by Yann Martel
I was better prepared for Greece than I had been for Portugal. I read up on the country, I bought a good practical guidebook, my backpack weighed in at six kilos, I felt I was better at assessing situations, at bargaining; in short, the prospect of sunset was less terrifying. Still, like the last time, I left Canada feeling depressed, lonely and nervous. I knew no one, no one knew me, where was I going? why was I doing this? -- round and round.
Blue and white are the colours of Greece, blue of sea, white of marble, set in an air that has a certain glow. It was in the midst of these simple elements, three days after landing in Athens, that I rediscovered the pleasure of travelling. The temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion, a bus ride of a few hours down the Attic peninsula from the capital, is Greece in its purest, most archetypal form: a solitary Doric temple on a rocky promontory overlooking a vastness of sparkling blue. I spent the whole day there in an ecstatic reverie. Everything would be fine, everything would be fine.
During my time in Greece I was a chameleon who favoured blue and white (and black, the black of the billions of olives that fell from trees and peppered the hilly, arid ground). In the presence of these colours I was still and happy. By which I mean that I was content to do nothing except listen to the pulse, the rustle, the roll, of time flowing by, which felt not like a tick-tock marking something coming to an end but, on the contrary, like something increasing all the time, all the seconds adding up to a whole.
I travelled in a leisurely way, seeing the major sights because it would be crazy to be blind to them, but also getting lost by going to places not usually visited by tourists. I read poems by Cavafy and novels by Kazantzakis.
It is one of the ironies of travel in the late twentieth century that, unless you make special efforts or are lucky, if you go to England you will meet Australians, if you go to Egypt you will meet Germans, if you go to Greece you will meet Swedes and so on. In my case, while seeing the glory of Greece, while smelling it, while eating it, while treading upon it, I met America.
Upon arriving in Pilos, in the south-western Peloponnese, I went for a walk about the hills outside the town. It was more of a village, really; the division between settlement and wilderness was uncertain. Early that morning I had split up in Kalamata with a Canadian drummer and a Dutch architect who were returning to Athens. We had visited Mistra and Sparta together and we had shared lively conversations and a lot of laughter. I was feeling a little left out in Pilos. I spent hours walking among beehives and down countless sheep paths that led nowhere.
In the evening I was very tired and I decided to eat at my little hotel. The place was run by a family, and their restaurant was more an extension of their kitchen than a proper dining establishment. The menu had x items of which x--1 were unavailable. I discovered later, from Ruth, that the determinant of this sole offering was either the family's whim or, if they were in a good mood that day, the result of a rough poll conducted in the morning among the guests, a consultation in which democracy might triumph. On the days when the family's whim was at work, guests were offered menus so they could see in print what they were -- and were not -- going to eat. On democratic days, menus were dispensed with -- since guests already knew what they were having -- except for new guests, who had to go through the exercise of being rebuked on every item except one. My first evening, it turned out, was one of family whim.
All this to say the following: that I was handed the menu, that the first item I struck from my mental list was the moussaka -- I had had enough of moussakas with fatty, granular ground lamb that dripped with oil -- but that I ended up ordering moussaka.
A woman at a table next to mine, clearly a tourist, smiled at me during the menu elimination process. When the man had left with the preordained order, she said, "It's not bad, actually. They eat it themselves."
"Good -- then if we die, we shall all die together."
She chuckled. "Are you American?" she asked.
"No, a neighbour."
"Ah." A pause. "Buenos dias, como esta usted?"
I looked at her. I was going through a quick series of anti-American thoughts.
She smiled. "I'm joking. I have a daughter who's studying in British Columbia."
I laughed. Damn my presumption, damn it.
