A Year in the World (38 page)

Dusty
from Knossos, we check into Elounda Mare. The hotel has a basically modern design, but they have recuperated old door surrounds and Cretan stone floors, weavings, and copper trays. Old farm doors are sparingly but effectively used for ornaments, on either side of openings, and for tables. We get lost. The architect must have been inspired by the labyrinth at Knossos. We are luckily upgraded to a room with a private pool, terrace, and small yard with the sea below. We have a couple of days to look around at this part of Crete, but really we just laze about, taking a brief jaunt to see Spinalonga, a tiny island that formerly was a leper colony. Back at the hotel gift shop, I buy glass evil eye protectors for my house in California. The clerk says, “The sun gives us power. If we have two days without sun, we go crazy.”

We walk to dinner at the Calypso restaurant. It’s under the tutelage of a chef with a two-star restaurant in France. We’re seated near a marble pool with fountain jets; below, the sea spreads calmly to infinity. At the next table I’m convinced we have a member of the Russian mafia. The big-muscled, no-neck guy can’t put his arms down because of his expanded waist. He’s sweating alarmingly. His wife across from him is plump, too, but they have refused to acknowledge girth and are squeezed into clothes from an earlier size. He looks like a bouncer, and she’s forced-smiley and crunched into an aqua blue sequined top with tiny straps cutting into her soft meaty shoulders. Square-cut emerald earrings dangle on either side of her puffy little face with darting eyes. She looks trapped. He is silent, she is chattering. He moves to another chair at the table. Didn’t want his back to the door? Doubtless my mind is leaping; he made a fortune in cell phones or BMWs. We say good evening to them as they leave, this being a civilized custom practiced all over Europe, but they stare stonily ahead and do not respond.

This is our last night in Crete.

A
quick flight to Athens, and we’re suddenly in our rental car, heading toward the city. After the solitude of Crete, these roads look chaotic. We’re on a bumper-car course, with detours, closed lanes, flares in the road, and
no
signs. I’m gazing at the map, trying to catch a name, a street, a direction. Ed plows forward. We cross the entire city and somehow, miraculously, emerge on the road to Náfplio. The baptism of our friends Steven and Vicki’s boy will be in three days.

Just out of the Athens sprawl—oh, please let us find the airport when we return—we pass a building supply company that sells prefabricated chapels, painted yellow, trimmed in white. I want one. I’ve photographed every one we’ve passed. They may be memorials to the roadside dead, but I think of them as tributes to the travel gods. Ed keeps driving. “They weigh probably two hundred pounds. Hoist that onto luggage check-in?”

“Look, a Byzantine model, white with blue dome.”

“We are not hauling one of those through two airports. Who would be the one to carry it?”

“I could set it in front of our house in California. We could keep a votive lighted and photographs of our own dead inside. Maybe a poem by Ritsos.”

“The homeowners’ association would be on you in a heartbeat.”

Hotel Byron
in Náfplio, not easy to find, hides behind a boarded-up, domed Arab building and across from the church where the Mavromihalis clan assassinated the first president of Greece. I’m looking forward to meeting Steven’s Greek family, but the bullet hole in the church wall is disconcerting. We hoist our bags up several flights of stairs to get to the hotel, then hoist again up to the third floor above that. No elevator. Náfplio shows everywhere the inheritance of the Venetian taskmasters. They ruled capriciously and often heartlessly, but wherever their Machiavellian hard hand was felt, the legacy is efficacious—the mellow colors along the water, the genteel houses, the piazzas; the Venetians knew how to set up a city for living pleasantly. We came to Náfplio on the previous trip and now stop by to see George Couveris at his shop Preludio, where Ed bought gold earrings with sapphires to remind me of the Aegean. His is the prettiest jewelry I’ve seen in Greece. I’m tempted again by a heavy gold cross with other sea-colored stones, but under the influence of Cretan simplicity, I don’t even try it on. He remembers us and shows us all the latest designs, then sends us off to eat at Basilis, tables on the street, because they make the spiciest eggplant
imam
in town.

Because Ed likes hardware stores, we stop in to admire those triangular-handled aluminum trays for delivering coffee from the bar to a shop—how Italian
that
is. We buy skewers topped with brass owls, hares, and fish for our neighbor Placido, the master griller. What a throwback—they stock a number of frosted aluminum glasses and pitchers—those redolent of the 1960s colors, fuchsia, magenta, lime, blue, all sheened with the glow of moonlight. I’ll take Fiorella a few handmade bells, though she has no sheep or goats.

