Folegandros
Three nights on a wind-pressed cliff in the Cyclades, and a man who has forgotten how to stop bracing, until the evening the wind drops all at once.
The Boat from Santorini
I had not stopped in a long time.
That is the plain fact I carried onto the boat, and it is the only fact I did not want her to see. The work I do is not the kind a man sets down at a door. It follows the body home. For a long stretch before this trip I had been the one who did not flinch when the room asked for it, the one who held while others fell forward, and a body kept at that pitch learns an angle and forgets it can stand any other way. I had come to the Cyclades to put myself down. I was not certain I still knew how.
The Sea Jet from Santorini ran the channel between Sikinos and the larger island in a long northwest line, and the meltemi was already up when we came out onto the deck for the approach. Her Highness was at the rail. I was a step behind her. The wind from the north quarter was coming across the bow at twenty knots steady and gusting higher, and I felt my own body meet it and lean the half degree it always leans, the small automatic bracing of a man who has spent too long expecting the room to move under him. She did not brace. She let the wind find her. That was the difference between us, standing at that rail, and I hoped she could not read it off my shoulders.
She had pinned her hair against the gust before we cleared Santorini and had not let it down since. A length of pale cream linen was wrapped twice around her throat. The hat had stayed in the case. The wind did not allow the hat.
I had told her about the wind on the call. I had said it would shape the trip, that the boats to the small beaches did not always run, that the meltemi could turn a warm afternoon cold in ten minutes. I had said all of that as though the wind were the reason. It was not the reason. I had chosen an island where a thing presses on you without pause and then, if you are lucky and the season turns, stops all at once, because I wanted to stand somewhere that might teach me the difference. I did not say that part. She had said one word on the call. “Yes.” She had not asked anything else.
The island came up off the port bow the way Folegandros comes up, all at once, low and rocky and the color of dry bone, the cliff of Chora rising on the north side to a height the eye took a moment to scale. A single white smudge near the top resolved into the church. The town sat on the cliff below it, a tight kastro of whitewashed walls settled into the rock as though the wind had pressed it there. The cliff above held its silence against the wind, and I looked at that silence the way a thirsty man looks at water he does not trust himself to reach.
Her Highness watched the cliff come closer.
“Two hundred meters,” she said. The number from the call.
“Straight up from the water. The town on top of it. The church above the town.”
“And we walk to the church.”
“Tomorrow at sunset. If the wind allows.”
“If the wind allows,” she said, and she kept her eye on the cliff, and something in the way she said it back to me was not agreement but a hand laid on the thing I had not told her. I let it pass. The boat came into the lee of the headland and the chop went off the water and the engine came back from a thrum into a low working idle, and the men at the lines made it fast.
The driver from the hotel took the bags. He greeted her in English and me in Greek with the small nod a driver gives the man whose company had booked the room. The Suzuki climbed the three kilometers of switchback in long slow loops cut into the rock, the verges falling away into the drop, the wind hitting the windward side on the open stretches and dropping in the lee of each curve. She held the strap above her door and watched the sea fall away below us. I watched her not brace, and I braced, and I hated the small machine in me that would not let the road be only a road.
We came over the lip of the ridge and Chora opened on the plateau, white and low and compact. The driver took the car to the small lot where the lanes began and stopped the engine, and the wind across the lot was the meltemi coming clean over the ridge from the north, pulling at the awning of the corner café where two old men drank coffee against the wall. He handed the bags to a boy with a trolley and went back down the road, and the sound of the car receded along the switchbacks for a long while, and then was gone.
The wind took the lot.
Her Highness turned her face into it. Her hair lifted at the side of her cheek and she did not push it back. She stood a moment with her eyes half closed against the gust.
“It is loud,” she said.
“It will be louder up there.” I tilted my head toward the church, the small white dome against the deeper blue to the north, a single cypress at its side bent into the curve a cypress takes when it has lived its whole life with the meltemi. She looked at the cypress a long moment, and then she looked at me, and I had the sudden certainty that she was reading the same shape off me, and I picked up her case before the boy could and turned up the lane so she would not.
Anemomilos
The hotel was on the cliff edge at the south end of Chora, a low two-story building of the same whitewashed plaster as every other, blue doors, blue shutters, a single bougainvillea grown into the shape of the entrance arch and holding its flowers against the wind in a stubborn dark pink. A woman in her sixties in a long navy dress came out from behind the small desk. She greeted her Highness with an open palm against her own chest, the soft welcome the older island women give a guest who has come a long way. She greeted me by name. Her father had built the hotel; her daughter ran the kitchen now. She did not give us a tour. She gave us the key and walked us out onto the terrace.
The terrace was the reason for the hotel. It ran the full length of the building along the cliff edge, whitewashed stone underfoot, a low white wall at the edge the height of a man’s hip and no higher. Beyond the wall the cliff fell straight two hundred meters to a sea that went a long way down, white-flecked where the wind worked the surface. A pair of cypresses at the corner stood bent permanently into the wind’s direction, and I looked at them and thought, without wanting to, that they had forgotten how to stand up, and that I had come to an island of trees shaped exactly like me.
She walked to the wall, set her hand on the white stone, looked down the drop, and the wind coming up the face of the cliff lifted her hair off her shoulders in one long upward draft and did not let it down. She did not step back.
“There is no railing,” she said. “Only the wall. And the wind is pushing up the cliff.”
“The cliff makes the wind go up. The terrace catches some of it.”
Her Highness turned her body slightly into the cliff so that the wind from the north came at her from the left and the lift off the cliff came up from below, and the two forces met at her body and she stood in them and did not adjust her stance. The owner had stayed at the doorway, watching from the soft middle distance the island women watch a guest from when they want to know what the guest is. She said something low to me in Greek. I caught half of it. She said the woman I had brought knew how to stand in the wind. I nodded. What I did not say was that I no longer knew how to do anything else.
The room was on the upper floor at the corner, a heavy blue door, an iron-framed double bed against the inner wall, a writing desk under a window that opened directly onto the cliff, no balcony, only the window set into the white wall above the terrace above the drop. It smelled of plaster and salt and the dry note of wild herbs the wind brought up off the slope. I set the bags down. She crossed to the window and opened the shutters and the wind came into the room in one steady press that held the curtain at a forty-degree angle from the wall and did not let it down. She did not close the shutters. She let the wind have the room.
She turned to me. “This is the room you booked.”
“This is the room I booked.”
“You wanted me in the wind.”
I said yes, and it was true, and it was also the smaller half of the truth. I had wanted myself in the wind. She watched my face while I gave her the smaller half, and she let me keep the larger half, and she crossed to the bed and sat on the edge and looked at me from there.
“Tell me the days,” she said.
“This afternoon the kastro. Tomorrow at sunset the path to the church. The day after, if the wind drops, the caïque to Katergo.”
“And if it does not drop.”
“Then it does not.” I heard my own voice go flat on the words, flatter than the sentence asked for, and she heard it too. She lay back on the bed and folded her hands across her stomach and watched the ceiling, and from somewhere below a cup met a saucer and was set down, and a goat bell rang twice down the slope, and the wind worked at the white wall outside the window in the steady press it had worked for as long as the building had stood.
“You are very far away,” she said, to the ceiling, not to me.
It was the truest thing anyone had said to me in a long time and I did not have an answer to it. I unpacked instead. She let the silence sit where the answer should have gone, and she did not reach into it, and that restraint was its own kind of knowing.