Up till that moment I had been tired, so tired that I could have fallen asleep then and there. But suddenly I felt recharged. Soon, from being at neighbouring tables, we were neighbours at one table. Her name was Ruth and she was from Philadelphia. She was in her forties and she was alone; there was no husband or family that was late for dinner. Till a week before, she had been with a friend. They had taken the boat from Bari, in Italy, to Corfu and had worked their way south. Her friend had returned to the U.S. from Athens -- commitments, attachments, obligations -- but Ruth's ticket was open. For the first time in her life, she had decided to travel on her own, "like a student", as she put it. She had commitments, attachments and obligations too, but they could "feed themselves, clean themselves and drive themselves on their own for once," she said, laughing (though she did miss and worry about her nine-year-old son, Danny. He came up regularly).
I don't remember when I started learning all the things about Ruth's life. We travelled together for a little over two months, and I'm good at remembering details but not chronology. That first evening she was still a stranger to me (how strange to say that -- Ruth a stranger to me. Quickly I couldn't recall for the life of me what she was like as a stranger. First impressions are such strange things). We had both liked Corinth -- New, Old and Ancient -- but she had seen nothing else of the Peloponnese after that, since she had taken a bus from the isthmus clear across the peninsula to Pilos, thus committing her, she felt, to visiting everything in between. Her resolve needed that. (We'd get as far as the Turko-Iranian border.)
The moussaka came and went hardly noticed, and when it was time for bed we agreed to have breakfast together in the morning.
We spent the next days in Pilos together. We walked and talked and played backgammon on my small magnetic set. It came naturally. In our regular settings, Ruth and I would never have got to know each other the way we did in Greece. Our differences would have kept us apart. But here it was precisely these differences that made us interesting to each other, although Ruth was more of a novelty to me than I was to her; the daughter who was at Simon Fraser University, Tuesday, was a year older than I and she had another daughter, Sandra, who was two years younger. Her stepson, Graham, was Tuesday's age. They, with Danny, were "good kids all," she said. She used the word "kids". I was hardly the first twenty-year-old she had known.
I, on the other hand, realized with amazement that I had never truly spoken with an adult woman before, never got beyond outer facts and functional interactions, never simply and profoundly chatted. Whom I had been speaking with for twenty years I don't know, but it seems it wasn't mature women. This is what drew me to Ruth. Next to her I felt so new, shiny and stupid. I felt like a piece of plastic to her worn leather. She was forty-six years old and she looked it. She was twice divorced and she had three children and one stepson. Her first husband, whom she had married when she was nineteen, was a gynaecologist-obstetrician who loved money and was an asshole (that's all I ever learned about him. Clearly "asshole" fully conveyed his essence and there was nothing more to be said. Words can be so wonderfully apt sometimes). He was the distant father of her two daughters. Her second husband had been her best friend's husband, but one day the best friend had been swimming with her young son, Graham, and they had been caught in a riptide and swept out to sea. The friend had spent all her energy pushing her son to safety, which she had succeeded in doing -- Graham managed to struggle to the beach -- but she had no strength left for herself and she drowned. In mourning her friend Ruth had got close to the husband and eventually she had married him, more from a feeling of responsibility for Graham than from any romantic inclination. He wasn't a bad man, he meant well, but he had trouble with being alive and he was an alcoholic. She divorce
d him, taking with her his belated gift, baby Danny. In the quiet eddies of this turmoil, sensing that she would have to earn money on her own one day, she took a course to become a computer programmer. She worked for a company that did contracts, a job of no significance or interest to her, which had nothing to do with who she was, except that it allowed her to pull in money, at the cost of eight of her daylight hours five days a week.
All this was etched not on her face, for forty-six is not very old, but in her manners. She exuded an experience of life, a road long travelled, that made me want to listen to her. I hated my youthfulness, which came out in too many words, too many opinions, too many emotions. I wanted her calmness, the simplicity of her approach to things. Once, later on, we had a fight. That is -- more accurately -- I was upset at her. It was in Marmaris, in Turkey. I can't remember why, what over. I was fulminating and sulking at the same time. It ended when she came over, touched me lightly on the forearm -- three tips of fingers touching three dots of skin -- and said, "I'm sorry." Then she went to bed. I was instantly disarmed. She had said her two and a half words plainly and definitively. They fully expressed what she felt and had to say. I reflected on the way I would have apologized ten times over, with emotional sloppiness and needless gesticulations. I went over to her and apologized for having been upset at her, trying to match her sincerity and economy of words.
