A Trip to the Stars (54 page)

Physically Voël didn’t look seventy: he was a blunt, big-necked man, with large hands scarred from wielding whips and being nipped by razor-sharp teeth—a man of steely calm, with unblinking brown eyes, who had faced down tigers, lions, and panthers in locked cages. He lived alone outside of town in a stone tower surrounded by cornfields. Melitta told me he was popular around the island, with the reputation of a reclusive bon vivant, a cosmopolitan spirit in repose. At his tower he took in as many stray cats—Naxos had hundreds—as he could accommodate, whom he fed and nursed.

But Voël’s latest passion, he confessed to Melitta and me, was the lost continent of Atlantis, ignited in him at the end of his circus career by a lady fire eater named Salome, from Santorini. A doctrinaire believer in the theory that Santorini, before its great volcanic eruption, had been the site of Atlantis, he regaled us with what he considered the most spurious Atlantis theories, including that of a man he had met several years earlier on Santorini. “I liked him very much,” Voël said, “despite the fact he had blinded himself to the truth. There we were on the scorched cliffs in Fira, overlooking the volcano’s caldera, and he is telling me with a straight face that Atlantis, situated somewhere off Spain, disappeared underwater when an asteroid fell into the sea beside it.”

While we sipped our coffee and watched the big ferries whir up to the slip with their lights blazing to unload passengers, I showed Melitta and Voël the photographs I had taken the previous week. They were mostly compositional shots of cacti, olive trees, and rock formations on the beach. I took one photograph each day, had them blown up, and set them in an album, one to a page. As of that night, I had 147 such shots taken on Naxos, including three self-portraits composed by way of an old Venetian mirror with a sea-green copper frame. Tilting it away from the sun, I propped the mirror against my house’s lone sink, an outdoor trough of white marble under an arbor sagging with grapevines. I placed the camera on the sink’s edge, pointed at the mirror, and positioned my reflection carefully before activating the shutter at the end of a long cord. Publicity shots aside, I hadn’t had a single photograph of myself taken in years; in these, wearing no makeup, illuminated by the pitiless Mediterranean sun, I saw myself as I never had before.

I had turned thirty-four in February and no longer retained the
girlish looks I had carried well into my twenties. From my years in the tropics and my grueling nocturnal life as a performer, I had a faint web of crow’s-feet beside my eyes, my forehead was creased by several thin lines, my nose was freckled, and my lips, too often sun-chapped, had grown puffier. But men still looked hard at me when I walked through the town, the local men and the visiting Europeans and Americans. I wore my hair long, combed straight back, and, as in the Pacific, it quickly lightened in the sun. Once again my body went from fish-white to tan to brown, and I was growing strong from swimming daily and returning to my old diet of fish and fruit. I knew, too, that thirty-four was still quite young, even though inside I sometimes felt as if I were well past fifty. After those first months on Naxos, falling into familiar rhythms, I had begun to be reinvigorated.

As for men, I had slept with no one since arriving on the island. On the road with Gaspard, I had had one-night stands when I thought I would go mad without some kind of release. With no close friends, and a scarcity of even casual acquaintances, I was sometimes desperate simply to have a warm body beside me. Living in hotels made it easy to find transitory partners—other performers, other lonely people, interesting travelers. Interesting enough, that is, to share maybe twelve hours with. Once I settled on Naxos, however, I became very cautious when it came to men. Melitta told me there were discreet men to whom she could introduce me—“they would die for you,” she laughed—but I declined the offer. I wanted no trouble like the kind I’d found on Kauai. Anyway, I told myself there were other appetites to indulge in this place.

