The Pillars of Hercules

While I bought lurid postcards of ancient pottery depicting bizarre sexual acts, Jack went to another jewelry store with Leonides. I found them later, being pursued by the owner.

Hurrying into the taxi, Jack said, “When a jeweler tells you a stone costs a hundred and forty thousand dollars and then after some haggling says that he’ll give it to you for eighty thousand dollars—a discount of sixty grand—does that inspire confidence?”

This brought forth a lesson in the form of a story from him in buying anything in the Middle East. This applied to Greece, Turkey, Iran, Israel, wherever one was possessed of a desire to spend.

“What I am about to tell you is very valuable,” he said. But the story was complicated. It concerned his friend Ali who had sold him a carpet, then bought it back, and resold it, all at different prices.

“What’s the point of the story?” he asked in a rhetorical way. It was this: Nothing in the Middle East has an absolute value. What a cousin is charged is different from what a stranger will be charged, and an old customer is told an altogether different price. There is no way of assigning a price to anything except by sizing up the buyer.

New passengers had arrived on board and were audible as they got acquainted with the old ones.

“—and then I’d be facing a two-hundred-thousand-dollar medical procedure.”

“—so big it wouldn’t fit in the safe in the house, so we had to take out a separate policy.”

“—on a scale of one to ten my brother-in-law is a minus four.”

“—our tenth cruise in two years.”

“—up the Amazon.”

“—Antarctica.”

“—Galapagos.”

The ship sailed south to the Peloponnesian port of Nafplion, gateway to Mycenae. I had seen the Mycenaean gold masks and bracelets in the museum in Athens, and felt in need of a little exercise, so I stayed in Nafplion and climbed the thousand steps on the hill behind the town to visit the Fortress Palamidi. This brooding structure of eight bastions that dominates the skyline was pronounced impregnable by its Venetian architect Agostino Sagredo. But he had tempted fate, because a year after it was finished, 1715, the Turks landed in the Peloponnese and immediately captured it. About a hundred years later in 1822, the year of Lord Byron’s death, during the Greek struggle for independence, the Greeks wrested it from the Turks.

At the top, a sign: Visitors are prayed to enter the site decently dressed. I knew this was another example of Greek puritanism and misplaced veneration. I asked the young man at the entrance to explain to me what it meant. He was unshaven, in a grubby shirt. He was playing cards with his much grubbier friend.

“People come with bikinis and shorts. They don’t look nice,” he said.

Oh, sure, Demetrios, and you look like Fred Astaire.

Hiking farther on, outside town, I met a woman on the footpath and asked her whether there was a village that lay at the end of it. I apologized for not speaking Greek.

“Don’t apologize,” she said. “I am Italian.”

So we spoke Italian. Her name was Estella.

“What part of Italy are you from?”

“I am from Uruguay,” she said, and added, “Let me tell you Uruguay is much cleaner and more orderly than Greece. Do you notice that Greeks throw paper and bottles all over the place?”

The litter in Greece was remarkable—the roadsides, the beaches, even the ruins were scattered with plastic bottles and candy wrappers and rags and tin cans. I wondered why.

“Because they are barbarians,” Estella said. “They are different from every other European.”

“You don’t think Greece is modern?”

“I have lived in Nafplion for three years. I can tell you it’s not pleasant. Greece is decades behind in every way. Twenty or thirty years behind the rest of Europe.”

“I am just visiting. I saw the fort.”

“The fort is like everything else here. Interesting, but dirty.” From a nearby hill I had a good view of Nafplion, the small old Venetian quarter, which was now just souvenir shops; the commercial part of the city, which had gone to seed; and the rest of it, ugly and recent and jerry-built and sprawling.