Don't I Know You? (6 page)

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Over the next hill we caught sight of the Libyan sea, cupped on the horizon like a darker distillate of the sky. The heat and the flat white light were dreamlike; only a few animals moved through the landscape. We passed a donkey with a high-pommelled wooden saddle, flicking his tail. A black-clad woman sat against a white wall with a gaping basket of fish for sale. Then the road ran out into sand and we arrived at Matala. Nick and I got off the bus with our packs and stood wondering where to go.

The village was nothing more than a small cluster of houses on a crescent of white sand facing Africa, unseen across the water. No hotels, no electricity except for one generator-run refrigerator. Bracketing the beach were two yellow-white sandstone promontories. The longer eastern arm tilted down into the sea like a gently foundering ocean liner. On that side we could see two or three tiers of cave openings, maybe twenty altogether. The caves were man-made but very old—perhaps a former Roman burial site, or leper colony. In Greek mythology, Matala was thought to be the place where Europa, future queen of Crete, was raped by the god Zeus, in the form of a white bull.

“The folksinger Joni Mitchell is staying here too,” said Rick and Souki, the couple from the bus, as we walked toward the cliffs. “But she's pretty shy. You see her sometimes in Delfini's. She's hanging out with the cook there.”

The other café was the Mermaid, where the owner had a battery-operated record player. There were parties, Rick said, lots of parties. “And they can get pretty wild,” said Souki, her hoop earrings swinging. They'd been in Matala for three months now.

“The cops hate the hippies but they can't arrest us or throw us in jail, because the caves are an archeological site, run by some other government department,” said Rick. “They're okay with weed if you don't flaunt it, but, like, painting the walls with Day-Glo is not cool.”

Besides, he went on, everybody at Matala was into a drug that could be bought right over the counter—a cough syrup called Romilar. Some combination of codeine and speed.

“It's like acid,” Souki said, “but more floaty and visual?” She wafted her arms. Nick perked up at this; he was a fan of acid.

“Is there an outhouse or anything?” I asked. My post-Moroccan fixation.

“There's the shit cave,” she said. “Which is not as bad as it sounds. It's at sea level, and when the tide comes in it washes everything away.”

Rick pointed down the beach. “Kostakis's boat is coming in. Let's go see what he's caught.” They headed off.

We could see figures moving about or lounging in the doorways of the caves. As we ground our way across the sand we came to the Mermaid café, with dark-blue tables set out on a cement patio. Someone had painted a sun-faded cartoon of a busty mermaid on one wall.

In the heat of the day the patio was deserted. Twisting up through the cement was a grape tree that offered a scrap of shade. We sat down under it and ordered Cokes from a silent boy of twelve or so.

A kid our age, long-limbed and American-looking with shoulder-length blond hair, approached us. He carried a plastic canister and a funnel.

“You two just arrive?”

“Yeah.”

“Buy your kerosene here. Delfini's charges more.”

“Thanks.”

He shook our hands, soul brother–style, holding eye contact. He had a nice Southern drawl.

“I'm Hoot, from San Antonio. Did you come over on the midnight ferry?”

“Yeah.”

“Hey, so welcome to paradise. How long you planning to stay?”

“A week or two I guess,” said Nick.

“Oh yeah. When I got here I thought I'd stay a couple days, swim, catch some rays.” Hoot laughed. “That was two months ago.” He sat down at our table and gazed out at the ocean as if he'd never noticed it before.

“Today's Saturday, right?”

“Right.”

“Come down to the Mermaid later on, that's where everybody goes on Saturday night. You'll hear the music anyway.”

“Are the caves all full?” I asked. “Can we, like, reserve one?” Something close to the shit cave, preferably.

“A couple from Amsterdam just left, so maybe—although I think Joni has her eye on that one. Joni Mitchell the folksinger, you know her?”

“Yeah, we heard.” This secretly thrilled me. She wasn't famous yet, this was the year before
Blue
came out. But I loved
Ladies of the Canyon
.

“Let's go check it out,” said Hoot. We followed him across the sand and up a stony path to the second tier of caves.

“Here's me,” Hoot said, pointing to a waist-high entrance. “It's bigger than it looks from the outside. Sort of a split-level.”

