Bellapais Villa Taylor Possession

When I was young, I had a different attitude. I wanted it all, and I had it all, but it was like a right then, a god-given right, and I found it easily. I never quite lost it, and now I have it all again, but no, not like I did back then.

Not like the days when I was young and I first found my escape on the island, in the Bellapais villa.

Ahh, the days of eating lunch, then drifting down to the square beside the ruined abbey, its broken stones clinging to the steep slope of the Kyrenia range, where it tumbled down to Cyprus' northern coast. Then sitting around ogling the local Turkish Cypriot men in the heat of the afternoon and letting them ogle me. Until I got that certain look from one I fancied and took him up to my small rented villa and let him vigorously and noisily fuck my brains out on a lounger under the sun on the terrace overlooking the Mediterranean.

Or down to the square in the twilight after dinner, with those fairy lights in the olive trees around the fringe of the café's stone terrace. And, in that soft light, hearing the twittering laughter of the Mediterranean men and watching the wisps of strong Turkish tobacco smoke drifting up, as I was eyeing and being eyed. Until I got that certain look from someone I fancied and took him back up to the villa and let him fuck me in long, slow, sweeping strokes as I lay back on my lounger on the terrace under the stars.

And maybe, if he was really, really beautiful and masterful, taking him back to my bed for a night of sleep broken by brief periods of wanton lust, waking to the feel of a hot poker at my hole and a wheedling whisper for permission at my ear. Me sighing "Yes" and arching back to accept the homage of his throbbing need to be deep inside me.

Breakfasting on the terrace by the small pool. Then pulling him into the pool and wrapping my legs around his waist and letting the swirling water soften the rhythmic in and outing as I threw my head back and watched the morning Mediterranean light filter through the sighing branches of the olive trees. Thinking then about my after-lunch visit to the café on the square, already assessing which eyes I would respond to that day.

Then that had ended, unexpectedly, as those seemingly endless days of youthful perfect pleasure do. Unfortunately, they decided to have a civil war on Cyprus and carve it up. Abandoning my villa with nothing but the clothes on my back, I scrambled up and over the Kyrenia range ridgeline, as Turkish paratroopers glided down into the meadow below the cliffside abbey walls. And I stumbled into the temporary safety of Nicosia along with streams of sobbing Greeks, being displaced for decades from their ancestral homes.

For a long time I couldn't get back to that part of the island either, even though my foreign status enabled me to enter there through Turkey. I tried briefly living in the Greek sector, teaching composition at the English School. But even this, a job I had been lucky to acquire, only made me ache for my favourite part of the island—my rented villa perched above the Bellapais abbey. Every day I faced a composition class, I recalled the author who had preceded me in the villa, Lawrence Durrell, and I ached for the ecstasy I had found there. The fulfillment that Durrell had enjoyed there at the tip of his pen was a fulfillment that I also had enjoyed, as nowhere else, at the tip of an endless succession of Turkish Cypriot cocks.

I returned to Sydney, where the island became a memory, and I collected Mediterranean and Turkish lovers in Australia instead. And I found many of the same attitudes to sex that I had found on that small island still hung about the men I took home and enjoyed being fucked by, there on that much bigger island continent lost in Asia. But I was never to attain the sexual fulfillment and satisfaction that I had in my Bellapais villa. And my life was spoiled; Australia could no longer satisfy my wants and needs.

Then I had the opportunity to return to Northern Cyprus, and I was in two minds about it. Torn by knowing that returning to the paradise of our past is so often a mistake, and that instead of regaining paradise, we lose the perfect memory of it.

So I hesitated. But the pull was strong, and in the end, I said, "For six months." Six months to see if I could recover that timeless sense of pleasure.

I returned via Istanbul to an airport I would never have recognised and drove a hire car along roads that hadn't been there when I left. But when I arrived in Bellapais, the town I had known, it was to find it recognisable, hardly changed at all. And when I drove nervously out to the village where I had spent my weekends, I found it familiar enough to make my heart race and my cock stiffen in anticipation. Then I drove cautiously up the familiar, narrow, steep, stone-bedded road to where I had rented the small villa I had spent my weekends and free time at. And it was there still too. I stopped the car and sat there looking at it, wondering. Remembering.

