A Trip to the Stars

by Nicholas Christopher

  The next night I returned to my room, drank two double espressos, and got into bed. And nothing happened. We flew to Paris, where I fell asleep exhausted after a lackluster performance, only to find that the tape recorder picked up the rustling and whispering again. In Venice the pattern was repeated: I forced myself to stay awake and heard nothing; when I slept, there was whispering. By the time we arrived in Athens, I thought I had better confront Gaspard with the tape recordings before I lost my mind altogether. But then something completely unexpected decided the entire matter for me.

  Gaspard usually stayed at the Grande Bretagne in the hub of the city, but there had been a mix-up and no rooms were available. So we checked in to a small dark hotel called the Aldebaran on an obscure square in the Kolonaki district, near the National Garden. Gaspard took a taxi to the theater where we would be performing and I went up to my room. At first, in the shuttered darkness, I didn’t see that there was someone else present. Catching a glint of silver across the room, then the gleam of a pair of eyes, I dropped my suitcase with a cry and jumped back to the door, groping for the handle. At that moment, a switch was thrown and a lamp came on, illuminating a woman sitting in an armchair.

  “I’m sorry I startled you, Mala,” she said in a low, softly accented voice.

  Blinking hard, I saw that she she was about sixty, thin, with a long nose and a wide mouth turned downward at the corners. Legs crossed, she looked relaxed in a gray pants suit that matched the color of her hair, which was pulled back tightly in a bun. Her eyes shone just as brightly in the lamplight as they had in the darkness.

  “Who are you,” I said, “and how do you know my name?”

  “How could I not?” Somehow her voice was familiar to me, though I was certain I had never seen or spoken with her before. “You’ve been working for my husband for five years.”

  “Your husband?” I said in astonishment.

  She nodded. “I’m Heléne Gaspard.”

  I just stared, for I had never expected to meet her. In fact, I had begun to doubt her very existence. Gaspard never talked about her. And until that moment I had only a vague idea of what she might have looked like, for he always mysteriously claimed to have no current photographs. In the only ones he showed me, glossy old promotional shots, a woman with jet black hair was sitting onstage in a long dress; half her face was concealed by the same sort of domino mask that I wore during performances, below which her wide mouth was firmly set, unsmiling. In the years I had been with Gaspard, Heléne was a phantom to me, alive only by way of her vaunted mind-reading technique, which in turn lived in me. Many times Gaspard had said, “You are Heléne when you are onstage”; it was his way of complimenting me, but it always made me feel anxious.

  “I am pleased to meet you,” she said.

  I shook my head. “What are you doing in my room?”

  “Waiting for you,” she replied simply. “I didn’t think you’d mind since you hadn’t yet checked in.”

  I wondered why the concierge hadn’t told me she was waiting.

  “Because he didn’t know,” she said, cutting into my thoughts as effortlessly as if I had spoken aloud.

  Though I knew secondhand her skills as a mind reader, this still took me by surprise.

  “But where did you come from?” I asked.

  “Venice. I was there when you were. And Paris before that. Jorge didn’t tell you?”

  “No, he didn’t.” And of course she would have known that he didn’t, I thought. “Were you in Madrid, too?” I asked quickly.

  “No, I have not been in Spain in many years,” she said with a thin smile, rising slowly from the chair and opening the shutters onto the night. It was only then, with a shiver, that I saw what had glinted in the darkness when I entered the room: she was wearing a silver pin on her lapel in the shape of a scorpion, with a ruby at its center. “The food in that country does not agree with me,” she went on. “But I know a fine place here, at the foot of Lykabettos, if you’ll join me for dinner. I must speak with you.”

  I would never find out why. With a hot breeze blowing in, sticking to my skin, I felt sick to my stomach; convinced that Heléne, not Gaspard, was the one invading my hotel rooms and my sleep, I decided at that moment to carry through on the impulse I had been suppressing for weeks: I would flee Gaspard and not look back. Finding Heléne in my room unannounced—even proprietary—had clinched it for me.

