no restaurants or bars open, as everyone was at private parties, and th
e air was everywhere scented with roasting lamb, roasting goat, and rosemary. I starved and slavered whilst listening to the merry clink and chatter of ubiquitous celebration.
Quite by chance, in the early evening, I was observed by some revellers and dragged in to a garden for a very pleasant hour. I would happily have stayed longer, but it was already late in the day; the party was succumbing to entropy, the ferry was leaving, and all the brief interlude did was to remind me that Greeks are hospitable and that I was a total pillock for managing to be the only person in the country who had contrived to spend Easter alone. On the empty overnight ferry I dozed in a reclining seat where, plotting to even the score, I determined to host a feast of my own as soon as I got back to Poros. I passed the waking hours of the voyage carefully compiling an eclectic guest list.
In the garden at my room by the clock tower were a large barbeque and a traditional stone oven, of which I had the use on request; and although Poros has any number of idyllic locations for al fresco recreation, I decided to hold my party at the house. It was a delightful setting. The space was just right for a group of perhaps twenty people; a rock-and-earth surface rising unevenly from a slate courtyard which offered numerous convenient places to sit, and was about half-covered by a shady pergola made of brightly painted steel pipe. The pergola, garden railings and the house walls were festooned with climbing plants in spring bloom.1 There was also a budding vine over the courtyard; and throughout the garden, wherever there was overhead support, hung dozens of dried gourds painted kaleidoscopic colours in disparate designs. The backdrop to this riot of colour was the view across the straits to Galatas on the one side and along the bay of Poros to the Sleeping Lady on the other. The water of the bay lay almost sapphire under the high afternoon sun, the hills a patchwork of fawn and olive, the sky a milky blue studded with puffs of pristine cloud. This high on the crest of the town a cooling breeze generally blew in the afternoon which, together with the help of the shady pergola, tempered the fierce sunshine of spring afternoons. The scents of flowers and pine came and went as the wind eddied around.
As attractive as the garden was, there was another reason for holding my event there, instead of at a beach or on an island... my landlady’s family had been so generous that I strongly felt it was time for me to reciprocate. Barely a day went by when I wasn’t offered a coffee or an ouzo-mezé in their courtyard, or given a portion of the day’s dessert, and the British instinct is to give in return. I had, however, managed to master the urge so far... for I had learned that Greeks do not esteem a kindness being promptly returned.
True Greek hospitality... and there is still plenty of it around... is freely given, without the expectation of repayment, so to reciprocate is to negate their generosity. For a Briton, raised in the tradition of standing his round, it can be uncomfortable to receive without reciprocation; but I soon found that people became rather stiff if I returned kindnesses promptly. Fortunately for me, Petros witnessed an early faux-pas on my part and explained it to me.
When Greeks do you a favour, either something asked of them or something which they have taken upon themselves because it will benefit you, it is registered and there is a score-card kept. A reciprocal gesture is expected, and appreciated when performed. But when someone does you a kindness unconnected with benefit... such as buying you a drink, giving you a piece of Mum’s delicious kataïfi2 or a pot of this year’s olives... then it is meant as a gift from the goodness of their hearts. To return it is impolite, as it gives the impression that the giver expected something in return, which devalues the gesture. One must learn to accept graciously, and this can be an uncomfortable thing for a Northern European, as the generosity can sometimes be quite significant. Very large rounds of drinks may suddenly materialise ‘from Kyrios Yiorgios’, and on occasion one may even find that one’s entire meal bill has been paid by someone who hardly knows you, but who has had a good day and just wants to share his happy condition.
Once I understood this, I compromised between Greek and British custom by accepting any generosity as graciously as I could, then waiting a decent time before reciprocating liberally, but in as different a manner as possible. It was in line with this policy, mindful of the many small kindnesses I had received from my landlady, that I decided to feast at my apartment. It would provide a charming, comfortable and well-equipped venue at which it would be entirely natural to include Kyria Fotini and her family... it was their garden, after all... and thus I planned to kill two birds with one hangover.
* * *
The day I got back from Samos I began issuing invitations, regardless of the fact that I hadn’t yet planned the event; and as I have already described, even when one has organised conscientiously, the Poros waterfront is a formidable adversary. Engaging it unprepared is simply to cast any hope of self-determination into the teeth of a gale. The first spanner it threw in the works was the utter destruction of my carefully compiled invitation list.
