Typically, when we told a cab driver or somebody at the airport that we were heading to Rethymno, we would get a response along the lines of:
“Ah, Rethymno, my father came from there.”
“Ah, it is the third largest town in Crete.”
“Ah, Rethymno, it is really making an effort!”
Along the beach strip Germans drink beer at any hour. In front of one Taverna that advertizes the World Hockey Championship, there’s a cut-out sign of the man who must once have been the owner. Sporting a huge black afro and moustache he is pointing to the restaurant: “Here is Manolis Place,” a word bubble emerging from his mouth says. Tourists pose beside him as if he were a grand monument from antiquity.
I asked the waitress who her favourite Greek God was and she seemed confused, perhaps even embarrassed by the question. But I pressed her a little bit, making myself clearer, and then something clicked, “Oh! I think I would be Hera! She is strong, and like me she gets very angry when her husband is bad!”
Just on the periphery of the old, antique town that caters almost exclusively to tourists, is the new town, which is small and unremarkable. Graffiti and evidence of limited opportunity abound. Pasted to walls are obituaries for rural villagers– mostly olive and sheep farmers–who had recently passed away. The photographs had a forlorn quality. Unsmiling, almost surprised, as if this picture was the first that anybody ever thought to take of them, their simple, lonely gazes looked back at the world from the past they now inhabited.
After driving up the mountain on a rented scooter, Rachelle and I stopped to admire the view. An Eagle, motionless in the sky, hung above us—ominous and beautiful. And back down the road, through all the twists and turns, past the empty apartments and vacation retreats, we returned to our hotel patio. Feral cats carrying secrets slunk between table legs, pausing to drink from the pool by which the tourists lounged.
At night dead-eyed Gypsy children moved from restaurant table to table. The girls an imposition of roses, the boys a robotic exclamation of accordion music that terminated the instant they received any change. Three older woman, all chewing gum, seemed to be in some sort of vague command. They also went from table to table with roses, each pointing with a thick-finger at a potentially pregnant belly and then their mouths, moving quickly and without sentiment from rejection to rejection. Later, around midnight, after the restaurants had poured into the bars, the boys went to an Internet Cafe. Their accordions still slung over their shoulders, like schoolboy knapsacks, they sat at computer monitors watching Katy Perry videos and playing games, their eyes lighting up for the first time that day.