  Trying to keep my mind blank, I told Heléne I would be glad to dine with her after I showered and changed. She peered at me closely—and I used all my willpower to project something, anything, other than what I was really thinking—then went down the hall to her own room, agreeing to meet me in the lobby in a half hour. Within five minutes, grabbing my suitcase and leaving my performer’s trunk, I bypassed the lift and rushed down the stairs. Making a fuss—so the clerk would remember—I called the airport from the front desk and reserved a seat on an eleven P.M. flight to London which I had no intention of taking. Then I hailed a taxi, and entering the fast-weaving traffic of the coast highway, headed straight for the docks at Piraeus.

  I never saw Gaspard or Heléne again. I would be surprised if they fell for my ruse of flying to England, but I doubt they even considered the possibility that I would board a ferry for a random island in the dead of night. I don’t know what I thought they could have done to me—ongoing hypnosis, brainwashing?—and within days, as I put distance between us, my fears diminished. But that night in Athens, everything in me had told me not to fight those fears, but to run.

  I remained wary for a time that Gaspard might try to trace my whereabouts. But how? I didn’t worry about his hiring a private detective; my own experiences with them had been so abyssmal. First, in New York when Loren was abducted, and then in Las Vegas in 1974 when I was sure I had crossed paths with him at The Stardust Casino. (And the further I got from that experience, the more I doubted it, fearing that what I had “seen” was an agglomeration of my own memories of Luna and my mother, short-circuited into being while I was performing, rather than some highly specific memory of Loren’s.) Before leaving Las Vegas the following day, I had hired a former Pinkerton detective to track down the young man whose memories I thought I had glimpsed during the act. A number of people had seen him and his female companion in her red dress; it was the kind of assignment the detective himself had called difficult but routine. Yet he had come up with nothing—zilch, zero, nada, as he cabled me in Copenhagen two months later. So I wasn’t quaking at this notion of a gumshoe on my trail in the Aegean.

  Several months after settling into my house on the southwest coast of Naxos, one last mention of Jorge Gaspard crept into my life. I had brought home a bunch of newspapers—the international Tribune, The London Times, Le Monde—as I did every couple of weeks, to catch up on the news. I didn’t even keep a radio in that house, and I had no interest in reading the papers daily. In the theatrical listings in Le Monde an announcement caught my eye: Jorge Gaspard, the world-famous mentalist, was beginning a twelve-country tour with a new act and a new assistant, one Zuléifa Turais. And good luck to her, I thought, with a small sigh of relief.

  I had spent that particular autumn day in typical fashion. Here was my life on Naxos in miniature: up early for a swim in the sea, walking a mile and back to the market for fruit, bread, and goat cheese, lunch, reading, siesta, a longer swim, and then riding into town for dinner. I had given up my Vespa and was leasing a four-wheel-drive jeep with which I explored every road on the island, dirt or paved, from the village of Moni, nestled like a white chess piece on a mountain precipice, to Apóllonas on the shore of a rocky cove. Occasionally I stayed in town late to listen to music at a taverna or have coffee with the one real friend I had made on the island, a woman about my age named Melitta, a silversmith with a studio in the maze of the Kastro.

  Melitta was a small woman with short blond hair, finely shaped hands, and a high-pitched laugh. A native of Corfu, she had come to Naxos when her on-again, off-again engagement
to a doctor in Athens remained stuck in its off-again stage. She had set up shop for a year, and five years later had no plans to leave. She liked to wear long embroidered dresses and velvet berets fashioned in the old Venetian style, prominent in the oil paintings I had seen in the former governor’s fortress. A sly, vivacious woman, she had managed to expand not only her business but her love life—quietly taking on a series of lovers—without compromising her privacy. In the closed and scrutinizing society of the island, this was no mean trick. She had many sides to her, and many friends to go with them, and through her I came to know people on the island I might not otherwise have met, from the abbess at the convent of St. John Chrysostom in Grotta to the Czech artist in Lionas who had come to Naxos in order to paint the sea.

