Paleo People

Paleo People

Pleasure and Progress--Chapter 13

Tom Bass

“Won’t you come?” Noemi asks, “We could go on a trip.”

Toby’s almost a teenager; he already hates everything and everyone. However, this is an opportunity to get what he wants.

Adventure.

“Once you’ve been to Jerusalem you don’t need the Bible,” she says.

“Why not Greece?”

He wins.

But not until the compulsory stop in England. For a fortnight he’s just one wet vinegary shit until the appointed hour when they pass over a black island over a black sea, descending swiftly, disembarking into the sultry Mediterranean darkness, a sunny tour rep greeting them at arrivals in Corfu.

The heat delivers its welcome. The cicadas moan in the darkness. The minivan snakes across the island—bugs glowing among cactus and cypress.

Dust whirls under the retreating lights.

Waves strike the bleak shore.

Palaiokastritsa.

The tour rep administers them to the proprietress, a large attractive woman who later opens a room behind the taverna’s veranda. The walls are green and dotted with tiny flying olives—mosquitoes, guaranteed to feed at dawn.

Tired, chilled, bitten, Toby’s the first person on the patio over the pebble beach and cove. He follows a path to the few cafes and shops that are the center of town. He’s undeterred by figs and peaches in a soppy paper bag or a baguette, short sharp coffee, or peptic mineral water. The bench is salty. The sea and mountains are as bright as spearmint gum. Everything looks fantastic.

His adolescent soul dissolves in the warm glassy sea that morning thanks to his mother capitulating to his demand for mask and fins; he’s absolutely spoiled this trip.

Noemi wraps herself in a sun-kissed towel and muses over her continental breakfast. She dots calamine on her swellings. Later, Noemi will join the esprit de corps of the Scandinavians and remove her tube top, the beach slowly inundated by gangs of appealing female bodies as the sun gains in joy.

A steep fragrant path leads to the lush mountains of Corfu. He can see Albania across the straits. The wind smells of mint, lizards, salt, pitch, his blood, his breath. The view’s too romantic. Nonetheless, it’s a seminal ideal that could be a revelation to an upset boy’s mind. Donkeys kick among the thistle and anis, and men stumble from a white village into the scrub, for such a view is like seeing all that life can and will be, perhaps with the luxury of the corner of an eye. Toby dips over a rise, the brush and stones scratching at his shins and pulling him to the dry red lime of the island, knowing he will return.

Toby’s miserable. Summer’s starting and school’s over. He’s already been in jail overnight for buying booze and he’s inadvertently pushed his lousy girlfriend in a ditch. He posts letters all over the world offering to volunteer for anything absolutely anywhere. Being an archaeologist seems sexy.

He’s forgotten all about his campaign, lost in the gap of empty restless June, when a beaten envelope from the antiquities department at Lecce arrives in Houston, the letter saying yes, he’s most welcome.

There’s no time to lose. Toby must go.

Even Noemi says so.

She’s proud to see him leave for Europe. He can put his Latin to use.

The plane circles the volcano.

It’s a hot, muggy day in Naples. Toby shares a taxi into town. Traffic signals, markings and signs that prescribe the rules mean little here. The cars coast, honk, then weave; the rhythm’s wonderful, vehicles surging, gliding, touching, conveying the lightness of the living to the blackest of secrets.

Toby hovers around the station most of the day, his train across the peninsula only departing at dusk. Bored, he does consign his knapsack for a while and ambles through a lovely, crumbling neighborhood, buildings sprayed in place with rude, menacing graffiti.

But the heat trims his energy and he withdraws to a cool billiard hall; dark men play and wager through the siesta hour, balls slide on the baize for hours—traveling yet not moving at all—Campari and a tiny black espresso at his side. It’s fabulous being Italian.

The train’s baked in the sun all day and reeks of human habits. There’s no choice but to get on and the first cool, albeit smelly breeze only appears once they’re tipping along Naples outskirts. His jetlag takes over once they round the volcano and pass the last human lava of villas, farms, and factories flowing into the hinterland.

No one comes to sit with him. No one takes his things. No one asks for his ticket until very late in the night briskly scented with mountain air.

