by Mary Norris
The shop had a display unit for pens and pencils in the form of a giant novelty pencil tip, like a sharpened torpedo, from the famous German pencil maker Staedtler. I wanted a picture of it but knew better than to whip out my cell phone and start framing a shot. I browsed the pencils and racked my brain for the Greek idiom for “take a picture.” Finally, I approached the counter and asked the owner, literally, “Please, can I pull a photo of your big lead?” It sounded obscene, but he did not overreact. He nodded ναι, narrowing his eyes and bringing his palms close together to indicate that I should focus strictly on the big pencil. “I don’t want to show everything,” he said.
I could not have chosen a person less likely to cooperate when I attempted to draw out this Maniot newsagent. I asked which newspaper was the favorite of the older customers in town, and he refused to say. “I read a lot of newspapers,” he said. “My opinions I reserve for my family.” This turns out to be a typical Maniot response. If you ask someone in Kardamyli to recommend a restaurant, he will demur, pointing out that, on the one hand, a person might like this restaurant, and, on the other hand, another person might like that restaurant. And then he’ll turn the question around and ask which restaurants you like.
I wanted to give the store my business. It stocked books by Patrick Leigh Fermor—I loved seeing his name in Greek: Πάτρικ Λη Φέρμορ—but I didn’t want to try to read him in translation, and I already owned all his books except A Time to Keep Silence, about staying in monasteries, which the store didn’t carry. There were some new volumes of letters—Leigh Fermor was a prodigious letter writer—but they were too heavy to carry back to the States, as was the biography, Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, by Artemis Cooper. But there was a slim volume, from a small press, called Drink Time!, by Dolores Payás, Leigh Fermor’s Spanish translator, who had visited him at his house in Kardamyli in his final years, and I bought that.
As I was leaving, the owner asked where I was from and what I did for work. I told him I was a writer from New York. He chose a Plato bookmark for me and said, “I hope you write many books.” That was as close as I got to a blessing on my literary enterprise in Greece.
I SPENT MORE TIME on my balcony, looking at the sea, than I did hiking or swimming or driving around in the Mani. I had finally matured into the kind of traveler who can stay in one place and soak it up. Reading the book by Dolores Payás on my balcony, I was pleased to learn that my view was the same one that Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermor had fallen in love with years ago: deep-green cypresses and soft-green pines descending a steep hill to the beach, with a border of olive and citrus trees. They had camped out on their land while designing and building their house, which took three years. Leigh Fermor went swimming every day, making his way down to the beach by rough stairs cut into the stone, like the ones at the hotel. He stashed walking sticks at strategic points along the way. Dolores Payás wrote that he left the doors and windows open all the time—once, a goat ran through the house. I thought this might be the local custom: the door to the balcony was open when I was let into the hotel room, and my instinct was to leave it like that. Why would you shut out the light, the air, that view for even an instant?
The Leigh Fermors were not initially welcomed by the locals. When they built a hut on the beach, it was dynamited. The town mayor got the locals to accept the British couple by putting out word that Patrick Leigh Fermor was a hero of the Resistance in Crete, having masterminded the kidnapping of General Kreipe. The mayor also sent his daughter Elpida to keep house for them. Joan died at the house in Kardamyli in 2003. She loved cats, and there was a cat door in the master bedroom. On the day she died, several Greek cats were keeping her company. Leigh Fermor became nearly blind with age—he wore an eyepatch and glasses—but he could always keep track of his wineglass.
Along the horizon stretched the peninsula of Messenia, with sandy Pylos, home of honey-voiced Nestor, on the far side, facing west. Nestor is the old man of the Iliad, the lord of the Western approaches (in Fitzgerald’s phrase): he ruled the Ionian Sea. Modern history has overtaken Pylos, which is now celebrated as the site of a decisive battle in the Greek War of Independence—the Battle of Navarino, in 1827—in which the Turks and Egyptians were defeated at sea by an alliance of British, French, and Russian forces. Nestor would have had a bird’s-eye view of the conflict from his palace on the headland and would no doubt have had something to say about it. His best fighting days over, he went to Troy as a counselor to the Achaeans. Every time Homer gives Nestor the floor, the action stalls while the old guy gasses away. In his prime a “master charioteer,” he holds up a chariot race during the funeral games for Patroclus to advise his son to hold tight in the turns. In a telling touch, he brought his own gold wine cup to Troy. Nestor’s cup is famous, both for its description in the Iliad and in the annals of epigraphy: a piece of pottery found on Ischia, near Naples, bears an inscription that, in one of the earliest known uses of the Greek alphabet (circa 740 BC), identifies it as Nestor’s cup. At first it seems as if packing along a cup is just a crotchet of old age, but what makes you feel more at home than drinking from your own cup? Nestor was bringing sandy Pylos with him to Troy.
