The Names

8

We stood by the side of the road, pissing in the wind. A hunter in a camouflage jacket came up out of the woods, called a greeting. Steam drifted up from the riverbed."Where do we go next?”"We cross this range, we eat lunch, then we drive south.”"Good," he said."You like that idea.”"As long as we drive. I want to keep driving. I like the driving.”The mountains here contained a sense of time, geologic time. Rounded, colorless, unwooded. They lay in embryo, a process unfolding, or a shriveled dying perhaps. They had the look of naked events. But what else? It took me awhile to understand in what precise way these pale masses, southwest of Argos, seemed so strange and irreducible, in what way they worked a mental labor in me, forcing me to shift my eyes time and again, keep to the wheel, look to the road. They were mountains as semantic rudiments, barest definitions of themselves."Maybe it'll be warmer down there.”"How far down?”"All the way," I said. "Where Europe ends.”"I don't mind the cold.”Tap had nothing to say about the landscape. He seemed interested in what we saw, even engrossed at times, but said nothing, looked out the window, tramped the hills. Eventually I did the same, talking about anything but what was out there. We let the features gather, the low skies and mists, the hilltops edged with miles of old walls, fallen battlements, that particular brooding woe of the Peloponnese. It hovers almost everywhere, war memory, a heaviness and death. Prankish castles, Turkish fortresses, ruined medieval towns, the gateways and vaulted cisterns, the massive limestone walls, the shaft graves, the empty churches with their faded All-Creator floating in the dome, the curved Lord, the non-Euclidean, and the votive lamps below, the walnut throne, the icons in the side galleries, Byzantine blood and gold. All we did was climb, drive and climb. For three days the weather was overcast and cold. We climbed the rubble trails, the goat and donkey paths, the tunnel stairways, the rutted spiral tracks to upper towns, we climbed the Gothic towers, the broad ramps of Mycenaean palace mounds."When I'm swimming, Dad.”"Yes.”"And I put my head under the water.”"Yes.”"How come the water doesn't rush into my ears and nose and fill my whole body, sending me to the bottom, where I'm crushed by the pressure?”South. The plains and orchards. Bare poplars in the distance, a combed silk shimmer. This wasn't a bad road. Others unsurfaced, some half washed off the edge of mountains, or rock-scattered, or ending in a pile of gravel, machines scaled with gray mud."That's it," he said. "That's the question. I'm finished.”Now, ahead, high above us, the hammered sheet, the broad snowy summit of Taygetus. This is the range that thrusts down through the Mani, the middle peninsula of the southern Peloponnese, the middle tit, Owen had called it, all mountain and wild coast.That whole afternoon we saw half a dozen cars, as many men with dogs and guns. A man riding a horse, a woman who walked behind him holding the horse's tail.The towns were small, with empty streets and squares. Wind blew across the olive groves, causing a wild tremor, a kind of panic, treetops going silver. We passed rubble fields, rock walls, groups of whale-back boulders, hillsides covered with enclosures of rough stone.We waited out a downpour in a deserted village square. An old church, a well, a cut-back mulberry tree. The rain was continuous, a single wavering surface, beating on the roof and hood. It was Christmas Day.A mountain cloud kept rolling toward a white village, then merged with warmer air and vanished. Again it fell, like a rush or slide of timeless snow, disappearing in the air above the village.In our mood of reticent observation, of speaking of other things, the journey through the Mani became something like a pure rite of seeing. This was appropriate, I thought. If Athens is a place where people breathe the spoken word, if much of Greece is this, then the Mani forms an argument for silence, for finding a way to acknowledge the bleakness that carries something human in it. Tap peered through the windshield, he looked at things with an odd thoughtfulness. We would see what was here, see clearly through the rain shrouds that hung in the gorges, through the bluish smoke high-piled on the coast.We came to a town that was larger than the others, built at a crossroads, a hotel on the edge of it, two-story cement, boarded shut. I drove slowly down a narrow street to what I thought might be the main square, small as it was, halfhearted, oddly shaped, an historical pause. In the narrowness of this place the stone houses loomed. We got out in a light rain, flexing our legs, and walked toward a cobbled street that seemed to lead down to the water. Doors opened in abandoned houses, wind-swayed. We heard goat-bells nearby and passed a church, seeing three goats come over a broken wall. There were more houses with swinging doors, a butcher shop with an empty meat case, a man standing in the dark near the counter.When we started down the stone path a wind came cutting up to meet us and we looked at each other and turned around. At the end of a street, bulking high over the road we'd just been on, was a massive anvil rock, maybe five hundred feet tall, a dark presence, a power like a voice in the sky. I spotted a café, tall windows, someone moving about. I told Tap to wait in the car and I went inside.It was a shabby place, two tables occupied. A man stood in a doorway at the back. It wasn't clear whether he was in charge or just hanging around. It was that kind of place, run by someone who drops in when he thinks of it. I asked the man, in Greek, about hotels nearby. He made a barely perceptible sign, a head movement, the smallest action of eyes and lips. Total disdain. Utter and aloof and final dismissal of all subject matter pertaining to this