The
road gnarls through the hard mountains of the Peloponnese, and every kilometer subtracts something else from the landscape until only stark rock and determined shrub trees remain. Occasionally a lone monastery, a muscular little donkey, a scrawny mimosa. Finally we arrive in Monemvassía, the poet Yannis Ritsos’s hometown, which he called “the rocky ship, my ship of stone, which carries me across the world.” I love his poems and quote to Ed, “I’ve always wanted to tell you about this miracle,” and “I am totally inside myself like a person returning home after an exhausting journey.” The great heap of a rock island joins the mainland by a causeway. Mostly abandoned, the town carved into the unforgiving rock broods alone, now that the only marauders approaching the islet are tourists. Taken by the Turks, the Venetians, then the Turks again, the history and geography conspire together to emphasize a besieged stance in the world. Ritsos, too, was always in trouble with politics, a resister, exiled to various islands. Monemvassía, built facing sea, turns its back on the mainland. But they had to get their wheat somewhere; perhaps they were vulnerable after all. They had to go to the mainland to farm. A few houses have been restored; most lie empty and often roofless. Everywhere the sea reminds you of its beauty. Every house knew the beauty of the sea at all hours, and now the town’s remaining restaurants occupy terraces that offer to visitors the three-hundred-degree views.

After climbing up and down the streets, we walk back to the modern town on the other side of the stone causeway. I sit down with an ice cream cone, while I wait for Ed to have coffee. Practically at my feet a man falls off his bicycle and lies unconscious in the street. People swarm out of their shops, someone slaps him, someone throws a pitcher of cold water in his face. I’m horrified—he’s had a heart attack or a brain aneurysm. But no, he rouses, shakes his head, and soon pushes on. They must be used to heat prostration around here. “It happened to my nephew,” a waitress tells me. “He fell off the tractor, and the tractor just kept going until it hit a stone wall.” We spend a quiet night at a hotel right at the entrance to the secretive town.

Before we leave, I pay a visit to Yannis Ritsos, buried among his townspeople in a simple grave.

By
noon we are in Sparta.
Mother, imagine, I went to Sparta!
A clean and modern city that has long since lost its legendary warrior rigor. We drive on in the afternoon to Mystras, another abandoned city, on the precipitous slopes of Mount Taigetos. According to
Nature Guides: Europe/Greece
by Bob Gibbons, there are blooming on this mountain three types of white saxifrage, golden drop, figwort, peacock anemones, giant orchids, spurge, white irises, Judas trees, vetches—blue and yellow—and a scattering of horseshoe, somber, and yellow bee orchids. He lists toadflax, starry clover, and on and on. In the summer heat we don’t see anything except dried grasses and a few drifts of something that looks like Queen Anne’s lace but isn’t. I would like to come back and spot the Nottingham catchfly, asphodel, and cranesbill and, in the air, rock nuthatches, booted eagles, peregrines, and blue rock thrushes. But will we ever come back to Mystras? The places people have abandoned have the rub of loss, the erasure of the particulars of living and the remains of form only. Gibbons’s description of wildflowers in the Mani and around Mystras creates images in my mind of olive groves lushly carpeted in spring with spotted orchids, milk thistles, bellflowers, and burnt candytuft. Just the names of the mostly unfamiliar flowers lure me: valerian, grass pea, furry-leaved woundwort, catchfly. Dreaming of wildflowers not in bloom, I scurry over the hills peering into the abandoned houses. In the main church, I see for the first time ex-votos of houses. Why should that be surprising? After the body, what do we want to protect? Our homes.

We’re drowsy as bees in the heat. Cicadas rhythmically shake their bags of nails, they’re chugging like a train, rattling a thousand tambourines. I want to pour a bottle of water over my head. When we get back to the car, the temperature is 44.5 degrees Celsius. That’s a heat-stroke-zone 112 degrees in the other world.

