CHAPTER 8

THE SEA! THE SEA!

WHEN I WAS first falling for Greece, Ed Stringham gave me the names of three writers: Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, and Patrick Leigh Fermor. I devoured Durrell’s three lyrical books in order—Prospero’s Cell, about Corfu; Reflections on a Marine Venus, about Rhodes; and Bitter Lemons, about Cyprus—and was able to introduce Ed to Gerald Durrell, Lawrence’s younger brother, who wrote a charming memoir, My Family and Other Animals, about his boyhood as a budding naturalist on Corfu. (To Dorothy Gregory, the famous writing Durrells of Corfu were Larry and Jerry.) Miller’s Colossus of Maroussi, about a visit to Greece in 1939 at the invitation of Lawrence Durrell, is a masterpiece, inimitable, capturing Greece just before the Second World War. But it was Patrick Leigh Fermor, a British writer and war hero, who would be my ideal traveling companion. Leigh Fermor—part Pausanias, part Bruce Chatwin—was curious about everything, charismatic, knowledgeable, and inexhaustible. In him I felt I had found a friend.

Leigh Fermor’s first claim to fame was as a soldier with the British Army on Crete during the Second World War, when he and a group of Cretan guerrillas kidnapped General Kreipe, the German who commanded the Nazi forces on the island, an exploit that inspired the 1957 movie Ill Met by Moonlight. (It was based on a 1950 book by William Stanley Moss, one of the kidnapping crew, and starred Dirk Bogarde as Leigh Fermor, who did not think much of either the book or the film.) Leigh Fermor’s writing is dense, fueled by memory, with the breadth of a polymath and the immediacy of personal correspondence. One can picture him crouching in the landscape, jotting notes that will later swell into paragraphs and burgeon into books, with the kind of running heads that are so enticing in the works of a certain British travel-writing genre: “Threshing and Winnowing,” “Wine-Dark Words,” “Transistrian Cats.” He is given to Homeric catalogues—three examples are never enough—and his lists don’t peter out but crescendo. In the first few pages of Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, under the heading “Ramifications in the Levant,” he lists 91 of the “strange communities” in the worldwide Greek diaspora, including “the Slavophones of Northern Macedonia . . . the phallus-wielding Bounariots of Tyrnavos . . . the Venetian nobles of the Ionian . . . the anchorites of Mt. Athos . . . the cotton-brokers of Alexandria . . . the Greeks of the Danube Delta . . . the Byzantines of Mistra . . . the lunatics of Cephalonia . . . [and] the Hello-boys back from the States.” Under “Mosaic Fauna” he describes a Greco-Roman mosaic floor in Sparta—Orpheus, Achilles, Europa—the sole surviving proof of a classical heritage in the modern town, whose warrior ancestors, you may remember, won the Peloponnesian War but evidently lost the race for enduring monuments.

Leigh Fermor is a cult figure among philhellenes, especially among the British, and was exceptionally well connected in Greece. With his wife, Joan, a photographer, whom he met in Cairo in the forties, he settled in Kardamyli (Kardameli), a remote town on the western coast of the Mani. There he wrote his best-known book, A Time of Gifts (1977), about his journey as a young man, in the early thirties, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, on foot. The journey was continued in Between the Woods and the Water (1986) and The Broken Road (2013), which was published posthumously (it ends in midsentence; one hates to say it, but he did die, in 2011). Leigh Fermor viewed his youthful adventures as if through the wrong end of a telescope: distant yet detailed, like an exquisite miniature.

There is something contagious about the writing of Patrick Leigh Fermor. It makes people want to follow in his footsteps. A young writer named Nick Hunt walked 2,500 miles through Europe, retracing Leigh Fermor’s route for Walking the Woods and the Water (2014). More recently, a Dutch artist and birder named Jacques Grégoire has produced a series of watercolors from the same European walking tour for a project called From the North Sea to the Black Sea. I followed in Leigh Fermor’s footsteps, albeit by car, in 2000, driving the coastal route around the Mani peninsula, from Kalamata to Cape Tenaro, the entrance to Hades, and back. The house he built, with Joan, in Kardamyli, a storied town about a quarter of the way down the western coast of the Mani, loomed large in my imagination, especially after I found out that the Leigh Fermors had left their house to the Benaki Museum, which hoped to turn it into a center for international literary events and a residence for writers.

I had learned from an item in the Times Literary Supplement that one could book a tour of the house in Kardamyli for ten euros—and the cost of getting there, of course. So the next time I was in Greece, in March of 2017, fulfilling a long-held dream of returning to the Aegean to stay longer than I did the first time, thirty years earlier, I wrote a careful letter, in Greek, to the Benaki, vetted by my latest Greek teacher, Chrysanthe, requesting permission to visit the Kardamyli house. I found it difficult to read the reply, partly because it was written in bureaucratic Greek and partly because I didn’t like what it said. Apparently the museum was awaiting work permits, and as soon as those permits came through, the house would be closed to visitors so that restoration work, paid for by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, could begin. I would just miss the chance, unless . . . Well, this was Greece, after all, and it was possible that the permits would be delayed. I decided to trust the Greek gods, add Kardamyli to my itinerary, and hope for the best.

KARDAMYLI IS MENTIONED by Homer in the Iliad: Agamemnon promises the region to Achilles if he will rejoin the battle against Troy. (You may remember that Achilles spends most of the Iliad sulking in his tent and is drawn back to battle only to avenge his friend Patroclus, who, having disguised himself in Achilles’ armor to put fear into the Trojans, is slain by Hector.) The town is exceptionally well sited: it’s protected from severe weather to the east by Mount Taygetus, the gigantic mountain of the Peloponnese that slopes all the way to the tip of the Mani; to the west, it looks out over the Messenian Gulf to the westernmost peninsula of the southern Peloponnese. Winds from the west keep Kardamyli temperate even in winter. Although Achilles refused all Agamemnon’s gifts, he did rejoin the war, and after his death it is said that his son Neoptolemus came to collect.