  That night I had dined with her at an ouzeria, where a tinny bouzouki band played loudly and a fire crackled in the blue brick fireplace. It was the middle of October and, unlike Kauai, on Naxos no matter how warm the days, the nights were always chilly. I washed down small plates of grilled octopus and fried mullet with mineral water while Melitta tossed back smoky shots of barrel ouzo. In nearly eight years, since New Year’s Day 1972, when I was dragged blind and half-dead from the tangled wreck of Francis’s sports car, I hadn’t touched a drink. Nor smoked, sniffed, or shot any drug. In the company of someone like Melitta, with whom I felt safe, I was tempted to have some wine with dinner, but the longevity of my abstinence always outweighed these desires. I didn’t see any percentage in gambling with the one portion of my sanity that I could truly control.

  After dinner, we met a new friend of Melitta’s at a café on the harbor. He introduced himself to me as Sergius Voël, a onetime cat-tamer from a Belgian circus who the previous year, on his seventieth birthday, had retired to the island. Voël was his new name, he added, formally adopted after he had left the circus. “Not an uncommon thing to do,” he said in his bass voice that pitched and rolled like a boat at sea, “when beginning a second life. Did you know that El Greco, born in Crete, was in his first life known as Doménikos Theotokópoulos?” I thought of Zaren Eboli—a lifetime ago—telling me that Jelly Roll Morton’s original name was Ferdinand La Menthe.

  Physically Voël didn’t look seventy: he was a blunt, big-necked man, with large hands scarred from wielding whips and being nipped by razor-sharp teeth—a man of steely calm, with unblinking brown eyes, who had faced down tigers, lions, and panthers in locked cages. He lived alone outside of town in a stone tower surrounded by cornfields. Melitta told me he was popular around the island, with the reputation of a reclusive bon vivant, a cosmopolitan spirit in repose. At his tower he took in as many stray cats—Naxos had hundreds—as he could accommodate, whom he fed and nursed.

  But Voël’s latest passion, he confessed to Melitta and me, was the lost continent of Atlantis, ignited in him at the end of his circus career by a lady fire eater named Salome, from Santorini. A doctrinaire believer in the theory that Santorini, before its great volcanic eruption, had been the site of Atlantis, he regaled us with what he considered the most spurious Atlantis theories, including that of a man he had met several years earlier on Santorini. “I liked him very much,” Voël said, “despite the fact he had blinded himself to the truth. There we were on the scorched cliffs in Fira, overlooking the volcano’s caldera, and he is telling me with a straight face that Atlantis, situated somewhere off Spain, disappeared underwater when an asteroid fell into the sea beside it.”

  While we sipped our coffee and watched the big ferries whir up to the slip with their lights blazing to unload passengers, I showed Melitta and Voël the photographs I had taken the previous week. They were mostly compositional shots of cacti, olive trees, and rock formations on the beach. I took one photograph each day, had them blown up, and set them in an album, one to a page. As of that night, I had 147 such shots taken on Naxos, including three self-portraits composed by way of an old Venetian mirror with a sea-green copper frame. Tilting it away from the sun, I propped the mirror against my house’s lone sink, an outdoor trough of white marble under an arbor sagging with grapevines. I placed the camera on the sink’s edge, pointed at the mirror, and positioned my reflection carefully before activating the shutter at the end of a long cord. Publicity shots aside, I hadn’t had a single photograph of myself taken in years; in these, wearing no makeup, illuminated by the pitiless Mediterranean sun, I saw myself as I never had before.

  I had turned thirty-four in February and no longer retained the girlish looks I had carried well into my twenties. From my years in the tropics and my grueling nocturnal life as a performer, I had a faint web of crow’s-feet beside my eyes, my forehead was creased by several thin lines, my nose was freckled, and my lips, too often sun-chapped, had grown puffier. But men still looked hard at me when I walked through the town, the local men and the visiting Europeans and Americans. I wore my hair long, combed straight back, and, as in the Pacific, it quickly lightened in the sun. Once again my body went from fish-white to tan to brown, and I was growing strong from swimming daily and returning to my old diet of fish and fruit. I knew, too, that thirty-four was still quite young, even though inside I sometimes felt as if I were well past fifty. After those first months on Naxos, falling into familiar rhythms, I had begun to be reinvigorated.

