„You called her a goddess,“ I said. '„Was she beautiful?“
He gave me a look of cool amusement. „Tell me,“ he said. „Do you find our islands beautiful?“ And he made a sweeping, eloquent gesture that somehow indicated the summer sea, with its crop of lovely, sterile rock piles.
„Yes, of course,“ I answered.
„Then she was beautiful.“ He leaned toward me and dropped his voice to a hoarse whisper. „She looked at me with eyes so crazy that I gave up my pretext of madness, ashamed again. And then she spoke, in a voice like a lost child. Do you know what she said?“
I shook my head.
„She said, „Where is Alexander the Great? Where is he?“ She spoke with all the confusion of an old person who has forgotten his name, or a baby who has yet to learn his.“
„What did you do?“
His shoulders slumped slightly. „I discovered that my despair was not so deep as I had imagined. . so I answered as one who fears to die must. I said, Great Alexander lives and rules.“
A silence fell, and the sun sank into waves beyond the harbor mole.
Finally I spoke. „And if you had not answered so?“
„Then she would have given me the swift, painless death I thought I craved.“
„And then? What happened next?“
His face seemed oddly naked, for such a hard, secretive man. „She smiled at me, as sweetly as an infant. Then she went away, like a blown-out candle. The sea regained its strength, but only for a few minutes. The mistral eased, and I lived. . to tell you this tale.“
I know that I envied Demetrios his memory — for it was clear he believed his story, that it had for him a significance deeper than any I can imagine. I envy everyone who does not live the synthetic life I live, always removed from the intensity of the moment by my crippled writer's observance. Always I wonder how best to record what I see, what I feel, what I do — and neglect to see, to feel, to do.
My affair with the sea is a failure of a different sort. When I was very young, I read about the sea with the same starry-eyed fervor that other children read about cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers. As a young man, I continued this long-distance romance; I lived in an inland city, far from any reality that might injure my illusions. I read all the great sailing chronicles: Voss, Slocum, Gerbault, the Smeetons, the Hiscocks, Robinson, Chichester, Barton, Allcard, Villiers. . the names roll off the tongue sweetly, and they all mean freedom, the excitement of faraway lands and people, self-reliance, adventure, the crunch of the bow wave, the spicy smell of the island. All good things, of course. I don't deny it, even now.
Anyway, tonight, plunging through the sea in a strengthening gale, I think particularly of Bernard Moitessier, that magnificent eccentric. The sea is Moitessier's religion, and his books are full of overwrought spiritual mania, though they are far more readable than the books of other French seamen, who seem for the most part to be so afflicted with hysterical Gallic chauvinism as to become caricatures of men, walking, talking tricolors.
However, Moitessier's devotion to the sea now seems to me utterly irrational. He sailed in the first single-handed, round-the-world, nonstop race. His steel ketch Joshua was the fastest boat in the race, and he was well ahead of the others, almost to the finish line, when he decided that all the months he had already spent alone at sea were not enough. He dipped back down in to the high southern latitudes and rounded th e Cape of Good Hope again, sailed through the Indian Ocean and in to the Pacific, and didn't drop anchor until he reached Tahiti.
And then, to compound this strangeness, he wrote a book about the voyage and donated the royalties to the pope. To save the earth.
Anyway, when I think of Moitessier's rapturous descriptions, and how he wrote of joyously sailing through the storms, I can't decide whether to laugh or cry.
When I sold my first book, my publisher, guilty perhaps of wishful thinking, paid a foolishly optimistic advance.
I took the money to Annapolis, where I bought my first boat. Before that, the only sailing I had done was in friends' boats on the lake. Gentle breezes, placid water.
I can still remember how shocked I was when, for the first time, I took my sailboat out into the Atlantic. How frightened.
The air was light when we left the jetty, but it soon freshened, and by midafternoon, it was blowing twenty knots across six-foot seas. Nothing, really, just a fresh breeze. It's blowing twice as hard tonight. But I realized, with a certainty that has never left me, just how mindlessly malevolent the sea is, how much it craves the lives of the puny air-breathers who venture out on it.
When we came back in, I tied the boat to the dock and didn't move her again for six weeks. By that time I had convinced myself that my initial reaction was just an aberration, that I would soon get over my fright and begin to see the same beauty and feel the same joy that my heroes wrote of.
But I never have.
Why do I keep trying? Because. . because sailing is the only real thing I've ever done. No matter how frightened I am — and I'm sick with fear and ouzo right now — I can stilt define myself as a seaman. As an adventurer, a voyager, a striver against the elements. Otherwise I'm just an aging, failed writer, a drunk, alone.
What would I do, if I could ever find some fool to buy Olympius? When I try to imagine, I see myself, even older and fatter and more decayed, vegetating at some Podunk junior college, resting on my meager laurels, teaching pimply-faced adolescents to write brainless essays, fucking the occasional presentable coed.
I may, of course, be assuming too much, to think that even junior-college coeds would be stupid enough to be dazzled by my small frame and worn-out charm.
Or perhaps I might get a job writing guidebooks.
I WASN'T ALWAYS so pitiful. I remember, a long time ago, a wharf at Piraeus.
That was the day I met my ex-wife.
I was still young enough to believe that I would one day become a good writer, despite the poor sales and the unkindness of the critics. And I had learned to pretend fearlessness, sometimes so well that I fooled myself. I drank for joy, not for anesthesia. . or at least that was the theory.