The conductor rattles the door, forces his way in, sits down, dramatically pushing his buttocks into the brown vinyl seats; he winks, tips his black plastic cap, rubs himself as he asks for the ticket, taking the occasion to drop it and touch Toby’s leg with his wet fingers.

He’s quick to show the porno snaps in his wallet.

“You like girls?” He pushes them forward. “Girls?” He clenches his chest, then fondles his trousers, pauses. He purrs as he marks the ticket, then handing it over, letting his hand linger.

“Creep,” Toby says.

Old enough to claim some authority, he firmly pushes the man away. He’s certainly not drunk, though lonesome and unsettled might do.

The train falters on through the night, curtains swinging, soothing roar subsuming into restless hush. A sequence of abrupt stops begins before dawn, stations seemingly no more than a fluttering grape leave or a buzzing insect dashing across the cobalt sky. Suddenly, a flash of lapis and turquoise, the sea, a white conurbation at its edge, and wagons of freight and containers sketched into the landscape. By mid-morning he’s sandwiched between the Apennines and the Adriatic. Everything is hotter, sweeter, and more aromatic.

The last leg’s a cinch. At Lecce, Toby transfers to a cute local train covering the final few kilometers of track to Italy’s jagged heel. Speaking Latin is useless unless he wants to conduct mass. Somehow he figures out the G’s silent in Màglia.

Malia.

White dust covers the countryside of Graeca Minor and he’s smothered with it once he disembarks from the old puffer.

A priest intercepts him within a few minutes: he knows why Toby’s here.

“Prego,” he says, guiding the boy to his tiny white Fiat and bidding him to get in.

Màglia’s secondary school has been requisitioned for the summer as a dormitory for the team of volunteers and archaeologists. Toby tramps up the stone steps into the arms of none other than Professor Androtti, who smiles and lauds his “Americano.”

It’s the priest’s idea to retrieve a bottle of red from the car and the two of them are soon happily tittering in Androtti’s office in garbled English. 

On this first day the professor leaves Toby to unpack, rest, and get to know his two French roommates: Bruno, handsome, smiling, and Le Bestia, awkward and crooked toothed, aptly named due to the notoriety of his smelly feet. 

The team assembles in the evening at a restaurant; they will eat there every day henceforth. Fifty-odd people sit around the table: Androtti and cronies clustered at the head of the table laden with bottles of rosé and mineral water, grad students doting in the middle, and undergrads and volunteers like Toby neglected at the very extreme end. As the courses come and go (soup, pasta, calamari, prosciutto, fruit), Toby finds himself looking into the eyes of two disarmingly beautiful women. They’re Dutch and soon fast friends.

The dinner lasts until the professor rises and declares the meal and conversation done, and there’s nothing else to do except eat, drink, and talk in the interim, not a bad proposal considering Toby doesn’t often meet a pair of beautiful young Dutch women in a small restaurant at the bottom of Italy. It’s the moment to be an American teenager and debate whether there are good waves lurking in the Mediterranean or sound drug and prostitution policies in Holland.

He’d claim anything to get their kit off.

Later, the team promenades into town, Androtti leading the pack, hands clasped behind his back, spinning to admire his acolytes, protégés and just plain laborers. The stragglers have already plunked down outside a café for gelato—Toby’s lemon scoop incomparable to any lemon he has ever tasted—and the Dutch are willing to flirt with Toby by now, pulling and teasing. Adolescents zap around the plaza on their scooters.

Night has fallen and a breeze rises from the nearby sea.

Toby’s true to his vow to retire relatively early, since will begin in earnest well before dawn, sleep easy if it were not for the scent of Le Bestia’s gnarled feet, unfortunately not quite potent enough to drive away the biters.

Toby’s ready to bundle into Bruno’s car for the hinterland at dawn.

“Into the in-between,” he thinks.

But they first stop at the dig site.

People are carefully scraping at the earth with trowels and whisks, separating orange soil from yellow. Professor Androtti is hunting for the antecedents of the Greek colonies in Italy, a distinct proto-culture, the missing link establishing just how old and important are Italians.

Toby already wishes that archaeology could be more exciting. He’s not going further with Bruno today but kneeling in the dirt.

By midmorning everyone retreats to a nearby café for an espresso and sandwich. The locals peruse the pink pages of La Gazzetta Dello Sport. The team’s happy to melt in the shade except for the eager-beavers still analyzing a temple stone. Androtti sends them back out until one.

