Mercy

country the nights we go or to my room the nights we go right

there. M y room is a tiny shack with a single bed, low,

decrepit, old, and a table and a chair. I have a typewriter at the

table and I write there. I’m writing a novel against the War and

poems and theater pieces that are very avant-garde, more than

Genet. I also have Greek grammar books and in the afternoons

I sit and copy the letters and try to learn the words. I love

drawing the alphabet. The toilet is outside behind the chicken

coops. The chickens are kept by an old man, Pappous, it

means grandpa. There is m y room, thin w ood walls, unfinished wood, big sticks, and a concrete floor, no w indow ,

then the landlady’s room, an old woman, then the old man’s

room, then the chickens, then the toilet. There is one mean,

scrawny, angry rooster who sits on the toilet all the time. The

old woman is a peasant who came to the city after all the men

and boys in her village were lined up and shot by the Nazis.

T w o sons died. She is big and old and in mourning still,

dressed from head to toe in black. One day she burns her hands

using an iron that you fill with hot coals to use. I have never

seen such an accident or such an iron. The only running water

is outside. There is a pump. M ’s fam ily is rich but he lives a

vagabond life. He was a Com m unist w ho left the party. His

fam ily has a trucking business. He went to university for tw o

years but there are so many books he hasn’t read, so many

books you can’t get here. He was the first one on the island to

wear bell-bottom pants, he showed up in them one day all

puffed up with pride but he has never read Freud. He w orks

behind the bar because he likes it and sometimes he carries

bags for tourists down at the harbor. O r maybe it is political, I

don’t know. Crete is a hotbed o f plots and plans. I never know

i f he will come back but not because I am afraid o f him leaving

me. He will never leave me. M aybe he flirts but he couldn’t

leave me; it’d kill him, I truly think. I’m afraid for him. I know

there is intrigue and danger but I can’t follow it or understand

it or appraise it. I put m y fears aside by saying to m yself that he

is vain, which he is; beautiful, smart, vain; he likes carrying the

bags o f the tourists; his beauty is riveting and he loves to see

the effect, the tremor, the shock. He loves the millions o f

flirtations. In the summer there are wom en from everywhere.

In the winter there are rich men from France w ho come on

yachts. I’ve seen the one he is with. I know he gets presents

from him. His best friend is a handsome Frenchman, a pied

noir, born in Algeria and he thinks it’s his, right-wing;

gunrunning from Crete for the outlawed O . A . S. I don’t

understand how they can be friends. O . A . S. is outright

fascist, imperialist, racist. But M says it is a tie beyond politics

and beyond betrayal. He is handsome and cold and keeps his

eyes away from me. I don’t know w hy I think N ikko looks

Russian because all the Russians in the harbor have been blond

and round-faced, bursting with good cheer. The Russians and

the Israelis seem to send blond sailors, ingenues; they are

blond and young and well-mannered and innocent, not

aggressive, eternal virgins with disarming shyness, an

ingenuity for having it seem always like the first time. I do

what I want, I go where I want, in bed with anyone who

catches my eye, a glimmer o f light or a soupcon o f romance.

I’m not inside time or language or rules or society. It’s minute

to minute with a sense o f being able to last forever like Crete

itself. In my mind I am doing what I want and it is private and I

don’t understand that everyone sees, everyone looks, everyone knows, because I am outside the accountability o f

language and family and convention; what I feel is the only

society I have or know; I don’t see the million eyes and more to

the point I don’t hear the million tongues. I think I am alone

living m y life as I want. I think that when I am with someone I

am with him. I don’t understand that everyone sees and tells M

he loves a whore but I would expect him to be above pettiness

and malice and small minds. I’ve met men from all over, N ew

Zealand, Australia, Israel, Nigeria, France, a Russian; only

one Amerikan, not military, a thin, gentle black man who

loved Nancy Wilson, the greatest jazz singer, he loved her and

loved her and loved her and I felt bad after. I’ve met Greeks in

Athens and in Piraeus and on Crete. It’s not a matter o f being

faithful; I don’t have the words or categories. It’s being too

alive to stop and living in the minute absolutely without' a

second thought because now is true. Everything I feel I feel

absolutely. I have no fear, no ambivalence, no yesterday, no

tom orrow; not even a name really. When I am with M there is

nothing else on earth than us, an embrace past anything

mortal, and when he is not with me I am still as alive, no less

so, a rapture with no reason to wait or deny m yself anything I

feel. There are lots o f Amerikans on Crete, military bases filled

with soldiers, the permanent ones for the bases and then the

ones sent here from Vietnam to rest and then sent back to

Vietnam. Sometimes they come to the cafes in the afternoons

to drink. I don’t go near them except to tell them not to go to

Vietnam. I say it quietly to tables full o f them in the blazing

sun that keeps them always a little blind so they hesitate and I

leave fast. The Cretans hate Amerikans; I guess most Greeks

do because the Am erikan government keeps interfering so

there w o n ’t be a left-wing government. The C . I. A. is a strong

and widely known presence. On Crete there are A ir Force

bases and the Amerikans treat the Cretans bad. The Cretans

know the arrogance o f occupying armies, the bilious arrogance. T hey recognize the condescension without speaking

the literal language o f the occupiers. M ost o f the Am erikans

are from the Deep South, white boys, and they call the Cretans

niggers. They laugh at them and shout at them and call them

cunts, treat them like dirt, even the old mountain men whose

faces surely would terrify anyone not a fool, the ones the Nazis

didn’t kill not because they were collaborators but because

they were resisters. The Amerikans are young, eighteen,

nineteen, twenty, and they have the arrogance o f Napoleon,

each and every one o f them; they are the kings o f the w orld all

flatulent with white wealth and the darkies are meant to serve

them. T hey make me ashamed. They hate anything not