Nestor is one of the lucky ones whose voyage home from Troy was without incident. The Nestoriad would be a snooze. Perhaps his role in the Iliad is to give the Achaeans something stable against which to measure their own experience. All the Achaeans long for home, of course; the hope of any soldier going off to war is that he will return home. Nestor’s is the supreme example of a successful homecoming. His very name suggests it: nóstos, homecoming, from the verb néomai, to return home. The word nostalgia yokes the notion of homecoming to the Greek for pain: homesickness. The longing for home is what drives Odysseus.
Long-winded Nestor is pivotal to the Odyssey as well. On the advice of Mentor (Athena), Telemachus sets off for sandy Pylos to ask the old king if he knows what happened to his father, Odysseus. “While Nestor talked, the sun went down the sky / and gloom came on the land.” In other words, everyone started to yawn. On Nestor’s advice, Telemachus travels overland to Sparta, where he meets Menelaus and Helen, but he does not stay long, telling the king, “Longing has come upon me to go home.” On his return to Pylos, he asks his companion, Nestor’s son Peisistratus, to please drop him off at the ship, because the old king will no doubt bid him a long goodbye, pack a lunch, offer gifts, and delay his departure.
By this time, I was feeling a bit nostalgic myself. I had been away from home for three months, and was replete with beauty. I’d spent a month on Rhodes, one of the sunniest places in the Mediterranean, where I’d picked ambrosial oranges in a grove belonging to my teacher’s family, and another month on Patmos, where, on Holy Thursday at the monastery of St. John the Theologian, I bore witness as the Holy Spirit hovered over the washing of the feet in the form of a drone. I’d spent three nights on cosmopolitan Mykonos, and three days exploring neighboring Delos, the uninhabited island and open-air museum, sacred to Apollo. And I had come from the Aegean to the Ionian, to the very birthplace of nostalgia, to visit the home of a writer whom, I suddenly realized, I thought of as my literary father.
Nostalgia may mean a yearning for a place, but it is also a yearning for a time when you were in that place and therefore for the you of the past. Revisiting the Aegean had given me more than a few Wordsworthian moments as I strove to reconcile myself now, sitting on a balcony enjoying the view, with that earlier self, hopping from ferry to ferry, trying to plumb the depths of the wine-dark sea and master a language that a better linguist than I could founder in. I had struggled and struggled in Greek, only to realize that my modern Greek had peaked early, on my second trip, in 1985, when, on the island of Kefalonia, in the Ionian Sea, I tried on a two-piece bathing suit and, emerging from the fitting room, said spontaneously to the salesgirl, “Είμαι παχιά”—“I’m fat”—nailing the feminine ending on a difficult class of Greek adjective. The salesgirl gave me a drawn-out “Όοοχι!�
��—“Noooooo!”—and made the sale. I got ripples of sunburn on my virgin midriff.
I knew a lot of Greek, but I wouldn’t say I spoke modern Greek or call myself a classicist, either. I was more in love with the language than it was with me. My mind was like a riverbed that had silted up: it had its own archaeological strata from which an occasional find emerged. I had not mastered the language, ancient or modern, but I got glimpses of its genius, its patterns, the way it husbanded the alphabet, stretching those twenty-four letters to record everything anyone could ever want to say.
For all I knew, this would be my last trip to Greece—it was undeniably the last to date, and the longest. I once harbored a desire to spend an entire year here, from solstice to solstice and equinox to equinox, and back to solstice again. Now I wondered if that wouldn’t feel like exile. I had something in common with Patrick Leigh Fermor: I had a history in Greece, memories of youthful travels, and could compose my own catalogue in the style of the master: watching the mummified body of St. Spyridon being carried through the streets of Corfu Town, swaying jauntily in his upright glass coffin, on Palm Sunday (“There is nothing more picturesque than Corfu at Easter,” Dorothy Gregory had written to me); taking a wrong turn on Naxos with my friend Paula and accidentally touring emery-mining country (who knew?), marveling at the system of antique chair lifts for hauling the mineral out of the gorge, and skidding onto the white pebble beach of Lionas at the end of the road, with its crystalline water beckoning and the locals coming out to wave hello; waking in a bare-bones hotel room in the mountains of Cyprus to the sound of Greek men twittering like birds in the kafeneíon across the street; speeding through the landscape of Antiparos with Cynthia, my fellow-philhellene, at the wheel, huntresses in pursuit of the perfect taverna; laughing with Andreas the Turk on a bus that was struck in traffic in Athens as he explained why he didn’t like Starbucks (“They don’t have Nescafé”). There were still places I wanted to go—Sifnos, Kythera, Poros, Folegandros, Nisyros, Spetses, Hydra—and I would never stop trying to master the language. But I found I could say with Telemachus that longing had come upon me to go home.