question, now and forever. A soul shrug. A gesture that placed the question outside the human environment, the things men will rouse themselves to discuss.He was a grave man with wavy black hair, a thick mustache. I crowded him, as I tended to do when speaking Greek, in order to avoid being overheard by others, and said in an earnest halting way that I had three maps of the area south of here, the area where the main road makes its deepest penetration, then turns to go up the opposite coast. And the maps were all different. And I wondered if he could look at the maps and tell me which one was accurate, if any. The people at the nearest table, not Greeks, stopped talking when I was halfway through my recitation. This made me nervous, of course. Not that it mattered to the black-haired man. He said something I didn't understand, three, maybe four words, looking past me to the front window.The voices resumed. I bought some chocolate bars for Tap. Then I asked if there was a toilet. The man looked to his left and I asked if this meant outside and he looked again and I saw that it did.I walked through an alley, across a muddy yard to the toilet. It was the terminal shithouse of the Peloponnese. The walls were splattered with shit, the bowl was clogged, there was shit on the floor, on the toilet seat, on the fixtures and pipes. An inch of exhausted piss lay collected around the base of the toilet, a minor swamp in the general wreckage and mess. In the chill wind, the soft sweet rain, this doleful shed was another plane of experience. It had a history, a reek of squatting armies, centuries of war, plunder, siege, blood feuds. I stood five feet from the bowl to urinate, tip-toed. How strange that people used this place, still. It was like an offering to Death, to stand there directing my stream toward that porcelain hole.Driving slowly, nosing the car out of town, I passed the café, aware we were being watched, although I wasn't sure by whom. We headed south again, in misty light, sharing some chocolate. Soon we began seeing tower houses, tall narrow structures, flat-roofed except where broken near the top. They stood in the bare landscape, solitary pieces, chess pieces, unfigured, raised straight in the dead afternoon. They looked less like houses, former houses, than some mysterious use of the local stone."Was I born during the Vietnam war?”"Don't sound so depressed. You're not scarred for life, I don't think.”"But was I?”"Yes. It was our favorite war, your mother's and mine. We were both against it but she insisted on being more against it than I was. It got to be a contest, a running battle. We used to have terrific arguments.”"Not smart.”This is what he said on those occasions when another kid might say "dumb" or "pretty stupid." Not smart. A whole world existed in this distinction.He was belted in, wearing a watch cap, suspended in one of his inward states. He possessed an eerie calm at such times and was capable of the most unsettling questions about himself, his degree of sanity, his chances of living past the age of twenty, figured against world conflicts, new diseases, in a studious monotone. It was almost a talent, a knack he had, these elaborate balances, the way he dwelt in his own mind as a statistician, a neutral weigher of destinies."What do Sherpas do?" I said."Climb mountains.”"What's in Arecibo?”"The radio telescope. The big dish.”"Let me think of some more.”"Think of some more.”"Let me think," I said.On a plateau in the distance, separated by open sky, were two clusters of tower houses, long gray forms rising out of the rocks and scrub. The houses were set at varying heights so that in aggregate they resembled a modern skyline seen from a certain distance, a certain elevation, in the rain and haze, in ruins. I felt we were coming upon something no one had approached in a thousand years. A lost history. A pair of towered cities set at the end of the continent.They were only villages, of course, and there was nothing very lost about them. It only seemed that way, here, in the Mani, in a landscape of rocks. We found a dirt road and drove into the first of the towns. The road was unpaved all the way in, turned to mud in some places, deep pools in others. Some of the buildings were clearly inhabited, although we saw no one. There were several recent structures, made of the same stone, among the broken towers. Walled cactus gardens. House numbers in green paint. Utility poles."Who am I named after?”"You know the answer to that.”"But he died.”"That has nothing to do with it. When you go back to London, ask your mother and your aunt to tell you about his eccentricities. He had some juicy quirks. That's a local fruit you ought to try. And when you go back to Victoria, write me a letter now and then.”"But why am I named after him?”"Your mother and I both loved him. He was a sweet man, your grandfather. Even your nickname comes from him. Some of his business associates called him Tap. Thomas Arthur Pattison, get it? But the family didn't use the name much. We called him Tommy. He was Tommy, you were Tap. A couple of funny guys. Even though you're Thomas Arthur Axton and not Pattison, we wanted to call you Tap, after him.”"How did he die?”"You want to know how he died so you can decide whether or not that's how you're going to die. Well there's no connection, so forget it.”A dog slept on a mound of olive pulp. We went a short distance, then turned off the main road again, left this time, and drove slowly up into the other towered hamlet. We saw a woman and child retreat from a doorway, heard gunshots in the hills, two soft bursts, hunters again. Stones were arranged in circular figures, threshing floors. Some houses had slate roofs topped with stones. Stones were crammed into window spaces."Here's one for you. What goes on at the Bonneville salt flats?”"Rocket cars. High-speed tests.”"What do you