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PARTISAN REVIEW
something you don't understand. Ina has been here for as long as I can
remember. Now, maybe she se lls wind and maybe not, that I don't
know-but I do know that those who stay on her good side live well.
The fish they catch are plentiful, and the storms don't touch them ... "
Darkness crept into her voice, and Constantine fe lt her fingers shake
ever so slightly. A sickening suspicion began to form in the pit of his
stomach.
"Domenico ... He was not from around here, so he laughed at the
vil lagers' ways. When we got married, I tried to persuade him, but he
wouldn't give in. It insulted his reason, he used to say.... Well, I finally
got so scared of him always going out to sea w ithout the winds' pro–
tection that I sneaked out to Ina's cave and begged her to se ll me some–
but she refused. 'Your husband himself must come,' she said . But the
years passed, and he never did. And then ... then the storm hit."
Constantine looked at her as if he had never seen her before. Her face
was ca lm, and the sorrow lay on it like a sea l, dark, set, and accepted.
"Beppe was only ten at the time. When he grew older, he told me he
didn't like the sea, he wanted to li ve in Athens, find work there. I was
sad, of course, but a lso relieved, and he left. He'd come back every year
or two, but he always went away again. He wrote letters to me, such
clever letters .. ."
Abruptly Maria released his hand and finished her wine in a gulp.
"When Beppe was here last, he got into an argument with one of the
men at the taverna, and the man said to him that his father had died
through his own fault. Domenico had been too proud to respect the vil–
lagers' beliefs, the man said. That evening Beppe returned home very
upset and asked me many questions, so 1 finally told him about Ina. He
became angry, started shouting about dark ages and superstitions, and
rushed out. He was gone all night. Early in the morning he came back,
shaking and thin-lipped, repeating over and over that he was going to
prove to them their winds were nothing but nonsense.. .. I was scared,
I'd never seen him like this, so I kept an eye on him all day, but in the
evening he slipped out. Later they told me he took the first boat he saw
in the harbor ... "
Her voice trailed off. The only sounds in the kitchen were Hope's
wheezing and the creaking of Constantine's chair as he shifted uneasily.
THAT NIGHT CONSTANTINE COULD NOT SLEEP. Standing by the open
window, still in his suit, he looked out at the white houses of Inos that
gleamed in the moonlight like any quaint little vil lage on a glossy post–
card, and felt as if the solid reality of his life had suddenly revealed itself
