Bourdeto

by Edward Lear, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

At ten past six the green boat came round the end of the mole, and Lela Moustaki put up the shutter.

Stamatis Sordinas saw both of these things from the roof of the community office, where he had gone, as he went every morning, to read the rain gauge. The gauge was a copper funnel on a post, and it had been sent to him in 1989 by a Service in Athens which had since changed its name twice. In the night it had caught four millimetres. He wrote this in the book in pencil, and the wind, which was from the north-west and light, and the sea, which was slight, and the sky, which was the grey of a pigeon's back going to apricot over Corfu. Then, because nobody had ever told him not to, he watched the harbour.

The boat was not quite green. It had been painted with what was left over when the church railings were done in 1997, and the church railings had been a dark bottle-green, and the sea and the sun had been at it for twenty-nine years, so that it was now the green of a lettuce leaf at the bottom of the bowl, gone pale and soft. It came in slowly, as it always did, with the engine making the noise of a man clearing his throat at a funeral. Nikiforos Kapsalis tied it at the end of the jetty, took out the blue plastic crate, and carried it up the beach to the kafeneio.

He did not go in. He never went in. He stopped at the window beside the door, the one with the hinge that Lela had never had mended, and she opened it from inside and he put the crate on the sill. She looked into the crate. She took out whatever she was going to take: this morning, from where Stamatis stood, two red mullet and something larger with spines. Then she put a glass of coffee on the sill, and he drank it standing, with his back to the harbour, and gave her back the glass, and took up the crate, and went away along the beach to the hut at the far end where he lived among his nets.

They did not, as far as anybody could tell, say anything. They had not said anything for thirty-one years.

Stamatis wrote, in the margin of the weather book where he wrote nothing official: N. K., 06.10. Usual. He had been writing it since 2002. He did not know why. It was simply an event that took place every morning at the same time, and it seemed improper to observe the rain and not to observe that.

---

Nikiforos came to the community office on a Tuesday, at a quarter to twelve.

Nobody on Othonoi had seen him at a quarter to twelve for a very long time. He kept the hours of an owl. He went out at dusk to set his nets off the north side of the island, and came in at dawn to lift them, and slept through the middle of the day behind a blanket nailed over his window. So when he stood in the doorway of the office in the full light of noon, in a jacket, Stamatis did not at first know who it was, and then knew at once, by the face.

The left side of Nikiforos Kapsalis's face was the colour of wine. It was not one colour. Stamatis, who had sat next to that face at the school in Chorio for six years, could have drawn it from memory. In the middle of the cheek it was a deep CLARET, nearly purple, with a bloom on it, like a plum. Towards the ear and the jaw it went to the dull mauve of a mussel shell on the inside, and at its furthest edges, where it crossed the bridge of the nose and the left eyelid, it was no more than a pale LAVENDER stain, like the mark a glass leaves on a tablecloth. It had a definite border, as a coastline has. At the age of nine the two of them had found that it was almost exactly the shape of Kefalonia.

The other boys had not called it Kefalonia. They had called him Bourdeto, after the stew, because it was red and because it was hot. A child with a face like that, the reasoning went, must be hot. Stamatis had not invented the name, and he had not used it. But he had not done anything else either. He had been a thin child with spectacles, and he had sat very still while it happened, as a hare sits still in a field, and he had been grateful every day that it was not him.

"Stamati," said Nikiforos. "How does a person get married?"

Stamatis took off his spectacles and put them on again.

"Two people," he said.

"Yes."

"There are papers. Birth certificates. You will need to go to Corfu, or I can write. Then the deputy mayor comes on the boat and does it. It takes ten minutes. Who—" He stopped, because he knew who.

"Write," said Nikiforos, and put a supermarket bag on the desk. In it, in a plastic folder that had once held the instructions for an outboard motor, were his identity card, his fishing licence, a baptismal certificate from 1954 on paper as soft as a handkerchief, and a photograph of his mother. "I don't know what is needed. I brought all of it."