think of when I say Kimberley?”"Wait, let me think.”Who are they, the people in the café? Are they members? At one table an old man, a chipped white cup. At the other table a group, three or four, not Greeks. They listened when I asked about the maps. How do I know they aren't Greek? Who are they, what are they doing here, this desolate place, in winter? What am I doing here, and have I stumbled across them, and do I want to go back, to look again, to be sure, one way or the other, with my son in hand?"South Africa.”"Now if I get it, it's because you gave me a hint.”"Mining.”"Thanks for practically telling me.”"What is it then?”Morose, slumped in his seat. "Diamond mining," he said.Minutes later we approached the coast again. The last ridge of Taygetus fell to the sea, a clean line of descent in the fading light. I stopped the car to look at the maps. Tap pointed north, catching sight of something through my side of the windshield, and after a moment I was able to see a dark mass of towers set among the terraced hills."I think we ought to find a hotel or rooming house. At least figure out where we are.”"Just this last place," he said."You like the tower houses.”He kept peering through the glass."Or is it the driving you like?”"This one last place," he said. "Then I promise we can stop.”The road up was a dirt track, all stones and mud. Three or four runnels came splashing past the car, merged in places, and I began to think about the jagged rocks, the deep mud, the force of the racing water, the growing dark. Tap broke a section of chocolate from the bar, then subdivided, a piece for each of us. It was raining hard again."No signs. If we knew the name of this place, we could find it on the map. Then we'd know where we are for a change.”"Maybe there's someone up there we can ask.”"Although it's probably not on the map anyway.”"We can ask," he said.The muddy streams jumped ruts and smaller stones. I spotted dead cypress trees above us. The road kept turning, there was cactus hanging off the edges, stunted brush."First you see something in front of the car and then it goes past the way it really is.”"Like a tree," I said."Then you look in the mirror and you see the same thing, only it looks different and it moves faster, a lot faster. Whoby obis thobat.”"Too bad your mother isn't here. You could have a long talk in your native tongue. Have they given her a hole in the ground yet?”"She has an office.”"It's only a matter of time. There's a hole in the ground somewhere in British Columbia that she's determined to end up in. Is that a question you were asking?”"There are no questions in Ob. You can ask a question but you don't say it like a question in English. You say it like a regular sentence.”The last loop in the road took us away from our destination, momentarily, and provided a look at another towered hamlet, set along a distant ridge, and still another, a smaller cluster, silhouetted on a headland way below us. We turned up onto a long straight approach to the village and then I saw something that sent a chill through me, a delayed chill (I had to think, to translate). I stopped the car and sat there, staring out over the textured fields.It was a fallen rock, a ten-foot boulder standing by the roadcut to our left, a flat-faced reddish block with two white words painted across its width, the pigment running down off the letters in rough trickles, the accent mark clearly in place.Ta Onómata."Why are we stopping?”"It was stupid, coming up here. My fault. We ought to be finding a place to stay, some food.”"We're turning around, you mean, just when we get here?”"You had your drive up. Now you'll have your drive back down.”"What's painted on that rock? Do you think that's what they use for road signs here?”"No. It's not a road sign.”"What is it?”"Just someone writing. We've seen writing on walls and buildings everywhere we've gone. Politics. We've even seen crowns, long live the king. If there's no wall around, I guess they use the nearest thing. A rock in this case.”"Is it politics?”"No. It's not politics.”"What is it?”"I don't know, Tap.”"Do you know what it means?”"The Names," I said.

We found a room above a grocery store in a beaten seaside town with a rubble beach, cliffs dropping sheer to the sea. I was glad to be there. We sat each to a bed in the darkish room, attempting to put ourselves at a mental distance from the rocking car, the lurches and turns of the day. It took a while to believe we were off that last flooded track.The old grocer and his wife invited us down to dinner. The simple room at the back of the store had a beamed ceiling and oil lamp and carved box for linens and these made for a certain order and warmth, a comfort of the spirit after all that stone. The old man knew some German and used it whenever he sensed I wasn't following what he said. From time to time I reported his remarks to Tap, mainly inventing as I went along. It seemed to satisfy them both.The woman had white hair and clear blue eyes. Pictures of her children and grandchildren were set around a mirror. They were all in Athens or Patras except for one son, buried nearby.After dinner we watched television for half an hour. A man with a pointer stood before a map, explaining the weather. Tap thought this was very funny. The scene was familiar to him, of course. The map, the graphics, the talking-gesturing man. But this man spoke a language other than English. And this was funny, it upset his expectations, to hear these queer words in a familiar setting, as if the weather itself had gone berserk. The grocer and his wife joined in the laughter. We all did. Possibly, to Tap, the strange language exposed the whole idea as gibberish, the idea of forecasts, the idea of talking before a camera about the weather. It had been gibberish in English as well. But he hadn't realized it until now.We sat in the blue glow, laughing.

