here.”I said, 'Is this what you and Frank Volterra talked about for two nights?”'Partly. Yes, he wanted to talk. To talk and listen.”'Is that where he's gone?”'I don't know. He seemed to be considering it. Something about the place excited him. I made the trip myself once, some years ago; there are inscriptions, simple graffiti mostly, camel drivers scratching their names on rocks. I described it to him. We talked about it at some length, the idea of these people, this mad scene being played out in a vast beautiful silent place. The man almost frightened me with his attentiveness. To be listened to so closely can be disconcerting. It implies an obligation on the speaker's part.”'Frank's not your everyday tourist. Did you tell him about Donoussa?”'I don't know anything about it. Only that a young girl was killed. My assistant heard it from someone.”'Also a hammer,' I said.'Yes. A year ago.”A claw hammer. Is this what he'd meant when he talked about the language of destruction? Simple hand tool of iron and wood. He liked the sound of the words apparently, or the look of them, the way they were bonded perhaps, their compact joinder, like the tool itself, the iron and wood.If you think the name of the weapon is beautiful, are you implicated in the crime?I poured more wine, suddenly tired, feeling drumheaded and dumb. It didn't seem logical, the hangover preceding the drunk, or concurrent with it. Owen said something about madness or sadness. I tried to listen, realizing Kathryn was gone, inside somewhere, sitting in the dark or in bed already, wanting us to take these murders somewhere else. I would go down the hill with him in the small beam of his flashlight, watch him ride off on the undersized machine, legs crowding the handlebars. Then to my hotel, one flight up, the room at the end of the hall.Owen was talking again.'In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.”
The custom in warm weather is to hang curtains in doorways. The solid finish of the village yields to human needs. Surface shapes are engagingly disturbed. The wind blows, houses open to the passerby. There's no clear feeling of mysterious invitation. Only of stillness moved inside, stillness darkened, the grain of the inner day.The rooms are plain and square, immediate, without entranceways or intervening spaces, set at street level, so close to us as we walk in the narrow passage that we feel uneasy about intruding. The Greek in conversation crowds his listener and here we find the same unboundaried exercise of life. Families. People clustered, children everywhere, old women in black sitting motionless, rough hands folded in sleep. The bright and vast and deep are everywhere, sun-cut clarity, the open sea. These modest rooms mark out a refuge from eternal things. This is the impression we have, Tap and I, a sense of modesty, of nondescriptness, only glimpsing as we pass, careful not to appear too curious.Above the stepped streets there were occasional open spaces, stronger wind. I followed Tap past a large well with a conical iron cap. A woman with an open umbrella sat on a mule, waiting. Cats moved along the walls, watched from roof ledges, cankerous, lame, mangy, some of them minute, the size of a woolen glove.Climbing. The sea appeared, the ruined windmill to the east. We paused to catch our breath, looking down on a church with an openwork belfry of some patchy rose-pink hue, a rude and pretty touch in all the layered white. A single small church might press together half a dozen surfaces in unexpected ways, sea-waved, domed, straight-edged, barrel- vaulted, a sensuous economy of shapes and arrangements and cross-influences. We heard the hoarse roar of a donkey, an outsized violent sound. The heat felt good.I showed Tap a postcard my father had sent. It had a picture on it of the Ranchman's Cafe in Ponder, Texas. My father had never been to Texas as far as I knew. He lived in a small house in Ohio with a woman named Murph.Tap had received the same kind of postcard. In fact almost all my father's communications for two or three years had been in the form of postcards showing the Ranchman's Cafe.The message on his card, Tap said, was the same as the message on mine. He didn't seem surprised by this.A distant lazy drone. Cicadas. We'd seen them come whirring out of olive trees to sail into walls, dropping in a dry stunned rustle. The wind began to gather force.Tap led me to an unpaved area of houses with courtyards, the upper limit of the village. There were tall gateways here, some of them located a fair distance in front of the houses to which they belonged. Seen from certain angles these gateways framed a barren hilltop or the empty sky. They were artless arrangements, free of the texts they put before us, material cleanly broken from the world.We climbed a rock path that worked around a shoulder of land and curled out of sight of the village. A whitewashed chapel across a defile, abrupt in brown earth. We were high up now, in the sweep of the wind and sea, stopping frequently to find fresh perspectives. I sat at the edge of a narrow stand of pine, wishing we'd brought water. Tap wandered into a rocky field just below. The wind came across the defile with a sound that changed levels as the current increased in speed and reached the trees, rushing, from a pure swift surge of air to something like a voice, an urgent