Driving to Sounion    

Anastasio is leaning into a long curve, leaning out over the handlebars of his old Mego, on the E94, one curve among many along the coast road from Athens to the southern tip of the Greek mainland--and Cape Sounion. 

Squinting, through clouds of diesel exhaust, dust, bugs and road grit, he passes one-pump petrol stations, cement factories, vacant gyms, vacant coffee shops, the congested intersecting ramp-traffic for the airport (maybe one or two planes overhead, landing, taking off), shipping machinery supply-chains and yacht dealerships, an abandoned commuter train hub, rock-littered scrub farmland, desolate olive groves with emaciated, long-haired goats, tilted on their knees like small, anchored vessels, and tethered to marginal trees. 

It’s evening, the sun going down out there over the Aegean, some stray white clouds curdled gold at their edges, and while the heat of the day has dissipated, and while he’s more than used to it, Anastasio still feels as though the wind is searing his hands and face. 

But a wince is also a grin. Because he is driving to Sounion.

He closed his jewelry store early on Kidathineon Street, in Plaka, that warren of shops, restaurants and cafes under the shadow of the Acropolis selling cheap memories of Greece to tourists from everywhere. He swiped the kick-stand of the Mego, swung his leg over the saddle, turned the key, revved the engine and weaved his way, half-riding half-walking, through the crowded street. 

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Now, half an hour later, he’s leaving the outskirts of Athens, daylight paling, a little theatrically. Just for me, Anastasio is thinking. The failing light almost matches the sadness of all the empty structures he passes, those square, concrete hulks intended once to be houses, abandoned when German banks turned off the tap in 2008. 

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He makes this trip every month in summer, June through September. He’s done it for thirty years now.  

When the moon is full.  

He thinks of it as a cleansing. Away from all the noise. From all that seething humanity. Just the moon and the stars and the sea. And Poseidon’s temple, the marvelous ruins. Perfect marble columns still standing after nearly three thousand years. They dazzle the brain.

As he gets closer to Sounion, as the peninsula narrows and the traffic wains, as the air clears and the industrial suburbs give way to the lights of the gated mansions of the rich, the four star resorts and upscale tavernas, he slows down to savour the downhill ease of the last few kilometers, the only sound the Mego’s two-stroke echoing off the darkening hills that rise up on either side. 

At the last turn, the road twists severely toward the sea so that the angle allows him a glimpse, in the fading light, of the ruins of the temple high above him, more acute as he descends, and then coming into plain, level view as the road rises toward the site.

Peaceful silence now, but three thousand years ago? Ritual animal sacrifice. The screams of calves, of goats and sheep. Appeasing the god of the sea, quelling the fatal storms that were his wrath. 

Sacrifice as extravagant drama, to outstrip death itself. 

Anastasio knows the stories about the place.  Stories that are the place.  King Aegeus, founder of Athens, on the promontory, watching for his son Theseus returning from Crete. When he saw black sails on the approaching ship, Aegeus believed Theseus had been killed by the Minotaur. In his exaltation over his killing of the Minotaur, Theseus had forgotten to change his black sails to white. Aegeus leaped off the cliff to his death. And so his name was given to the sea.  

And last month, when Anastasio arrived, there were police cars everywhere, the spot where he usually spends the night under the stars, high on a cliff adjacent to the temple, above a small cove, cordoned off. That afternoon a young boy had fallen from the cliff onto the rocks below. The boy had been visiting the site with his parents, tourists from Spain. There were two coast guard boats in the cove at the bottom of the cliff, a hundred meters below. A strong north wind made the outer sea rough, and even in the sheltered cove they were having difficulty getting to the boy in the boats. The boy was still alive. The whole site had been shut down, tourists herded to the museum’s outdoor café, the perimeter circumscribed by yellow tape. Anastasio ducked under the tape and sat down at a table. Across from him were tourists from England. They said they had come just to see where Lord Byron had chiseled his signature into one of the columns. And now this. How terrible. How horrible. Every so often, they could hear from far below the boy’s cries, por favor, mama, por favor. Then there were no more cries. No one drank their coffee. No one finished their beer. Cups stayed on the tables. Glasses stayed on the tables. Hands gripping the arms of chairs. Hands folded in laps. No one looking up. Some people smoking, nervously. Fingers drumming a tabletop nearby. Finally, the police came and removed the tape, jumped in their cars, and raced off, sirens blaring.  The two boats could be heard accelerating separately out of the cove under the rising moon, across the bay to the marina. The floodlit temple stood still in majestic silence. 