What do you know about them?They weren't Greek.How do you know that?You see it right away. Faces, clothes, mannerisms. It's just there. A set of things. A history. Foreigners practically glow in certain local landscapes. You know at once.How many were there?A crowded table. But the tables in that place are small. I'd say four people. At least one was a woman. In the brief time I was in there, the glancing look I had, the animal feel of them, I think I sensed a guardedness, a suspicion. It's possible I'm supplying this impression after the fact but I don't think so. It was there. I didn't pick it up fully at the time. I was intent on other things. I didn't know it might mean something.What language did they speak?I don't know. I heard the voices as a tone, only, an undercurrent in the room. I was intent on asking my questions about hotels and maps.Was it English, possibly?No. Not English. I would have recognized English just from the tone, the particular quality of the noise.What did they look like, a general impression?They looked like people who came from nowhere. They'd escaped all the usual associations. They weren't Greek but what were they? In a sense they belonged to that worn-out café as much as any local idler does. They were in no hurry, I don't think, to find another place to sit, another place to live. They were people who found almost any place as good as almost any other. They didn't make distinctions.All this in a glance, a walk across the room?The feeling you get. I couldn't pick them out of a crowd of similar people, I don't know what they look like as individuals, but the general recognition, the awareness of some collective identity-yes, it's there at a glance.What were they wearing?I recall an old wasted aviator jacket on one man. Outer material peeling off. A hat, definitely. Someone wore a hat, a knitted skullcap, several dark colors, a circular pattern. I think the woman had a scarf and boots. I may have seen the boots when we drove past the café on our way out of town. Floor-to-ceiling windows.What else?Just an impression of old clothes, mixed things, some touches of brightness maybe, a sense of layers, whatever they could add on to keep warm.What else? Nothing.

In the morning, a couple of minutes out of town, I saw a dark shape come out of the scrub near the road, an instant with a speed and weight to it, something near the right front wheel, and I hit it, a dull sound trailing off behind us, and kept driving."What was it?”"A dog," he said."I saw it too late. It ran right into us.”He said nothing."Do you want to go back?”"What's the point?" he said."Maybe it's not dead. We can find somewhere to take it.”"Where could we take it? What's the point? Let's keep driving. I want to drive. That's all.”The rain was a torrent now and people started coming out of the fields, people I hadn't known were there, mostly the old and very young, shrouded in coats and shawls, riding donkeys, walking head down, leaving on tractors, whole families on tractors with umbrellas and blankets and plastic sheeting held over them as they crowded between the massive tires, moving slowly toward home.

I sat in the office alone, sending telexes, doing numbers on the calculator. It seemed to me that ever since the first of those island nights I'd been engaged in an argument with Owen Brademas. I wasn't sure what the subject was exactly but felt for the first time a weakening in my position, a danger.I also felt I was ahead of myself, doing things that didn't correspond to some reasonable and familiar model. I would have to wait to understand.Why had I gone to the Mani, knowing they might be there, and why with Tap? Was he my safeguard, my escape?I read reports, drafted letters. Mrs. Helen arrived, chiding me for being in so early, for looking so worn-out. She went to the alcove to make tea, Zou Zou Bop Golden tea, which someone had brought back from Egypt.I worked until ten that night, enjoying it, finding a deep and steady pleasure in the paperwork, the details, the close-to-childlike play of the telex, of tapping out messages. Even putting my desk in order was a satisfaction and odd comfort. Neat stacks for a change. Labeled folders. Mrs. Helen had devised for herself an entire theology of neatness and decorum, with texts and punishments. I could understand, faintly.I went home and made soup. Tap had left his hat behind. I resolved to stop drinking, although I'd had only a couple of glasses of wine in the last week or so. It was a setting of limits I thought I needed. A firmness and clarity, a sense that I could define the shape of things.