It had been added to, a large pergola and a carport. But they hadn't spoiled the setting or the view. When I looked down from where I was on the mountainside, I saw the changes more clearly. Units in small complexes scattered up the side of the hill behind the village in search of the sea views and a cool breeze. But my old Bellapais villa remained apart, near the summit of its spikey mountaintop overlooking the Mediterranean.

"It's a mistake to try to relive the past," I muttered to myself. Still, the villa drew me to it. If I told anyone among the English-speaking hangers on in Cyprus of this attraction, they would have told me that this was because this was the villa where the British novelist Lawrence Durrell had penned his

Alexandria Quartet

. But that held no attraction in and of itself to me. The pull of the villa for me was totally sexual. I had never felt more sexually alive than I had felt while living there. Whenever I had brought a man to that villa, I had died in his arms at the height of passion. It was only now, as I stood on the terrace of the house overlooking the Mediterranean that I knew that it was the villa that had drawn me back to the island. I felt stupid; it was so obvious that I should have known it all along. It was fate that I return, not least signaled by the fact that the villa obviously was empty, ready to be occupied once more.

I told myself a dozen times that it was fate that I should take up the strands of my Bellapais villa existence, as I drove down to the house where my landlady lived, parked the car on the side of the cobbled lane, and wandered into the courtyard. Two small children were playing in the coolness of the small garden and the girl ran off screaming, "Grandma."

When Layla emerged, I recognised her immediately. So little seemed to have changed in the time I had been gone.

"Ah, Mr. Taylor," she said smiling "You on holiday?" she asked, "Come in. coffee?" she added, leading the way into the front room of the house.

A good-looking man was in there resting his plastered leg up on the sofa in front of him.

"My son," she said. "You remember Baris?"

"Oh, yes," I said.

But he had been very young when I last saw him, only a silent, lean wild boy of eight or nine. There was no way I would have known this thickening; seemingly half asleep man was him.

"Mr. Taylor is back," Layla said to her son, as if coming back was hardly significant. "If you want to rent the villa, it is free again," she told me. "We now mostly rent to holiday people, for a month. They all want to come and soak up the atmosphere of where the

Alexandria Quartet

was written, but only for a month at a time," she added as if it was an insult to be expected to let it out for so short a time.

I nearly laughed at that image. I wondered how pleased they would be to have known the atmosphere of my own sensual habitation there that had overlain Durrell's residency.

"I am working here for six months," I said, "A trial."

"You will stay," she replied, and I noticed the son look at her with a frown.

"Maybe," I said, "I have to see . Things have changed."

"Nothing has changed," Layla said emphatically. "This is still the best place for you. For a time, there was another young man, an American, there in the villa who reminded me so much of you. I thought that he would stay as well. But there were rumors. And eventually he left. Just like you did."

I felt at a loss for words. I wondered how much she knew about my life in the villa—just how much the young Turkish Cypriot men had talked about me. And I wondered what Layla meant about this American being like me. She obviously had been fond of him; I could tell it in her smile when she spoke of him. The same smile she graced me with.

We drank strong Turkish coffee in small cups and ate Turkish delight as the son talked sporadically to me of the new developments in the Turkish-controlled portion of the island, and she disappeared into the kitchen, leaving him to appear to make the arrangements. He seemed hesitant.

But my life seemed to unfold without my conscious thought, and I got back into my hire car, knowing that when it was cleaned I was taking the villa again.

My work was the same but different, and the staff in the office were more modern in some ways. And there were more European faces on the street than I had expected. The new apartments appearing everywhere on the slopes were mainly full of English people, with a smattering of other Europeans. The less affluent, or more optimistic, forced out of the other half of Cyprus by the high prices and taking a chance that Turkish Cyprus would stay stable, willing to take the chance because it was dirt cheap in comparison.

I stayed in a hotel until the villa was ready, finding that there was little suitable accommodation in the harbor town of Kyrenia and that being in the smaller mountainside village of Bellapais was probably convenient while I worked out my six-months trial.

In a week I was already back into the life of the village as if I had never gone. Then my manager suddenly resigned his post to take his wife home to America for treatment of some cancer that had been found late, and I was told I'd be filling in for him. Everything seemed to be conspiring to ensure I stayed there, as I knew his job was mine if I did.

