Jane Miller

from "Seven Mediterraneans”

            The argument was with herself. The sweetness has gone out of it, she thinks. Or has it? Such uncertainty, such waver­ings. Like water, of course, she decides. Endless. She is on the lower path, with the three or four jewelry shops, and hotel rooms splayed out, mules hauling stones down out of the construction site, three crumbled churches, and a shell of church still standing.

            The few tourists must step off the path to let each other pass, hold to a house wall, brush the dust off, and resume walking. What was it all about? Now she is at the poet Ritsos' old house. It is filled with blown glass, postcards, books of his, and books about the town which appears only as a giant rockface when approached by sea. Behind which lies the double‑tiered town and its ruins. She tries hard to picture Ritsos, lifting a small cup to his lips, staring out at the sea.  Tries a wool coat on him, that's it, a boy, a teenager really, in a wool coat, a brimmed cap. She imagines him trying to keep warm after just having awakened and come downstairs.  She looks up at the wooden stairs. It could not have been that long ago. There are notices not to touch the blown glass, to ask to be shown the drinking glasses, the lamps. They're beautiful, she thinks. She wonders how she would get this one home. She bumps into the thought of home, nearly knocking over a cobalt vase.

            Trinkets, religious icons, playing cards with mythologi­cal creatures in erotic poses, tired wool shoulder bags, more books until, finally, she looks up, to rest on the view, out the narrow rear window, though a hanging row of prisms, of the blue sea. She remembers entering it, yesterday, how it broke her down until something of her rested, briefly, on the sea floor , and rose back up fully assured. Of love? Of life generally, and of herself. Now it seems far off, though in view, and the certainty of her power challenged. Power now reduced to a small sound in the back of herself, a tinkling of glass chimes.

She hears them now, and must move out of the way. A group of Germans has entered the shop. She watches Ritsos slowly set down his cup onto a glass counter and take the stairs back up two at a time. He is wearing sandals in winter.

The shop is crowded now. She leaves without buying anything, but stops along the narrow path. There is the leathery and herbaceous scent of simmering meat coming from the kitchen of one of the few restaurants, and the music of dishes. Under that, a television with a soccer match playing in the bar across the steep path, backed against the cliff.

Two tourists climb to their rooms with luggage. She has to move to let them pass. They're speaking French. They look to be lovers; they're both wearing shorts, he in white and she in black, and she has a bikini top on, and her hair is in a pony­tail. She smells good, a heavy evening musk, with a bit of vanilla, perhaps jasmine? They laugh, then, again, softer, looking hard at one another. It reminds her of her lover's perfume, its bare gardenia, and propels her back to their room.

What had been the argument? Better not to think of it before opening the door. The same argument, or a different one, fought in the same uncompromis­ing way. Why did you say that? You never listen to me.

They embrace, then decide to go out immediately. The days spill into one another, long walks in the morning, long swims in the afternoon, long meals in the evening. The jasmine and bougainvillea and roses beguile them.

            At dinner, the Milky Way drops into the back of the sea. They eat overlooking hundreds of miles of black water. They wait for the right moment, drinking, thinking, dreaming, and, fixed in a pattern of argument and forgiveness, one drifts into sarcasm and the other takes lightly a sincerity. The moment smokes painfully down; one has to wet her finger and stop it, squeezing the last flame.

            They take positions as resolute as constellations. Then they push back oily plates of fish bones, and push themselves from the table, slowly. Lingering, they lean on the thin rail between the restaurant's upper deck and the pots of gerani­ums below. What was it all about? They embrace, with resistance.

            Slowly, they climb to the hotel. The air is fragrant, redolent of many centuries

in which the wine and the oil and the elemental hour held suffering off until hard

dawn. For a moment, they are forgiven again. The freedom is enormous. The out­

doors, equally enormous, of wild olive trees, thousand year old stones.

            In their room, the human proportion overwhelms them. The sun‑dried

sheets, the little theaters of luggage lying open. They lie down to dream fields of

mint and anise. Together they plant cuttings in pots along the worn paths to their

hearts. Good night.

