Landscape 6: Ducking and Shaving

I drag my feet behind me, my movement is determined by my hips rotating my legs forward instead of lifting my knees up, feet down first. Time has taken on a different measure. The southern summer constitutes a different season all together. A man in his late fifties, notoriously ugly like Plato, with a fat hairy chest, a reddened scrambled face and blond straw mustache, wraps a brown towel around his waist and wriggles his swimsuit off, pulling up a pair of dry undershorts. Three Greek men, unshaven, sun glasses on their foreheads, smoke and converse, gesticulating with chins and arms, formulate a philosophy of trivia. Several people stand in the margin of the water line. Hands leaning on their hips, elbows pointing outward. The wrinkled skeleton of an old woman in black bathing suit stumbled out of the water, arms swinging theatrically as if she's walking on glass. A man with his sunglasses on, in the water up to his ankles stares at the faded horizon. Everyone lost in the reflection of the sun on the water. Only the small children run with a clear purpose into the water. A mother leans back in her beach chair, holding a mini camera constantly pointed at the water line, ready to capture the moment. The shining lean bodies of two girls glide restlessly back and forth on their towels. The jolly comments of a Cockney accent rise from the water. The city walls of Rodos follow the contours of the old harbor. My body tingles from a sticky laziness, a layer of sweaty pearls covers my forehead. I stick my hands and wrists in a fountain at the Therme cafe, cooling off my face and arms. The impression of general stagnation is everywhere. Shops close in the afternoon, ice drinks float from table to table, nourishing the only life in town. Cold blood runs, warm blood stands still, stares in everyone's eyes, body's hanging in chairs, arms affectionately holding a shoulder. I twist open a frozen bottle of water, stir a straw around a frappe and feel the stream flow down my stomach, reviving a spur of consciousness. There is no doubt that intellect dies in such tropic heat, and disappeared a long time ago. Gone are the days of Heraclitus, Protagoras, Pythagoras and sophism. What remains are the pretentious monologues of retired doctors visiting from Athens and the warm-hearted smiles of a few modest professors from Thessaloniki, all evaporating. Two thousand years of irrelevance stuffs the hot air.