El Presidente and I sit in lawn chairs on the shale of Haraki beach, basking in the last penumbra of afternoon sun. We’ve been here all afternoon, sipping Mythos, throwing stones into the sea, discussing women and…well, mostly women. I’ve told him about Susanna. He told me about an Egyptian woman he met at Cairo’s Friday market.

“I found her on the alley of the birds. She was a dove herself, American. A little dove with a voice like the moon. She lived in a tomb in the city of the dead with two brothers and her father. I went home with her and had tea with the men, and we talked football, and also women, too. They were very open discussing beautiful women. The tomb was very comfortable, although dark. The door was broken so they’d hung a carpet and they used candles and oil lamps for lighting. They slept on mats on the floor, right next to their dead ancestors. I came every day for two months. I was a young man then, before I met my Turkish wife. I was big and handsome, American. Not like now. This was before my muscles turned to fat! And I smelled better, too. I wish you could have seen me then American. I was a sight. I liked her brothers, and the father. The girl was very beautiful, and she sat and smiled while me and the men talked. Sometimes I would walk with her through the alleys of the dead, or visit her friends in the tombs that they called home. We did not talk much. There was no need. It was our silence that was beautiful. How is that, I ask these years later? How is it silence with a person is most beautiful, silence without sex? It was an energy between us, one without words, or that words would have spoiled. It is a mystery that haunts me all these years. I came to like her silence so much that I went beyond wanting sex, if you can understand that. It would have been too much, to fuck her. It would have spoiled her somehow. It would have been below her. And yet every day I went back for her, and I would torment my sleep dreaming about her. Dreaming about touching her forearm. How ridiculous, American! Me, dreaming about a girl’s forearm. And she was only a girl then, fourteen or fifteen. One night her father said to me, ‘I want you to marry my daughter and live here with us. Tonight, I want you to make a woman of her.’ So that night the father and brothers left me and the daughter alone in the tomb. Outside were the sounds of prayer and meals and life, the smoke of meat and incense. We sat with candles amongst the dead of her family. It was our silence, as always. It still confuses me, American, why I did not want her, or why I did not take her then. I think I had decided that this could not be my life. That I needed to run from it. But why, why? I could not tell you why. What is the difference between life there, or here, or anywhere? I was not searching for anything solid from life, I could not tell you what life I dreamed of. Maybe if I had dreamed a life for myself, I would have lived differently. But I knew that being with this girl in her tomb could not be my life, no matter how beautiful our silences. ‘Would you like to have me?’ she asked in quiet Arabic. I knew the language once, many years ago, though I have forgotten it, have forced myself to forget it. I said I would like many things with you, but not that. She looked hurt but she was very strong, American, and she did not cry or look away. She said you should leave then because my father and brothers will kill you. And she walked with me then, taking me on a route through the tombs that she knew her father and brothers would never take. When she left me I did not look back. I did not look back because I knew I would never see her again. Not looking back is a great regret of my life…I have not told that story for a long time, or to many people. I think sometimes about that girl and her life. I wonder what it was like. I wonder: what if I had stayed? I almost stayed. I thought at times I would stay. There would have been no Turkish wife, and no English wife. I wonder about the other women I have missed because I did not stay. The joys and pleasures of a life not lived, American, can be very powerful, if you fall into them, like falling into a well!”

I tell him about the Canadian poet I met in Paris and the month we spent wandering that city in winter. He tells me about a squalid summer spent fucking an Israeli widow in Jerusalem.

“It was always doomed from the start. I would come and she would make dinner. I always brought wine. This was after the failure with my Turkish wife, when I was very very sad. I was not good for much then, not even fucking, though sometimes we did fuck, very sad fucking, where one or both of us would cry. We had not a future, both of us knew. But we were so lonely and with each other we were less lonely.”

“It’s different now,” I told him. “Encounters like that. They don’t just end. They linger instead, somehow become tainted or colored by what comes after. They stop being legendary, and become very ordinary. Because of the internet and cell phones. You can keep tabs on each other, you can keep talking to one another. I sometimes email the Canadian poet, or read her poetry. And there are photos of us together, on the internet. There is a record of our encounter, and I suppose it will probably outlive us.”

“I do not know if I like that, American.”

As day slips sonorously into evening, El Presidente turns glum.

“I think they will take my pension,” he says. “I go to my solicitor yesterday. He says, ‘El Presidente, I need money for men in Athens. I need money to pay myself.’ I say, ‘I have no money, that is the problem! We are friends, old friends. Help me as old friends do.’ But he says, ‘El Presidente, my hands are tied. Times are tough for all of us. This is the new way in Greece. We must do what the Europeans tell us.’”

“What’ll you do? If they take your pension.”

He shrugs. “Drink myself to death, perhaps.” He glances at me out of the corner of his eye. From this view - his jowls resting on his chest - he resembles a de-tusked walrus. “No, no. That I won’t do, American. But what I will do, I do not know.”

“You have a lot of friends.”

“It is difficult for everyone,” he says. “It is harder each year to live like we live. The summer is longer, and the prices are higher. And there are more police. They sit in the bars all night, so that the owners must charge full price. Before, you go to a bar, and the owner knows you, and he doesn’t charge you for half of what you drink. It is good for all. He pays less taxes. But now, because the government needs taxes, they send police down for the summer.” He shakes his head. “Soon, they want this place to be all tourists.”

“Like me.”

He smiles at this, refills my glass with beer.

“Yes,” he says. “I suppose I should not like you.

The water inexorably rolls in. Night comes on. These are the reliable things in life, the constants in which solace might be found.

“I hope Yiorgo does not sell,” El Presidente says after a long silence. “He thinks of selling, I know. He is very torn. Alan says he should sell. I think Mona says he should sell. It would not be true to Yiorgo if he sells. And he knows that. But soon, he has no choice but to sell, I am afraid. Soon, we all must sell what we can, or this new world will forget us.”