But this was not the way Ruth saw it. She couldn't believe she was forty-six. She felt life had happened to her, with no direction. She had strong insecurities. For example, she kept a diary, had since she was in her early twenties, but she never showed it to me because she thought she'd never learned to write properly in high school. Whereas I! She envied me. She even found me a little intimidating at first, she told me. She thought I was so smart, so daring. Such energy, so much enthusiasm. And I had travelled so much. And what a tragedy to have lost my parents like that.
Typically, this is the way things went. Imagine this play:
DRAMATIS PERSONAE:
YOUTH
AGE
FUNNY-LOOKING CLOUD
SCENE: a hot, sunny beach in the south-western Peloponnese (The curtain rises. Youth and Age are lying on the beach, facing the sea and the sun.)
YOUTH: (rattles on at a hundred miles an hour while Age listens.)
(Funny-looking Cloud enters stage right)
AGE (pointing): Isn't that a funny-looking cloud?
YOUTH (looks, smiles): Yes, it is.
(They both look at the Funny-looking Cloud until it floats off stage left. A long pause.)
YOUTH: (rattles on at a hundred miles an hour while Age listens.)
CURTAIN
The natural thing to do after visiting Pilos is to visit Methoni and Koroni, the two other towns at the end of the Messinian peninsula, the westernmost of the three fingers that form the south of the Peloponnese. It was equally natural that Ruth and I should do this together. We were both happy to have a travel companion.
In Methoni we got a room together to save money. It was a large room with bright whitewashed walls and plain furniture that was so arbitrarily scattered about that it seemed planned. The cupboard stood three feet from the wall. The two beds, in opposite corners of the room, also stood some distance from the walls, but crooked, with an un-Greek blindness to alignment and symmetry. Similarly with the table. It was all to make sweeping the floor and changing the beds easy, I suppose, but in the way it made each piece of furniture stand out, alone within its own space, the effect was to make the room feel like a stage. When I opened the shutters, there was such a flood of light it felt as if the sun star itself had entered the room. The window was surrounded by leafy, invasive vines with heavy white flowers that gave off an exquisite fragrance. I don't think I'd ever seen such a pleasant room, so bright, bright, bright.
Methoni is prettier than Pilos, and Ruth and I walked all day. There were the ruins of a castle, and dunes and paths besides. By late afternoon we were tired and returned to our room. Someone suggested foot massages.
It was doing that, pressing my thumbs into the soles of Ruth's warm feet, that I first felt it. It came on with the suddenness of an idea.
Desire. I wanted to be close to Ruth not only in words, but in deed.
I stood up. I felt a touch dizzy. There was so much light in the room -- it felt like a liquid, and I was floating in it. I looked down to my naked feet. The tiles were cool. I looked towards the window, out into the world. But at that moment nothing out there interested me.
Ruth was still lying on the bed. I sat next to her. I wasn't nervous. Rather, I was incredibly alert. Though I was just sitting, doing nothing, it felt as if a lot was happening. My concentration was very busy.
Our gazes met. An attempt to remember a line by T.S. Eliot flitted through my mind, a thought of no relevance, just me shying away from my desire again, just me trying to reach for something while not looking at it. I bent down and we kissed. I am amazed now that I was so bold, that I, virgin inexperience, should not have waited for her, experience, to make the move. Ruth told me later that she never would have dared.
Between one kiss and the next Ruth said quietly, "I was wondering ...," as she played with my hair, which by now was long and was falling in her face.
I wanted to kiss for ever. There was nothing preliminary about it to me. Till then my lips had been instruments of speech, no more, except for smiling. But this was much better than words, infinitely better. Ruth once joked about my fondness for kissing ("but I love it," she said, bright-eyed, and gave me only a quick kiss because we were in a place that was possibly public). It's true that when I kissed her I tended to linger. There was so much to do -- to the left and right, up and down and dead ahead. There was the flat smoothness of her incisors, the roundness and pointiness of her upper canines, the ruggedness of her bicuspids. If gods kissed the earth, wouldn't they linger on the mountains? And then there was her tongue, that busy, solitary hermit, that funny indivisible organ bursting with personality. I loved kissing Ruth. She would sometimes turn away and laugh and say, "I feel like such a teenager!" Then we'd kiss some more.