From a perfunctory survey of the garden and courtyard I had a vague notion of how many people it could accommodate in comfort. I also considered how many bodies it would be acceptable to invite into what was, after all, someone else’s house. To Kyria Fotini I suggested that I might ask twelve people, and her family in addition, which might mean a total of twenty if she happened to be on speaking terms with her siblings on the day in question. She gave this judicious consideration and an eventual grave nod, which I took to mean that this, but not much more, was acceptable. So I selected twelve names from my list, a considered mix of locals and foreigners calculated to provide good conversation, added three or four names as first reserves, and set off into the waterfront to find my victims. This, of course, was somewhat before the advent of mobile telephones, which came surprisingly late in Greece.
Finding them took no time at all; they were, naturally, on the paralia, but the problem was, of course, that they weren’t all sitting together. They were sitting with other people, and I am not the sort of chap who can walk into a group of five people and invite just two of them to a party. And since they spent most of the day on the waterfront, it wasn’t much use trying to catch them alone elsewhere.
First of all, I joined groups where my intended guests were sitting and stayed until people went to the lavatory, when I finished my drink hurriedly and followed them to accost them alone; but people seemed to have bladders like buckets that day, and by the time I had managed to have a tête-a-tête with even half of my targets I was hours late, on the outside of about two pints of wine, and probably beginning to acquire a reputation as a stalker with exceedingly indiscriminate tastes.
About half way through the morning I managed to isolate Charlie this way, and as I delivered my invitation just outside the toilet the rather insubstantial door was almost torn from its frame to reveal PeePee, hurriedly re-tensioning her nether garment and squealing delightedly, “Oh! A Partee! Zat vood be vunderfool. Vot shoot I pring?” Okay, then, thirteen.
Next I found Monique sitting on her own in the Blue Ouzerie, so I sent an ouzo down to see how the wine was getting on inside me whilst I invited her. She accepted, and so did Willy and Ilsa whom I had not noticed at a nearby table. Well, thirteen is unlucky anyway.
I slogged on to Petros’ cafe and there, over a free nip of tsipouro,3 I invited my mentor; then I spotted Joe Burke in a corner... I hadn’t realised his boat was back in town, but I couldn’t not invite him. He gleefully accepted... and introduced his niece who was sailing with him.
At the Mouragio restaurant I was pressed to try a glass of retsina whilst Dimitris thanked me very effusively for the invitation and said that his mother also loved a party; then I was inveigled into the adjoining Lagoudera with another glass on the house, which could not be refused as I had been seen to accept next door. Passing George’s Cafe, I invited Gina and Andrea, two girls who worked in one of the bars. They hadn’t been on my initial list, but they looked so gorgeous sitting in the sun that no heterosexual male... not even a sober, respectable one...
could possibly have omitted them. In any case I thought I was safe... they were nocturnal animals who generally slept on a beach in the afternoon before working until dawn. I was wrong. The police had closed their bar for a week for making too much noise, so they were not only free but also unemployed and hungry. They were more than happy to accept a free meal, and kindly promised to bring two other girls who had just arrived looking for summer work and would be agreeable to looking attractive in return for a few calories.
The reader will, by this point, have got the picture. By the time the sun crossed the meridian, I had firmly invited about twenty-five people, suspected I had been overheard by many more, and my breakfast was dissolving gaseously in about a gallon of exceedingly miscellaneous intoxicants.
Then I weaved off looking for a butcher.
Up to this point, I hadn’t really made friends with a butcher in Poros. Eating out in Greece was so ridiculously inexpensive that there was no temptation for a bachelor of even modest means to cook. I didn’t want to be alone, to do washing up, or to carry a load of stuff up a steep hill, so my fridge contained only some cheese, olives and salami in case I got the midnight munchies... I don’t believe I even knew how the cooker at the house worked. Even on boats I only cooked if there wasn’t a taverna in sight when my belly started looking for a union official. I didn’t really know where to buy anything, apart from cheese pies, ice and cold drinks. I was choosing my butcher entirely blind... never a smart thing to do.
The meat market in Poros is a sort of arcade between the waterfront and a narrow alleyway behind, and in this alley was a very fine restaurant called Pandelis. Several nautical ne’er-do-wells were taking an early glass of tsipouro and I was inveigled to join them and add a tincture or two of this fire-water to my as yet lunchless tripes.
The Trojan Walrus Page 13