The light makes separating yellow dirt from orange quite impossible. Everything looks burnt, dun and matt. The science is futile, so Toby pretends, sweeping motes of history’s dust into the air.

They gather for lunch around the long table at the restaurant. Toby’s likes eating across from Anna and Roos, friendly and flirtatious like before; he suspects they’ve been thinking about him because he’s been thinking about them. Professor Androtti eyes the proceedings from his end of the table and Toby’s careful not to be too overt in his exchanges with them.

He dreads the siesta and Le Bestia’s unenviable feet.

Each evening they wash, sort and identify any artifacts from the day. The sacks of pottery shards from Bruno’s land survey are included. A prehistoric shark tooth or a pipe stem might be among them. Concentrations of shards known as impasto, a rough sandy ceramic belonging to the paleo people for whom Professor Androtti hopes to become famous, are why Bruno needs a team of eyes to assist him.

It’s serendipity when Androtti assigns Anna, Roos, and Toby as volunteers to this pleasant work. They find themselves walking in ranks; they comb through tobacco fields, melon patches, vineyards, olive groves, over entirely picturesque hills and glades, scanning and stooping to pick a tile or urn or ewer, anything manufactured. They show their shards to Bruno, who then marks their rough location on his geological survey map if they find a particular concentration. Sometimes they even collect some impasto and Bruno grins when someone hands over the blood-red pieces. Underneath could be a house, mill, workshop, temple, or town.

The survey team’s fine company.

Sometimes they can taste the sea. Not for the first time does Anna jump on Toby’s back and he piggybacks her downhill towards the sea, her breasts pushing into his back until he discharges her into the water. They take days surveying a large estate entered by a long approach lined with piñon pines; they pause each day to gather the nuts from the fragrant cones. The smallest of events are imbued with magic in this smallest of places like when Toby discovers a nest of centipedes, as thick as rulers, completely poisonous, under his favorite picnic rock.

The summer and the heat advance; they blacken their mouths with blackberries reaching from the stone walls; they soak in the polyphonic song of cicadas; they cannot imagine that trouble’s brewing on site.

Bruno, Anna, Roos, and Toby occasionally appear at the excavation and gaze at the progress: Professor Androtti really has unearthed a temple, with the help of a queeny colleague from Ghent who’s sharing the privilege of Professor Androtti’s office cum room.

One night after a few many beers outside the gelateria along the plaza, Anna and Roos seem to have a pact to be rowdy and aggressive. They claw at Toby and Bruno and the boys claw back: they’re wrestling vividly in public and everyone in Màglia sees what lusty orgy could stain or already has besmirched the good name of Professor Androtti, not least Androtti’s pal, the priest who is parked at another café, wondering about the reports of Bruno’s survey team combing the hills nude.

Toby becomes more aroused thinking of Roos, Anna, and Bruno together and wonders whom might be his eventual target. Feeling the bruises and scratches along his body, this might be the night. Will he surreptitiously escape from the cadaverous smell of Le Bestia’s feet to somewhere much more pleasant?

No.

Anna and Roos are angry and packing the next morning. They’re not coming on the survey today or on any other. They’re moving to another dig in the area run by a Dutch university.

“Androtti gave us marching orders,” Anna says. “The little fascist cannot tolerate any fun.”

“Androtti’s jealous because we’ve been giving you too much attention,” adds Roos. “He’s in love with Bruno, too, can’t you tell?”

The women berate the professor and his notions of what is and isn’t appropriate in a small traditional town on the heel of Italy, but Toby suspects it’s handsome Bruno and not him whom they are going to miss, even when they offer him not only a parting hug but two real kisses in the school hall.

Archaeology ceases to be of much interest to Toby with the departure of Anna and Roos, even with Bruno for company. Soon thereafter, he also leaves, forlorn and disappointed; he makes a careful choice: a berth on the upper deck of a ferry from Brindisi to Corfu.

The Greek port’s dismal but charming and just like he remembers it.

He steps down in the exhaust and dust along the main strip of Palaiokastritsa. There are many tavernas from which to choose. One lady assures him of figs from the trees and a breakfast of cheese and eggs. That clinches it. He’ll supply the bread.

