"Well," I said. I glanced over my shoulder and registered that the frothy satyr had retired into his shrubbery; the knife glinted as it slashed tamarisk in lieu of me. "Well, I suppose I should retreat to Daphaeu. Or am I permitted to stay?"
"Go, stay," she said. "I do not care at all."
She turned then, abruptly, and my heart slammed into the base of my throat. A childish silly reaction, yet I was quite unnverved, for now I saw what it was that had seemed vaguely peculiar from a distance. The lady on Medusa's island was masked.
She remained totally still, and let me have my reaction, neither helping nor hindering me.
It was an unusual mask, or usual-I am unfamiliar with the norm of such things. It was made of some matte light substance that toned well with the skin of her arms and hands, possibly not so well with that of her neck, where the scari^ provided camouflage. Besides which,.the chin of the mask, this certainly an extra to any mask I had ever seen, continued under her own. The mask's physiognomy was bland, nondescriptly pretty in a way that was somehow grossly insulting to her. Before confronting the mask, if I had tried to judge the sort of face she would have. I would have suspected a coarse, rather heavy beauty, probably redeemed by one chiseled feature, a small slender nose, perhaps. The mask. however, was vacuous- It did not suit her, was not true to her. Even after three minutes I could tell as much, or thought I could, which amounts to the same thing.
The blonde hair, seeming natural as the mask was not, cascaded down, lush as the foliage of the island. A blonde Greek, then. like the golden Greeks of Homer's time. when gods walked the earth in disguise.
In the end, without any help or hindrance from her, as I have said. I pulled myself together. As she had mentioned no aspect of her state, neither did I. I simply repeated what I had said before: "Am 1 permitted to stay?" The mask went on looking at me. The astonishing voice said:
"You wish to stay so much; what do you mean to do here?"
Talk to you, oblique lady, and wonder what lies behind the painted veil.
"Look at the island, if you'll let me. I found the statue of a faun near the beach," elaboration implied 1 should lie: "Someone told me there was an old shrine here."
"Ah!" She barked. It was apparently a laugh. "No one," she said, "told you anything about this place."
I was at a loss. Did she know what she said? "Frankly then, I romantically hoped there might be."
"Unromantically, there is not. No shrine. No temple. My father bought the faun in a shop, in Athens. A tourist shop.
He had vulgar tastes, but he knew it, and that has a certain charm, does it not?"
"Yes, I suppose it does. Your father-"
She cut me short again.
"The woods cover all the island. Except for an area behind the house. We grow things there, and we keep goats and chickens. We are very domesticated. Very sufficient for ourselves. There is a spring of fresh water, but no votary. No . genius loci. I am so sony to dash your dreams to pieces." 'r '. It suggested itself to me, from her tone of amusement, from little inflections in her shoulders, that she might be enjoying this, enjoying, if you like, putting me down as an idiot. Presumably visitors were rare. Perhaps it was even fun for her to talk to a man, youngish and unknown, though admittedly never likely to qualify for anyone's centrefold.
"But you have no objections to my being here," I pursued. "And your father?"
"My parents are dead," she informed me. "When I employed the plural, I referred to him," she gestured, a broad sweep of her hand, to the monster on the lawn, "arid a woman who attends to the house. My servants, my unpaid servants. I have no money anymore. Do you see this dress? It is my mother's dress. How lucky I am the same fitting as my mother, do you not think?"
"Yes…"
I was put in mind, suddenly, of myself as an ambassador at the court of some notorious female potentate, Cleopatra, say, or Catherine de Medici.
"You are very polite," she said, as if telepathically privy to my fantasies.
"I have every reason to be."
"What reason?"
"I'm trepassing. You treat me like a guest."
"And how," she said, vainglorious all at once, "do you rate my English?"
"It's wonderful."
"I speak eleven languages fluently," she said, with offhanded boastfulness- "Three more I can read very well."
I liked her. This display, touching and magnificent at once, her angular theatrical gesturings, which now came more and more often, her hair, her flat-waisted figure in its 1940's dress, her large, well-made hands, and her challenging me with the mask, saying nothing to explain it, all this hypnotised me.
I said something to express admiration, and she barked again, throwing back her blonde head and irresistibly, though only for a moment, conjuring Garbo's Queen Christina.
Then she walked down the steps, straight to me, demonstrating something else I had deduced, that she was only about an inch shorter than I.
"I," she said, "will show you the island. Come."
She showed me the island. Unsurprisingly, it was small.
To go directly round it would maybe have taken less than thirty minutes. But we lingered, over a particular tree, a view, and once we sat down on the ground near the gushing milk-white spring. The basin under the spring, she informed me, had been added in 1910. A little bronze nymph presided over the spot, dating from me same year, which you could tell in any case from the way her classical costume and her filletted hair had been adapted to the fashions of hobble skirt and Edwardian coiffeur. Each age imposes its own overlay on the past. Behind the house was a scatter of the meagre white dwellings that make up such places as the village on Daphaeu, now plainly unoccupied and put to other uses. Sheltered from the sun by a colossal cypress, six goats played about in the grass.
Chickens, and an assortment of other fowl, strutted up and down, while a pig, or pigs, grunted somewhere out of sight.
Things grew in strips and patches, and fruit trees and vines ended the miniature plantation before the woods resumed.
Self-sufficiency of a tolerable kind, I suppose. But there seemed, from what she said, no contact maintained with any other area, as if the world did not exist. Postulate that a blight, or harsh weather, intervened, what then? And me old satyr, how long would he last to tend the plots? He looked two hundred now. which on the islands probably meant sixty. 1 did not ask her what contingency plans she had for these emergencies and inevitabilities- What good, after all, are most plans? We could be invaded from Andromeda tomorrow, and what help for us all then? Either it is in your nature to survive, somehow, anyhow, or it is not.
She had well and truly hooked me. of course. If I had met her in Athens, some sun-baked afternoon, I would have felt decidedly out of my depth, taken her for cocktails, and foundered before we had even reached the dinner hour. But here. in this pulsing green bubble of light and leaves straight out of one's most irrational visions of the glades of Arcadia, conversation, however erratic, communication, however eccentric, was happening. The most inexplicable thing of all was that the mask had ceased, almost immediately, to bother me. 1 cannot, as I look back, properly account for this, for to spend a morning, a noon. an afternoon, allowing yourself to become fundamentally engaged by a woman whose face you have not seen, whose face you are actively being prevented from seeing, seems now incongruous, to the point of perversity. But there it is. We discussed Ibsen. Dickens. Euripides and Jung. I remembered trawling anecdotes of a grandfather, mentioned my sister's jewellery store in St. Louis, listened to an astonishing description of wild birds flying in across a desert from a sea. 1 assisted her over rocky turf. flirted with her, fell excited by and familiar with her, all this with her masked face before me. As if the mask, rather than being a part of her, meant no more than the frock she had elected to wear, or the narrow-heeled vanilla shoes she had chosen to put on. As if I knew her face totally and had no need to be shown it, the face of her movements and her ridiculous voice.