Hi everyone
Well...
Mr. Richard Tenenbaum wrote an amazing journey diary and the way he describes Matala
and the Mermaid cafe is only too lovely and vivid.
It's a bit long - but fun to read. Hope you enjoy.
Nuri
"Matala boasted several seedy cafes, the most popular being the Mermaid. Its verandah
spread out fan-wise towards the beach, the Mermaid was the central hang-out of the
cave dwellers. Their corrugated faces hunched over kerosene lamps and candles, they
huddled together, samples of all the migratory hordes gone A.W.O.L. from the anthills
of the world: campus Guevarists in Fidelista fatigues, sexual Leftists and sanyasins
in long-flowing robes, minstrels of sunburnt bohemianism, aspiring earringed gurus,
the Eminences and Prometheus-poseurs of Hip-- all fixated in the dim waxen light like
mannequins from Madame Tussaud's. But the specialty of the house consisted of dogs, a
dozen starving canary-yellow mastodons in half-sitting position who would go berserk
whenever one of the cave dwellers at the tables threw them a morsel. With the hounds
zooming by, ravenous and snapping, the Mermaid resembled a loony-bin, intoxicating,
like the rezina I kept guzzling in the corner.
The next morning I had my first chance to look around. On the beach, feeling
healthy as a bull and glorying in the blueness of the Greek sky, I suddenly heard a
scream from the top tier of the caves. Had Neptune himself emerged on a dolphin from
the waves, the metaphoric dimension of Mister Jason's descent from his cave couldn't
have been more dramatic. Like Tarzan, he dangled from a rope in mid-air and in a
twinkling disappeared from sight. Then contoured against the sky, unmistakable in his
raffish costume-- for all that it mattered, Mister Jason might have been deep-dyed in
green and armored in gold-- he meandered along the beach until he came to where I was
sitting. Then sticking out his ten-foot high pole crowned with a sheep's skull he
cried, "Welcome to Matala!"
Mister Jason, gallivanting along in his djellabah, was the pearl in the hip
oyster, but he was not by a long shot the only pearl on the beach. Next to me sat
Miriam, a stunner from L.A. Life had plucked her from a world where everything was
mined and fitted with booby-traps to a glorified apartment house for hippies, she
complained. Unlike Mister Jason, who presided with panache in his cave, Miriam was a
newcomer and lived in squalor. In this she was not alone. On any one day at least a
hundred people occupied the caves on a first-come-first-serve basis. The more elegant
caves were old Cretan tombs carved out of the rock with semi-circular burial niches
for sleeping. These, the museum pieces, belonged to0 the established residents of
Matala who looked down their noses on the new arrivals streaming in every day on the
bus. For Miriam the only available cave was a hole-in-the-wall and the flies on the
dung-heaps threatened with typhus.
But as the sun rose in state over the bay who cared about the dangers of
disease? Disinfatuated with the municipal-grays of technocracy, the cave dwellers had
dropped out of the rat-races, the assembly lines, the universities, and all the other
traps conjured up by the anthills of the world to rob them of their integrity; and now
they sat, imigris from a remote civilization, on the rocky beach. Like latter-day
Diogeneses, they had reduced the essentials of life to a sleeping bag and a rucksack.
To them Matala was not a cop-out or a cultural kamikaze-act but the fulfillment of a
hankering for the natural.
A sociologist might argue that there were two types of cave dwellers in Matala:
the typical middle-class drop-out and the unclassifiable. Mister Jason clearly
belonged to the latter category. No one knew where he was from. One rumor spoke of
Chile, another Italy, a third Canada. As the fifth oldest cave dweller Mister Jason
enjoyed status in the pecking order of seniority, but even in this world of outsiders
and desperadoes everything about Mister Jason was exotic and controversial. In the
Mermaid he held court at a special table where he tried to recruit the cave dwellers
to join him Mussolini-wise on a march to Athens in a plot to overthrow the Colonels.
He was serious. He volunteered to drill his recruits in the olive fields and when
people scoffed he mumbled about his years in the Spanish Foreign Legion and waved his
sheep skull called Beelzebub at them.