He went out again into the light. He walked down the hill with his head a little lowered and turned, the way a man walks into a wind, though there was almost no wind at all.

---

It was a small island, and it knew by evening.

Stamatis had not told anybody. He had written two letters to Corfu and one email, and he had kept the folder in the drawer of his desk under the rain records. But Nikiforos had been seen at noon, and that was enough; an island of a few hundred people does not need to be told things, it only needs to be given one fact and left alone with it.

By the next morning there were objections. Stamatis heard them at the bakery, at the clinic, at the door of the church, and on the bench by the harbour where five old men sat in a row, facing the sea, like birds on a wire who had fallen out. He was a classifying man, and he could not help sorting them.

There were the objections of age. She was sixty-nine and he was seventy-two, and what, at that time of life, was the point, and who would look after whom.

There were the objections of habit. He was a creature of the night, and she was a creature of the day, and the two kinds do not share a nest. This one was made chiefly by Kyra Fotini, who kept bees, and who said that she had never yet seen an owl marry a hen, and was satisfied with the remark for most of the week.

There were the objections of property. The kafeneio had been her father's, and the hut on the beach had been nobody's, and a man who lived in a hut that belonged to nobody, said the bench by the harbour, would not be long in finding a use for a kafeneio.

And there was one objection that nobody made, that was in the air all the same, like the smell of the sea, which you stop noticing and never stop breathing. Stamatis heard it in the gaps between the others. Nobody said the face. Sixty years had passed, and the boys who had shouted Bourdeto in the yard at Chorio were the old men on the bench now, and they did not say it. They said, But he has never even sat down in there.

That, at least, was true.

---

On the Thursday Lela sent for him.

The kafeneio was empty at that hour, between the morning men and the afternoon men. It was a long low room with a ceiling of planks, eight tables with tin tops, a television on a bracket that had not been switched on since the football in 2004, and a calendar from a feed merchant in Kassiopi that was three years out of date and showed a goat. Lela was behind the counter, slicing onions. She sliced them very thin, into half-moons, and they fell over on the board in rows, one against the next, like dominoes.

She was a short, square woman with forearms like a baker's, and her hair, which had been black, was now the colour of iron filings, and she wore it pinned up with a pencil. She did not look up.

"You're doing the papers," she said.

"I've written to Corfu."

"Good." She swept the onions into a bowl with the side of the knife and began on another. "Tell him something from me."

Stamatis waited.

"Tell him I'll make a bourdeto. On the day. Here." She pointed with the knife at the long table by the window, the one where the old men sat on Sundays, which looked out across the harbour to the jetty and the green boat. "With his fish. And he'll sit at that table and eat it with me, in the middle of the day, with everyone there. Tell him if he can do that, I'll marry him. Tell him if he can't, he can go on handing me fish through that window for another thirty years, and I'll go on giving him coffee, and nothing's lost."

She put the knife down. Her eyes were running, but that was the onions.

"I've never cooked him anything," she said. "Thirty-one years. Only coffee. You can't hand a plate through a window."

---

Stamatis went along the beach to the hut that evening, before the light went. Nikiforos was sitting on an upturned crate outside it, mending a net. The net lay across his knees and over the stones in a great brown heap, and he was working at a hole in it with a wooden needle, his fingers going in and out of the mesh faster than Stamatis could follow, the way a spider's legs go. The hole closed as he watched.

Stamatis said what he had been told to say. He said it exactly, word for word, in the order she had said it, because he did not trust himself to improve it.

Nikiforos did not stop mending. When the hole was closed he cut the twine with his teeth and looked along the net for the next one. There was not a next one. He went on looking.

"Bourdeto," he said at last.

"Yes."

"She said bourdeto."

"Yes."

Nikiforos folded the net, which took a long time, and put it in the boat. Then he took the boat out, though it was early, and Stamatis stood on the beach and watched it go round the end of the mole, pale green on dark green, until he could not tell it from the water.

