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Five

11 Sept.

When I unpacked I set up the two tripods in the corner of the living room, one with the Nikon on it and the other with the Hasselblad. They’re still standing there, untouched. I’ve draped a blue bandanna over one and a red over the other, hooded them. Dust covers. The portable darkroom is still in its canvas bag, the last rolls of film are in the refrigerator, undeveloped. It will take more nerve than I’ve got to look at them now.

When I unpacked on Sými at the end of May it was different. I set up the dark room before I hung my shirts. I found Sými even more beautiful than I remembered, perhaps because it was the place in the photograph, and I wanted to enter the world I had seen in the photograph of the white Vespa. To be sure. And in landing on Sými I did seem to enter that world. I found the house on the first day. Driving with the owner up to it, when he said, That’s it, gesturing toward a house half hidden by rocks on the bluff overhead, a low yellow house with rust-red shutters and door, I had known it was the house for me. Walking through the cool rooms, looking through the old, wavy glass down toward Yialós, everything in me said, Yes, this is the place. I signed a lease for four months, with an option to renew at a reduced rate for the off-season.

The next day I hired a taxi and moved in. The house was small, but the design was strong; it held its own with the landscape, with the cliffs out back and the yard of exposed boulders, with the few gnarled olives and large agaves. There were two big pots of jasmine on either side of the front door, and a weathered table and chairs under the largest of the olives, where the shade was deep. The view rolled over a tumbled landscape, all dry, beautiful in sandy stone and yellowed grasses, and that smoky green of trees and shrubs in arid countries.

There was a small bedroom, hardly bigger than a closet, where I set up the dark room, and a small, hard, island bed in an alcove in the main room, where I planned to sleep. The house had escaped serious remodeling; it still had hand-carved wooden cupboards, built-in Turkish-style low couches, and a saw-edged mantle over the hearth. Very rough wooden floors, the grain standing ribbed above the worn away spaces in between. I loved the place all at once.

I walked into town, down a road that followed the bends of a dry wash. In the quiet, the insects hummed. And then I was in town and making inquiries about a motorbike. I was directed to a shop and in a row of mostly new and newish motorbikes saw a couple of old Vespas, one blue and one white. I only took one out for a test ride, the white Vespa, and only haggled a little over the price. It ran well, puttering up the steep road to my new house without undue difficulty.

That evening, I finished unpacking, putting the photograph of the man in white on the mantle. If anything, I was drawn to the photo more than ever, and I looked at it several times in the edgy light of the bare bulb that hung from the ceiling. Finally, I began to entertain the suspicion that the Vespa in the photograph might be the same one that was parked in the yard under a tree. I noted the pattern of dents and creases then took my flashlight out into the night to check. I felt very odd out there, bending over the bike in the dark, discovering that it was indeed the same one that was in the photograph. Just for a second, I felt I had become someone else. I clicked off the light. I had thought I wanted to be someone else, but it felt wrong, more like possession than getting free. But it was only a feeling, and by the time I’d picked my way back to the house by starlight, I felt fine, felt that things were going my way.