I was supposed to go to Delos today.
I did not go to Delos.
I have been telling people for three days that Delos is the reason I came, and when I said it, it was true. There is a boat. It goes in the morning. I know where it leaves from because I have walked past it twice.
This morning I looked at the boat, and then I looked at the town, and I went and had a coffee instead.
I want to be clear that this was a decision and not a failure of planning.
Well. It was mostly a decision.
The truth is that this island has quietly got hold of me, and I did not see it happening.
In the afternoon here, the light does most of the work for you.
The buildings are white and low and stand very close together, and almost everything here has some kind of slatted roof thrown over it. A pergola, a cane awning, timber laid across the gap between two walls for shade. By four o’clock the sun comes through all of it sideways, and the whole town is striped.
It lands on the walls. It lands on the ground.
It lands on you.
You do not really choose it. You walk into it, and suddenly you are wearing it, and there is nothing to be done except stand still for a second.
I spent an unreasonable amount of the afternoon inside a shadow.
The lanes are the same as they were on the first day, which is to say, confusing, and I have stopped fighting them. I no longer try very hard to get anywhere. I pick a direction and let the town decide.
You can walk the same thirty metres four times without noticing because every corner looks vaguely like the last one and the whitewash takes the edges off everything. It should be maddening.
It is oddly restful.
Which is how I walked past the same church four times before I actually looked at it.
It is the white one at the edge of the old town, the one everybody photographs from roughly the same three square metres of ground. I had passed it on the first day and registered it as a church, filed it, moved on.
It is not one church.
It is five.
Four at ground level, with another above them. They were not all built at once, either. The first dates to 1425 and the whole thing took roughly two hundred years to become what it is now.
That explained the shape to me.
All those soft white curves that look as though somebody sculpted them are the places where one church meets another. It was not conceived as the strange, beautiful thing everybody photographs now. It became that way by being added to.
It is named after a gate into the old castle. The gate is not there anymore.
A building named after a door that disappeared.
I liked that.
I am not going to tell you which one it is.
I sat on the step for a while and did not go inside.
Later I went down to the beach, which on this island means something fairly specific. Rows of striped umbrellas set very close together, a man behind a bar cutting fruit with enormous patience, and a great many people who have clearly been there since eleven in the morning.
I had a glass of cold white wine, got in the sea twice, and read four pages of a book.
The umbrellas throw their shadows across the shallows, so the water near the shore is a row of dark circles, and the water beyond them is not. You can swim in and out of the shade.
I am aware this is not a profound observation.
It was the best thing about the afternoon.
Walking back up, an older woman was pulling her blue shutters closed against the last of the heat. She did it with the efficiency of somebody who has done it every evening for fifty years and has absolutely no reason to think about it anymore.
That is the part of this island I keep looking at.
Not only the windmills or the sunset. The fact that underneath all of it there is a small working town getting on with its afternoon while the rest of us stand in the lanes photographing the walls.
I changed the ferry.
I am staying a few more days.
Delos has been there for several thousand years and will presumably manage another week without me.
V.
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