cactus and mud, where there was mystery, true, but not of folklore or narrative verse.'Four days ago. Those towers. I found him sleeping in a damp cellar, stinking of goats. Andahl. He knows my work.”It was cold, we went back inside.'He was with them on the island. He's still with them but the situation isn't the same. They had to leave that village and they're a little scattered now but still in one area, the Deep Mani. Five people. Andahl likes to deliver recitations. I let him recite. I'm not here to argue with the bastards.”'Why did they have to leave that village?”'It's being developed. The whole place is being renovated. Workmen start coming in any day. Somebody wants to make guest houses out of the towers. Open the area to tourists.”'Real life,' I said. 'Where is he now?”'There are caves on the Messinian coast. Some well known, very extensive. Others just holes in the sea rock. I drop him on the road that leads to the caves. I don't know where he goes after that. Last three days that's been the routine. In the morning I show up, same place. Eventually he appears. They're talking. He's trying to arrange a meeting.”'Have you asked him what the pattern is? Why they keep a watch. How they decide who and where to strike.”'He puts a finger to his lips,' Frank said.Because part of the eastern coast is without roads of any kind, we had to cross the peninsula twice before reaching Githion, beyond the towers, a tiered port town that opens directly, almost bluntly on the sea. Sundown. We found Del Nearing in a waterfront cafe, writing a postcard to her cat.
'A man will say, if you ask him how many children he has, two, proudly. Then you learn he has a daughter he didn't bother to count. Only the sons count. That's the Mani.”'I wonder if I'll ever see my apartment again,' Del said. 'I've been trying to reconstruct it in my mind. There are large gaps. It's like parts of my life have melted away.”'Death and revenge,' Frank said. 'A lot of the killing revolved around the family. The house was also the fortress. That's the reason for these towers. Endless vendettas. The family is the safekeeper of revenge. They keep the idea warm. They nurture it, they promote the conditions. It's like those family sagas of crime in the movies. People respond to Italian gangster sagas not just for the crime and violence but for the sense of family. Italians have made the family an extremist group. The family is the instrument of revenge. Revenge is a desire that almost never becomes an act. It's a thing most of us are limited to enjoying in the contemplation alone. To see these families, these crime families, many of them blood relatives, to see them enact their revenge is an uplifting experience, it's practically a religious experience. The Manson family was America's morbid attempt to make a stronger instinctive unit, literally a blood-related unit. But they forgot something. The revenge motive. They had nothing to revenge. If there's going to be blood, it has to be a return for some injury, some death. Otherwise the violent act is ghastly and sick, which is exactly the way we see the Manson murders.”'Frank's people come from Tuscany. I tell him why do you talk like a Sicilian.”'Look at her. I love that face. That dull empty perfect face. How right for today.”'Suck a rock.”'Self-created,' he said. 'It's a blankness she wills out of her deepest being. Vapid. Does vapid say it? Maybe vapid says too much.”'If Manson is ghastly and sick,' I said, 'what do we have here, with our own cult?”'Totally different. Different in every respect. These people are monks, they're secular monks. They want to vault into eternity.”'The same but different.”'Film is not part of the real world. This is why people will have sex on film, commit suicide on film, die of some wasting disease on film, commit murder on film. They're adding material to the public dream. There's a sense in which film is independent of the filmmaker, independent of the people who appear. There's a clear separation. This is what I want to explore.”It was a long dark room. A boy kept bringing pots of tea, ouzo for Frank. Del was watching an old man sitting in a corner, a cigarette hanging from the middle of his face.'Film,' she said absently. 'Film, film. Like insects making a noise. Film, film, film. Over and over. Rubbing their front wings together. Film, film. A summer day in the meadow, the sky's full of heat and glare. Film, film, film, film.”It was only when she'd finished talking that she turned her attention to Frank, grabbing a handful of hair at the back of his neck and twisting his head so that he might see directly into her gray eyes. Their public affection was reserved for the times when they heckled and mocked each other. It was an automatic balance, the hands and eyes as the truth-tellers of love, the things that redeem what we say.We went to a restaurant two doors down. There was a handful of red mullet in a basket out front. We were starting to eat when the old man hobbled in, worn down to an argument with himself, a cigarette still drooping from his mouth. This made Del happy. She decided she didn't want to talk to us anymore. She wanted to talk to him.We watched her at his table, gesturing elaborately as she spoke, pronouncing words carefully, words in English, a few in Italian and Spanish. Frank seemed to be looking right through her to some interesting object fixed to the wall.'She's not part of anything,' he said. 'She doesn't know yet whether she wants to grow up and assume responsibilities in the world. She had a miserable time most of her life. She has a tendency to give in to fate or other people. But we tell each other everything. There's an easiness between us. I've never known a woman I could be so intimate with. It's our gift as a couple. Intimacy. I sometimes feel we've known each other three lifetimes. I tell her everything.”'You told Kathryn everything.”'She never told me anything back.”'You told Kathryn more than I told her. It was a kind of challenge, wasn't it? That was the mechanism between you two. You dared her to be part of something totally unfamiliar. You wanted to shock her, mystify her. She found this interesting, I think. Something her background hadn't encompassed.”'Kathryn was equal to any challenge I could come up with. Not that I know what you mean by dares and challenges.”'Remember the shirt? She still has it. Your
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I made my way through the mud streets, the same complicated solitude. I could almost see myself, glowing in borrowed light. A voice, my own but outside me, speaking something other than words, commented somehow on the action.I was made of denim and sheepskin. My shoes were waterproof, my gloves lined with wool.This is the way things happen. I walk into a cafe in a wind-beaten town and they are right there even if I don't know it at the time. And now I duck under a stone beam on a cold smoky morning in the towered hamlet where no one (almost no one) lives and he is sitting on a blue crate, a crate for soda bottles, and there is one for me as well, upended. A fire is going, twigs mostly, and he lifts his feet off the dirt floor, putting them close to the flames, and it is nothing, a talk in a basement room with a medium-sized man who has a cold. But how else would it be? What did I expect? The only true surprise is that I am in the scene. It ought to be someone else sitting here, a man who has seen himself plain.'What do we have?' he said. 'First we have a film director and now we have a writer. This is not so strange really.”'Frank thinks I want to write about him.”'About him or about us?”'I'm a friend of Owen Brademas. That's all. I know Owen. We've talked many times.”'A man who knows languages. A calm man, very humane, I think. He has a wide and tolerant understanding, a capacity for civilized thought. He is not hurried, he is not grasping for satisfactions. This is what it means to know languages.”He had a long face, a receding hairline, pale freckles high on his forehead. Small hands. This reassured me in some mysterious way, the size of his hands. His face was impassive. He wore a black tunic unraveling at the right shoulder. I studied, I took mental notes.'I thought you would want to speak Greek,' I said. 'Or whatever the language of a particular place.”'We are no longer