At the same time, being alone so much again, memories that I had tried to bury away began to preoccupy me. Memories of Cassiel in Manila which, after ten years, were still painful to revisit. I had been with a good number of men since then, some for much longer than I had been with him, but those four days at the Hôtel Alnilam, and the weeks preceding them on the
Repose
, remained alive in my head as no other period in my life. Why was that, I asked myself—what was it about him and the brief time we had together that truly kept me from wanting to be with anyone else? At one point, on Kauai, I had been looking for love; but, mostly, over all those years I had remained celibate for long stretches, or used brief affairs to keep love away. I wondered
if the reason for this was that the time I had shared with Cassiel was so short. And that I was so young. In a war. Crazed out of my mind. On top of which he had disappeared so abruptly. Mysterious even when I knew him, he had become a mystery in the end. And that carried its own allure. But deep down I didn’t believe it was my youth or the war or his disappearance. I had known I was in love with Cassiel that day on the
Repose
when, seeing his eyes fixed on me, I wended a path through all the other wounded men directly to his bed. It was as if I had known him always and always been in love with him. More deeply than I had ever loved anyone or anything. And nothing, and no one, I had encountered since then had supplanted or dislodged that feeling.

Voël finished his coffee and ordered a cîtron, the island’s lemon liqueur, and began talking about Ariadne—another single woman washed ashore on Naxos.

“In the legend, after Theseus abandoned her, Dionysus found her on the beach, made her his queen, and when she died set the crown Aphrodite had fashioned for her among the constellations—the Corona Borealis. Before her death, Ariadne made a wish which Dionysus granted: that when the stars are properly aligned over Naxos, lost things can be found by those who pray to Zeus.”

“What do you mean by ‘properly’?” I asked, for he had piqued my interest.

“The position of the Corona Borealis. When it is directly over the island, look for your lost things and you will find them.”

“But when is that?” I asked.

“The Corona lies near Scorpio,” Voël replied. “Scorpio appears over the island in the spring. In the village of Corona at the island’s center—and named after that other Corona—they celebrate Scorpio’s arrival in a nightlong festival. Next year it will be in April. While they search for lost things, the participants will wear masks to conceal their identities.”

“It’s true, amazing things turn up,” Melitta said, “some of them having been missing for many years. Articles of clothing, money, keepsakes, even goats and sheep. Last year, an old man found a pocket watch he had lost on his wedding night, still keeping perfect time.”

“Do they find people, too?” I asked quietly.

Voël looked at me with a crooked smile.

“I don’t believe that has ever happened,” Melitta said. “But you never know.”

Six months later, the night before the Festival of Scorpio, I barely slept. It was a windy night and the sea was crashing. Bands of moonlight streamed through the shutters and the cypress branches were swaying. But it was the cicadas in the scrub brush that kept me awake, their high-pitched, metallic drone that must have filled the ears of the ancient Greeks when they invented their Furies.

Finally I got up and brewed a cup of mandrake leaf tea, which the apothecary had recommended as a sleep remedy. At the kitchen table I went through my daily photographs that now filled three albums. I had been living on Naxos for a full year, and as I turned the laminated pages, the days and weeks passed before me: the slanting rains in late fall; the smoky winter light; forest anemones blooming in March; and then the first hint of blinding summer skies that had appeared that very week. It had been a peaceful fall and winter, cooking for myself for the first time in years, exploring the island on foot, and most nights reading until my eyes hurt. After exhausting my Latin library, I attempted some of the Greek historians, whose books I ordered from Athens. It was Strabo’s
Geography
, the chapter on Naxos itself, I was poring over later that night—a first, for me, to be in an ancient place while reading about it—when the mandrake leaf took effect.

At four o’clock the following afternoon, I drove into Naxia to buy the mask required of all visitors to the festival before I headed out to Corona. Suggesting it was good luck to get the mask that very day, Melitta had shown me the shop where I ought to go. Several alleys away from her own workshop in the Kastro, down steep marble steps, it had a door constructed of driftwood with an oarlock for a handle and a brass hand for a knocker. The shop itself was very small and dimly lit. Scented charcoal burned in a brass bowl and flute music was playing somewhere in the back. The floor was a mosaic of colored seashells that formed a stingray. Mythological scenes were depicted on large tiles propped against the wall: Dionysus presiding over revellers in a moonlit vineyard; Theseus strangling the Minotaur in the labyrinth; Ariadne watching the Athenian ship disappear over the horizon. A glass case beneath the counter was filled with masks, also designed
around the Ariadne myth: a young woman’s face tragically frozen; a leering masculine face with grape clusters for hair; and various animal masks—bulls, owls, dogs, and foxes.

