Ecstasy at Sea
The sea surface is smooth and mirror-like, and from the deck of Bushido I scan the coastline for the mother and baby porpoises who live inside a blue-green grotto off Assos, the tiny village which clings to a small isthmus between the island and a huge, forested pine hill crowned by a ruined 15th-century fort. It is a bad time of day to meet mother and baby, the sun is straight up and blistering, the air still except for the noise of an occasional motor pest disturbing both the porpoises as well as yours truly. I first made their acquaintance at sunset the day before. My friend Nicola Anouilh, son of the great playwright Jean Anouilh, and a Cephalonian by choice, knows every nook and grotto of this, the most dramatic of the Ionian islands. He took me on his rubber boat inside the grotto, turned off the motor, and we both slid silently into the clear, cool water. Then we saw mama porpoise emerge, blinking her yellow-green eyes, or so they looked to us. Then came baby, more animated then mama, curious to see what these strange creatures who were visiting them were up to. We silently climbed back up on the rubber dinghy and slowly reversed out of the cave leaving them be. The old boy, the male, had left them long ago and Nicola tells me he only comes back when he needs a you-know-what rather badly. It was the most tender of scenes, one I shall not soon forget.
The normal peasant response to nature in general and porpoises in particular is to kill or drive wildlife away. There are only about 300 porpoises left around these waters, or so Nicola tells me; the rest have been slaughtered by fishermen. To kill a porpoise, a dolphin, or a hummingbird, for that matter, really takes gigantic ignorance, but we Greeks are Solomons compared with what Africans are doing to their own wild animals. I think about mother and baby porpoise while scanning their grotto through my glasses and feel sad. But my mood improves the moment I sling down the first of the day, an icy glass of white northern Greek wine, to go along with my feta cheese, tomatoes and Greek peasant bread. I am lunching in the simplest, and best, taverna, five miles south of Assos, run by father, son and daughter-in-law. Father sits outside with the guests, the son and his wife work inside the hot kitchen, losing pounds by the minute like boxers trying to make the weight. They emerge only to serve, then back inside the sweat box they go. It is like that for four months a year, and then they rest, piling on the kilos until it’s time to go back into training. It’s a good life, at least it beats trying to screw your fellow man in Wall Street, the City, or whatever places these strange creatures known as hedgies inhabit.
Assos, which means Ace in Greek, is aptly named. It lies on the bottom of the rugged cliffs and mountains that surround it, its peasant houses painted bright blues and reds built just off the aquamarine waters that gently lap against the limestone base. The only minus is the crickets, which have been known to drive some men mad, others crazed enough to murder their neighbours. (As it turned out it wasn’t at all the crickets’ fault, but a dispute over land, what else?) I flew to Cephalonia from London and straight on to my boat. After three weeks of non-stop partying, seeing a long dazzling beach, with a few unknown people minding their own business, was like finding the proverbial oasis in the desert. There are no Abramoviches here, no pop tarts, no celebrities. At night I hear a sad, elegiac, romantic sound coming from a lanterna, painted maroon; it is played by turning a brass handle at the side which strikes a series of levers inside. The old man with a white moustache who is playing it has more dignity than all the billionaires of St. Tropez and Monte Carlo put together, but then what else is new? As both Socrates and Plato said, a lanterna player is worth ten billionaires and change.
I’m on my way to Corfu to pick up the editor of Chronicles, Thomas Fleming, and his wife, as well as Peter Brimelow and his young bride, for a short cruise around that once wonderful island, now turned into a hell hole by tourism and the Greek propensity for ruining the old and beautiful and replacing it with Coney Island honky tonk. Tom Fleming is a polymath à la Paul Johnson, so I’m hoping something will rub off on me, but high winds are forecast, which means unless their sea legs are in good nick, we’ll be doing a mama porpoise and staying safely in a man-made grotto, the marina.
The last evening in Cephalonia, we dined at the Anouilh house, literally hanging over a gorge with a 300-metre drop to the beach below. It is safe to say that this is the most dramatic setting anywhere on earth. I got such vertigo that it was hard to swallow, but swallow I did, lots of fine wine, but never ventured from my seat in the outdoor dining room, and never once dared to look below. We then tried to telephone Michel Déon, the great French writer and Academician, who lives in Ireland, but there, too, it was no go. No signal, rather. The Anouilhs were laughing as I made my way out, clutching at furniture and concentrating on the door and freedom. My thoughts were with mama and baby porpoise, and how lucky they are to be in their beautiful grotto safely on sea level. On my way back I plan to visit them again and say hello.
Comments
Are you trying to promote top-down class warfare or what? This piece makes me so jealous I can’t see straight. And I’m not even Greek.
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Though the place seemed very well and humanely run, and the inmates happy, this made me sad that the amazing dolphins we swam with last year don’t have their freedom and aren’t in some similar place. It also evoked another of my favorite writers, and I’m glad you didn’t have 17 Papa dobles and make a wrong turn towards an unplanned BASE jump.
