PALEOKASTRITSA

There were some repairs to be made on a broken intake valve, so we got hold of our driver the next morning and had him take us to a little hotel on the other side of the island, at Paleokastritsa, which is one of the several places claimed as the spot where Ulysses was washed up and discovered by Nausicaa. The hotel is small and shares the beach with one other equally small hotel and a modest restaurant. In contrast to Viareggio, it is just the sort of place that anyone, poet or not, living or dead, would be delighted to be washed up on.

The beach makes a gleaming semi-circle at the end of a narrow cove, whose deep waters reflect the steep cliffs that hem it in. Oleander, bougainvillaea and jasmine are everywhere, a monastery shines white on a cliff high above the water, and centuries-old olive groves stretch off, silvery and green, in park-like symmetry, to other beaches and other hidden coves nearby. Langoustes are kept alive in large, slatted viviers underwater, and you are rowed out by a boatman, accompanied by your waiter, who unlocks a padlock and fishes in the crate for the size langouste you indicate. Outside the crates, lobsters are kept, tethered underwater on ropes, because if they were put in with the langoustes they would damage them with their claws.

Twenty minutes after you have made your choice, the langouste is served, broiled, with melted butter and lemon, flakily tender and tasting of the depths. We drank white wine without resin, as the taste of turpentine is not as romantic to me as to other Northern Greekophiles.

To keep the place from being inhumanly idyllic, certain annoyances were provided. There were wasps everywhere who like freshly caught langouste as much as you do and who duel you cleverly for each morsel. One wasp, frustrated at table, followed me out to the beach, and taking an approximate fix on the assumed location of my langouste at the moment, dove at my abdomen and, in a burst of suicidal morbidity, well and truly stung me. Greek wasps, I discovered, are like Greek soldiers in one respect. They sacrifice themselves, but they do not sacrifice themselves in vain. I had an angry little red lump under my belt and it lasted for more than a week.

Further to prove that perfection in this world is never absolute, a radio blared forth an incessant stream of sound. Rock and roll, bazouki, Beethoven, and political speeches followed each other without pause or plan, because from the time the radio is switched on at eight in the morning until it is shut at midnight, nobody bothers to turn a dial on it. And a group of about fifteen French people, boys and girls in their early twenties, who had bicycled over for a swim and lunch from a French holiday camp on the other side of the island, did all the things that people of that generation do to make people of my generation despair. They talked loudly, using, with numbing frequency, the word which in French is supposed to be less objectionable than its English translation but which still does not fall on the ear with grace, especially on Ulysses’ beach. They wore less clothes than they should have and the girls more eye makeup than they should have and they necked in public and amused themselves at the table by pouring water over each other, to the accompaniment of gales of laughter.

To even things up on a nationalistic basis, a troop of German boys in their teens arrived in a bus and wandered around the beach, making their presence felt. They were all dressed in leather shorts and carried what looked like daggers at their belts and they sang marching songs and started a malicious game which involved skipping stones at each other across the water, purposely close to other bathers. They were probably innocent boy scouts, but somebody ought to tell the Germans that they ought not to wear daggers when they visit foreign countries. Even with the best will in the world, one remembers the Hitler Jugend, and Strength Through Joy, and when the leader of the troop, a young man of about twenty-five, marched past me in his heavy shoes, I could not help but look at the leather map case swinging from his shoulder and wonder how many drawings of key military points were contained therein.

In the late afternoon, things improved. The French went off on their bicycles, with five or six volleys of their talismanic word. The Germans, some of them carrying guitars, although still bedaggered, took boats to a camping spot, and it was possible to find a spot on the beach out of range of the restaurant radio. There we could talk in peace to two ladies who had been our neighbors at lunch, one of them Australian, the other, as she put it, more or less mixed-up English. They lived in London and had spent most of their holiday in Paleokastritsa, and loved it. Neither of them had ever been married, and they were like charming heroines in the novels of E. M. Forster, intelligent, sensitive, formidably well-read, widely-traveled, gently mannered, and transparently good. Naturally, their favorite author was E. M. Forster. Ladies like these are to be found traveling resolutely all over Europe, and if they were ever to disappear, Europe would be much the poorer for it.

