by Don DeLillo
“What is left, Owen?”
“Ah. I ask myself.”
“Where are you staying?”
“Colleagues have given me a room at the American School. Do you know it?”
“I live up the street.”
“Then we’ll see each other again. Good. I’ll be here a week.
Then I leave for Bombay, by freighter.”
“So India is next.”
“India.”
“You told us once.”
“India.”
“Sanskrit.”
“Sanskrit, Pali, Tamil, Oriya, Bengali, Telugu. It’s crazy, James. Rock edicts in ancient languages. I’ll see what I can before the money runs out or the rains come. When do the rains come?”
“Another thing you told us, on one of those island nights. They’re on the mainland. They’re in the Peloponnese.”
“A supposition.”
“On some level you want other people involved in this, don’t you? I’m not sure you’re even conscious of it but you don’t want to be alone in this. With Kathryn there was no chance—she was firm about keeping a distance. In my case there was only a token interest, conversation for its own sake. But with Volterra you found a willing listener, a willing participant in a sense. He showed no reluctance, no scruples about what they did. This is a man whose interest in things can be almost deadly. He wanted to know more, he wanted to find them. So you pointed him in a certain direction. I’m not sure it was the best or simplest direction. I suspect you wanted to keep the local group to yourself. You didn’t exactly mislead Frank. You told him the truth, the partial truth. You sent him after a second or third group, whatever the correct number. What is the correct number?”
“Most likely three. No more than four.”
“One is in Greece.”
“You’re supposing,” he said.
“One is in Jordan. One was in Syria—I don’t know how long ago. Vosdanik mentioned Syria, he mentioned Jordan, he also told us about a cult murder in northern Iran. But it wasn’t clear how many groups he was talking about.”
“Forget it,” Owen said.
“That’s what I told Frank. Forget it.”
They are engaged in a painstaking denial. We can see them as people intent on ritualizing a denial of our elemental nature. To eat, to expel waste, to sense things, to survive. To do what is necessary, to satisfy what is animal in us, to be organic, meat-eating, all blood-sense and digestion.
Why would a denial of these things have to end in murder?
We know we will die. This is our saving grace in a sense. No animal knows this but us. It is one of the things that sets us apart. It is our special sadness, this knowledge, and therefore a richness, a sanctification. The final denial of our base reality, in this schematic, is to produce a death. Here is the stark drama of our separateness. A needless death. A death by system, by machine intellect.
So we talked, so we argued, the anthropologist, the storyteller, the mad logician. Strange that when we saw each other again it would not be that week, in Athens, with only half a city block between us. Maybe all the talking had brought us closer to an understanding, a complicity, than we wanted to be.
In the light of a lowering sky the city is immediate and sculptured. None of summer’s white palls, its failures of distance and perspective. There are shadow-angles, highlighted surfaces, areas of grayish arcs and washes. Laundry blows on rooftops and balconies. Against an urgent sky, with dull thunder pounding over the gulf, this washwork streaming in the wind can be an emblematic and touching thing. Always the laundry, always the lone old woman in black who keeps to a corner of the elevator, the bent woman in endless mourning. She disturbs the composure of the modern building with its intercom and carpeted lobby, its marble veneer.
Some nights the wind never stops, beginning in a clean shrill pitch that broadens and deepens to a careless and suspenseful force, rattling shutters, knocking things off the balconies, creating a pause in 0ne’s mind, a waiting-for-the-full-force-to-hit. Inside the apartment, closet doors swing open, creak shut. The next day it’s there again, a clatter in the alleys.
A single cloud, low-lying, serpentine, clings to the long ridge of Hymettus. The mountain seems to collect weather, to give it a structure, an aspect beyond the physical, weather’s menace, say, or the inner light of things. The sun and moon rise behind the mountain and in the last moments of certain days a lovely dying appears in the heights, a delivering into violet, burnt rose. The cloud is there now, a shaped thing, dense and white, concealing the radar that faces east.