A beaded curtain parted in the rear of the store and a thin bearded man appeared. About my own age, he wore a multicolored vest and his long platinum hair was held fast with a scarlet bandanna. He had very dark, direct eyes.

“A mask?” he said simply.

I nodded. “Melitta sent me.”

He smiled, and after looking at me closely, pointed to a small wall mirror.

Then he patiently showed me one mask after another from the glass case. We didn’t exchange another word, but it was clear none of the masks satisfied me—or him. I was beginning to despair when he put up one finger and murmured, “Wait, please.”

Disappearing through the beaded curtain, he brought back a flat cardboard box and removed a mask like no other I had seen: a mermaid with crescent eyes, tiny stars for eyebrows, and coral lips verging on a smile. I held the mask to my face, and at once the man nodded his approval. Looking in the mirror, I felt a rush of pleasure—almost of recognition, so perfectly did the mask suit me. I thanked the man and paid him while he put the mask back into its box. Then he made me a small bow and showed me to the door.

I descended from the Kastro in the direction of the harbor, where I had left my jeep. It was that strange limbo hour at the end of siesta, and zigzagging through the warrens of houses and shops, I encountered no one. Every so often a twisting whitewashed alley would end in an explosion of color, a dense flower garden or wall of bougainvillea. These squares of bright color seemed to have been precisely fitted, as if from above, into a sprawling geometrical puzzle. A jumble of trapezoids, triangles, and rectangles, the town of Naxia was as much a labyrinth as the one Ariadne had helped Theseus to negotiate in Crete. And it seemed that whenever I walked through it, I came on a place I had never seen before.

This time it happened near the archaeological museum, a neighborhood I thought I knew well. Turning a corner, I was standing before an unfamiliar church in a windy, deserted plaza. The church was dedicated to St. Antony, the desert hermit who lived to be 105
years old in a cave by the Red Sea. His church on Naxos could not have been in a less desert-like setting. Ringed by eucalyptus trees, hibiscus vines climbing its white walls, it was located at one end of a diamond-shaped orchard. A wrought-iron fence surrounded the orchard, and according to a plaque at its gate, the church had been rebuilt after the Nazis bombed the original building. Only the foundation and the west wall had survived the bombing. The enormous ceiling mural, executed in the sixteenth century by the Venetian painter Francesco Gozzoli on a commission from the doge, had disappeared after the war, carted off apparently in a thousand fragments. I was sorry, for I would have liked to see this ceiling, which the plaque described as a celestial landscape populated by hundreds of angels in concentric circles.

The orchard was so beautiful, the foliage silver, the wind fragrant, that I decided to walk through it before proceeding down the hill. It contained only fruit trees, fig, plum, orange, and lemon, as well as some pomegranate bushes. All but the fig trees were laden with fruit, but it was one of the orange trees that caught my eye. Or was it a lemon tree? Its branches contained both fruits, and also what looked like combinations of the two—big, gnarled, amber ovals. The tree was solitary, in one corner, and at its base, fringed with moss, was a wooden sign that read
BIZZARRIA ORANGE
. In Greek, the sign detailed the tree’s history.
An offspring of the first true hybrid
, it read, grown in Florence by one Barone Zelo. Zelo married a Venetian lady born on Naxos and in 1660 brought a grafting from his famous tree to the island; since then, the tree had reproduced itself several times. Looking around quickly, on an impulse I went up on tiptoe, plucked one of the bizzarria oranges, and dropped it into my pocket.

An hour later, I was midway to Corona in my jeep, climbing the tall mountains of the interior. Night had fallen fast. The moon rose, its craters sharply visible, and the stars began to shine. As promised, the Corona Borealis and Scorpio beside it—Antares bright as a drop of blood—were directly overhead. The air was cold in the mountains, and I turned on the jeep’s heater to warm my legs. In an isolated town like Corona, where I would be one of only a few foreigners, it would have been disrespectful to wear anything but a white or black dress, as the local women did, depending on whether or not they were widows. I
wore white, though sometimes at that point in my life I felt like a widow. Certainly I did that night, driving into the darkness, increasingly preoccupied with thoughts of the people and things I had lost over the years, until I saw the lights of Corona twinking in a deep valley.