Lindsay Whitman Keller, eating an olive.Voices around us, some vague occasion of the Mainland Bank, a suite at the Hilton. People stood with their hands in the air, eating, drinking, smoking, or they clutched their own elbows or engaged with others in prolonged and significant handshakes."Is this an assigned duty?" I said."Spouses have no rights. Good thing I have my teaching job.”"Good thing David's not a hard-liner.”"This one I had to attend. Something to do with the future of Turkey. Unofficially, of course.”"Has the bank decided to let them live?”"Banks plural.”"Even more ominous.”"What's your excuse?" she said."Hard liquor. I've been working day and night and not minding at all. This worried me.”Two men seemed to be barking at each other but it was only laughter, a story about a plane skidding off a runway in Khartoum. The bank wives stood mainly in groups of three or four in their corporate aura, tolerant, durable, suffused with a light of middling privilege that was almost sensual in its effect, in the way that a woman's arrangements with a man are a worldly thing, bargained over and handled and full of knowingness. The forced suburbia of these women's lives, the clubby limits of the 1950s in some dead American pasturage, here was a dislocation with certain seductive attributes and balances. The duty-free car, the furlough allowance, the housing allowance, the living allowance, the education allowance, the tax equilization, the foreign assignment premium. Often the women stood with a man in attendance, a flawlessly groomed Pakistani or a Lebanese in a well-tailored suit. Bankers from poor countries dressed like military men. They looked alert and precise and slightly in pain and they spoke a brisk and assured English with a blend of shortened forms. JDs were Jordanian dinars, DJs were dinner jackets.David moved across the room in our direction. I asked Lindsay what it was about him that always gave me the impression he was pushing people out of the way. He fed his wife some cheese and took her drink."Always near a woman," he said to me, then turned to Lindsay. "Not to be trusted, these men who talk to women.”"Tried to call you yesterday," I said."I was in Tunis.”"Are they killing Americans?”He wouldn't give the glass back to her."Per capita GNP is the fifth largest in Africa. We love them. We want to throw some money at them.”I gestured around us."Have you decided to let them live? The Turks? Or will you shut them down for ten or twenty years?”"I'll tell you what this is all about. It's about two kinds of discipline, two kinds of fundamentalism. You have Western banks on the one hand trying to demand austerity from a country like Turkey, a country like Zaire. Then you have OPEC at the other end preaching to the West about fuel consumption, our piggish habits, our self-indulgence and waste. The Calvinist banks, the Islamic oil producers. We're talking across each other to the deaf and the blind.”"I didn't know you saw yourself as a righteous force, a righteous presence.”"A voice in the wilderness. Want to fly to Frankfurt and watch the bowl games on TV?”"You're out of your mind.”"We can watch on a monitor at the Armed Forces studios. No problem. The bank will arrange.”"He's serious," Lindsay said."We're all serious," he said. "It's the start of a new decade. We're serious people and we want to do this thing.”"Let's have a quiet New Year's Eve," she said, "in that little French place up the street.”"We'll have a quiet New Year's Eve, then we'll all get on a plane to Frankfurt and watch the bowl games on TV. The Huskers go against Houston. I outright refuse to miss it.”Why was I so happy, standing in that mob of bodies? I would talk to the bank wives. I would talk to Vedat Nesin, one of the many Turks I met that year who had a name with interchangeable syllables. I would talk to a man from the IMF, an Irishman who complained that he kept walking into scenes of destruction and bloodshed that never got reported. In Bahrain he walked into a Shi'ite riot. In Istanbul he fled his hotel in a service elevator during a demonstration that no one knew was coming, that no one understood, that did not appear in local newspapers or anywhere else. It was as though the thing had never happened, as though the corridors hadn't filled with smoke and rampaging men. His fear was going undocumented in city after city. He was disturbed by the prospect that the riot or terrorist act which caused his death would not be covered by the media. The death itself seemed not so much to matter.I embraced the wives and looked into their eyes, studying for signs of restlessness, buried grudges against their husbands' way of life. These are things that lead to afternoons of thoughtful love. I spoke to a Kuwaiti about the grace and form of characters in Arabic, asking him to pronounce for me the letter jim. I told stories, drank bourbon, ate the snacks and tidbits. I listened to the voices."You are lucky," Vedat Nesin said. "You are a target only outside your country. I am a target outside and inside. I am in the government. This makes me a marked man. Armenians outside, Turks inside. I go to Japan next week. This is a relatively safe place for a Turk. Very bad is Paris. Even worse is Beirut. The Secret Army is very active there. Every secret army in the world keeps a post office box in Beirut. I will eat this shrimp in garlic and butter. Later I will eat profiteroles in thick chocolate sauce. After Japan I go to Australia. This is a place that should be safe for a Turk. It is not.”

