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| Cliffs at Cape Drastis, Corfu |
From Cape Drastis in the north west of Corfu. We stop in Sidari.
We pull up behind the kiosk that's on the edge of the parking area. It's almost empty, a brown gravelly space and a couple of tall and graceful eucalyptus trees. The kiosk is pale cream, its windows lined with the usual packets and tubes of sweets, bags of crisps and biscuits, packets of tobacco...
The heat bounces off the gravel in the parking lot, reverberates, so the air quivers like the surface of the sea, where small fish dart underneath. Near the entrance to the lot, two men are pouring water into a depression in the ground, (a mixture of small stones, earth and dust). The leaves of the eucalyptus trees hang limp, like plants needing water.
A breeze would blow away neglect, swell the leaves and branches with movement, and the rustling (eucalyptus leaves make the lightest, the most musical of sounds), it would stop me in my tracks. There is no sound and no wind. Even the men watering the ground make no noise. Even the man walking slowly across the lot, with an enormous piece, a triangular piece of what looks like a monstrously large plastic float or lilo, even he (and I can only see his ankles and feet emerging from underneath the triangular plastic burden he carries on his back) as he walks slowly, (possibly because the large load is awkward – and it looks as if his back has turned into a giant manta ray) walks noiselessly across the dry and dusty parking lot, until he disappears behind a wall at the other side.
The sun beats down, R sits in the car and J goes to a shop to buy some water. The men hosing the muddy puddles don't look up. The car radio is playing, an Orthodox chant, like a dirge from some memory so distant it feels located in your body's rhythm, in the pulse of it, the way you swing your legs while walking. Maybe it was from a first memory of sunlight, then its removal, of cold and dark and night.
The puddle in the parking lot has been filled up – the men with hoses move on.
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| House in village near Cape Drastis |
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