---

The papers came back from Corfu in eleven days, which Stamatis entered in the margin of the weather book as a record. The deputy mayor would come on the Saturday boat. He was a young man called Andreas Voulgaris who suffered on the sea, and had married couples on Othonoi before, white-faced, in a hurry, with one eye on the timetable.

On the Friday Kyra Fotini brought a jar of thyme honey to the kafeneio, and put it on the counter without a word, and went out. In the afternoon the baker's wife sent up a loaf the size of a car wheel. One of the old men from the bench, Kyr Thanasis, who had been the loudest boy in the yard at Chorio, came in at closing time and stood about, and finally put down on the counter a bottle of his own wine, which was not good, and said, "For the—" and could not decide what it was for, and went out again. Stamatis observed all of this from the corner table, where he had found reasons to sit for most of the week, and he understood it in the way a man understands the birds who come to a feeder in hard weather: none of them is there for the reason that brought the others.

Lela put the honey and the bread and the wine on the shelf behind her. She did not say anything either. But that evening she took the calendar with the goat off the wall, and put up nothing in its place, and the paint behind it was a clean pale blue that nobody had seen since 2023.

---

On Saturday morning, at ten past six, the green boat did not come round the mole.

Stamatis stood on the roof with the pencil in his hand. Rain, nil. Wind, north-west, light. Sea, calm. Sky clear, the light coming up over Corfu the colour of the inside of an apricot. The mole stood out into the water with nothing beyond it.

At a quarter past six, Lela put up the shutter. She looked out at the empty jetty for some time. Then she went inside.

Stamatis wrote in the margin: N. K. —, and stopped, and left it.

By nine the whole of Ammos knew. By ten they had decided what it meant, in four different ways, and were explaining it to one another at the bakery. By eleven the boat from Corfu came in, twenty minutes late because of the gas bottles, and Andreas Voulgaris came down the ramp holding a briefcase against his chest, as if it were the only thing keeping him upright, and was led up to the kafeneio and given a chair and a glass of water. The long table by the window had been laid. There was a white cloth on it, a real one, with a darn in one corner. There was the bread. On the stove at the back, in the big aluminium pot, the onions had been softening in oil since eight o'clock, very low, and beside the stove stood the two jars of red pepper, the sweet and the hot, with their lids off, so that the whole room smelt of them, a dark dry smell that made the eyes water from the door. Everything was ready but the fish. The fish was his.

Lela stood at the stove and stirred the onions, which did not need stirring.

At twenty to one Stamatis went up on the roof again. He did not need to. The rain gauge was read once a day and he had read it. But it was the highest place in Ammos, and from up there, with his hand over his spectacles against the glare, he could see beyond the end of the mole and out across the water towards the north side of the island.

The green boat was there. It was perhaps four hundred metres out, past the point, and it was not moving. Its engine was off. It sat on the flat sea with the sun straight down on it, and a man sat in the stern with his hands between his knees, not fishing, not rowing, only sitting, in a white shirt that Stamatis had never seen before, waiting. It was the posture of a heron in the shallows, which can stand on one leg in a single place for an hour, and is not resting, and is not asleep.

Stamatis came down and went into the kafeneio and said, to Lela only, "He's off the point."

She wiped her hands on her apron and went out of the door and down the beach, past the bench with the five old men on it, who stopped talking, and out along the jetty to its very end. She did not wave. She did not call out, which would not have carried. She stood at the end of the jetty in her apron with her arms folded, square and still, a short dark upright figure on the white concrete, in the sun, where she could be seen from anywhere on the sea.

Stamatis did not know afterwards how long it was. He had a watch, and did not look at it. It was the only measurement in his life that he did not take.

Then the engine cleared its throat across the water.

---

He came in slowly. He tied up at the end of the jetty, at her feet, and she did not help him with the rope. He lifted out the blue crate. He did not give it to her there. He walked past her, and she turned and walked behind him, and he carried the crate up the beach in the full noon light, past the bench, past the bakery door, past the women from the church who had come down to see, and the light fell on the left side of his face with nothing in the world to stop it.