I started out at first light, stopping only once, below Tripolis, for something to eat, and the same bluish clouds were massed down the coast, over the bays and processional headlands, but it wasn't raining this time when I reached the spot where the rutted track bends its way up to the boulder and the towered village beyond. Signs of night were hours off.I drove slowly up the hill and left the car behind the large rock. Someone, using tar, had painted over the words we'd seen six days earlier, covered them completely. It was a level stretch to the village, sixty yards, and the sky was so low and close I felt I was walking into it, into sea mists and scattered light.Bags of cement on the ground, stacked crates of empty bottles. A woman in black sitting on a bench in an open area of mud and stones. She had a bony face framed in a head-cloth. One of her shoes was broken, split across the instep. I spoke a greeting, nodded toward the alley that led into the village proper, asking leave to enter in effect. She paid no attention and I didn't know if she'd even seen me.I followed the narrow unpaved passage. A millstone lay in the first ruined tower and there was cactus jutting out of other houses, stones packed solid in window slits and doorways. I kept walking into dead-ends, mud and rubble, weeds, prickly pear.There was scaffolding on a number of structures, surprisingly, and house numbers in red as well as surveyors' marks.I moved slowly, feeling a need to remember all this, and I touched the walls, studied the inscription above a door, 1866, examined the crude steps, the small crude belltower, and noted the colors of the stone as if some importance might attach to my describing them precisely someday, the unmellowed tone of this particular biscuit brown, this rust, this sky gray.Along the intricate and twisting paths, among the broken towers, I began to wonder if this might all be one structure, the whole village, a complex formation whose parts were joined by arches, walls, the lower rooms that smelled of animals and forage. There seemed no clear and single separation between the front and back ends of the village, between this oblong tower and that.It was their place, I was sure. A place of hesitations and textures. An uncertain progress that was like the inner labor of some argument. The barred window, the black bees we'd seen on the island. A place that was a muffled question, as some places are shouts or formal lectures. All the buildings joined. One mind, one madness. Was I beginning to know who they were?I came out above a slope of terraced earth, the empty sea. Several trees had become entangled in their growth, and the bare branches grappled and twisted and the smooth gray trunks were locked in what appeared a passionate and human fury. How strongly this element of humanness showed in that stark mingling. The wood resembled burnished stone. A mortal struggle, a nakedness, sex and death together.I took a path back out the other side of the village. This was limestone, those were fig trees, that was a barrel-vaulted chamber. The names. I felt strangely, self-consciously alone. This place was returning to me a sense of my own motion through it, my stoopings into rooms, my pauses to judge the way.There were two women now. The second was very old, trying to pick apart an orange section by section. I stood in front of them, asking if anyone lived in the town. Foreigners. Do foreigners live here? The old one made a gesture that either meant she didn't know what I was talking about or that they'd gone, the people I meant, they'd cleared out.Do you live here alone?One other, she said. The man of the other woman.From the car I could see the hamlet on the far ridge. Tap and I had passed through there on our way home, after coming across the road that led up the Laconian coast, and I thought I might find something to eat there, houses with people. I drove back down to the paved road, eventually heading northeast, climbing again.I left the car next to a tower with a blue balcony, recently attached, and was directed by some children down a steep path, seeing a café with a small evergreen out front, trimmed with balloons. The dirt was redder here, the towers had an ochre glow. Volterra was standing in the doorway. He had his hands jammed in his pockets. His breath showed white.I decided the only thing to do was smile. He gave me something of a measured look. But a grin emerged as we shook hands, a crooked smile, speculative, hinting at a certain appreciation. I followed him inside, a dark room with a wood-burning stove, and ate an omelette as he watched."These towers are strange," he said. "The older ones are three, almost four hundred years. These people spent all their time killing. When they weren't killing Turks, they killed each other.”"Where is Del?”"In a hotel up the coast.”"Watching TV.”"Are you here to write something, Jim?”"No.”"You know how I am about privacy. I'd hate to think you came here to do a story on me. A major piece, as they say. Full of insights. The man and his work.”"I don't write, Frank. I have a job. It doesn't involve writing anything but reports and memos.”"You used to write. All kinds of things.”"I don't write. My son writes.”"It's a subject I have to raise from time to time with certain people.”"Reluctantly.”"Reluctantly. Even friends don't always know how serious I am about this. The filmmaker on location. The filmmaker in seclusion. Major pieces. They're always major pieces.”"I only came because Owen more or less indicated they were here. It was just to see.”"What have you seen?”"Nothing," I said."From the beginning Brademas talked about a design. That's what got me going. This last time he seemed close to telling me what it is. Their waiting, the way they select a victim. But he changed his mind or maybe I didn't handle it right. Maybe there's a set of forms, a right and wrong way to pursue the matter.”A man brought coffee for both of us. Two children stood in the doorway, watching me. When I smiled they edged away."Poor bastard," Frank said."Where did you talk to him, this last time?”"Athens.”"Thanks for getting in touch.”"I know. You offered us lodging. But we were only there a day, only long enough for me to talk to him. This thing is building. I want this thing. I'm beginning to see what it's all about. Only Del, she's the only person I can stand to have around me for long periods without feeling everything's pressing in, everybody's one purpose in life is to throw me off, to set me back." Laughing. "The bitch.”"You thought the desert was a frame. What about the Mani?”"The desert fits the screen. It is the screen. Low horizontal, high verticals. People talk about classic westerns. The classic thing has always been the space, the emptiness. The lines are drawn for us. All we have to do is insert the figures, men in dusty boots, certain faces. Figures in open space have always been what film is all about. American film. This is the situation. People