Girls wear toggle coats. In heavy rain there is flooding, people die. A certain kind of old man is seen in a black beret, hands folded behind him as he walks.
Charles Maitland paid a visit, making a number of sound effects as he got out of his rubberized slicker. He walked to an armchair and sat down.
“Time for my midnight cup of cocoa.”
It was seven o’clock and he wanted a beer.
“Where are your rugs?” he said.
“I don’t have any.”
“Everyone in the area has rugs. We all have rugs. It’s what we do, James. Buy rugs.”
“I’m not interested in rugs. I’m not a rug person, as the Bordens would say.”
“I was over there yesterday. They have some Turkomans and Baluchis, fresh from customs. Very nice indeed.”
“Means nothing to me.”
“Weaving districts are becoming inaccessible. Whole countries in fact. It’s almost too late to go to the source. It is too late in many cases. They seem to go together, carpet-weaving and political instability.”
We thought about this.
“Or martial law and pregnant women,” I said.
“Yes,” he said slowly, looking at me. “Or gooey desserts and queues for petrol.”
“Plastic sandals and public beheadings.”
“Pious concern for the future of the Bedouins. What does that go with?”
He sat forward now, turning the pages of a magazine on the coffee table. A sound of rain on the terrace rail.
“Who is it, do you think?” I said. “Is it the Greek? Eliades?” He looked at me sharply.
“Just a guess,” I said. “I noticed them at dinner that night.”
“You noticed nothing. She would never give anyone cause to notice. Whatever she’s doing, I promise you it’s not being noticed.”
“I know I shouldn’t be bringing it up. I’ve no right. But it’s been hanging in the air. Even your son makes reference. I don’t want us to have to adopt a cryptic language or a way of avoiding each other’s eyes.”
“What Greek?” he said.
“Eliades. The night David and Lindsay took their famous swim. Intense man, black beard.”
“Who was he with?”
“The German. There was a German. He was there to meet someone who never showed up. Someone David knows. Refrigeration systems.”
“You saw nothing. I could never believe she gave anyone cause to notice.”
“It’s not what I saw. It’s what I heard. She spoke to him in Greek.”
I waited for him to tell me how stupid it was to believe this meant something. I felt stupid, saying it. But the sound of her voice, the way it fell, the way it became a sharing, a trust, drawing them away from the rest of us, the way it shaded toward a murmur—the moment haunted me, I think.
Charles didn’t tell me I was stupid. He sat quietly turning the pages, possibly thinking back to that night, trying to recollect. There were so many dinners, friends, transients, so many names and accents. I could see him try to construct a summer night around that single image, Lindsay standing on the beach, in half light, laughing. He couldn’t connect it. One more sadness at the middle of things.
“I went clean off the rails in Port Harcourt. She left me, you know.”
“I know.”
“There was no one else. Just left.”
“She was lonely. What do you expect?”
“The Greek,�
�� he said, like a name mislaid. “Was it in Tunis I met him? Did we see each other later at the airport, come back to Athens together? I took him home for a drink. We all sat around and talked. An acceptable scenario, wouldn’t you say? I didn’t see him again until the night you describe.”
We went to a movie together, went to dinner, saw a man so fat he had to move sideways down a flight of steps. The wind kept me up that night until two or three, a steady noise, a rustling in the walls.
When I walked into the lobby the next evening Niko was at the desk with his coffee cup and newspaper. His small daughter was in his lap and he had to keep shifting her to read the paper.
Cold.
Cold, I said.
Rain.
Small rain.
I talked to the girl briefly, waiting for the elevator to descend. I said she had two shoes. One, two. I said her eyes were brown, her hair was brown. She knocked the empty coffee cup into the saucer. The concierge’s wife came out, a broad woman in house slippers.
Cold.
Cold.
Very cold.
Later my father called.
“What time is it there?” he said.