He stopped at the window with the broken hinge. He stood there with the crate in his arms, as he had stood ten thousand mornings, and for a moment Stamatis thought that was all he could do, and that it would have to be enough.

Then he went to the door, and through it.

He put the crate on the counter. In it were two scorpionfish. They were the large red kind, the ones the fishermen call skorpina, which live in the rocks in deep water and are not easily caught. Their colour was not a single red. It was a hot VERMILION along the back, broken into patches and mottlings by darker blotches of something nearer to CRIMSON, and it faded on the belly to a rosy flesh colour with a little gold in it, and all over the head grew small ragged flaps of skin, like weed, so that the fish might lie among the rocks and be taken for one. The spines along the back stood up like the mast and stays of a very small ship. They were, as everyone in the room knew, the ugliest fish in the sea, and the best to eat, and the only proper fish for a bourdeto.

He had gone round the whole of the north side of the island for them, and out past the last rocks of the point, and had not come in until he had two.

Lela looked at them for a long time. Then she pointed at the long table by the window, and he went and sat down at it.

---

Andreas Voulgaris married them at a quarter past one, at the table, with the cloth pushed back from one end to make room for the register. It took nine minutes. Stamatis signed where he was told to sign, and his hand was perfectly steady, and he was surprised by that. The ring was Lela's mother's, and had been kept in a sugar tin on the shelf above the stove for forty years against exactly this. It was too small for Nikiforos's finger, which had been hauling nets since 1966, and it went no further than the middle knuckle, and he wore it there, and nobody laughed.

Then the bourdeto came.

She had cleaned the fish and cut them into thick pieces through the bone, and put in the pepper, the sweet and the hot, and laid the fish in the red oil, and covered them with water, and let them simmer down until there was no water left to speak of, only a thick dark sauce, shining, the colour of the brick of an old wall in rain. She put the pot in the middle of the table, and the bread beside it, and two plates.

Nikiforos looked at the pot. Everyone on Othonoi who could get into the kafeneio was in it, and those who could not were at the window, and all of them looked at him looking at the pot. Kyr Thanasis, at the far end of the long table, had his wine in front of him and did not drink it.

Lela served him first. She gave him the head, which is the best part, and broke the bread for him with her hands.

He ate it. He ate it slowly and completely, as a man eats who has been on the sea since dusk the evening before and has had nothing but water, and he picked the small bones out of the head with his fingers and laid them in a neat row along the rim of his plate, like the teeth of a comb. The hot pepper brought up the colour in both his cheeks, the right as well as the left. By the end of the plate you could not have said, with any precision, where the stain began.

At the far end of the table Kyr Thanasis finally lifted his glass, and held it a moment, and looked down the table at the man he had named in a schoolyard sixty years before.

"Good bourdeto," he said.

Nikiforos looked up. Stamatis, who had sat beside that face for six years and watched it for thirty-one more, could not read what was in it. He never would be able to. He did not try to record it.

"Yes," said Nikiforos. "It is." And he held out his plate for more.

---

On Sunday morning at six Stamatis climbed on to the roof of the community office and read the rain gauge. Rain, nil. Wind, south-east, light. Sea, calm. Sky clear, the light coming up over Corfu the colour of the inside of a shell.

The green boat was tied at the end of the jetty, where it had been all night. Nobody had set any nets.

At ten past six the shutter of the kafeneio went up. It was not Lela who put it up. It was a tall stooping man in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled, who pushed it up from inside with both hands, and hooked it, and stood for a moment in the open doorway with the whole of the morning on his face. Behind him, at the counter, Lela was setting out two glasses.

Stamatis wrote the weather in the book. Then, in the margin, in pencil: N. K., 06.10.

He looked at it for some time, and did not write Usual.

THE END

✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum Kalendās Novembrēs (26 October 2026), ab Eduardō Lear per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Edward Lear, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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