in a wilderness, a wild and barren space. The space is the desert, the movie screen, the strip of film, however you see it. What are the people doing here? This is their existence. They're here to work out their existence. This space, this emptiness is what they have to confront. I've always loved American spaces. People at the end of a long lens. Swimming in space. But this situation isn't American. There's something traditional and closed-in. The secret goes back. I believe it goes back. And these tower houses, they're perfect, they give me my vertical. Old worn rugged stone the color of the land. Lines of flat land. Lines moving diagonally to the sea. Lines up and down the hills, those stone walls, like scar tissue. And the towers showing up everywhere, unexpectedly. Black and white. The natural colors hardly stray from that anyway. You could count fifty kinds of gray out there today.”"How do you make a movie out of it, out of the situation? Where is the movie?”"Look. You have a strong bare place. Four or five interesting and mysterious faces. A strange plot or scheme. A victim. A stalking. A murder. Pure and simple. I want to get back to that. It'll be an essay on film, on what film is, what it means. It'll be like nothing you know. Forget relationships. I want faces, land, weather. People speaking whatever languages. Three, four different languages. I want to make the voices part of a landscape of sound. The spoken word will be an element in the landscape. I'll use the voices as synchronous sound and as off-screen narration. The voices will be filmed voices. The wind, the donkeys braying, the hunting dogs. And then this line that moves through the film. A scant narrative line. Everything else gathers around this line, hangs from it. Somebody's being watched, he's being followed. There's a pattern, something inevitable and mad, some closed-in horrible logic, and this cult is locked into it, insane with it, but calm, very patient, faces, eyes, and the victim is off in the distance, he's always in the distance, among the stones. All the elements are here. Some strong and distinct like the towers. Some set back a ways like the victim, a crippled goatherd maybe, a vague figure, throwing stones at his flock, living in one of those tin-roof enclosures up in the hills.”"Do you film the murder?”"Eat your eggs.”"You haven't thought that far ahead.”"There won't be a murder. Nobody gets hurt. At the end they raise their arms, holding the weapons, the hammers or knives or stones. They raise their arms. That's all we see. We don't know what it means. Are they surrendering their weapons? Are they preparing to strike? Is it a gesture that means the illusion is over now, you can go on with your lives, we give you permission to go on with your lives, the film is over, the mass is over, Ite, missa est. This image has been in my head. The cult members raise their arms. Will they kill him once the camera stops turning? I want this question to linger.”"How do you know they won't kill him? This is what they do, after all.”"Obviously we make an agreement. We'll have to agree. If they're interested in doing the film at all, I think they'll agree to this condition. They'll see it's the only way I can do it. Whatever else they are, they're educated. I almost want to say they're reasonable. I have a sense of these people. I spent enough time with Brademas to understand certain things about them. My conviction is that they'll want to do it. The life they lead out here, what they do, seems so close to something on film, so natural to film, that I believe once I talk to them they'll see it's an idea they might have thought of themselves, an idea involving languages, patterns, extreme forms, extreme ways of seeing. Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film. It's the filmed century. You have to ask yourself if there's anything about us more important than the fact that we're constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves. The whole world is on film, all the time. Spy satellites, microscopic scanners, pictures of the uterus, embryos, sex, war, assassinations, everything. I can't believe these people won't instantly see they belong on film. Instantly. I want them to film some of it themselves. It's time for me to go back to a sharing of duties, anonymous, a collective effort. I want them to handle the camera, appear on camera, help me plan shots and sequences. I want them to recite alphabets. Strange things. Whatever they do, whatever they say and do. It'll be like nothing you know, Jim. They'll shoot some of it, I'll shoot some. Maybe shoot backgrounds myself, landscapes. We all do something. That's appealing, that idea, right now.”"How do you get it all going?”"I've found one," he said. "I've got one.”I'm not sure I would have known what he meant except for the look, the grim pleasure of the will, showing through. One what, I would have said.He took me outside, where we stood between two carob trees and looked over the valley to the towered village I'd just been wandering through. It stood among swirling banks of earth, the terraced groves that seemed a lyrical attempt to ring the hill with steps, a rippling descent of dream trees and lunar tones. Mist pooled around the towers. The village from this distance and perspective was an aerial fancy. It had an element of medieval legend about it, something I hadn't found in the cactus and mud, where there was mystery, true, but not of folklore or narrative verse."Four days ago. Those towers. I found him sleeping in a damp cellar, stinking of goats. Andahl. He knows my work.”It was cold, we went back inside."He was with them on the island. He's still with them but the situation isn't the same. They had to leave that village and they're a little scattered now but still in one area, the Deep Mani. Five people. Andahl likes to deliver recitations. I let him recite. I'm not here to argue with the bastards.”"Why did they have to leave that village?”"It's being developed. The whole place is being renovated. Workmen start coming in any day. Somebody wants to make guest houses out of the towers. Open the area to tourists.”"Real life," I said. "Where is he now?”"There are caves on the Messinian coast. Some well known, very extensive. Others just holes in the sea rock. I drop him on the road that leads to the caves. I don't know where he goes after that. Last three days that's been the routine. In the morning I show up, same place. Eventually he appears. They're talking. He's trying to arrange a meeting.”"Have you asked him what the pattern is? Why they keep a watch. How they decide who and where to strike.”"He puts a finger to his lips," Frank said.Because part of the eastern coast is without roads of any kind, we had to cross the peninsula twice before reaching Githion, beyond the towers, a tiered port town that opens directly, almost bluntly on the sea. Sundown. We found Del Nearing in a waterfront café, writing a postcard to her cat.