We passed a guy with an Afro grilling little fish on a charcoal brazier and came to a doorway covered by a canvas tarp.

“This is maybe the third biggest one. I would have moved in myself, but my stuff is all set up the way I like.”

The round, dark entrance was like a tooth socket. We stepped inside to coolness and a clean smell of earth. The cave was ten or twelve feet deep with a couple stone ledges. Against one wall was a flat gravel-covered area. The bedroom.

“Got camping mats?” We didn't.

“Doesn't matter, just put your clothes under your sleeping bags. You don't need many clothes here anyway. Although when the police are around, it's not cool to go around naked. They're more uptight about that than the drugs.”

I felt something unfamiliar as we toured the cave: domestic lust. Yes, I thought, we can sleep over there, store our packs in that cranny, and I can hang my batik Indian scarves over the door. Line up our books together on the shelf. Here I could wash my hair as often as I wanted and dry it in the sun. The two of us could settle down.

“This is perfect,” I said, like a client at an open house. I set my pack on the “bed” in a proprietorial way and looked at Nick, desperate for him to agree.

“Yeah, it looks okay,” Nick said. “Although we'll have to buy stuff to cook with.”

“Stelios can tell you where to get anything. He runs the Mermaid.”

Hoot ducked out of the entrance, momentarily blocking the sunlight's blare. “So I'm down the way, if you need me. It's the one with the cowbell nailed outside. And you'll meet everybody tonight at the Mermaid.”

He put his hands in a prayer position and gave a slight bow.

“Welcome to Matala.”

While I unpacked Nick knelt in the entrance and looked out at the ocean. A few kids in cutoff jeans were in the water, standing in swells that raced far up onto the beach before the waves broke into a bluish-white ruffle of foam, and then shrank back into the sea. A steady soft breeze blew. The only sound was when the tide sometimes surged into the sea-level caves with a booming clap.

I unrolled my sleeping bag on the gravel bed, then took Nick's bag and smoothed it out alongside mine. They were different makes but with some patience the two could be zipped together into one cocoon. The bed side of the cave was tucked away from the door and quite private.

Nick changed into his bathing suit, opened his notebook, and uncapped his pen. I lay down in our new bedroom where the walls radiated a stony coolness. I turned to a fresh page in my journal and wrote the word “Matala.” If it took living in a cave to play house, I was game.

Feb. 10th, 1970

Yesterday we took a trip into Pitsidia and bought ourselves the local version of a BBQ—a little brazier that holds charcoal—and an iron frying pan. A kerosene lamp, extra wick, and candles. Some of the coarse salt they use here, twisted up in brown paper, fresh oregano, eggs in a cloth. Plus a bottle of olive oil the color of baby snakes.

We spent seventy cents on a fish in a plastic bag with ice that melted on the 4 k. walk back to Matala. Found the old guy in the village who sells bundles of firewood. He wraps each one tenderly in grapevines. So we're all set up now.

The caves are better than a hotel in some ways. They're soundproof, for one thing. No thunder from your neighbor's shower (I wish). And they never lose their coolness even in the heat of the day. The shit cave is not great, you have to watch your step, but it does get “flushed” twice a day. Garbage is burnt in the beach bonfires, and we don't generate much. Anything perishable the local dogs take care of.

There's only one tap for all of us and lugging cans of water up the cliff is a chore. On Sundays the tour buses arrive and people with cameras roam around the cliffs for an hour or so, apologetically poking their heads into our homes as if we were Maasai warriors living in mud huts. Well, they are caves.

Nick's writing a lot, and has finished some really good poems. I like it when we're both in the cave at dusk, waiting for the charcoal embers to get perfectly white, and he's scribbling away—it's pathetic, this playing-house thing, I know. But I'm tired of always being on the move and out of my element (whatever that is). So far everyone here is friendly and nice except for a few weirdos who live on the opposite cliff and don't hang out much. I like the way the weather rules everything here. A full moon means late parties on the beach, and on windy days with high surf, everyone holes up (literally).

In the cave next door to us are a brother and sister from South Carolina—I think he just went AWOL from the marines. She's some sort of musician, a classical pianist I think. Shy.