“It was built in the night,” she says, “So we didn’t have to get a permit.”

He’s fine with the arrangement, the beach a short trot from his simple room.

A lovely brunette splashed on the sand makes him ache with desire. Her large breasts look painfully taut. But he doesn’t have the courage to look at her face or ask her name. He shakes the water from his lean body. As a last resort he changes from his wet shorts, but she displays disinterest at the dangling spoon. Toby’s Doctor Doolittle for not speaking to her or any of the cute girls selling T-shirts and lavender oil along the road.

The sexual anxiety sends him on a hike to the island’s interior. He’s looking for the spot. His legs, heart, and brain are nagging for air when he arrives on the island’s divide, the Balkan Peninsula stretching out before him. Gazing into the empyreal distance, he’s satisfied with the order of the world, Noemi’s voice behind him, urging him to shed all responsibility. Why have a home when life settles on serendipity? The wind seems to lift his body like a kite from the ground and he’s flying over the straits of Otranto among the breasts of islands, looking for a home, looking for clues of Androtti’s proto people, looking for the place where humanity might have been born.

He can search all he likes, he thinks, the project of a lifetime that he’ll probably never finish, the charm of adolescence despoiled and ruined, adulthood lying ahead somewhere behind the sun, of which he’s been warned but chosen not to listen, reality sending him striding through the mint and thistles back to the mundane beaches and coves below.

Toby’s traveling to a specific dot and he must use all means. His last night is in Corfu airport. He’s kept back just enough for a flight back to base. He curls up next to the baggage carousel and sleeps, not caring about the bucket flights arriving in the night like he had so long ago. The ambient conversations filter into Toby’s dreams: a fabulous cocktail party where he’s well-tanned baggage, all vapor and vermouth among the holidaymakers waiting for their cases.

Sometime before dawn he boards the first flight of two. By mid-morning, the itinerary on pause, he reckons he can walk into Athens; he leaves the perimeter of the airport, heading for the Parthenon. A long boulevard draped in smog indicates that this is impossible. Why not settle for the beach? He turns his brown feet in the dirty sand, trying not to fall asleep in the acid sun. He doesn’t wander; he’s too low on resources and too high on confidence, so much so that he’s talkative and confident the entire way to Heathrow, teasing ten quid from a fellow passenger, a girl, surely willing to pay such a small price to ditch the intrepid archaeologist and explorer that he temporarily imagines himself to be.

He’s careless, a snob and insists on the train, the girl’s tenner getting him as far as Reading. Undeterred, he marches to the motorway and hitchhikes further as evening falls. Late that night he locates Momma Empire’s flat hidden among a street of grumpy maisonettes in Bath. He has one saving grace: a key.

He taps on the radio, fuzzing to life and issuing gale reports.

A sense of remorse and guilt reminds him that she’s not here.

She’d be impressed by the solo journey.

The books are dusty and smell of tobacco and mildew. The rooms overflow with furniture. Two gold angels play tag on the ceiling. Carpets and tapestries line the floors and walls. The four winds blow from the molding. A chrome globe hangs over the window to ward away evil. The hallway brims with ivory, heavy silver, jars of spices, basins and ironed damask, course and fly-fishing rods, oil-skin anoraks, wellies, and spades. The pink cellar bedroom is littered with hand-painted silk scarves. Beads of amber and amethyst, garnet and ebony hibernate in a jewelry box. Two closets, a garish array of textures and patterns, pajamas, robes, shawls, caftans. A chest of drawers is stuffed with fancy, fine knickers.

He recalls his final words to her: “You’re a bitch. You’re not just being one, you are one.”

Why did he say it?

Or did he really mean his mum?

Momma Empire had been pursuing him for days for his mannerlessness when he finally lets her have his teenage judgment. His teeth are clenched in braces and his face is in spots. What’s really wrong is that Momma Empire has cancer but she doesn’t tell him. Nor anyone.  Only when they return to America piqued by Momma Empire’s atrocious behavior does she let them know.

Momma Empire fades rapidly. She makes a business of vanishing, but not without spirit or style. She pads around the spa town, attending lectures in the library or tending to her allotment or buying a ticket in the Gods for the theater. She regularly pouts in a coffee shop staring at the weir and fumes on a Woodbine. Yet she’s courageous and battles with her vigor but it’s no good. The odds of lax doctors and late diagnoses are not in her favor.

