To mollify me, she tells me that she dropped out of college in her second semester, which is indeed precocious, I remark, but she continues as if I hadn’t said that. Then, in New York, she worked as an artist’s model, posing nude four times a week, three hours each sitting, for students from an art school and also for some private classes. Helen frequented clubs and bars all during that time — Max’s especially. She dyed her hair orange, wore flat white powder on her face, and painted dark red lipstick on her naturally blush pink lips. She acquired a series of musician boyfriends who had apartments; she lived with each for about a month, until it wasn’t cool anymore, as she puts it. But, she states definitively, she’d never do it for money. I am slightly shocked, to hear that she might even consider doing it for money. She’s not romantic, she admits, which I can almost grasp, though it’s difficult to accept from one so young and, in a way, delicate. She is in another league altogether. I think of that — other leagues and other clubs. Twenty thousand leagues under the sea dwell those fascinating and grotesque octopuses. Why do they disgust me so? Has she read Jules Verne? I think not.
When she and I walk together in town, men watch her move — women too — and I can’t tell if she’s doing something with her surprisingly round bottom or if it’s just the shape of it and her general demeanor. She’s not classically beautiful, but pretty and appealing, I think, and sexy in an awkward, almost androgynous way. She is also knowing, but then that’s an appropriately cool pose. As we get out of the car, having reached the village, which is just a few cottages, she rushes to explain that I don’t have to tell her anything I don’t want to, ever, that that ought to be our rule — no rules but that — our friendship must be different, unique. She says this so earnestly I want to embrace her, but feel that would be more common than unique and not at all hip. I respond pensively and formally, given the gravity of her statements: One should never have to say anything if one doesn’t want to do so. Helen tells me that she knows I want to be a mystery. With her, she asserts, I don’t have to try. I am one. I think quite the same thing about her, but would probably never tell her.
The sun must be directly overhead. Twelve-thirty or one in the afternoon, and still the women labor in the rocky fields — what is this always called? stubborn earth. Their tanned faces are streaked with sweat and dirt. Kostas, the peasant who fought the Turks, is sitting under the shade of his arbor, the green grapes weighing down the slight structure. I don’t know how old he is but his age has afforded him a respected position in the village, that and his having fought the hated Turks. His BMW motorcycle, a remnant of World War II and the presence of the Germans, is parked next to a small barn where several donkeys bray, annoyed by flies. It is a wonderful, pastoral scene, a scene from the past one thought evanescent. Yet it exists and is untouched, by something. Innocent, isn’t it? Is Helen affected as I am by the beauty of such simplicity?
Kostas offers us brandy—raki—in small glasses, and though it is too early for liquor and against my rules, I swallow my drink in one gulp. Helen sips hers slowly. Kostas and I converse in Greek and he pats Helen’s knee which, I can tell, doesn’t bother her. She appears to accept everything, almost neutrally. The youngest of the village children gather around us, having heard that foreigners have arrived. We are watched by dark-haired boys and girls who stand mutely by the side of the road. They stare at us guilelessly and as if we were noteworthy. Helen waves to them. Kostas eyes her and tells me, in Greek, that I am lucky to have her. I explain that we are friends, but he does not accept this and wants to know if I will marry her. It is lucky that there are many words for love in Greek, but I think he allows only one, in this case. Helen won’t have understood any of this, but I’m certain she knows we are talking about her. To change the subject I ask Kostas to show us the ruins at the top of the hill or small mountain that is the background to this scene, the backyard to his house.
He pours us another shot and disperses the children with a shake of his walking stick, perhaps a bull’s penis or some such thing. They scamper away. Helen waves good-bye, something like a queen or more likely a fairy princess, and sips a little more of her raki. I down another. To hell with rules, to hell with noon. It’s a high noon. Kostas takes her hand, which is little in his rough, big one, more like a baseball mitt — a catcher’s mitt — than a hand, and she follows him up the hill, slipping and sliding in his wake. He wears those black leather boots that reach to the knee and that, even though he’s probably worn them for decades, are stiff, very stiff. Most uncomfortable, I should think. But masculine, I suppose, in their stiffness. I’ve never thought of that before. Helen carries on up the hill, struggling but undaunted, Kostas pulling her after him. I trudge behind them silently, and the odd thing is that once we get to the top, nothing memorable occurs. I can’t, now, remember what Kostas showed us. A ruin, of course, which I’d wanted to see, and probably had already viewed, years ago, but we looked around briefly and Helen seemed uninterested, and I’m embarrassed to admit that it all escapes me. I have to admit also that I am a terrible sightseer, for when in the site I have set out to visit I usually experience disappointment, not unlike that which one has after sex. I don’t want to make too much of this.
But one sight I will always remember has nothing to do with what we ought to have seen. Perhaps the ruin was so ruined it was almost invisible. Perhaps we looked at hallowed, sacred and flat earth. Walking down the hill, Helen slipped and fell. Those stupid shoes of hers. Kostas swooped over to her, lifted her up and placed her on his back, and this ancient man carried her in that manner, on his back like a sack of potatoes, all the way down the mountain. Helen’s legs stuck out from his sides. I wouldn’t tell her so, but in the heat of the day, with her skirt riding up and her bare, tanned legs exposed, it was as if, indeed, Kostas were having her, as if they were making the beast with two backs. At the bottom of the hill, when he bent down to let her slide off his back, he kissed her cheek. It was very odd, and I don’t know what she made of it. Or what he made of it, that peculiar intimacy. She was silent all the way home but kissed me on the cheek when we returned to town, a kiss that seemed to me a bond. That’s what I thought at the time.
It’s not yet 6 P.M. The sun has already begun its descent, relinquishing its place at the top of the heavens. I watch Helen walk away, her round bottom swaying or shifting with each determined step. What is she thinking about? I have time to go to a movie, though my head feels dull and my eyes hurt from having looked continuously at the road. Those winding, horrible roads on the sides of mountains. I would leave civilization at the bottom of a hill rather than carry it on my back to the top, the way Kostas carried Helen. Helen is a kind of civilization. I must be tipsy to think that Helen is civilization, for if she is, she is of a different order from any I know. I’m certain she’s a new type, and I am somewhat proud to have discovered her while the others haven’t. This is probably why I want to know her, she who is scarcely more than a child.
I pass the cafés. The men are playing tavoli, backgammon, at the tables. A few tourists have come into town. I notice their cars first and then I see them, excited and expectant. They depress me, always. I wonder if the Gypsy woman will make further contact with Helen. I pass the theater. The movie’s a Western which I’ve already seen three times so that makes up my mind. No movie tonight. Work. I love decisions being made for me, like the wonderful blizzards that closed school and kept one at home for the day. Sadly this is not unique to me, even here on Crete, and I am not alone in remembering those wintry New England days, remembering them on hot sunny ones and reliving them, even feeling them, with a poignant pleasure.