"A man will say, if you ask him how many children he has, two, proudly. Then you learn he has a daughter he didn't bother to count. Only the sons count. That's the Mani.”"I wonder if I'll ever see my apartment again," Del said. "I've been trying to reconstruct it in my mind. There are large gaps. It's like parts of my life have melted away.”"Death and revenge," Frank said. "A lot of the killing revolved around the family. The house was also the fortress. That's the reason for these towers. Endless vendettas. The family is the safekeeper of revenge. They keep the idea warm. They nurture it, they promote the conditions. It's like those family sagas of crime in the movies. People respond to Italian gangster sagas not just for the crime and violence but for the sense of family. Italians have made the family an extremist group. The family is the instrument of revenge. Revenge is a desire that almost never becomes an act. It's a thing most of us are limited to enjoying in the contemplation alone. To see these families, these crime families, many of them blood relatives, to see them enact their revenge is an uplifting experience, it's practically a religious experience. The Manson family was America's morbid attempt to make a stronger instinctive unit, literally a blood-related unit. But they forgot something. The revenge motive. They had nothing to revenge. If there's going to be blood, it has to be a return for some injury, some death. Otherwise the violent act is ghastly and sick, which is exactly the way we see the Manson murders.”"Frank's people come from Tuscany. I tell him why do you talk like a Sicilian.”"Look at her. I love that face. That dull empty perfect face. How right for today.”"Suck a rock.”"Self-created," he said. "It's a blankness she wills out of her deepest being. Vapid. Does vapid say it? Maybe vapid says too much.”"If Manson is ghastly and sick," I said, "what do we have here, with our own cult?”"Totally different. Different in every respect. These people are monks, they're secular monks. They want to vault into eternity.”"The same but different.”"Film is not part of the real world. This is why people will have sex on film, commit suicide on film, die of some wasting disease on film, commit murder on film. They're adding material to the public dream. There's a sense in which film is independent of the filmmaker, independent of the people who appear. There's a clear separation. This is what I want to explore.”It was a long dark room. A boy kept bringing pots of tea, ouzo for Frank. Del was watching an old man sitting in a corner, a cigarette hanging from the middle of his face."Film," she said absently. "Film, film. Like insects making a noise. Film, film, film. Over and over. Rubbing their front wings together. Film, film. A summer day in the meadow, the sky's full of heat and glare. Film, film, film, film.”It was only when she'd finished talking that she turned her attention to Frank, grabbing a handful of hair at the back of his neck and twisting his head so that he might see directly into her gray eyes. Their public affection was reserved for the times when they heckled and mocked each other. It was an automatic balance, the hands and eyes as the truth-tellers of love, the things that redeem what we say.We went to a restaurant two doors down. There was a handful of red mullet in a basket out front. We were starting to eat when the old man hobbled in, worn down to an argument with himself, a cigarette still drooping from his mouth. This made Del happy. She decided she didn't want to talk to us anymore. She wanted to talk to him.We watched her at his table, gesturing elaborately as she spoke, pronouncing words carefully, words in English, a few in Italian and Spanish. Frank seemed to be looking right through her to some interesting object fixed to the wall."She's not part of anything," he said. "She doesn't know yet whether she wants to grow up and assume responsibilities in the world. She had a miserable time most of her life. She has a tendency to give in to fate or other people. But we tell each other everything. There's an easiness between us. I've never known a woman I could be so intimate with. It's our gift as a couple. Intimacy. I sometimes feel we've known each other three lifetimes. I tell her everything.”"You told Kathryn everything.”"She never told me anything back.”"You told Kathryn more than I told her. It was a kind of challenge, wasn't it? That was the mechanism between you two. You dared her to be part of something totally unfamiliar. You wanted to shock her, mystify her. She found this interesting, I think. Something her background hadn't encompassed.”"Kathryn was equal to any challenge I could come up with. Not that I know what you mean by dares and challenges.”"Remember the shirt? She still has it. Your carabiniere shirt.”"She looked good in that shirt.”"She still does. It still bothers me, how good she looks in that shirt.”"Finish your wine. This is the stupidest talk I've had in ten years.”Del, the waiter and the old man were talking. The waiter was balancing an ashtray on the back of each hand."She's beautiful. Del is.”"Christ, yes, I do love her face. Despite what I say. It never changes. It's eerie, how it never changes, no matter how tired she is, how sick, whatever.”We sat in the hotel lobby, in almost total dark, talking. When Frank and Del went upstairs I walked through the streets above the waterfront. A strong wind came up, different from wind in an open space. It went banging through town, disturbing the surface of things, agitating, taking things with it, exposing things as temporary, subject to a sudden unreason. There were wooden balconies, chicken coops. The walls were crumbling in places and cactus grew everywhere. Figures in the light, in small rooms, wall shadows, faces.They want to vault into eternity.I would conceal myself in Volterra's obsession as I had in Owen's unprotected pain, his songs of helplessness.