After I got the news I went back to the hotel and stripped off and looked at myself in the mirror, knowing what my real fear was. I was in good firm shape but I had been twenty-five back then when I had left. Now I was fifty-five. In Australia I had cruised the places where Mediterranean men had congregated. The mild Greeks escaping from their small islands, or born in Melbourne, and the Turks, Lebanese, Palestinians, refugees from half a dozen civil wars. And then in time I had ogled their descendants. Young Australians of Mediterranean descent, men with the beauty and grace of cats. And occasionally they had ended up with me and found me more than satisfactory. And sometimes I had paid them in one way or another. But in the last years it had been their fathers and uncles that had fucked me most.

I looked in the mirror and knew what really frightened me. That I would go down from my villa to the café on the square and would return alone too often.

I moved just the bare necessities into the villa, saying to myself that I was only trialing it. That the drive might be too much each day. But really wanting to be free to leave quickly without a fuss, if I couldn't bear to stay. And I was nervous. More than I had been for years.

The first day I was half hard knowing that that night I would be going down to the square and into the café and sitting on a stool by the bar and eyeing them off. And I was afraid, afraid of being the desperate old gay man sitting there like he was begging.

I went down to the square in the twilight after dinner, and the fairy lights in the olive trees around the fringe of the café's stone terrace were there still. And in that soft light I could hear the achingly familiar twittering laughter of the Mediterranean men and see the wisps of strong Turkish tobacco smoke drifting up into the night.

I walked into the café and took a stool by the bar, ordering a beer from the wiry waiter who brought it to me ice cold and refreshing. I nervously eyed the men about me and a few looked at me briefly, but I saw the young men of the type I had once adored and been eyed off by laughing together and ignoring me. Then one turned and looked my way and I thought I saw that look start, before a friend gripped his shoulder and he turned away.

"You used to come here," a voice said behind me, and I turned to find the waiter smiling at me shyly. "Many years ago," he added.

"Yes," I replied, glad of something to break the tension in the air. "Nearly thirty years ago." And I realised the face was familiar. "Mustafa," I said, amazed "You were here then."

He nodded shyly. He was still lean and wiry and holding his age well, and I remembered that he had come to the villa with me more than once and had fucked me long and hard.

"You are back at the villa?" he asked

"Yes," I replied.

"I am off at ten. Maybe I come see you there. Remember old times," he said, and I smiled at him, reassured that tonight at least would be familiar.

I stayed till the café closed and we walked up the cobbled lane together, saying little.

In the villa, he playfully pushed me back to the wall inside the door and squeezed my package, then followed me as I removed my clothes and led the way to the bedroom. I hadn't dared to get a lounger for the patio. Knowing there would be nothing worse than to have it there and never use it. To see it every day, accusing me of being too old and a fool to imagine I could recapture the past.

So instead Mustafa pushed me onto my bed and I stripped my briefs off as I lay back. My cock was hard and dripping as he pulled off his own pants and briefs and I looked at the body of a man who worked hard—lean, with ropey muscle across his belly. His tool was surprisingly thick for such a lean man, and I remembered it had surprised me when I was young. As my own large piece had surprised him.

I lay back, and he was casual and experienced as he opened me up with his calloused fingers and then entered me. My channel opened suddenly for him and pulled him in, playing a long remembered game. He fucked me deep and hard with obvious eagerness, and I lay back and moved my hips with him and moaned, happy to be there, more than happy for it to be just as it was, a familiar friendly fuck. But also a good hard one. And I spouted up my belly quickly as the tension drained from me and I moaned and moved in tune with him. With his pumping hips and driving tool. He came, and laughed a shy little laugh of satisfaction and pleasure and leant over me as if to kiss me. And he did. A big friendly kiss.

I was busy until the weekend, when I wandered down to the café on the square after lunch and took a chair at a small table by the door and sat there in the warmth of autumn ogling the local Turkish Cypriot men and feeling the reassuring pleasure of several of them ogling me. Mostly older men, and some starting to spread from too much time spent sitting idly in the café. But when I returned to my villa, it was with a man who had still not lost the last shadow of the beauty of his youth, and he was rough and demanding as he took me. The sort of man I wanted. That I needed. The dark olive skinned body with its heavy splashes of glossy, curly, black hair over his chest and belly overpowering me. Fucking me hard and deep and for so long that he seemed to have been saving himself just for me.

I may not have recaptured the past completely, but I knew that the last few weeks had been my journey home, and that I had arrived at last.

On Monday morning I drove into the city and parked at my office, where I quickly made some excuse and left, going in search of a lounger for the terrace of my villa.