AT LAST THE DAY CAME when I got the OK: I could visit the house of Patrick Leigh Fermor. I had written again to the Benaki (in English this time) and heard back that the permits had in fact been delayed. The house had been emptied of books and furniture, but the work had not yet begun, and, owing to popular demand, the Benaki was permitting tours. I dressed carefully: a sun hat instead of a baseball cap, a stiff underwire bra instead of a sports bra—I felt like I was hoisting a breastplate worthy of Athena—my best-fitting black pants, a blue top with a turquoise shirt over it, and hiking boots instead of sandals. I carried only a small shoulder bag with my sunglasses, phone, notebook, and wallet. Nothing extra—no sunscreen or beach gear. This was a serious, single-minded mission. I took a shortcut through the olive grove. Yellow butterflies fluttered in the trees, as if sharing my excitement—the pathetic fallacy! The path was littered with what I at first took for animal droppings, but as I passed a ewe nosing aside her nursing lamb, I realized that I was under a mulberry tree in full fruit. I sampled the mulberries and gathered some in my hat to offer as a gift to the housekeeper, Mrs. Elpida Beloyianni, who I knew by now was the same Elpida who had worked for Leigh Fermor, depicted in Dolores Payás’s book. The Benaki had kept her on as caretaker.
A German couple was there when I arrived. Then a chatty English couple I recognized from breakfast at the hotel drove up. There was a gray car parked outside, with flat tires and a peeling roof. We would learn that it was Leigh Fermor’s car, kept for his guests’ convenience. The wall around the house had double doors, painted blue, with small high grilled windows, which a tall person could peer through. The shade of blue was one I saw often in the Mani: a perfect blend of pale blue, pale green, and pale gray—glaucous! Often while traveling in Greece I had stood outside a closed door and felt frustrated: if you can’t open a door, it might as well not exist. But a door that opens, as this one now did, framing Elpida, is an invitation to a whole world that had previously been denied. Elpida had red hair with gray roots and was wearing an oversized black T-shirt with three sets of big smooching lips on it in turquoise, peach, and royal blue.
Inside, we were still outside. We entered an arched stone passageway, paved with pebble mosaics and open to the sky. “Ghika designed the mosaic,” Elpida said, gesturing, in English. (“Who is Ghika?” the British woman asked me. “A painter,” I said, feeling superior. Nikos Ghika and his wife, Tiggie, short for Antigone, were friends of the Leigh Fermors. Ghika had given his house in Athens to the Benaki. It is now a studio museum.) There was art by Ghika built into the walls as well: a stone face sculpted into a plaster wall surrounded by a dotted red line, with the word ΠΡΟΣΟXΗ!—CAUTION!—hand-lettered under it. Within what might have been a window frame was a chalky stippled painting in pale blues and browns, of a cat (or maybe a fox) standing on its hind legs to reach a fish. Houses in Kardamyli—all over the Mani, in fact—are built from the native stone, quarried out of Mount Taygetus. I had seen men along the road chipping stones into rough blocks with mallet and chisel. There is something so autochthonous about the way Europeans build their homes from the local stone—the stone cottages of the Cotswolds, the yellow sandstone of Sicily, the black lava of Catania—quarrying it out of the mountains and taming it into blocks, turning the earth inside out and stitching it up in walls on the other side. In the Mani, builders make jokes in the stone and plant self-portraits in the walls. Leigh Fermor had shells embedded in the rocks surrounding one window. A narrow vertical niche alongside a door had glass shelves in it and a mirror behind them that reflected whoever was trying to peer inside. Doors along an arcade led to bedrooms, the kitchen, and a staircase to a lower level. Elpida opened the door to the master bedroom, which I knew from the Payás book had been Joan’s room: someone had placed a small mirror near the bottom to block the cat door. Leigh Fermor slept in his studio in a separate building.