            In the morning, they determine to climb to the upper tier, the ghost town.

They rise early, and it is already hot. The limestone mountain crumbles slightly as

they make the nearly vertical climb. Down the rough escarpment, the sea appears

unmoving. The stubborn mountain and the stubborn sea‑survivors, she thinks,

as she follows behind, now skipping through a microscopic avalanche.

            Rock‑more dead than alive? powerfully alive? Olga used to joke, “Be careful what you say: the rocks have ears.” She thinks of the poet Ritsos, restless, writing

of Helen:

                                                                                                                Helen,

    holding a glass to her lips, said, “Listen

to how my bracelets jangle; I am dead" —

and a pure white light streamed from her teeth, which

suddenly

all became marble and bone. Her hands and her voice

were nailed to the air.

      They churn through the air until, finally, there is barely any shade, and they reach the top. Up here, it is possible to hear the heavy bracelets, and she strains for them. They sit under a huge olive tree, its gnarled trunk hundreds, maybe a thousand years old, umbilicaled to the stony soil. Its oily leaves shimmer like freshly watered grass. She fails to hear anything, in fact, in a world so suddenly full of butterflies. She makes a mental note to call her mother, she cannot fathom how she has forgotten. She must get to a phone later today which, because of the heat, seems endless, timeless‑meaningless? she asks herself, and stands up awkward­ly, startling a field of butterflies just beyond the penumbra of shade.

           Both standing now, they pose inside the “V” of branches, while one holds the camera at the length of her arm and preserves them there, in partial shadow, lit by a thousand leaves. They laugh purely and quietly, watching Helen lift the glass to her lips and tip it back.

           They both turn to face the only standing structure, an ancient, unadorned church. The darkness calls them inside the entrance. A sharp incense startles them, as if they have wandered into some intimacy, yet they are alone in the church. The coolness, too, is shocking and, although she feels they are trespassing, she feels welcome. A dozen wooden taverna chairs, their straw seats coming unwoven, are scattered about the small chamber. Who sustains this? Who has lit the incense and swept the marble, who has lit the candles? They feel stung again by their trespass, despite the welcome.

They look al each other, they have had to catch their breath again, not because

          —that Trojan Horse before the walls,

implacable, with its enormous glass eyes mirroring the sea­—

wooden horse, with azure eyes, fully alive. You'd think

that the same sea saw itself with the horse's eyes,

saw, at the same time, the horse's belly, pitch dark, hollow,

with the fully armed warriors shut inside.

            Moving deeper into the darkness, small glittering icons become visible against the whitewashed walls. Old mirrors with their mercurial images. There's a tiny music stand and behind it a small altar. Bowls of water and floating candles. She watches as one sails across the bay of a small blue dish. God, she thinks, drawn suddenly outside the church, which now feels full to bursting. She is clearly one person too many. Lest they break out of the holy body a moment too soon, and be discovered.

            The sea is mercifully—mercilessly?—still there, far off, and all around them. Why come here, to the top of a limestone mountain, whose warriors are carrying out a subterfuge that will alter history, and, as yet, not once to have visited her father's grave?

            Her lover is quiet. Shall we start down? (Before we are trampled, she thinks.) Before it gets hotter? (And they burst from the church, charging.) Or shall we go back in, where it is cool (in the belly of the beast) and where the air is perfumed and virginal (where I shall see father again) and we may sit among the petitioners (mourners) and finally call mother and say we shall rush home (sailing a sea of a million million isinglass mirrors).

            The heat is reassuring. One holds the other's gaze. They hustle down, bathed in sweat, sprung from the darkness of midday. Their wooden limbs now shake off the ages, walking naturally in the light. Past the oracular olives, the stony air fra­grant of lemon thyme

       The broken horse, no longer needed, now wholly inanimate, lies among the broken branches and the crumbled stones of what were houses, of what was a vil­lage. They look back up from the first curve: the church, the old olive in front. The horror of a wire and plaster head, its two eyes silent. They lead the old horse—­vivid as a dream—down the mountain.

For a few days, everything else seems incomprehensible and deceptive.