Market Day

A long time ago I learned that if I wanted to find an open-air market in Europe but didn’t know the way, I should follow in reverse direction the women carrying full market baskets.

Today I did and arrived in a mere ten minutes with not a single wrong turn. Grizzled old men were vending brackish retsina from the backs of their pickups. There were country couples whose sole offering seemed to be sun-dried olives. A woman with brazen blond hair sat behind more padded bras than I could imagine being demanded by the entire island. Backyard tomatoes were so fresh I could smell them ten feet away. Eggplants were lined up in rows alongside piles of fresh herbs tied by their stems with tiny rubber bands. Romaine lettuces twice the size of the ones in the supermarket sold for a Euro less. A dozen different kinds of garlics in wooden crates were priced according to potency. Wooden kegs were filled with elias lada. One spigot still dripped from a recent sale into a buyer-provided bottle whose former store-bought label was now smeary with refill stains. Crete’s great bath soaps made out of pure olive oil were going for one Euro a bar. (It is a good thing they didn’t add garlic to it or I’d have gone around smelling like a pizza.)

There were Gypsy women with their Indo-Altaic eyes and their big round gold earrings and their brilliantly coloured densely patterned triple-layered garb, advertising their bins full of cheap millend dresses by flinging them high into the air shrieking, 'Euros! Euros!', the most exotic of all imaginable thrift sales.

Then came the vendors of gilt-framed mirrors and screwdrivers and bunches of backyard daisies fading by the minute in the sun.

Bananas Kriti ran a three Euros per kilo, texture like moist sawdust but flavour like honeyed perfume. Potted plants— phyta, the original Origin of the Species—were in little clay pots, looking profoundly innocent of the majesty of their history. A pair of supplewaisted flashing-eyed teengirls extolled the virtues of their raisins and prunes and dried chickpeas and almonds. Their pistachios smiled from split-lengthwise shells like the pouty little lips in the film version of The Little Shop of Horrors. Not to mention the fruity carmel-sized toothsomes dusted with confectioner’s sugar which smelled and tasted like a distillate of roses. How could I leave such a pretty sight without buying at least a dozen? (Two dozen, if truth be told.)

But eventually, pocket finally depleted of Euros, I did. I walked home with both hands full of plastic bags, just like the lumpy ladies in black who reverse-guided me there. All I could think about was the excuse that had been haunting me from the moment I first rounded the corner and laid eyes on this jam-packed gyre of purchasing humanity, the women with their tiny-wheeled carts and the harried mothers with kids and the dutiful sons offloading potato sacks with knot-armed heaves and the old gents wearing opennecked shirts under antique double-breasted suits and the smartaleckey studs with godawful sunglasses and the cats scurrying underfoot and the bewondering little girls with fawn-coloured hair in pony-tails tied with a rubber band and the smells of mustards and

rosemary and oranges and underarms—even with all this flooding across my vision and my nose, what I couldn’t escape thinking about was the first excuse to dispense with all this expectation and get down to the basics, which duly arrived in the form of the first twinge of appetite.