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Taki dear, that’s a laTerna!
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Wonderful essay Taki, I have been a fan of yours since your National Review days.
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“....the Greek propensity for ruining the old and beautiful and replacing it with Coney Island honky tonk”.
Actually, the Greeks haven’t done too badly when one considers what has been done in places like Spain or even Malta..
The real architectural crimes were committed by the brutal regime of the vulgar colonels.
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Arent you little old to be taking Ecstasy?
*joking, of course*
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I participated in the lawyering on a deal last year in which the Italian company purchasing our client’s assets was located on the via Martiri di Cefalonia, evidently outside Milan. A reminder of Cephalonia’s darker history (see “Captain Correlli’s Violin” for the sanitized version). Another fact that I seem to recall is that Sir John Napier was once British Resident on Cephalonia, siring two girls there by a local lass. He then rtired to England to raise his natural daughters in somewhat genteel poverty until called back into Her Majesty’s service; he went on become, at age 60 or so (there’s hope yet!) the Conqueror of Afghanistan, and author of the immortal telegram of triumph: “peccavi” (I have sinned), and married at least one of the girls off to a dashing young officer, as well.
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Peccavi = I have sinned (for Sind, you got it, I know).
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Oh, and could we pretty please have a broadside photo of the good ship Bushido? It’s maddening to have had it mentioned several times over the years, with comments about ugly yachts such as the monster built for the Oracle honcho, and no idea of what one described as relatively modest and seamanlike looks like. Please.
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@ RegS, You can find Bushido on the web if you search. It’s a beautiful green two master.
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i’m not jealous but you do pass the envy test. i hope you
put that one in your top drawer. can i ask a blue collar
question: is your top drawer the sock drawer?
no, i’m kidding a bit. it’s almost as beautiful in terms
of the sea down south in the gulf of mexico off of the
island of cozumel. it’s great to scuba dive therein with
the groupers. they’re huge some of them, the cows of the
sea yet they can move around down there like speeding
bullets or ghosts. fortunately mother Nature has programmed
them not to attempt to inhale anything the size of a diver
or it could really mess with one’s vital equipment.
if you feed them which is why they show up in the first place
wondering if you will, since others have. And then you drift dive
underwater in the current. They’ll follow you, thinking they’ll
be fed more. The current means nothing to their swimming ability
and they don’t realize that for a human speeding along, that’s all one
can do at the moment, no room for further feeding. Then they tire and leave
the current like stockbrokers looking for the next ‘client.’
I suppose hedgies would be the sharks. Think any of them’ll ever be human;
or were they short-sheeted, or truncated in evolution?
I remember when I used to work down there on municipal bonds so the rich
don’t have to pay any taxes the motto on the commercial side of it was:
‘take the suckers as they go by.’ frankly i’d put a grouper or shark
higher on the scale of evolution to be honest.
the sea, the sea i wonder why mother Nature ever had us go beyond.
I’m going back when i do in a good way - feeding the groupers.
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Thanks for the tip. How silly of me not to just Google bushido yacht. And it really is for sailing and not looking like a degenerate twit. How refreshing.
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Maybe we should request places for Taki to go and tell us about? Pictures?
One place I saw in a magazine a long time ago was Civita di Bagnoregio, accessible only by a narrow footbridge. Maybe he has already been there.
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I remember arriving on Kefalonia in the port town of Sami on the morning of September 11, 2001.
I remember how sick I felt after seeing the devastation brought to the world by our Islamic fanatic friends that day.
But what I remember most was taking the time to drive with my family around the island and finding Assos. I sat in a taverna on the dock and had lunch, oh how it brought me peace to be there.
Thanks for the article, every time I think of Kefalonia, I can’t help but think of that beautiful little picturesque village of Assos.
I need to go back soon.
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Quote: “Maybe we should request places for Taki to go and tell us about? Pictures?”
end quote of Daisy H. above. You know what I would love to see (if they weren’t so busy)
is a travel team of Taki and Tom Fleming traveling through Europe and having it filmed for
public television. Can you imagine that, that would be like having died and gone to
heaven. (With where to stay, see, eat, drink like the other shows do.) And allowing a
limited number of those who wish to join and travel along to sign up. It would rapidly I
reckon the gold standard of such shows. Wow. If there are scholarships to be able to
attend I would like to apply now.
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Gawd, this is embarrassing - listen Yianni, just ditch the literary pretensions - papa Hemingway you’re not!
Stick to chasing tail & rants about Jack Straw. Yasou!
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Ah, the life of the idle rich!
The rest of us mere mortals will never manage to be “lunching” anywhere, we’ll have to settle for “eating” at Sal’s diner, like the good proletarian cud-chewers that we are.
Still, when pulling up to the drive-thru window in a yacht, i guess one can be said to be “lunching”, nothing so ordinary as eating.
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