Two days later Anastasio learned the boy had died at a hospital in Athens. He was in his store when he read about it on Facebook. It had been a slow day, much too hot for most people to shop. So he was scrolling, reading aimlessly. And he came upon it. Ten-year old boy. Only child. Parents devastated. But claiming there should have been protective fencing. Threatening legal action, lawyers in Spain and Greece weighing in. Later that evening, on television, Anastasio watched workers from the site interviewed—a security guard, a café waiter, a shop cashier. The guard and the cashier, a man and a woman, both said how horrified they were by the boy’s death. How sorry they were. How they felt for the family. The waiter said that perhaps Poseidon had taken the child. He said that, after all, Sounion was a place of sacrifice. A sacred place. And a sacred place has its power and its secrets. That it was arrogant to believe we can control Fate. The next day the waiter was excoriated on social media, and fired from his job. 

Anastasio wondered if the waiter hadn’t somehow been right. He thought of earthquakes. Delivered by the same angry god. How many had struck Greece during his lifetime, and how many since time began, across the islands and on the mainland? All those deaths, all that destruction. Pregnant mothers and helpless babies, budding children, accomplished athletes, towering thinkers and politicians, doctors, dangerous criminals, great artists, feeble ninety-year olds—the toll was indiscriminate. When “the innocent” died in earthquakes, everyone said the same thing: it was Fate. Tragic, yes, but it was ever thus and that was life in Greece. There was nothing to be done to prevent such events from happening. The priests said that the victims were with God. God had taken them to be with Him, so the nation’s mourning should be tempered by acceptance, even joy. 

Anastasio wondered: if some invisible orthodox God can take us, couldn’t a pagan god with a trident take us as well? Couldn’t there exist some divine residue from that ancient energy, enough for the god of the sea to take a ten year-old boy? 

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No matter, he thought, whatever the cause, we store the death we witness in the ruins of collective memory, enclosed by the national mind’s perfect columns, to be visited, re-visited, and visited again.

Tonight though, this last day of August, Anastasio was convinced that, for him at least, tonight would be the best night of the summer. The sunsets at Sounion, which is what many tourists came to see, were rivalled only, they were told, by the sunsets on Santorini, and the sun’s performance earlier had indeed been stunning: orange-red bleeding into amber, the surrounding mountains turning dusky, a darkish blue. The sky totally clear now, the tourists all gone, Anastasio watches a few bits of stars struggle to be seen in the darkness of the east. The first bits aren’t enough. He knows they need companions. He knows that in an hour the moon, the eternal moon, just visible now, just risen behind the islands to the south, will dwarf them, fade them out.

He thinks about what it must have been like, so long ago, to arrive here, to be returning by sail to the place your ship had left months, maybe even years, earlier. How, with the sun sinking into the west, the Aegean seems to consist more of light than of water. And light that pulses. The temple would have appeared, from even a long way off, a transparently glorious pearl. Ghostly. It would begin to glow like a kiln as the wind pushed your ship, like a snail, closer, pushed it from the crimson west and the sun melting on the horizon and vanishing into the sea toward the temple shimmering on the cliffs. For truly into the sea they believed it went, back then, the sun—and into the waiting arms of the moody, greedy god.

And they would have stared at the temple in awe: deos. The flaming naked columns rising into the sky at the head of the bay, on treeless cliffs, jewel-like, a gem set in hard, bare rock, the sultry, bluish peaks of mountains all around. And to them it would have existed for as long as the mountains had been there, so long that no one could recall who had erected it, how it ever got there. 

With every return, it was always a vision, a wonderfully terrifying vision, before it was a thing. And then, it was a thing, as they set foot on dry land and marched up the path, steep, precipitous, broad, arid, a dusty brown narrowing to the summit. To kneel in submission and prayer. Then gaze up at the glowing marble, the way children will look up with naïve, impersonal wonder at the stars.

Now Anastasio sees that cars arriving at the hotel are raising a little dust in the beams of their headlights as they lunge down the hill, searching the dark. The hotel lights glint and twitch, but neither the cars nor the hotel lights distract him from his purpose: to feel the living sky and the living sea flow through his veins. 

And to find, to find again, among his own individual columns of memory, Nefeli.

He spreads his blanket on the ground.  He sits and listens: a murmur of waves, the last, distant cicadas, a dog barking. Moon-shadows beginning to form under the bushes that surround him. There’s now no such thing as Athens. Plaka is no more. It’s a miracle to be staring at those columns rising into the moonlight. Suddenly he is ecstatic. And suddenly he is sad. Because he is going to sit here all night, as he always does, remembering moments from his life with her. 

Nefeli.