We talked about the time, the weather. He’d received a letter from Tap and a card from Kathryn. Printed at the bottom of the card, he said, was the following sentence: No trees were destroyed to make this card. This annoyed him. Typical Kathryn, he said. Most of his anger came from TV. All that violence, crime, political cowardice, government deception, all that appeasement, that official faintheartedness. It rankled, it curled him into a furious ball, a fetus of pure rage. The six o’clock news, the seven o’clock news, the eleven o’clock news. He sat there collecting it, doubled up with his tapioca pudding. The TV set was a rage-making machine, working at him all the time, giving him direction and scope, enlarging him in a sense, filling him with a world rage, a great stalking soreness and rancor.
“Do they have exact-change lanes?” he shouted out to me.
“What about goat cheese, Murph wants to know. In case we might visit, which I seriously doubt.”
When the violet light seeps into Hymettus, when the sky suddenly fills with birds, tall wavering spiral columns, I sometimes want to turn away. These birdforms mingle, flash, soar, change color light to dark, revolve and shimmer, silk scarves turning in the wind. Bands of light pour out of cloud massifs. The mountain is a glowing coal. How is it the city keeps on functioning, buses plowing through the dusk, while these forces converge in the air, natural radiances and laws, this coded flight of birds, a winter’s day? (Kathryn would know what kind of birds they are.) Sometimes I think I’m the only one who sees it. Sometimes, too, I go back to whatever I was doing, to my magazine, my English-Greek vocabulary. I come in off the terrace and sit with my back to the sliding door.
You don’t allow yourself the full pleasure of things.
A white-armed traffic cop stands in the dark, gesturing, beckoning to the gathered shapes. I hear the cadenced wail of an ambulance stuck in traffic. How hard it is to find the lyrical mode we’ve devised to accompany our cities to their nostalgic doom. An evolution of seeing. The sensibility that enables us to see a ruined beauty in these places can’t easily be adapted to Athens, where the surface of things is mostly new, where the ruin is differently managed, the demise indistinguishable from the literal building-up and building-out. What happens when a city can’t fade longingly toward its end, can’t be abandoned piece by piece to its damaged truth, its layered ages of brick and iron? When it contains only the tension and paralysis of the superficial new? Paralysis. This is what the city teaches us to fear.
The ambulance stands fast, wailing in the night. The kiosks are lighted now.
8
We stood by the side of the road, pissing in the wind. A hunter in a camouflage jacket came up out of the woods, called a greeting. Steam drifted up from the riverbed.
“Where do we go next?”
“We cross this range, we eat lunch, then we drive south.”
“Good,” he said.
“You like that idea.”
“As long as we drive. I want to keep driving. I like the driving.”
The mountains here contained a sense of time, geologic time. Rounded, colorless, unwooded. They lay in embryo, a process unfolding, or a shriveled dying perhaps. They had the look of naked events. But what else? It took me awhile to understand in what precise way these pale masses, southwest of Argos, seemed so strange and irreducible, in what way they worked a mental labor in me, forcing me to shift my eyes time and again, keep to the wheel, look to the road. They were mountains as semantic rudiments, barest definitions of themselves.
“Maybe it’ll be warmer down there.”
“How far down?”
“All the way,” I said. “Where Europe ends.”
“I don’t mind the cold.”
Tap had nothing to say about the landscape. He seemed interested in what we saw, even engrossed at times, but said nothing, looked out the window, tramped the hills. Eventually I did the same, talking about anything but what was out there. We let the features gather, the low skies and mists, the hilltops edged with miles of old walls, fallen battlements, that particular brooding woe of the Peloponnese. It hovers almost everywhere, war memory, a heaviness and death. Frankish castles, Turkish fortresses, ruined medieval towns, the gateways and vaulted cisterns, the massive limestone walls, the shaft graves, the empty churches with their faded All-Creator floating in the dome, the curved Lord, the non-Euclidean, and the votive lamps below, the walnut throne, the icons in the side galleries, Byzantine blood and gold. All we did was climb, drive and climb. For three days the weather was overcast and cold. We climbed the rubble trails, the goat and donkey paths, the tunnel stairways, the rutted spiral tracks to upper towns, we climbed the Gothic towers, the broad ramps of Mycenian palace mounds.