emotion. Tap looked up at me.Ten minutes later I got to my feet and walked out into the sun. The wind had died. I saw him standing fifty yards away in the steep field. He was absolutely still. I called to him, he didn't move. I walked that way, asking what was wrong, calling the words out across the immense silence around us, the drop-off into distances. He stood with his knees slightly flexed, one foot forward, head down, his hands at belt level, held slightly out from his body. Arrested motion. I saw them right away, lustrous black bees, enormous, maybe a dozen, bobbing in the air around him. At twenty yards I heard the buzzing.I told him not to worry, they wouldn't sting. I moved in slowly, as much to reassure Tap as to keep the bees from getting riled. Burnished, black-enameled. They rose to eye level, dropped away, humming in the sun. I put my arm around him. I told him it was all right to move. I told him we would move slowly up toward the path. I felt him tense up even more. His way of saying no, of course. He was afraid even to speak. I told him it was safe, they wouldn't sting. They hadn't stung me and I'd walked right through them. All we had to do was move slowly up the slope. They were beautiful, I said. I'd never seen bees this size or color. They gleamed, I told him. They were grand, fantastic.Raising his head now, turning. Did I expect relief, chagrin? As I held him close he gave me a look that spoke some final disappointment. As if I could convince him, stung twice before. As if I could take him out of his fear, a thing so large and deep as fear, by prattling on about the beauty of these things. As if I could tell him anything at all, fake father, liar.We held that inept stance a moment longer. Then I took his arm and led him through the field.
Kathryn and I had dinner on the harborfront with Anand Dass. She knew what was in the kitchen and gave our orders to a boy who stood with his arms crossed on his chest, nodding as she listed the items. The food and supply boat was docked nearby, a single-masted broad-beamed vessel with mystical eyes painted on the bow. No one wanted to talk about the cult.'It was flawless. A perfect flight. I mean it, those Japanese, they impress me. When I learned they have their own security at the Athens airport, I knew I would send him JAL.”'You go to the States soon,' I said.'The whole family, we converge, what an event,' he said. 'Even my sister is coming.”'Do you come back in the spring?”'Here? No. The University of Pennsylvania takes over the whole operation. I'll be back in India by then.”Kathryn passed the bread around.'In any case I'm not interested in underwater work,' he said. 'Outside my frame.”'What do you mean?' I said.He looked at Kathryn. She said to me, 'They're going to concentrate on the submerged ruins. They'll alternate. Next season, underwater work. Following year, back to the trenches.”'This is new,' I said.'Yes.”'But I don't think we'll ever alternate,' Anand said. 'I think we're finished for the season, the decade, the century, whatever.”He had a strong laugh. People stood along the quay, talking in last light. I leaned back in the chair and watched Kathryn eat.The argument was long and detailed, with natural pauses, and moved from the street to the terrace, into the house, finally up onto the roof. It was full of pettiness and spite, the domestic forms of assault, the agreed-upon reductions. This seemed the point, to reduce each other and everything else. What marriage is for, according to her. Our rage was immense but all we could show for it, all we could utter, were these gibes and rejoinders. And that we did poorly. We weren't able to take advantage of the clear openings. It didn't seem to matter who got the better of it. The argument had an inner life, a force distinct from the issues. There were surges, hesitations, loud voices, laughter, mimicry, moments in which we tried to remember what we wanted to say next, a pace, a range. After a while this became our only motive, to extend the argument to its natural end.It began on the way up to the house.'Bitch. You knew.”'I've been trying to find an alternative.”'This means no England.”'We could still go to England.”'I know you.”'What do you know?”'You want to dig.”'I didn't want to tell you the plan had broken down until I had some kind of alternative.”'When will you tell me about the alternative? When the alternative breaks down?”'Shut up, ass.”'I know what this means.”'I don't know what it means. How could you?”'I know how you think.”'What does it mean? I don't know what it means.”'You won't go to England.”'Good. We won't go to England.”'That whole thing was based on your coming back here.”'We could go anyway. We could work out a plan for the summer while we're there.”'But you won't.”'Why won't we?”'Because you won't. It's too obvious and simple. It lacks in-trepidness. It was intrepid when you came up with it originally. It is now obvious and simple and dull.”'You want to see the Elgin marbles.”'It's a fallback. You hate that.”'You're a fallback.”'What are you?”'You want to see the Elgin marbles but you won't go to the Acropolis. You want to see the rip-off, the imperialist swag in its proper surroundings.”'Hopeless. How the hell did I ever imagine I could come here?”'Swag. I got that from Tap.”'I hate this climb.”'You keep saying.”'I'm not the man-never mind.”'You never
