Tales Of Crete - Paradise Lost -- 17

Tales of Crete© “Paradise Lost” 17 By Jack Schimmelman When I awoke in my cave and my eyes could focus, Bèbè came into view. She was squatting by the shore, paying homage to Apollo’s chariot, which had begun its inevitable journey across the transparent blue sky. I watched her lovely body, covered by a thin blue sari, sway towards the welcoming cool sea. The furnace was in full force. As I remembered to fall in love all over again, Jorge emerged from his cave next door. Today, no lover preceded him. He was alone. I watched him approach his soul and she flinched when he touched her. Accompanied by the sea’s textured harmonies, they circled each other. Leaning in away head tilted, bodies revealing memories. A few words drifted towards me. “Perdón” (sorry) was one. “Bastardardo” (bastard) another.” I focused on Bèbè’s eyes and could see her heart losing its veil. I just knew that this was a rhythm to which they had danced many times. Jorge took Bèbè in his arms, kissed her and the day began. I joined them and we walked to the café for breakfast. Jorge asked us how the night had gone and we both said fine. Upon arriving at our morning destiny, Jorge gladly showed Bèbè the ice water ceremony that we euphemistically called a shower. Bèbè did not indulge, silk sari and all. Jorge and I, on the other hand, each had our turn in the deep freeze water pellets and we both assumed a temporary blue sheath, which ultimately returned to our usual colored skin. By this point of the summer, I was a deep tan with blonde hair. Jorge was midnight black with black hair. I had begun April being a pudgy, brown haired guy from the Bronx and had now morphed into a Jewish facsimile of a lean surfer dude, avec surf, mais sans board. We joined our friends, Carlos, Margot, Werner and Jorge’s ex-lover, Anke. Anke didn’t seem to care and became friends with Bèbè. By the time we had finished our coffee, Jorge and Bèbè were back in business. Literally. After all, they were business partners in Florence. Throughout the day he showed her how he found the unique shells he used to make his jewelry. She offered new marketing techniques. Soul mates are like that. Bèbè was very Latin, she would later explain to me. She would stand by her man no matter what. Jorge had told her that he was overwhelmed by the variety of female pulchritude or as they say in the Bronx, tits and ass. Beautiful, lusty, Goddess, women descended upon him and Jorge claimed to be helpless

confronted by such heat. He had not heard of the Lenny Bruce dictum, which is “never, never, never admit to anything.” Never. I suppose he missed that performance at the Café Au Go Go in New York City in 1962. Nevertheless, in this case, Lenny’s dictum was not needed. Bèbè would return to her man. She accepted his machismo. He accepted her love. Smart man. Throughout the summer waves of tourists would make their mark on Damnoni. Most were German, but some were from other European countries. French, Swiss, Italian, Austrian, but not one other American. I was unique in this respect. For several weeks I made the acquaintance of a Roman woman in her 20s, very tall, very lovely and very fucked up. She told me that her rich industrialist father had sent her to Crete to “dry out.” She was a junkie and I did note tracks running up and down her arms as sure as European trains ran on schedule. She told me that after three weeks, she had taken the “cure.” She had withdrawn, cold turkey, which I found impossible, but there she was, sober, clean. Apollo had baked her poison until it disintegrated and was washed out to sea. She related many stories about her life in Rome; stories that rivaled Fellini’s universe. Her name was Alba and she moved like her name. She traversed the landscape as an unfurling dawn. Somehow, though, I always was able to see the shadows that were dwelling within her omnipresent sunrise. I don’t know who else she had told about her habit. Maybe no one. She left Damnoni, although she was scared to death. She didn’t want to leave paradise; afraid of the sun setting on her sobriety. I wished her luck. I hope she made it and eventually left Rome forever. From her description, her father was a candidate for a storyline on Law and Order. I met theatre people from Copenhagen. I still considered myself a theatre director and I asked about Stanley Rosenberg, a New York director who had done early work at Café La Mama in New York City’s East Village and had gone to Copenhagen to work and live. In the early 70’s I had met Stanley on 5th Avenue in Manhattan when he was buying his airline ticket and he invited me to come with him. I had just returned from living in Paris and thought, no, I would stay in the U.S. for a few moments. The tourists told me that, indeed, they knew Stanley, for he had created his own, successful theatre in Copenhagen. He had done exactly what he said he would. I almost left heaven to find him. People used to say that if you stand on Times Square long enough, you would see everybody you knew and everybody you would come to know and everybody you would never know. You would eventually see the world pass through Times Square. That’s how Damnoni felt. As 2