The older of the two ladies, who had a responsible job in a big London hospital, had been offered a similar post in a hospital in New Haven. She asked me what New Haven was like, and I tried to give her an honest answer. My memories of New Haven include having my nose broken badly in a football game there in 1931 (neither for nor against Yale, but playing against Arnold for Brooklyn College, neither of which teams has ever posed a real threat to Texas or Oklahoma for national honors). I had also been in and out of New Haven for the tryout performances of plays, which, for the most part, turned out to be much more painful than the broken nose. Since it was unlikely that the English lady would ever have to run back a kickoff or rewrite a third act in one night in the Hotel Taft, I told her that she would probably like New Haven, and that even if she didn’t, New York was only an hour away by train.

In the evening, we all strolled together through olive groves to another cove and had a glass of ouzo in a little fisherman’s restaurant there and talked to an American professor of English from Chicago who had published, inevitably, a thesis on Melville. He had just finished a year teaching in Greece on an exchange fellowship. He was starting back to Chicago the next morning with his wife and two sons and he was already suffering the pangs of nostalgia for Greece as we drank the ouzo and watched a boat full of large stones being unloaded at the water’s edge. The work was being done by women, but when a particularly heavy stone had to be taken from the boat one of the husbands lounging about would heave himself to his feet and help lift it and place it, with a loving smile, on his wife’s head before sinking down again among his fellows. “It’s a cinch,” the professor said, regarding this Ionian division of labor, “I won’t see anything like that in Chicago.”

There was a full moon that night and a cool green dawn in the morning, through which huge bearded monks with long hair done up in buns walked barefoot to market from the monastery on the hill, and it seemed foolish ever to leave this place for anyplace else. But our ship was waiting and it was a long way to Venice, where we were committed to surrender the ship before the 31st of July, and we had a last swim, a last langouste with our friends, and got into our still-unpaid-for taxi and drove slowly back to the city. En route we were doused twice with clouds of DDT, which was being sprayed impartially in thick clouds on town and countryside from an old biplane flying in a low methodical pattern over this section of the island. Our driver explained that this happened every year as a prelude to the visit of the King and Queen of Greece to their summer residence of Mon Repos near the city. The Royal Family has an aversion to mosquitoes.

When we got to the harbor we saw immediately that any idea we might have had of leaving port that afternoon was out of the question. A wild wind was blowing and all the small craft in the harbor were rolling at their moorings and pieces of paper and leaves were skirling across the square. The Captain had put down an extra anchor and secured extra lines astern, but even with that the craft was pulling with the wind, and when we slept in it that night, it was almost as uncomfortable as it would have been during a storm in the open sea.

By morning, the sea had calmed magically, and we pulled out of the harbor soon after saying goodbye to the ladies from Paleokastritsa, who had come down to Corfu to catch the handsome new Italian car ferry, the Appia, which is painted a striking dull gold and plies between the mainland of Greece, Corfu and Brindisi.

An hour or so out of port we came upon one of the camps of the Club Méditerrannée, a Parisian organization which has instituted some very attractive new ideas in low-cost holidays. The camp on Corfu is made up of groups of simply built Tahitian huts, set in a huge olive grove and fronting on a magnificent stretch of beach. The dining areas are all in the open air, as are bars, dance-floors and libraries. Most of the vacationers were young, in their twenties, but there were some older people and children, and while there were guests from all over Europe there, the only language I heard being spoken was French. Everything was neat and tidy and bright with flowers, and the Tahitian huts blended gracefully into the shade of the olive groves, so that from a little distance at sea they were hardly visible. On a dock in front of the camp there was a crowd of people waiting to be pulled around the bay on water skis by one of the two powerful outboards that buzzed in and out, picking up new skiers with hardly any slow-down, like a nautical assembly line.

There are camps like this in Italy, Sicily, Yugoslavia, and Israel, cleverly run and growing more popular every year. The prices are most reasonable. For a Parisian, two weeks at the camp in Corfu, with round trip passage by train and boat and all the wine he can drink included, is to be had for one hundred and twelve dollars. Additional time can be had for nineteen dollars and sixty cents a week. For a young man or woman who wanted to learn French and get a glimpse of Greece in the same summer, the camp on Corfu would seem almost irresistible. It would take a taste for gregarious living, and the sightseeing, which is arranged by the camp, would cost a little extra, and you would have to be careful about repeating some of the phrases you picked up if you happened to be invited later to a reception at the Élysée, but the advantages would outweigh the disadvantages, and at the very least you would return with a great tan and the ability to understand the dirtier scenes in almost all the new French movies.