380
PARTISAN REVIEW
"Madame Passano," he said abruptly, "who lives on the other side of
the hill?"
She swung toward him, and her lips twitched, whether with anxiety
or anger, he could not tell.
"Costas," she said steadily, looking into his face, "the island people
have their ways, and you have yours. Let it be."
He waited, but she said nothing else. Finally he nodded, pushed the
door open, and walked out. This time he did not stop at the top of the
hill but cautiously made his way down. The evening was clear like hand–
made glass, seagulls cried shrilly, and for one illusory instant he thought
he caught a waft of some subtle, expensive perfume-orange blossoms,
lilacs, and something else, something unnameably exotic and rare. Then
there he was, at the foot of the hill, waves murmuring just a few long
strides away from the tips of his shoes.
Warily he scanned the shore before him and noticed a jagged crack
running along the cliff which looked much like a cave opening. A vision
of a storybook band of pirates camping out between the boulders made
him smile a tense smile; still, as he crouched in the sparse shadow of the
cypresses, he was suddenly glad of the gun in his holster.
And precisely then he heard a woman singing, surprisingly close by.
Neither young nor old, her hoarse, warm voice unhurriedly ascended
higher and higher into the sky, following a strange, haunting melody.
The sea tore her words away before he could quite hear them, carrying
them far, far out, to where the sun was about to set; but after a while,
in a momentary hush between the waves, he managed to catch a couple
of lines. "Daughters of happy Nereus, swimming through the light, /
Charming their flowing souls with their liquid dance."
The verse sounded odd, almost foreign, and with a start he realized
that the invisible woman was singing in the dead language. It must have
been a lyric from some ancient poet he did not remember. Amazed, he
strained to hear more, but already the singing stopped, as abruptly as it
had begun-and then he saw her.
She came out of the opening in the cliff and stood on the shore, her
face upturned toward the sea. He was too far away to see her features,
but was sure he had never met her before. Even from this distance, she
seemed different from the solidly built, faintly mustachioed girls of Inos,
so tall and slender she looked in her long, free-falling, glimmering robe
whose color he could not make out. Entranced, he watched her silhou–
etted against the sky that was rapidly turning brighter, acquiring first the
tint of rose petals, then the taint of newly spilt blood-and suddenly he
understood. He remembered that only men ever came here, recalled their