the summer waltzed its way through the south shore’s dry, desert air, the atmosphere grew more and more charged with delight. By August, the beaches were overrun with tourists as that was the month all Europeans took their vacations. Everybody walked in. They took buses to the tops of hills and meandered their way down the rocky paths to the beach of their dreams. On any given day, if you looked at the hills surrounding Damnoni, you would see a happy migration to their fantasy awaiting them on these transcendent beaches. My friends and I were the only ones who had been there since the full flower of Spring. We were the unofficial tour guides to other seekers. Every weekend, the first beach, the clothed, sacred area was inundated with Greek families, mostly from the interior and north shore of Crete. Obviously, everybody respected the first beach’s culture and traditions. Nobody disrobed. Nobody had sex. Nobody got publicly drunk on that beach during the day. You did not need to be a genius to understand that this was the way we needed to be. We all would go to the next beach and the next and the next, each time making our passage over a small mountain, searching for the enclave where cloth was decorative, but not necessary. As for being drunk, that would always wait until darkness enveloped the landscape and the families had gone home. As for sex, people remained discrete. Due to my previous encounter with Crete’s traditional vats, I remained more or less sober the entire summer. I didn’t have the heart to share with my co-celebrants the tragic secrets I had discovered in wine country. Besides, at that time wine from Crete was miserable no matter what, so not many people ventured to taste. I understand that that is not true today. With Jorge and Bèbè safely entwined in each other’s lives, I remained alone in my cave, drinking the pleasures of saturated elements. One morning, however, Apollo had to be coaxed into the sky. He was not smiling. No music played as he wheeled his way to the West. Upon awakening, I knew something was about to change. My bones understood. That day, a wave of young tourists invaded the main beach, the family beach. It was Friday. They were on holiday before they would go back to work and school in their country. They had brought their city with them. They also had managed to bring a fourwheel drive vehicle right onto the beach. This was before SUVs had become popular. I don’t want to mention their nationality. It would not be fair, for it wasn’t nationality that prompted them to behave the way they did. It was their character. At breakfast, we could not help but notice the change in the atmosphere. Something different had settled upon us. We were quiet. The newly arrived visitors banged the drums loudly. The Greek 3

families who had arrived for the weekend to sun bathe and swim were horrified. We were embarrassed and quickly disappeared. Before we left, Jorge tried to talk to them. He always thought he could charm stone itself. Well, maybe he could, but this group was not persuaded. They basically told him that what they did was none of his business. We disappeared to the next beach. The air was quickly arriving at its standard 38ºC (100º+F), so I decided to spend the day at the waterfall in the nearby valley, making sure to say hello to the tethered goats and my chorus of sheep along the way. When I returned I was refreshed, my friends were fried. When we returned to the main café, we learned that the group had bathed nude, ignoring the shock and disgust of the Greek families who had gathered and then left. The café owners begged us to talk to these guys, for they were destroying what until that point was an exquisite milieu of pleasure and mutual respect. Again, we were ignored. That night urban life crashed onto Damnoni along with the tide. At first, my friends and I were quite taken by their abandon. Some part of us admired their “fuck you” attitude. But we knew that this road was rockier than anything that Crete had to offer. Their van was firmly entrenched on the beach. You could see it rocking. Punk rock snarled from its sides and Jorge came running up to me and said that I just had to see what was going on inside. He had gone to the window and looked in. Nobody seemed to mind. They were all high. When I got there, I saw clearly that everybody was fucking everybody. You could not make out the individual forms. They were in the middle of the main beach. The family beach. We walked back to our respective caves. The noise did not end until very late that night, early the next morning. I could not sleep. I swear that that was the first time I failed to see stars pouring from the Milky Way. I awakened with first light. Jorge and Bèbè were already walking towards the first cold shower of the day. At breakfast, we could see that the newly arrived group had not slept and they were prepared to pick up where they left off. At least silence prevailed, if only momentarily. The couple who owned the café, both of whom university graduates, came to us and begged us to speak to these guys once again. This time we sent Margot. Maybe she could charm them. No avail. After breakfast, we left the café to go to “our” beach and we noticed that no families had arrived on this beautiful Saturday morning. The word had already spread. Islands have very efficient means of communication. This was before internet; before cell phones. You don’t need any of that on an island community. On Martha’s Vineyard, where I lived, if someone down-island sneezed, someone up-island said “God bless you.” This intense community alignment kept everybody honest. Everybody, that is, except these city refugees. The day passed anxiously. The sun did not set that evening. It fell. Apollo’s chariot had lost its wheels. 4

That night, we stayed close to the café, under the canopy, quietly reassuring ourselves that this storm would soon pass. On the beach, we heard a ruckus. Men yelling, a girl shouting, but we just assumed that they were engaged in their nightly orgy. Some of the urban group was with us in the café; some were in the van and we guessed that others were on the sand in the black deep night. The next morning we all ambled back to the café from our respective sleeping places. The night had gone better than the one before in the sense that there had been less music, less noise. We hoped that the end was near. We saw a young woman straggle from the beach to the café. She was weaving. Her friends greeted her. Her clothes were in tatters. She was wailing. We learned from one of them that she had been raped by three Greek men who had heard about their behavior the day before and decided that all the foreign women in the area were whores and theirs for the taking. They had emerged from the interior as bears seeking honey. I looked at this girl, for she was barely a woman. My guess was that she was a university student. I looked at her eyes. The sun had not risen for her that day. The urban group quietly gathered their stuff; took their friend in their arms; hugged her; went to their van and drove away. We were in shock. We gazed into each other’s sorrow. The fabric of bliss had been ripped. In its place remained a black and white photo. The day had just begun. Paradise lost.

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