Now
we head deep into the Mani. The Peloponnese has three thumbs of land protruding at the bottom of the peninsula. Mani is the middle one, and surely the wildest and most individualistic part of Greece. We are meeting our friends at Limeni on the coast, where there is a new hotel. Exhilarating to travel early in the morning with the car packed with luggage, heading into the roaring sun. How forlorn the landscape. Mountains jut straight up, and any slope is littered with low stone walls—sheep folds—that look like archaeological remains of a village. The pastel scent of oleander flies through the window, and no sign of human life appears for mile after mile after mile. If your car broke down, you would be in limbo. As we go deeper, hour after hour—
niente
, only stone. Nary a posy, only the rare pitiful tree. The ultimate subtracted landscape. I can imagine a pterodactyl setting down a big foot on the windshield of the car with an ear-splitting shriek.

But finally we emerge from a pass and wind down to the village of Limeni on the sea. At the taverna suddenly, we are greeted. We must have arrived for the baptism. The owners are cousins of our friend—everyone must be cousins in the Mani—but for now we are taken into the kitchen, fish are pointed out, and we are seated right by the water where cheery fishing boats ride their reflections. The cousins point out the home of Petrobey Mavromihalis, Steven’s ancestor, who led the revolt against the Ottomans, in a classic bite-the-hand maneuver. He’d been appointed
bey
, ruler of the area, a move by the Ottomans to give the illusion of power back to local people. Instead he united the famously warring clans of the area and led an attack against the Ottomans that resulted in the liberation of Kalamata. The Mavromihalis family conducted themselves with the same fearless zeal on many fronts. Elias Mavromihalis is honored every July 20 in Styra for a famous battle at a windmill, in which he and six other Maniots lost their lives in a brave exit from the windmill with swords.

During the years Steven and Vicki have been friends of ours, we’ve heard stories of this intense family. The bullet that made the hole in the Náfplio church was fired at the new president of Greece by Petrobey’s brothers because Petrobey and other relatives had been imprisoned in Náfplio when they opposed this first president of the new independent Greece. All it takes is a day’s drive through the mountains to see how conquering the Mani would be impossible. Pirates and slave traders frequently raided this area, and the Maniots were not opposed to those activities from time to time themselves. The terrain speaks of isolation, individualism, privation, and xenophobia. Ferocious defenders of their freedom and dreamers of liberty, way in the Mani, they also must dream of green beans and peas.

Our Mavromihalis clan, most peaceful and charming of humans, we find by the pool at the hotel. Vicki’s family lives an hour north, and they’ve come down from her home place this morning with their four children. Steven and Vicki live near us in Marin, where they have important lives and careers and hundreds of friends. But they passionately love their Greek heritage, and they are giving their children the great gift of a home in this world. Already the three older children, eight, six, and three, speak Greek fluently. They think it’s funny to teach us ένας, δύο, τρείς,
énas, thío, tris,
one, two, three. They talk to baby Constantine in Greek, and probably he already understands. Last year Steven and Vicki bought a grove over the sea and are planning to restore a house. Every year they travel to Greece at least twice. Steven is a car buff, and last year they flew to France, where he bought a classic Deux Chevaux, one of those hump-backed vintage Renaults, and the entire family drove all across Europe to Greece. Some might consider that a journey into hell, but they had fun. They always do. Their family life warms anyone who’s around them because all the children enjoy each other. They joke and sing and hold hands when they walk. “How did you do this?” I’ve asked the parents so often. “Why aren’t they whining and fighting?”

“They know the family is a team,” Steve says. But really, they know they are cherished and appreciated, and the atmosphere of mutual respect in this family feels palpable. I once heard someone say that the best thing a man can do for his children is to love their mother. In Steven’s case that must be easy. Vicki shines with intelligence as brightly as with beauty, a clear open face, black eyes, and a smile that makes you see what she looked like as a nine-year-old. Steven, too, remains the boy who studied fencing and went to the Olympics for Greece. His enthusiasm and simpatico personality will always keep him vibrant. A top real estate agent, he continues to study history and philology, often teaching courses at Stanford and Berkeley. Vicki has put aside her work as an attorney for a while and guards the time she spends with her children, Franco, Nikki, and Georgia, followed by Constantine, who is about to be baptized. Now “this girl’s through,” according to Vicki. What beauties. From one legend springs the source of the clan’s beauty: an early Mavromihalis wed a mermaid. I have an Irish runaway priest and nun in my ancestry, but this pales in comparison to a mermaid in the bloodline.