In the middle of the winter, the spring again. After a second cold spell with freezing winds which brought the temperature down to around 2-3 degrees centigrade in the night, the wind drops and the next day the sun shines and warms up everything to a point of exaggeration. The island is totally green with yellow patches of small spring flowers, which open when the sun is out and close again at sunset. The result is that you have different landscapes depending whether the sun is out or not. As if a painter puts yellow colors with a brush on the green fields during the day, and takes them out after sunset.
The white churches in the middle of all this greenery look even whiter.
A lot of gossip is going around about people I know or have just met. There is a complicated story about a bizarre Italian-British woman whom I met in October. She was about to buy a piece of land in Polydendri, so I introduced her to Thaleia and Fanis for possible advice and potentially using Thaleia as an architect. I now learn that she has a local boyfriend, a drunkard who drives a Toyota half-truck like a madman (on it is written with red letters: ANTISTASIS which means RESISTENCE; to what, only he knows) and who is about to die of cirrhosis of the liver. While this is supposed to be a doctor’s secret, the whole island is au courant. The woman is also accusing a Greek-Australian woman named Claire who came to the island from Australia to teach English (whom she spent Christmas with her parents somewhere in the Peloponnese) to have stolen her bankcard and all the money in her Greek bank account. It is all very confusing, and both women are accusing each other of a coup monté. They are to appear in court shortly. I can just imagine the faces of the policemen and the judge of a small provincial town in the Peloponnese having to confront and decide about all this. It could be the subject of a film of the fifties made in Italy starring Marcello Mastroianni.
But it turns out that both women might be compulsive thieves. Brigitte tells me that she let the Italian-British woman have the keys of her house while she went to Florida, so that she can watch TV; when Brigitte came back, there were some valuable materials missing, as well as some expensive art books. In the meantime, the woman went back to Italy or England and left in the Brigitte’s house two suitcases, one open and one locked. The locked one is very heavy, and Brigitte thinks it contains the stolen stuff. But the woman is away in the Bahamas with Joan and Theo, and will not be back until the end of March. So the suspense continues and the drunkard drives around the island madly resisting …
I also spent almost a week with Petros and Lilian, the secretive Athenian millionaires, who bought a piece of land above Ammoudari and can’t get permission to build because it is a classified “forest area”. They tried to bribe the authorities but things are still not clear. They came to the house several times for drinks, and Petros was very optimistic, making plans about their future house and getting inspiration from our own. They left for Athens full of love for our sublime island and self-congratulating about their luck to soon be owners and part of the select society of this island.
Last night however, I was invited for dinner and “biriba” (a Greek card game) by Thaleia and Fanis. In front of the roaring open fire, we sat sipping ouzo and whiskey and discussing Petros. Thaleia is furious. She thinks he is so clumsy and childish that he ruins all the patient work she has done to try and obtain a building permit for him. It is still uncertain whether the permit will be obtained, and he just bought another adjacent piece of land containing a half ruined building/animal shed, which he plans to convert into a garage and storeroom––all this in an area where they have recently found Mycenean tombs of the 12 century BC. When we visited his land, as we were walking, I spotted a stone which was obviously carved by hand. I told him, “This looks ancient”. “I don’t want to know!” he screamed, terrified. If they find antiquities in his land it will be “the mouse in the soup” as we say in Greece. Thaleia looked at me straight in the eye and said, rather terrified herself: “How can this man have been a senior economic adviser to the Minister of Economy, dealing with Ministers and Prime Ministers? He is incapable in managing simple economic operations in everyday life!”
No comment.
I went to Thaleia’s house at 8, “early” because we were to play biriba. Knowing their habits I ate a substantive lunch quite late, about 4 o’clock, in order to be able to stand it until dinnertime. We actually ate about midnight and continued to play until 2 o’clock in the morning. When we were eating we discussed these new people I met through Petros and Lilian. They are both teaching in Stanford, are semi-retired and now about to spend several months of the year on the island. Thaleia said she cannot stand her singing. “What singing?” I asked. “She sings in the water!” exclaimed Thaleia in her Louis Armstrong voice, almost suffocating with protest. Apparently the couple are also members of the select Rocky Beach social club and go there swimming every day in the summer. Apparently, the lady, who is also a qualified opera singer, starts singing arias when she hits the water and does not stop until she has swam to the opposite little promontory and back, to the annoyance of everybody else. So she is not in Thaleia’s good books. I didn’t dare ask if she sings well, at least.
Talking of gossip, nobody can beat Rickey, the Canadian retired professor who came to the island fifteen years ago and learned the language and mixed with the locals in an intimate way. He has an absolute knowledge of all family relationships of practically all the 2000 resident islanders (a highly complicated and confusing task with the same few names being repeated over and over again as a result of intermarriage and in-breeding over the centuries). He also appears to have a good knowledge of most non-family relationships, sexual inclinations and preferences and past passions and related stories. If you happen to be sitting with Rickey at a table in the little café of the main square under the vine, being bitten by mosquitos and scratching your legs below your shorts, while sipping your ouzo, he will point at passers-by and give you a thorough genealogical construction of the passer’s family as well as recent events such as adulteries, divorces, romances with happy or unhappy endings, as well as other dramas or blissful events. Rickey looks completely like a local, growing a small grey beard and a moustache with a sunburnt face and old-fashioned baggy trousers. He lives in a tiny house that he bought almost for nothing when he first visited the island, twenty years ago. It has a splendid view and is packed with literary reviews.
Rickey’s informers are mainly fishermen with whom he is very close as he goes often fishing with them. This also gives him an advantage in getting good fresh fish even during the high tourist season when restaurants and tavernas pay gold for such produce.
Herodotus also liked gossip, although he presented it properly dressed as a historical investigation and a scientific quest for truth. He relished the passions, mistakes and other human characteristics that compose the unending human romance and drama. He only wrote a few paragraphs about our island. He was obviously not very impressed.