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And those moments? They unfailingly start with the same elongated scene: that first morning with her, waking after the first rapturous night. The heaviness of the sun through the indolent bedroom window matching the languor of their sprawled limbs. Her perfume had worked itself into the sweat in the fabric of the pillowcase, the same sweat he tasted on the vague places of her body in the dark, the body now taking such pleasure in the sun’s lazy caress.  Like a real touch. Then the mixed scent of tobacco and coffee, standing, leaning against one another, gazing into the blue-yellow gas flame, warm and dazed.

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He will never forget it, that morning. Not even in death, he thinks. It returns to him like this in the light of the full moon, which is now directly above him: the perfume, the smell of her skin, the smell of her hair--all mingling with the thyme and sage the moist night air now brings. 

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It is not a dream, it is not illusion, it is not nostalgia. He’s adamant. It is what she left him, running in his blood. 

He sees Her—he feels Her—walking with him in the street. Footsteps flowing in his blood.

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Here, on the cliffs, under the full moon, beside the ancient temple, he’s transported:   

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His younger self, a friend’s taverna, alone in the corner, sipping tsoupiro. At the other end of the room, a rustic band playing harshly, and a few old men, drunk and singing. All of which become a buzzing backdrop of noise, fading, shrinking, diminishing, because suddenly it is an overwhelming pleasure to be sitting there, sipping tsoupiro, and staring, for the very first time, at Beauty. At her. In She walked and he is blind forevermore to everything else. Lost. Life now nothing more than that buzzing noise, a tinny bouzouki, having seen her face, the most real thing he has ever seen. Real as in beautiful. 

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That night he walked her home, and after they had agreed to meet the next evening, and had said goodbye, Anastasio was so wound up he just kept walking. And walking. Soon there were only cats in the streets, hissing, howling to the wide sky. He walked all night, until he came to the edge of the city where the stars got blown out by a rising wind and the silence broken by the idling of the earliest busses, a few cars, some motos whining. 

He’d started out the night before, on the way to the taverna, with a dozen minds and a dozen problems to solve, but dizzyingly unable to commit himself to any one of them. His shop had made no money the month before, and the month before that, and he was trying to trick himself into believing that things would work out. That he was not forlorn. That he would land on his feet. Which now, because of her, felt no longer like feet but feathers, and he was simply flying over the pavement, through airy clouds above the streetlamps and suburban nightshift buildings, all of them now tilted, cock-eyed, rose-purple in the dawn-light rising out of the dark, the buildings themselves floating in mid-air, as in a painting by Chagall. He reared his head back and made a high-pitched, almost non-human, cat-like shriek. To celebrate this flying. This new life. Now, he felt, he was truly living up to the meaning of the name his parents had given him. Anastasio. Reborn.

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But the euphoria was short-lived. Her parents, with their insistent, cruel, resounding NO, extinguished their love. And Nefeli passed out of his life, never to return, like a cloud, the thing she was named for.

When he examines himself now, decades later, grey-haired, shoulders stooped, age-spots dotting his face and hands, his gait slow, ungainly, it’s hard to believe there was a woman, once, years and years ago, who caressed that face, who kissed his unblemished skin until it shivered, and who then slept beside him, a hand grazing, touching, holding his. 

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Now, when he returns home to sleep, he can’t sleep.  He sighs. He watches television. He sighs. He drinks a little wine and picks at some olives, some stale feta, pale tomatoes and onions. And sighs some more.  

Only on nights such as this, under a full moon, does Anastasio become his name.

He sits all night in the moonlight. Until it fades and disappears with the last stars, and then he drives to the nearby cluster of tavernas and cafes and gas stations and small tourist shops, and walks through the makeshift streets, down to the sea in the morning’s splendor, to watch the men unloading their catch. The fish are mostly sequined-silver, but they can be shades of scarlet, or a deep-sea greenish black. Seeing the fish, knowing they will later feed and please so many, even in his sleeplessness he feels restored, he feels young. And so, for the moment the world, too, is young.

But this time, come morning, he doesn’t go down to walk through the streets. He doesn’t end up where the men on their boats are unloading a sparkling catch.

He stands and gazes at the temple a long time. He wonders now if it is actually not a miracle but an anachronism.  

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Or if he is the anachronism.

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The crickets have stopped and the cicadas have begun. The first servers in the café have arrived. They begin taking chairs off tables, wiping dust from the tables. 

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And there’s a black bird that’s appeared from out of nowhere, circling the temple, wings held still against the wind, like a black slit opening into another world, blank, god-angry and god-cold. 

Now half-wheeling, is the bird beckoning him?  

“Reborn?” Take the step. 

Or mocking him? 

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Really? You don’t have it in you. 

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And Anastasio looks down at his feet, trying to remember.