The living and dining room was huge, with a bay of windows at one end and low, built-in platforms along it, padded with thin mattresses, as if for a symposium. Rickety bookshelves rose along all the walls. The books had been removed to the Benaki for restoration. The fireplace was in the shape of a flame, modeled after an architectural flourish from a mosque in Istanbul. “He was a traveler,” Elpida said, explaining the owner’s taste. The ceiling was coffered wood and the floor was stone. In the center of the room was a slab of porphyry shaped like a many-pointed star. “We’ll take it,” one of the Germans joked.
Why had I wanted to come here? What did I expect to see? How did I expect this house to bring me closer to Patrick Leigh Fermor, the philhellenes’ philhellene? Leigh Fermor was very sociable—he had chosen Kardamyli over Crete because it was more isolated and if he lived in Crete he’d never get any work done. I was glad the place was unfurnished, though I would have loved to see the books. I asked Elpida where the drinks table had stood. Dolores Payás had described it, and the endless supply of wine, Nemean red. Maybe that’s why I liked this place, this house, this headland of the Peloponnese: it had that quality of Greece I most admired—it was spare and giving at the same time.
In the garden, paved with stones and pebble mosaics, there were beds of rosemary, overgrown, and wooden benches circling olive trees. Stone benches enclosed the far end, over the drop to the sea, framed to the left by the same stand of pine and cypress that I could see from my hotel balcony. I knew that out here somewhere were the stairs to the beach.
Back inside, Elpida waited patiently. The British couple, who were from Bath, asked if this was a good time to pay. It was five euros apiece, Elpida said, but I had only a ten-euro note, and she didn’t have change. I said I would happily donate the extra five euros, but she complained, “Then I will have to write another receipt!” and gave me the change out of her own pocket. I hung around for as long as I could, offering her the mulberries (she took one out of politeness). “Ε
ίναι δύσκολο να φύγει,” I said, getting the person wrong (“It is difficult for him to leave” instead of “It is difficult for me to leave”). She let it pass.
I WENT TO the Kalamitsi town beach afterward, down the road from Leigh Fermor’s house. It was hard walking—the stones were the size of fists. I crunched along toward some big rocks in the direction of my hotel. I wasn’t sure I could get past them, but I always have to see what is around the bend, and I still wanted to find the stone stairs leading to Leigh Fermor’s beach. So I picked my way around the rocks, and beyond them was a secluded cove with three cypress trees and gigantic, impassable rocks on the other side. There, camouflaged by lichen, was a narrow stone flight of stairs cut into the cliff, with a padlocked gate at the third step. These were Leigh Fermor’s stairs, and I was on the beach from which he swam every day.
I parked myself on a comfortable rock and looked at the view: rocks, sea, cypresses, an offshore island. The yellow but terflies were down here on the beach, too. I wanted to go for a swim and thought of my Speedo hanging from the clothesline on the hotel balcony. I could swim in my underwear, but that would make for an uncomfortable walk home. I decided to risk it. Yes, Reader, I stripped again—shirt, boots, pants, bra, and underwear—and picked my way over the stones until I could flop facedown in the water. It was exhilarating to paddle around in this sparkling place! There was a riffle on the surface a ways out, where there must have been a reef, but it was easy to imagine that the water had been kicked up by a chorus line of nymphs. All the movement in the water seemed animated, intentional, fueled by personality—some god or monster might rise from it any second. I swam around one of the big rocks and discovered a cave, where the water made weird sucking sounds. I did not investigate. Hearing the tinkle of bells, I spotted some goats jumping from high rocks down to the shore. This made me glad—I’d never seen goats from out in the water before. I swam back to the beach and clambered over the wet stones to my rock, where I air-dried in the breeze. The swim had relaxed me and I had lost all fear that anyone would come trekking over those treacherous rocks, so I was astonished to look up and see a young man with dark hair and a backpack and hiking boots approaching from the way I had come. I screamed and grabbed my shirt to cover my front. “Excuse me!” I yelled. “I thought I had complete privacy!” He made a motion that it was OK, breasts are fine, no need to cover up. He walked past and then took off his own clothes and waded into the water, where he splashed around a bit but did not immerse himself. I was trying not to stare, or at least not to be caught staring, but I watched out of the corner of my eye as he got out of the water, took a sketchbook out of his pack, and, crouching there on the beach, drew in it or wrote for a while.