I eased myself beside her. I pressed myself against her, one of her legs between mine, trying to feel as much of her body against mine as possible. I felt as if I were drunk. I didn't think I had ever felt so intensely while doing so little.
"I can't believe we're doing this," she said, smiling, short of breath.
"It's nice, very nice," I replied, burying my face in her neck.
"I've been masturbating the last couple of nights thinking about you," she whispered.
"Really?" I looked up. I loved it that she had used that word.
"In fact, when you suggested that we get a room together my first thought was Oh no, where am I going to masturbate?"
We laughed. How extraordinary that the same thought hadn't occurred to me. I masturbated every night before falling asleep, and always in bed. Yet the inconvenience of having Ruth in the same room had never crossed my mind. We kissed again.
Finally to break with Elena. To desire someone else.
"Have you slept with other women?"
"No. Once, long ago, probably before you were born -- God I feel old."
"Yes?" I nudged.
"This friend and I kissed and fooled around a bit. But that was it."
We fell silent.
My drunkenness got a keen edge. I was feeling incredibly horny. I was holding on tightly to her leg and rubbing myself against her. I was wet right through.
She smiled, a knowing smile, and turned to face me, propping herself up on an elbow. She cleared the hair from my face and gently drifted her fingers down from my forehead, kissing me in their wake. She ran her hand over my body, lingering over my breasts and pressing between my legs.
She suddenly got up. "Too much light," she said. She closed the shutters and pulled the curtains. The penumbra of intimacy. She checked the door, and stood looking at me. I was on my knees on the bed. I was nervously, deliciously tense
.
She came close to me again and, while we kissed, hands began to act of their own accord. Hers slowly unbuttoned my shirt, undid my bra, held and caressed my breasts. Mine wavered in the air, accommodated the removing of clothes and then settled on her shoulders. I stood on the bed, my pants and underwear were assisted off -- and I was completely naked. Ruth gently took one of my breasts into her mouth. She glided her hands over my back, from bump of shoulder-blade to curve of bum.
I did not so much help her remove her clothes as trail my hands behind the task as it was done. As soon as she had removed her pants and underwear -- I can see it still: she bent over, steadying herself with a hand on my hip, first one leg, then the other, then standing straight -- I touched her between the legs. Her light brown hairs were silky, softer than mine, and she was wet, wet at the first touch. What an incredible feeling, a sameness that is someone else. She caught her breath.
She pushed me onto the bed. We lay body against body, skin slightly cool at first, soon very warm. We spoke little; our sentences were short and practical -- secondary language. Mostly we spoke with our hands. A communication that even had the structure of a conversation: she spoke with her hands, and my body listened without interruption, then my hands replied on her body.
Such a lovely form, the feminine form -- so soft, so open, so receiving. Ruth had small breasts, smaller than mine, with nipples that had fed two girls and a boy. Her euphemistic tummy, which had produced three babies, twenty-seven months' hard work, had a little bulge, which she hated, which I loved. I always placed my hand on it, as one would on a globe, which is exactly what I thought her belly was like -- a slight curve that traced a history and a geography. A globe representing the planet Tuesday (I was young and eager: I wanted to put everything into words. My metaphors -- which I worked on hard -- made Ruth roll her eyes. "A planet! Oh, what next? College students!" she said, and laughed, and kissed me. Always a kiss). My body was fit only for plain adjectives: young, slender, nimble. I liked it plenty, don't mean to say the contrary, it has always been faithful to me -- I had nice breasts, not large but pleasing in their shape, and though my legs were a little thin, I was well proportioned -- but it was barren ground for rich metaphors. I hungered for a sexual history.
