A BLUE COVE
The only scenery that bores me is any that I can’t imagine purchasing a part of: usually, if a place provides the slightest uplift, I instantly consider buying or building a house. The hundreds of properties I’ve constructed mentally! But now something serious has occurred. For the past few days we’ve been cruising around Rhodes, lingering a lot at the perfect little bay of Lindos. An American acquaintance who has a house above Lindos took me to see something he thinks I should own.
I think so too. It is a small stone farmhouse situated inside a horseshoe-shaped cove; the beach is a sandy confection, and the water, being entirely protected, tranquil as a sapphire winking in a jeweler’s window. It could be mine for three thousand dollars: an investment of another five or six would put the house in delicious order. It is a prospect that sizzles the imagination.
At night I think, Yes I will, but in the morning I recall—politics, old mortality, inconvenient emotional commitments, the impossibilities of the Greek tongue, a trillion difficulties. Still, I ought to have the courage; I’ll never again find anything quite as ideal as that.
AT A CAFE
I left the yacht at Rhodes, and this morning flew to Athens. Now at not quite midnight am sitting alone in an outdoor café on Constitution Square. There are not many patrons, though I recognize one of them as someone I’d seen years ago in Tangier, where she was quite the Queen of the Casbah (Southern Belle Version): Eugenia Bank-head, Tallulah’s even more voluble sister. She is arguing with a Negro companion.
Come to consider, many of the world-trampers who used to hang around Tangier now frequent Athens. Across the street from where I sit I see every conceivable breed of hustler, from muscled dock-hands to plump Egyptian lovelies wearing wavy platinum wigs.
It is very hot, and the ubiquitous white dust of Athens mists the air, coats the street and my tabletop like the pale rough crust on a bilious tongue. I am remembering the stone house in the blue cove. But that is all I will ever do. Remember it.
1968
The End