censored skiathos journal (part 6)

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I go to the shop to get some bread, which there’s none of, and as I’m walking away, bearing just a bottle of water, a man walks past and kind of double takes, then he stops and says: ‘Hello, I know you very well, you come to Skiathos many times, no?’ and I blink and look at him, he’s normal looking, blue shirt, Greek, short hair, sunglasses, jeans, and I say ‘I don’t think so’, but he’s so convinced he says, ‘You have brother then, I know I see you many times here before’ and he doesn’t want anything from or need anything from me, but I tell him, ‘No. sorry, not me’, and he calls to the supermarket owner, a dry, friendly man and says in Greek something like (I assume) ‘You’ve seen him before haven’t you’ and the supermarket man nods, and I say again, I don’t think so, and the man says well ‘In that case you have a brother or something,’ and gives a slightly knowing laugh and I walk off waving over my shoulder.


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I cooked and ate. Tuna from a can. Aubergine. Rice. Yoghurt. It was nothing to get excited about.

This is the process – feel ok, read, eat, then some lumbering dark shadowed thought ambles by, saying, good evening, hate to disturb you, but – And then you are disturbed.

You can see no way out of the mismaze, none at all, forever and ever.

You are full of a tacit anger, or sadness, or fear.

Then the cloud goes on, slips off the radar, you get back to whatever…

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Finished the Rainbow. This afternoon on the beach. I waited for the bus for an age in a bid to go back South, but the bus never came so went to the local Paraskevi beach instead.

It is quite a cruel act of an author to let his lead character just elide away over the last sixty pages. Melt into nothingness. His fate unrecorded. So be it. It is quite a cruel conception to plant a manboy in the belly of a rocket and fire him out into space.

Maybe it’s compounded by my state of mind (Well, no, really…) but it also seems a lonesome book at the end, all those pages and people and they’re mostly just thrown back on themselves. Fending for themselves in the Zone. Ring any bells there? Searching for the transcendent which may be revealed… in their futures, missing clues, finding clues, but in the end, holding no one’s hand, staring out of the Imipolex shroud all by themselves. And the author doing the same thing to you, dear reader, no matter how familiar he may seem. Work it out for yourselves. He not going to make it easy for you.

It’s fair enough. I have taken a lot out of living in its pages this last week or so (is it a week). It has given me much, none more so than revealing the borders of ignorance. I noted, with great pleasure, this morning, Marcel turning up in the closing pages. Thought that when I read the book 20 years ago I might not have spotted him, nor perhaps, Red Malcolm, certainly, unquestionably, not the Rioplatensa Spanish, the sad inflexion of a complex geography. Wouldn’t even have suspected there’d be any reason for me to know, ten years or so later, that it was all bona fide, too true, sir, too true for words (it’s all in the tone). The tone. So maybe that’s a reason to carry on living. So that you can come back to the Rainbow every twenty years and see the things you missed the last time. Which gives me perhaps two more readings of it. Perhaps less.