“When I’m swimming, Dad.”
“Yes.”
“And I put my head under the water.”
“Yes.”
“How come the water doesn’t rush into my ears and nose and fill my whole body, sending me to the bottom, where I’m crushed by the pressure?”
South. The plains and orchards. Bare poplars in the distance, a combed silk shimmer. This wasn’t a bad road. Others unsurfaced, some half washed off the edge of mountains, or rock scattered, or ending in a pile of gravel, machines scaled with gray mud.
“That’s it,” he said. “That’s the question. I’m finished.”
Now, ahead, high above us, the hammered sheet, the broad snowy summit of Taygetus. This is the range that thrusts down through the Mani, the middle peninsula of the southern Peloponnese, the middle tit, Owen had called it, all mountain and wild coast.
That whole afternoon we saw half a dozen cars, as many men with dogs and guns. A man riding a horse, a woman who walked behind him holding the horse’s tail.
The towns were small, with empty streets and squares. Wind blew across the olive groves, causing a wild tremor, a kind of panic, treetops going silver. We passed rubble fields, rock walls, groups of whale-back boulders, hillsides covered with enclosures of rough stone.
We waited out a downpour in a deserted village square. An old church, a well, a cut-back mulberry tree. The rain was continuous, a single wavering surface, beating on the roof and hood. It was Christmas Day.
A mountain cloud kept rolling toward a white village, then merged with warmer air and vanished. Again it fell, like a rush or slide of timeless snow, disappearing in the air above the village. In our mood of reticent observation, of speaking of other things, the journey through the Mani became something like a pure rite of seeing. This was appropriate, I thought. If Athens is a place where people breathe the spoken word, if much of Greece is this, then the Mani forms an argument for silence, for finding a way to acknowledge the bleakness that carries something human in it. Tap peered through the windshield, he looked at things with an odd thoughtfulness. We would see what was here, see clearly through the rain shrouds
that hung in the gorges, through the bluish smoke high-piled on the coast.
We came to a town that was larger than the others, built at a crossroads, a hotel on the edge of it, two-story cement, boarded shut. I drove slowly down a narrow street to what I thought might be the main square, small as it was, halfhearted, oddly shaped, an historical pause. In the narrowness of this place the stone houses loomed. We got out in a light rain, flexing our legs, and walked toward a cobbled street that seemed to lead down to the water. Doors opened in abandoned houses, wind-swayed. We heard goat-bells nearby and passed a church, seeing three goats come over a broken wall. There were more houses with swinging doors, a butcher shop with an empty meat case, a man standing in the dark near the counter.
When we started down the stone path a wind came cutting up to meet us and we looked at each other and turned around. At the end of a street, bulking high over the road we’d just been on, was a massive anvil rock, maybe five hundred feet tall, a dark presence, a power like a voice in the sky. I spotted a café, tall windows, someone moving about. I told Tap to wait in the car and I went inside.
It was a shabby place, two tables occupied. A man stood in a doorway at the back. It wasn’t clear whether he was in charge or just hanging around. It was that kind of place, run by someone who drops in when he thinks of it. I asked the man, in Greek, about hotels nearby. He made a barely perceptible sign, a head movement, the smallest action of eyes and lips. Total disdain. Utter and aloof and final dismissal of all subject matter pertaining to this question, now and forever. A soul shrug. A gesture that placed the question outside the human environment, the things men will rouse themselves to discuss.
He was a grave man with wavy black hair, a thick mustache. I crowded him, as I tended to do when speaking Greek, in order to avoid being overheard by others, and said in an earnest halting way that I had three maps of the area south of here, the area where the main road makes its deepest penetration, then turns to go up the opposite coast. And the maps were all different. And I wondered if he could look at the maps and tell me which one was accurate, if any. The people at the nearest table, not Greeks, stopped talking when I was halfway through my recitation. This made me nervous, of course. Not that it mattered to the black haired man. He said something I didn’t understand, three, maybe four words, looking past me to the front window.
