Cast in Doubt (23 page)

Sitting by the window, with the cacophonous and comforting sounds of harbor life playing on my ears like incidental music, I open my book. We non-Gypsies, I learn, are designated by them as
gadjo
or
gadje
, for whom they have nothing but contempt. “The proper meaning of
gadjo
is peasant, farmer, with the pejorative sense of ‘clodhopper,’ ‘yokel,’ or ‘bumpkin.’” To the Gypsies, we are the sedentary ones. To these wanderers, nomads, travelers, we are ones who do not move, who are fixed. My eyes fix on these lines. Sedentary indeed.

Instantly I am overcome with exhaustion, and nearly close the book. So weary, even my eyes are tired, but I do not stop reading. I sense that I must go on. I flip to another chapter. “If the Gypsies have no system of writing, as we usually understand the word, they nevertheless use a very full list of conventional signs which enable them to communicate visually and in time. This secret code is called the
patrin
(from
patran
, leaf of a tree)…”

It’s pleasing to discover that
patrin
, their secret means of communication, is linguistically close to the English “pattern.” As this sentence is at the bottom of the page, I again nearly close the book, but resist, fight my weariness, and continue reading. “Each tribe has its own distinctive sign, and it is the chief who is usually the holder of the sign; and this sign is a secret.” Then down to the bottom of the next page: “Thus a Gypsy woman will be the first to go into a farmhouse on the pretext of selling items…or to tell fortunes.” She will find out family secrets, important family matters, recent illnesses and so forth. “As she is going away, she will scratch on the wall or mark with chalk or charcoal signs which only her racial brothers will know how to make out.”

These signs allow the next Gypsy to reveal closely held family secrets to the amazed family. How clever, I think.

Ultimately the full import of what I have just read reaches my clotted brain. “In chalk or charcoal.” Chalk. The chalk drawings or signs on the wall in Helen’s room may not have been made by Helen. They may have been drawn or penned by the Gypsy woman. This was the break I needed. What I ascertained to be penises and vaginas could have been messages from the Gypsy, written in her alphabet or code, which I don’t know and would never even be able to guess.

I am stunned. It is such a good story, and so mysterious, and I haven’t even made it up! I am in thrall to it, and frightened by it. For next I learn, as I study the pages before me, that Gypsies use herbs and plants and all manner of vegetable and animal matter for spells, to achieve various results. In a flash a picture of Helen appears before me and I see a small silver ball attached to a silver chain. The necklace hung around Helen’s neck the last night I saw her. It may have contained a plant, a potion. Ridiculous, Horace, I tell myself. Still, weird, foul, foreign herbs—or worse—may account for the dreadful smell, the aroma that suffused Helen’s room. That awful odor could have been produced by rotting vegetable matter, spoiled organic stuff, and have been a potion meant to cast a spell, over me perhaps, and which I may be obeying even now as I read. My acute exhaustion? A potion to do what?

How crazy I felt in these moments, how bereft of the means to know what the truth was or to judge my experience in and of Helen’s room. I cannot adequately signify or express it. What I can articulate is that it was, and is, in no way like me to have thought I could be subject to a spell. Or, indeed, to believe that I was the victim of a plot. I was the one who confabulated, who wrote plots, the one who knew. Yet the logic I used proceeded in this manner: I may have been under a spell because even imagining that I could be, or to have believed myself to have been, made it seem more likely that I was or could have been. It was not like me, not at all like me, to entertain such nonsense.

I did not completely accept any of the above, but I did allow it, seriously. I passed a sleepless night on account of it. I would awaken startled, as if shaken by Yannis, and think, what if it’s true? In rebuttal I would answer, You are a fool, Horace. Then I would place my head on the pillow and try to fall asleep, counting from one thousand backward. (Both my parents were insomniacs.) Yet the persistent and disturbing idea—that one could not know what one did not know—recurred. I awoke with a start to the question, What if it’s true? But it was truer to say that I didn’t know the what of it, what was what, the what of the question.