Momma Empire’s flat is full of Empire; her spell of mystery lives on. The uncanny leopard skin leers on the blue carpet floor, food for the next evolution of moth. The divan is as uncomfortable as ever. Animal ivories roar on a mock Serengeti. Momma’s esoteric books of suspects, teachers, and poets—El Idres Shah, Ouspensky, Gurdjieff, Steiner, Rumi—are interspersed among the more mundane guides to antiques, cookery, fishing, gardens, and languages.

For a woman who seemed perpetually cross, he can’t imagine what Momma Empire sought in the Theosophy movement?

The screed about masters and pupils wiggles on the pages.

What kind of antidote is this?

Apparently she sought harmony and unity with God, whatever demeanor. Did she know that God does not even know himself? Perhaps she needed a cup in which to brew her wanderings, tasked with awakening.

His former ally against the inanity of the American suburbs really has disappeared. He claps if that would summon her but nothing stirs. The damp downstairs is permanent.

No Momma Empire.

No note, no hint, nothing.

He rubs an ivory hippopotamus but nothing like that will bring her back; she’s been gobbled by hawks or angels, no more than a potpourri of memories in her pink bedroom and the churning shadows of the trees tossed by the wind.

A lantern swings above the porch.

Loose slates scuttle down the roof.

Midnight’s at the end of the garden.

Crossroads kiss beyond the house.

Further on, a river swirls with trout.

White wax trickles from the candles.

The ash glides down from a cigarette.

Maybe she hasn’t gone to the cemetery after all, he considers, Momma Empire back from the dead to put the living in order. Certainly, her unsettling secrets may have aroused her from her slumber, the young girls advised to take hot bathes, drop from heights or drink a bottle of spirits if the poultices of white rose and nutmeg and rainwater don’t work in her kitchen, babies induced from their places, helping the girls, as Momma Empire says, “Move on.”

People already are walking on the wet street above the bedroom. Toby’s sheets are cold and wet. He dons a pullover, climbs up to the kitchen, pours the grouts of a Turkish coffee and rustles the newspaper in a fragment of sunlight. His finger plays with one of Momma’s Woodbines. Toby resists lighting it, then opens the door to the lounge.

He cries out.

Is that Momma expired in the armchair, the yawp of life blown from her body?

She’s thin and emphysematous, pale like the blue paper and clutching a smoke. A tiny fly buzzes at the corner of her eyes wryly smiling in one corner.

Is it no more than a cosmic joke composed in his mind by Madame Blavatsky?

“Dear Momma,” he calls, “Momma Empire!”

But it’s no use; he can’t rouse her with his voice and he’s too squeamish to close her gelatinous eyes.

Toby retreats downstairs and phones a neighbor.

He yanks on his dirty travel jeans before hastily opening the front door.

The neighbor confirms that Momma Empire’s quite dead. “Weren’t you at the funeral, Toby?” he asks.

“Oh no, sir, I had exams. But can you tell me who’s that?” he asks, pointing at what appears to be an empty chair.

He doesn’t know what to say in the pause

“Well, get some rest,” suggests the neighbor. “Maybe you should call home.”

 The phone rings deep in the American night.

“She passed away, you know that,” his father say, full of sleep but capable of euphemism. “You coming home?”

“Before college starts, dad,” he says, “Not long.”

Toby’s spooked and finds some company in the radio, accidentally nudging the needle over Radio Caroline. Ska and Rocksteady clang from the ether. A DJ anchored somewhere out in the Channel gives the command and Toby can feel the listeners like himself hoist the island’s canvas and set sail for the Caribbean.

Although there’s little to do in Bath for a teenage boy without cash, still he drifts around the sand-colored town so high on itself that no one bothers with a kid like Toby Pleasure. The hipsters on the high street are competing to mimic David Bowie. The hippies on the coal canal Chewbacca. There’s nothing cool or dangerous about a tan geek with spots and braces. But they’re inordinately polite, the cooperation that people offer one another in the cramped quarters of Britain’s terrain, vales of decorum and brooks of friendship, when he asks for a tip about where to go.

“The Hat and Feather,” they say. “The drug pub.”


Up next: La Naranja and the Cosmos