Several weeks after my arrival Mister Jason invited me for a visit to his cave.
"Don't worry," he admonished in his thick accent as we trekked along the pathways of
the cliff to his rope, "there's nothing to fear. I'll show you how to use the rope."
There are things one does at thirty-- and I was certainly playing Huck Finn at
thirty-- that one doesn't attempt to do ten or fifteen years later, and swinging on a
rope over jagged boulders on a cliff overlooking the Aegean to have tea with a nut in
a cave must certainly be one of them. Mister Jason's cave, dim, squalid, irregularly
shaped, boasted none of the amenities sometimes found down below in the tombs adjacent
to the bay. We sat cross-legged on the powdery floor while sipping our tea. All
around us the light of the candle metamorphosed the walls into eerie kaleidoscopic
formations. The whole scenario might have been a set-up for my demise. Instead
Mister Jason whispered, "I must show you my coin collection."!
He got up and emerged a few seconds later from the darkness holding a bag of coins
which he emptied on the ground. "Algerian," he said, his dark eyes glittering in the
light, "My people." His story then came out in bits and pieces, perhaps a fantasy,
perhaps not. Mister Jason claimed to be an Italian anthropologist from Turin. He was
stranded in Matala without money ( He occasionally worked as a day-laborer in the
olive fields ) and had only one all-consuming desire: to return to his tribe in
Southern Algeria. The tribe had adopted him. Anywhere else he felt lost and
deracinated. I stared at him as he explained his tribe's unique hieroglyphic system.
Clearly Mister Jason was if daft not uneducated. The costume was tribal. The March
on Athens was a scheme to rake up money for steerage to Algeria. His story fell in
place.
I stayed in the caves for three months. When I finally located my own cave it
was with a colony of five London anarchists who inhabited a warren of adjoining tombs
where one of the anarchists held periodic poetry readings. However pleasant the Brits
were, I needed privacy to paint. In addition, there was only one water spigot for the
entire cave population and disease of one sort or another always threatened. The cave
dwellers, imigris mostly from Europe and North America, although unorganizable, all
participated in one daily ritual.. At sunset they would emerge from their caves and
stand on the rocks to observe the setting of the sun over the Aegean. About three
weeks after my arrival I noticed during this ritual a small house perched on the
opposite promontory where very few cave dwellers lived and upon inquiry found that I
could rent the house with its outdoor water faucet for only eight dollars a month.
The house was little more than a stone shack with two !
rooms and almost no light. It boasted a stone verandah with a view of the town and
diagonally below in an open cave was the stall of a pig named Herman. By this time I
had had enough of Matala's midnight revels. I had left America to paint and though I
had become somewhat of a local celebrity by painting in the outdoor cafes-- the
Mermaid once tried to commission a wall relief from me-- I needed not only privacy but
security from theft. Matala's inhabitants were not known for their affluence. Some
of the cave dwellers like Mister Jason hired themselves out for a pittance as day
laborers in the fields. Others sold their blood for 350 drachmas a pint in the
Iraklion hospital. At this time I had in my pocket my savings from Berkeley, close to
$4000 in travelers checks , which in terms of today's currency represented a
considerable sum. Eight dollars a month seemed then a modest outlay to continue my
artistic activities.
In Matala my verandah with its water faucet was a godsend. One day as I was
sitting alone there occurred what I can only call an epiphany, a divine gift. Robert
Motherwell once remarked that in the 20th century a painter can either follow
conventional lines or find his own doodle. Sailing to Byzantium, my first original
doodle, in retrospect just grew on the paper as the waves lapped beneath me. If
surrealism is the spontaneous evocation of unconscious images, then Sailing to
Byzantium is very much an example of surrealism, a mad map akin to the maps of
schizophrenics, except that in this case the outline resembles that of the Eastern
Mediterranean. Its meaning must always remain to me inscrutable, and perhaps the best
commentary on Sailing to Byzantium was made by a professor and his wife who purchased
a later version in Ann Arbor and two years afterwards when I bumped into them in
Chicago they commented, "It's in our breakfast room. We stare at it every morning!
, but we still haven't exhausted its meaning, whatever it might be."
(c)
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