* *
*

I begin the journey south on a blustery Cretan morning. Though I passed a relatively sleepless night, fraught with doubt and unanswerable questions and, upon waking, feel enervated, I am committed to my task and resolved to be focused. I have always been resilient. As one gets older one knows how to pace oneself; it is one of the few comforts one has. The clouds are moving anarchically, to match my own eager and jumpy spirits. For my eyes alone, they perform wicked tricks, and the heavens above compose messages set in skywriting. I am filled with a peculiar, nourishing hope. I will leave this city I love, my adopted home, to itself.

As I drive through it, I wave to a few of the shopkeepers who stand in front of their places of business. I remember that I owe Lefteris a courtesy call—he repaired my radio, but refused payment. That means a game or two of tavoli and some ouzo. The baker and his wife have just set out the freshly baked bread for the late-morning crowd. I almost can’t bear to leave, drawn to the ordinary drama I know so well. But I am in search of Helen and, I would have to say, high drama.

Earlier I had gone to the bank, the liquor store, paid a few bills, and had also written a note to Yannis, which I left for him in an envelope, with some cash, on the mantelpiece. I gave the letter meant for Gwen to Nectaria and kissed Nectaria warmly on her rosy, full cheek. I assured myself of two things: that I had chosen the right path, though it might be risky, and that matters at home had been left in a good state. The right path and left in a good state…

To the left or to the right? I ask myself at the first significant crossroad. Dante positioned Beatrice to his left and Virgil to his right. Left is faith; right, reason. Reason and Faith, I hoped, would be my traveling companions. I do not beckon God, I hold to no religious faith, of course, but I am imbued with my own brand of secular faith. Is that reason? And therefore redundant? It is a good thing that at the last moment I threw in not just extra paper but my portable typewriter. I can write in longhand but prefer to labor on my old manual.

As I drive farther from home, everything seems very much behind me. Literally, it is behind me. To tell the truth, I find myself peeping into the rearview mirror often, anxious that the nameless things of daily life will catch up to me or even overtake me, things that I want left behind. I am not completely sure which things. The light-headedness that I have lately been experiencing accompanies me, an invisible but effective agent. I am in a new, nearly alien state of mind; I am convinced it is all to the good.

A pleasurable, indeed delicious, aspect of travel is that one may choose a variety of routes, some slow, some fast, some straight, some curved, and so on—the enduring metaphors of the journey theme. I go left and next turn right. Possessing a good sense of direction—is this genetic?—I can always find my way, except when inebriated. So I know that if I take this road, I will end up at that road, and then I know that that road will lead me to another, and then another, and in the end all will be right. If one knows where one is headed, so to speak, one can get there, especially when blessed with a good sense of direction. My mother often asserted this and I believe it as if it had been cast in stone, like one of the Ten Commandments.

All roads lead to Rome, I caution myself and chortle aloud. It was the Venetians who were here ages ago, not the Romans, and they settled in Crete ages before the still-dreaded Turks conquered it, and would an ancient Venetian have claimed that all roads lead to Rome or not? Or just when would a Venetian have begun to claim that?

I journey along the coast road, then turn south past Galatas, though I could have gone the other way, in the opposite direction, which would have been faster. By taking the road I have, I avoid being in the proximity of Souda Bay, where the naval installation is, and I would rather, and do, travel miles out of my way just to bypass it. I detest that part of my Sunday morning when the naval-band from Souda marches around our Peaceful harbor and makes a ruckus that could wake the dead. I am so glad that the military government is out. It is not that the parades halted, but when the colonels were in power, there was an arrogance and pomp to the Sunday parade which it now lacks.

This reminds me of another argument I had with Roger. Though he supported the junta, contradictorily he was dismayed when the monarchy was abolished and King Constantine deposed. In part, I repeatedly told him, the junta had formed in opposition to Queen Frederika and her son, Constantine. Still, Roger likes royalty—the English line in particular. He likes pomp. I have eternally insisted that even an Anglophile such as myself must agree that having a monarch is an anachronism of the most bizarre kind, entirely unsuited to a modern democratic state and a modern mind. Roger claims also to like strong leaders, men of decision. Roger fools no one. But why think of Roger now, as I set off on a new road?

