The name on the awning of the taverna struck me and brought up memories so rapidly and fully that I wasn't completely aware of the guitar music wafting up in my brain. If I had been I wouldn't have climbed the two terrazzo steps to the terrace level of the Tree of Idleness restaurant and sat at a table under a spreading olive tree.
Even then, though, I knew I was tempted to enter the restaurant because of its similarity to the one Adrianna and I had often frequented in the village of Bellapais in the northern, Turkish, enclave of Cyprus. As it was, the memories brought back so much pain that I collapsed more than sat, breathless, in one of the straw-bottomed chairs, and was pinned to the spot because the young Greek Cypriot waiter was so quick to take my order of a bottle of chilled Palamino wine and a plate of sheftalia.
I was on somewhat of a pilgrimage of nostalgia to try to hang onto memories of the good times with Adrianna—the years before she had contracted breast cancer and our world was sent spinning. But this was, perhaps, too much nostalgia too quickly. And running into a restaurant named the Tree of Idleness was more than I had bargained for.
Adrianna and I had met at a restaurant called the Tree of Idleness in northern Cyprus. She ran her own seaside pool bar west of Kyrenia on the northern Cypriot coast, but her then husband, Jalil, was a musician at both her bar and the Tree of Idleness, and I went to the latter restaurant in Bellapais one evening. I was in my first year following journalism school and was traveling around Europe. I told everyone that I was looking for out-of-the-way vacation places and was compiling a tour book, but I acknowledged to myself that I was hiding.
Jalil wasn't playing his set when I went into the restaurant. If he had been, I wouldn't have gone in. The open terrace under a spreading olive tree was nearly empty except for the usual elderly Turkish men, lining the wall in their straw-bottomed chairs, drinking the sludge they called coffee, and ogling all of the pretty girls walking through the Bellapais central square.
There was a girl for me to ogle too. She was sitting alone at a table and looking pensive. I was bold and asked her if I could sit with her while I drank an Efes beer. She was amenable to that. She was a mere wisp of a girl—a young woman, surely, but waiflike, with dark hair in a pixie cut, which made me think of her as a girl. I discovered in chatting her up that she was English. She said that she was there to hear the guitarist who would be playing in a few minutes. I almost left then, the mere mention of a guitar being what I was trying to escape, but the young woman—Adrianna—seemed almost to beg me to stay with the look in her eyes.
Then Jalil, a dark, handsome Turkish Cypriot man, who wasn't much older than I was and was strongly built, perched on a stool next to the door into the interior of the taverna and began to tune his guitar. Adrianna stopped speaking in midsentence and almost looked frightened when Jalil first appeared. But when Jalil started to play his soft, but insistent, Spanish guitar music, she became mesmerized. So did I for that matter, much to my chagrin.
Jalil was as compelling as his music was. His features were rugged in a way that promised to make him ugly in old age, and he was powerfully built, evoking surprise that he was strumming a guitar rather than working on a fishing boat. But he was beautiful now, and there was a sensuality in what he played and how he played it that seemed to hold Adrianna in thrall. It did me, certainly.
When he'd finished his first set, he came over to the table and demanded—I can't say asked, as it certainly seemed like a demand—that Adrianna tell him who I was. She introduced us and then, almost immediately, said she'd have to leave. I started to rise when she did, but Jalil asked, almost with a pout, if I wasn't going to stay to listen to his next set, which would be his last for the evening. As compelled as I was to do so, I would have said no, but Adrianna insisted that I do so as well.
The music of his concluding set was so compelling and sensual that I almost couldn't speak when he finished and came back to my table.
"You seemed to enjoy that," he said, with a smile.
"Yes, it was incredible," I answered.
"I watched you as I was playing. It enhanced my playing, I think," he said in a low, hoarse voice. "It was almost like having sex, wasn't it?"
"Yes," I murmured in answer. It was exactly like that. That's what I was hiding from, and that's why I probably should have left as soon as he started playing.
"That was my last set, but there is more that I'd like to play for you. I live on the coast, down west of Kyrenia, but I have a room here too, above the taverna. Will you come with me?" he asked.
"Yes," I said, instinctively knowing what he was asking of me.
And then in a lower-register voice, his eyes drilling into mine, and his fingers lightly brushing the hair on my forearm, causing chills to go up my spine. "And will you come for me?"
"Yes," I whispered.
Later Jalil told me about the pool bar on the Mediterranean coast that he and his English wife, Adrianna—he only told me they were married after he'd fucked me—ran, and he invited me to move in with them and use the bar as a base to do my tour book research.
I accepted. I knew it was a mistake to do so, and perhaps if he didn't play the guitar so divinely . . .
Once I'd moved into the pool bar house, I found that Jalil was often drunk and, when so, was a brutal, rough lover. I could take it—in fact I rather enjoyed being taken totally and roughly and slapped around a bit. But he fucked his wife this way too.
In time, after she'd been brutally assaulted in the night after the pool had closed down and I had to sit in my room and listen to his taking of her—knowing exactly how it felt to be grabbed and slapped and forced down under him on the bed and have my legs forced open and the hardness of him thrust up inside me and the plowing start as he choked the breath out of me—I could not ignore it anymore. I never reached the stage of trying to intervene. We were in his country, with its traditional laws. She was English and I was American, and she was his wife—almost his possession, in Turkish terms. And as long as he played his guitar for me, I was virtually his possession as well.
But later, after he'd left her sobbing to go drink himself further into a stupor, I'd come to her room and comfort her and tend to her bruises. In time, comforting her included giving her the gentle fuck that her husband wouldn't give her.
All the time he was fucking me too. When he found out that I was fucking Adrianna, we had to flee him and northern Cyprus. We went to London, where I wrote and she worked in a pub. We married when her divorce from Jalil went into effect, and we returned to Cyprus—this time to the Greek side—where we opened a small boutique hotel and taverna on the southern coast, near Limmasol. It did well—and my travel writings were doing well also. When Adrianna contracted breast cancer, we owned and operated a larger boutique hotel in the Lake District of England.
It took Adrianna two horrible years to die. I sold the hotel and went wandering, enabled to do so because writing about this was my bread and butter. But in my wanderings I found I was both seeking and hiding from something—something that I now was free to do, but that I still thought was wrong for me to do.
My wanderings and search for places Adrianna and I had been happy brought me back to Greek Cyprus. I was lodged at the Nicosia Hilton now, in the interior capitol of Cyprus. Restlessness had sent me walking in an ever-enlarged circle around the hotel. And that was what brought me to the taverna, on the small side street, named the Tree of Idleness, just as the taverna on the square in Bellapais on the Turkish side had been named.
I was still deep in reverie when the music began. The guitarist hadn't come out to the patio under the olive tree. He sat on a stool inside the taverna, which was really used only in the colder winter months, so he was the only one inside. It was dusk and he was under a spotlight, though, so he was hard to miss. He was playing Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Corcovado," which had been one of my favorites in college when I heard Cat Ralston play it.
I couldn't leave now. I was a prisoner to the music—and to the guitarist. He was considerably older than I was, maybe forty-five or so, of medium height, but he was hard-bodied in a sinewy way and with rugged features that showed wear and tear but, when put together, exuded power and sensuality. I couldn't help myself, I was already thinking of him as a lover and wondering if he'd be gentle or rough—was he long, thick? Jalil was both.
