only blue-eyed blond Greek I’d ever met, and said, assuredly, “You will love it!”
Even if you hadn’t been strung out in youth hostels for months, keeping constant paralyzing track of your dwindling dollars, repetitively checking the pouch around your neck that held your passport and your money with a kind of obsessive worry, you would drink up this warmth and this generosity like it was ice cold beer. Iannis was thrilled to show me his city, the food of his country, his house on the island, to give me a frothy glass of apple, milk, and honey to drink in the cool salvation of his terrace, where a small orange tree grew, giving off its perfume.
And Kostas was right. I did love the island. I loved it so much that I stayed for months, and found a job in a well-lit touristy restaurant in the center of the port that paid a thousand drachmas a day where I washed dishes and pots and cleaned all the calamari and made hundreds of koriatiki—the Greek salad with tomatoes and feta. The waiters wore black pants and white polo shirts and smoked a pack of cigarettes in a single shift. I made my home in a little hut I had built on the beach. I showered in the ocean, shat behind the rocks, slept under the stars, and spent those early days in Serifos wandering the mountainside. Chamomile, mint, capers, oregano, thyme, figs, lemons, oranges—these grew so rampantly that when you walked, the herbs crushed underfoot and released their scent into the air. I followed narrow goat paths, and the shiny, black licorice, jelly bean goat poops guided me to hidden fresh water and mountainside gardens tended by their owners who came and went on donkeys. At the top of the world, high up in the mountain away from everything, I would sometimes encounter an old man, a goat herder with his tinkling goats, coming down the mountain riding his donkey in a wooden saddle as his dog followed. “Xiarete!” I greeted him, and he said back “Iachera.”
And every night when I finished work, I walked to the very end of the port, to the last light before the vast darkness beyond the mountain jutting up out of the sea. There was a restaurant there. A few tables scattered in the yard under the long-needled pine trees where the locals went. Tourists had been swarming the Greek islands for decades of course, and everyone knew of the wild nightlife in Santorini and the party yachts in Mykonos, but Serifos was a world away, a tiny island in the undiscovered Cyclades where only Greeks went, where the oven at the bakery in Livadi was still used communally and town women brought their casseroles to bake in the ashes after the day’s bread had been baked, and Margarita’s little place there at the end of the port will forever be my idea of a perfect restaurant. Her son went out in his boat and fished and whatever he netted and however much of it he caught is what was for dinner. If it ran out at eight p.m., it just ran out, and people ached to see some delicious thing on the next table that they couldn’t also have because there just hadn’t been enough. If you wanted the lamb, it came saucy and ungarnished—alone on a plate. If you also wanted broad beans or potatoes, you ordered them separately and she served them also on separate plates. Margarita, maybe only forty but looking sixty, with sun-hardened skin and thick working hands, rode her donkey, sidesaddle, up into the hillside and got everything she cooked from her garden. I walked there many times in the early mornings, and when you pushed open the little gate fashioned out of branches and bedsprings, there was a rough and casual Eden inside, with olive trees, grapes, fig trees, zucchini and eggplant and tomatoes, and the wild greens called horta that she boiled in salted water to tame drabness and then drowned—delicious death!—in her own olive oil. Her freshwater spring was covered by a heavy wooden lid, and in her shed she stored a few tools, some bags, and large vats of homemade, copper-colored wine. Margarita, like many on the island, made her own wine. There was no menu, no daily special, no appetizers, entrees, and no dessert, ever. You either went into the kitchen and lifted the lids to see what there was or let her come to