While I don’t care to hurry, at the same time I experience a strong sense of urgency. And too it is in my mind, almost disproportionately, that I must leave myself, and the trip, open to chance. This is a chance operation, I say aloud, in hard-boiled style, and again indulge in a spur-of-the-moment directional decision. I even wonder whether or not I will better appreciate the abstract expressionists after this trip, since it is to be based to some extent on randomness. My perambulating may be a whimsical foray into abstraction. But its randomness is under my control; that is, I am in charge of it. I decide when or if it is this road or that that I take. I am, I tell myself, the agent of change, my own travel agent. After all, even Jackson Pollock, whom Gwen likes better than I—she has far greater sympathy for the barmen, as she calls them—even he, to some extent, controlled randomness through his execution of it. It is not as if anyone at all could have just walked up to one of his gigantic canvases and thrown paint at it.

A stream of cars passes me; sometimes there are many, sometimes few. Cars usually pass me. I drive quite slowly. Carts drawn by horses do not pass me, though. I remember horse-drawn carts in my hometown. They were still in use when I was a child, after all. How strange that is to consider in this day. Greek men on World War II German motorcycles with sidecars overtake me; the Greeks glance at me and my Volkswagen bug with amusement. Were I to have any, my passengers would become infuriated because of my caution and lack of speed, though Helen didn’t when we drove to the mountains that day. But as I am alone, with no passenger, no one to answer to, I am free to do what I please. But why, I wonder, should I be thinking of this condition as a freedom, as if it were rare, when I live alone and essentially answer to no one?

Yannis is there but not there. It is true that I am never unaware of his presence, of his odd and occasionally sinister gaze that can so brutally penetrate and pierce me, my soul, if I have one. His look can pin me to, or in, a moment. It is painful, dreadful. It has to do with one human being being seen by another and one or both being able to understand in that all-too-human instant something intensely peculiar, even deranged, about the other. There can be no recording of the vague exchange, no document left behind, just one’s experience of a naked expression, of being naked, in an impropitious moment. It is chilling and unsettling to be caught unaware. It is probably why many people prefer to live alone. I remember Gwen telling me that a man she was seeing caught her staring at herself in a mirror, as she pushed her hair from her forehead and studied her face. She realized that in that brief moment he discovered something about her, her narcissism, her paranoia, her incessant insecurity—in regard to him as well—all of which she would never have wanted revealed. He didn’t telephone her again, though they had been seeing each other off and on for two years. Gwen was relieved. She felt that neither he nor she could have borne the burden of what had passed furtively between them.

It is strange to break off a relationship in that manner, but then that is the way it happens. The break is sudden and sharp but seldom clean. And, to prove my hypothesis, Gwen is one who lives alone. One Who Lives Alone is another good title. I pull over to the side of the road and jot that down.

Looking at the map of Crete, at the road ahead and the environs, I am struck again by the island’s magnificent geography. Most of the major roads appear to halt in the middle of the island, because of the treacherous mountains. The mountains defy one and all. This is extraordinary country, rugged and violent. Its landscape is unexpected and invigorating. With my eye and finger I trace on the map the many possible courses—possible worlds—from which to select, and decide, again on the spot, to quit the road I have been taking and head toward the coast road again, so as to travel near the sea and around the exterior of Crete. It was what I originally had planned but then for some reason rebelled against, even though it was my idea. At my age it may always be one’s own ideas, however hackneyed, that one rebels against.

I don’t particularly want to drive through the mountains, and of course the roads do come to a halt disastrously and one would have to backtrack here and there, to meet up with the right road, and in a sense one would be much too directed by the terrain. One is by the coast road too, but one does not experience it in just that way. Besides, if Helen were with the Gypsy, or on her own, mightn’t she want to see the beautiful coastline? I start up the car, plot my new course, and turn around, to begin again. The scenery is magnificent.