Leigh Fermor never worried that Kardamyli would become a tourist destination, because it is so remote. Neoptolemus probably arrived by boat. The trip overland has been made easier in recent years by a modern highway from Corinth to Kalamata, at the base of the peninsula. But it takes an intrepid driver to negotiate the tortuous drive from Kalamata over and down to Kardamyli. On the map the road loops back and forth like a diagram of the small intestine. But it is in the large intestine that one feels the twists and turns of the mountain road, negotiating the switchbacks and running along high precipices; one moment the sea is far down on your right, and then suddenly, dizzyingly, it’s on your left. It reminded me of a bus ride I took on the island of Ithaca, which twists in the middle like a Möbius strip. After about thirty kilometers, Kardamyli comes into view, down at sea level. At the bottom of the road, you can make a sharp right to the town beach, with a strip of hotels and restaurants, or stay to the left and drive through the center: two rival grocery stores right next to each other, a fishing dock down on the water, restaurants with terraces overlooking the sea, cafés along the main street, a newsstand, a shop or two specializing in olive oil, and a hardware store with a faded sign that advertises paint in bright colors—chrómata. Just outside town to the south is the Kalamitsi Hotel, a palatial establishment, built of the local stone, with arched windows and a red-tiled roof. Leigh Fermor had once written that there was no better place to write than a hotel room in Kardamyli, so while I was waiting and hoping to visit his house I stayed in a room here with a balcony and a spectacular view out over a grove of well-tended olive and citrus trees to the sea.

I could hear the sea, and also the fluting of doves, an insistent three-note figure that would have driven me crazy if I didn’t try to tame it by hearing it as syllables of English. It sounded like “Your Birth Day!” or “Your Broom Stick!” One melodious song I traced to a black bird with an orange beak perched in a lemon tree. Sheep bleated, and there was the tinkle of goat bells. There was also, right below me one day, bluegrass music. Kardamyli that week was host to an international jazz festival, and the hotel was full of German, Norwegian, and American musicians.

The hotel had a steep stone stairway down to a private beach. I trotted down there right away. A couple were sunning themselves and ignored me. A white-haired man with one eye squinched shut debouched from the staircase to take a swim, and I automatically started to leave. “You don’t have to go—you can stay,” he said, in accented English. I explained that I didn’t have my bathing suit, which was true. It is also true that I like having a beach to myself.

Once back in my room, it was hard to leave and impossible to stop looking. The sun left a pink smear above the distant gray-blue peninsula, and the sea was like a bolt of ice-blue satin, with matching sky, except that the colors of the air were not as nuanced, having no surface, existing as pure distance measured in light. In the grove in the foreground the trunks of the olive trees twisted seductively. A tongue of sea eased in from the Messenian Gulf below a steep hillside covered with pines, plane trees, and pointed cypresses. Below them, the water was an especially hypnotic shade of deep gray-green-blue, perhaps reflecting the jade green of the trees. Mount Taygetus rose above, catching the light of the setting sun: gray and craggy with scarps of yellow-orange rock and swaths and patches of livid green. As when someone who knows how rich she is, how sufficient her home and income, views the homes and possessions of others without a pinch of envy, so I enjoyed my view of the sea from this stony perch in the hotel. I was looking at the depths of color on the surface—isn’t that where the radical beauty lurks? The only thing lacking was a seventh sense to take it in with. When you’re traveling, you have a heightened sense of things, and what I was feeling was a kind of historical-hysterical envelopment by beauty.

I pried myself away to cultivate the newsstand, which had a handmade signboard out front that read “Εφημερίδες, βιβλία!” “Newspapers, books!” (The Greek for newspapers is related to the English “ephemera”: things that last but a day.) The store also advertised hiking maps and “Handmade affairs.” The owner, behind the counter, was grizzled and handsome, barely tolerant toward the Germans who had come in before me, but willing to sell them his handmade affairs. An old Maniot came in, a regular, and the owner automatically reached under the counter and slapped down the customer’s favorite newspaper. The old man pointed to the headline and groaned as he opened his coin purse: another round of cuts to pensions had been announced—yet a deeper reach into the Greeks’ pockets to pay the country’s debts and keep it in the Eurozone. How bitter for the Greeks to be punished like this, to have their circumstances straitened in their old age.

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). “Είναι 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.

I pulled on my pants and shirt at about the same time the young man did, stuffing my underwear in my hat. I nodded goodbye, fully clothed, as he left, circling behind me, and followed him out shortly after. I had been caught naked on the beach, one of the most embarrassing things that can happen to a person, short of subsequently having your clothes stolen and having to return home nude, skulking from olive tree to olive tree, as in a dream, hoping a shepherd will come by and lend you a fleece. I thought of the myths of mortals stumbling onto Artemis or Aphrodite bathing in the woods. The only nude art I resembled was a portrait by Lucian Freud. But nothing terrible had happened—my encounter left no residue of guilt or shame. Nobody cared that I sat naked on a beach in the Peloponnese. On Patrick Leigh Fermor’s beach I was allowed.

On the way back to the hotel, I kept feeling a vibration coming from the hat—which was in my hand, not on my head— and I thought it was my cell phone. But my phone was in my shoulder bag with my notebook and wallet and glasses. Before going into my room at the hotel, I set the hat upside down on a low stone wall, and as I pulled out my intimates a yellow butterfly shot into the garden.