The other day Nick and I ventured farther down the shoreline. There are coves like this, one after another, all down the coast, with great dinosaur humps of rock in between. One cove has dark-red sand. The rock is scoured with trenches and furrows, or in other places it's pockmarked and lacy, like bone marrow. A twenty-minute walk in either direction and there's not another soul around.

Ran into Joni Mitchell at the bakery lady's today! She was wearing turquoise and silver rings on her fingers and had a bad sunburn on her chest. Long straight blond hair and a long upper lip, with a cute overbite. There was only one loaf of bread left and she really seemed to want it, so I let her buy it. Then the red-haired guy with the turban, his name is Carey I think, came in and scared her, grabbing her from behind and lifting her up. She has a nice big laugh. I was relieved when they ignored me. I can never bring myself to say fan stuff to musicians or actors. It feels so intrusive.

I told Nick about Joni, but he doesn't like her songs that much. “Her lines have too many words,” he said. I felt like holding up his notebook, but refrained.

*   *   *

Something has happened that I don't understand. The moon was full, it was the middle of the night and I was having a nightmare. I only remember the end of it, when there was a huge bee circling my head, dive-bombing me, trying to fly into my eyes. It wasn't a regular bee, it was a killer bee and I was very scared. I had a little paddle in one hand that I was using to fend off this attacker. I woke up with that incredible sense of relief you have when you realize it was only a dream, and now you're safe in bed. Then I noticed that Nick wasn't beside me.

He's gone out to pee, I thought, and lay in my warm sleeping bag, grateful to have surfaced and escaped the killer bee. The light of the moon shone through the door of the cave, through my pretty batik curtain. Some of the wild dogs that roam the beach were barking, and from the sound of the surf, the wind was coming up. I remembered that we'd left the charcoal brazier outside and hoped the wind hadn't scattered any leftover embers.

Nick's side felt cool. He must have been gone for some time. I unzipped my bag to go looking for him.

When I stepped out of our cave the moon was so bright it was as if a big television were casting a blue pall on everything. It threw my shadow on the cliff wall. I smelled cigarette smoke and saw that the marine next door was sitting on the ledge, in boxer shorts. He had a brush cut; he was the only cave guy with short hair. Beano, they called him, because that's all he cooked, beans and rice. That's what he brought to the parties.

Hey Beano, I said, what're you doing up?

He lifted his cigarette.

Want one?

I did smoke, but I rolled my own and didn't like filtered American cigarettes.

Have you seen Nick?

Yeah, he said with his eyes fixed on the surf below.

Is there a party somewhere? I asked. But the night was perfectly quiet, except for the dogs.

He pointed behind him with his cigarette, toward the cave he shared with his sister.

Nick's in there?

He nodded and gave me a kindly look with lustrous eyes. Whatever he had been through in the marines, it seemed to have made him gentler than the others here, so intent on being pacifists.

I was slow to put it together. So, Nick had slipped out of our zippered bed and had gone next door, to sleep with … Sally, that was her name. Beano and Sally, brother and sister, the model family next door. What nerve, among other things.

This time Beano passed me his cigarette and I took it. I didn't know what to do—storm into the cave and drag him “home”? I was confused. Nick and I had sex, lots of sex. I thought he loved me, and my body, at least he said he did. A deep sense of disorientation came over me. Everything was turned upside down, and I doubted it all, one hundred percent of it. Nick was not who I had thought he was, and so neither was I.

He could have at least warned me that he wanted to sleep with someone else. Was restless. It might have been negotiable. In theory.

Luckily there was a canvas tarp nailed over the entrance to their cave, thick enough to muffle any sounds. The dogs barked on, as if scolding the moon for being so bright. Beano and I didn't say anything, we just sat there smoking and watching the phosphorescent white foam of the waves as they broke down below. The breeze, all the way from Africa, was not as warm as usual; I began to shiver, so I left Beano and went back inside. I curled up in bed, pulling the toggle on my sleeping bag to cover everything but my face. Maybe they were just talking, I thought. She was quiet, but she seemed smart, knowing. Dark bangs cut straight, like Veronica in the cartoon strip. I decided I would give him the benefit of the doubt.