The custom in warm weather is to hang curtains in doorways. The solid finish of the village yields to human needs. Surface shapes are engagingly disturbed. The wind blows, houses open to the passerby. There's no clear feeling of mysterious invitation. Only of stillness moved inside, stillness darkened, the grain of the inner day.The rooms are plain and square, immediate, without entranceways or intervening spaces, set at street level, so close to us as we walk in the narrow passage that we feel uneasy about intruding. The Greek in conversation crowds his listener and here we find the same unboundaried exercise of life. Families. People clustered, children everywhere, old women in black sitting motionless, rough hands folded in sleep. The bright and vast and deep are everywhere, sun-cut clarity, the open sea. These modest rooms mark out a refuge from eternal things. This is the impression we have, Tap and I, a sense of modesty, of nondescriptness, only glimpsing as we pass, careful not to appear too curious.Above the stepped streets there were occasional open spaces, stronger wind. I followed Tap past a large well with a conical iron cap. A woman with an open umbrella sat on a mule, waiting. Cats moved along the walls, watched from roof ledges, cankerous, lame, mangy, some of them minute, the size of a woolen glove.Climbing. The sea appeared, the ruined windmill to the east. We paused to catch our breath, looking down on a church with an openwork belfry of some patchy rose-pink hue, a rude and pretty touch in all the layered white. A single small church might press together half a dozen surfaces in unexpected ways, sea-waved, domed, straight-edged, barrel-vaulted, a sensuous economy of shapes and arrangements and cross-influences. We heard the hoarse roar of a donkey, an outsized violent sound. The heat felt good.I showed Tap a postcard my father had sent. It had a picture on it of the Ranchman's Café in Ponder, Texas. My father had never been to Texas as far as I knew. He lived in a small house in Ohio with a woman named Murph.Tap had received the same kind of postcard. In fact almost all my father's communications for two or three years had been in the form of postcards showing the Ranchman's Café.The message on his card, Tap said, was the same as the message on mine. He didn't seem surprised by this.A distant lazy drone. Cicadas. We'd seen them come whirring out of olive trees to sail into walls, dropping in a dry stunned rustle. The wind began to gather force.Tap led me to an unpaved area of houses with courtyards, the upper limit of the village. There were tall gateways here, some of them located a fair distance in front of the houses to which they belonged. Seen from certain angles these gateways framed a barren hilltop or the empty sky. They were artless arrangements, free of the texts they put before us, material cleanly broken from the world.We climbed a rock path that worked around a shoulder of land and curled out of sight of the village. A whitewashed chapel across a defile, abrupt in brown earth. We were high up now, in the sweep of the wind and sea, stopping frequently to find fresh perspectives. I sat at the edge of a narrow stand of pine, wishing we'd brought water. Tap wandered into a rocky field just below. The wind came across the defile with a sound that changed levels as the current increased in speed and reached the trees, rushing, from a pure swift surge of air to something like a voice, an urgent emotion. Tap looked up at me.Ten minutes later I got to my feet and walked out into the sun. The wind had died. I saw him standing fifty yards away in the steep field. He was absolutely still. I called to him, he didn't move. I walked that way, asking what was wrong, calling the words out across the immense silence around us, the drop-off into distances. He stood with his knees slightly flexed, one foot forward, head down, his hands at belt level, held slightly out from his body. Arrested motion. I saw them right away, lustrous black bees, enormous, maybe a dozen, bobbing in the air around him. At twenty yards I heard the buzzing.I told him not to worry, they wouldn't sting. I moved in slowly, as much to reassure Tap as to keep the bees from getting riled. Burnished, black-enameled. They rose to eye level, dropped away, humming in the sun. I put my arm around him. I told him it was all right to move. I told him we would move slowly up toward the path. I felt him tense up even more. His way of saying no, of course. He was afraid even to speak. I told him it was safe, they wouldn't sting. They hadn't stung me and I'd walked right through them. All we had to do was move slowly up the slope. They were beautiful, I said. I'd never seen bees this size or color. They gleamed, I told him. They were grand, fantastic.Raising his head now, turning. Did I expect relief, chagrin? As I held him close he gave me a look that spoke some final disappointment. As if I could convince him, stung twice before. As if I could take him out of his fear, a thing so large and deep as fear, by prattling on about the beauty of these things. As if I could tell him anything at all, fake father, liar.We held that inept stance a moment longer. Then I took his arm and led him through the field.