  As for men, I had slept with no one since arriving on the island. On the road with Gaspard, I had had one-night stands when I thought I would go mad without some kind of release. With no close friends, and a scarcity of even casual acquaintances, I was sometimes desperate simply to have a warm body beside me. Living in hotels made it easy to find transitory partners—other performers, other lonely people, interesting travelers. Interesting enough, that is, to share maybe twelve hours with. Once I settled on Naxos, however, I became very cautious when it came to men. Melitta told me there were discreet men to whom she could introduce me—“they would die for you,” she laughed—but I declined the offer. I wanted no trouble like the kind I’d found on Kauai. Anyway, I told myself there were other appetites to indulge in this place.

  At the same time, being alone so much again, memories that I had tried to bury away began to preoccupy me. Memories of Cassiel in Manila which, after ten years, were still painful to revisit. I had been with a good number of men since then, some for much longer than I had been with him, but those four days at the Hôtel Alnilam, and the weeks preceding them on the Repose, remained alive in my head as no other period in my life. Why was that, I asked myself—what was it about him and the brief time we had together that truly kept me from wanting to be with anyone else? At one point, on Kauai, I had been looking for love; but, mostly, over all those years I had remained celibate for long stretches, or used brief affairs to keep love away. I wondered if the reason for this was that the time I had shared with Cassiel was so short. And that I was so young. In a war. Crazed out of my mind. On top of which he had disappeared so abruptly. Mysterious even when I knew him, he had become a mystery in the end. And that carried its own allure. But deep down I didn’t believe it was my youth or the war or his disappearance. I had known I was in love with Cassiel that day on the Repose when, seeing his eyes fixed on me, I wended a path through all the other wounded men directly to his bed. It was as if I had known him always and always been in love with him. More deeply than I had ever loved anyone or anything. And nothing, and no one, I had encountered since then had supplanted or dislodged that feeling.

  Voël finished his coffee and ordered a cîtron, the island’s lemon liqueur, and began talking about Ariadne—another single woman washed ashore on Naxos.

  “In the legend, after Theseus abandoned her, Dionysus found her on the beach, made her his queen, and when she died set the crown Aphrodite had fashioned for her among the constellations—the Corona Borealis. Before her death, Ariadne made a wish which Dionysus granted: that when the stars are properly aligned over Naxos, lost things can be found by those who pray to Zeus.”

  “What do you mean by ‘properly’?” I asked, for he had piqued my
interest.

  “The position of the Corona Borealis. When it is directly over the island, look for your lost things and you will find them.”

  “But when is that?” I asked.

  “The Corona lies near Scorpio,” Voël replied. “Scorpio appears over the island in the spring. In the village of Corona at the island’s center—and named after that other Corona—they celebrate Scorpio’s arrival in a nightlong festival. Next year it will be in April. While they search for lost things, the participants will wear masks to conceal their identities.”

  “It’s true, amazing things turn up,” Melitta said, “some of them having been missing for many years. Articles of clothing, money, keepsakes, even goats and sheep. Last year, an old man found a pocket watch he had lost on his wedding night, still keeping perfect time.”

  “Do they find people, too?” I asked quietly.

  Voël looked at me with a crooked smile.

  “I don’t believe that has ever happened,” Melitta said. “But you never know.”

  Six months later, the night before the Festival of Scorpio, I barely slept. It was a windy night and the sea was crashing. Bands of moonlight streamed through the shutters and the cypress branches were swaying. But it was the cicadas in the scrub brush that kept me awake, their high-pitched, metallic drone that must have filled the ears of the ancient Greeks when they invented their Furies.

  Finally I got up and brewed a cup of mandrake leaf tea, which the apothecary had recommended as a sleep remedy. At the kitchen table I went through my daily photographs that now filled three albums. I had been living on Naxos for a full year, and as I turned the laminated pages, the days and weeks passed before me: the slanting rains in late fall; the smoky winter light; forest anemones blooming in March; and then the first hint of blinding summer skies that had appeared that very week. It had been a peaceful fall and winter, cooking for myself for the first time in years, exploring the island on foot, and most nights reading until my eyes hurt. After exhausting my Latin library, I attempted some of the Greek historians, whose books I ordered from Athens. It was Strabo’s Geography, the chapter on Naxos itself, I was poring over later that night—a first, for me, to be in an ancient place while reading about it—when the mandrake leaf took effect.