The second is a combination of sun and smog, giving the skin a dark yellow tinge which darkens considerably when one walks past a truck, a bus or a taxi, stopped at the lights and emitting noxious exhaust fumes.
So when I ran into my friend Dionysios Colovakilofovos at a garden party the other day, and saw him looking pale as a winter moon, I thought there must be something seriously wrong with him.
“Have you been ill?” I asked him with concern.
“No, why, do I look ill?” he replied with equal concern.
I realized I had made a faux pas.
Dionysios is a bit of a hypochondriac at the best of times and I shouldn’t have been so blunt in remarking on his pallor.
“Well, you do look a little pale. Haven’t you been out in the sun lately?”
“Only to go to the pharmacy and to State Lab to hand in my sea samples.”
“Sea samples? What are those?”
“Samples of the sea that I take from those areas that were declared non-polluted at the beginning of the summer.”
“If I remember rightly,” I corrected him , “certain areas were declared polluted but no areas were declared non-polluted.”
“Exactly,” he said.
“They told us where it was dangerous to swim but they didn’t tell us specifically where it was safe, leaving us to infer that the areas they did not mention were non-polluted.
But who trusts them? I take my own samples, take them to the State Lab and pay a small fee to have them analyzed.”
“You go to all that trouble?” I asked incredulously. “And what have you found?”
“I’ve found that there are bugs that can give you enteritis, colitis, hepatitis, dermatitis, typhoid, dysentery and athlete’s foot in all the sea area around Attica, to a greater or lesser extent, and as I am rather vulnerable to disease, as you know, I have decided to give swimming a miss.”
“Then why don’t you just lie on the beach and get· a tan?”
“The paying beaches are too-crowded and the open ones are too full of garbage and tar.”
“I thought the boy scouts had picked it all up.”
“If they did, somebody must have brought it back again.” “Well, how about the Hilton pool?” “Too expensive, and I’m allergic to chlorine anyway.”
“Look,” I said, “why don’t you come with me to Hamolia where I have been swimming regularly for many years. It’s a stretch of rocky coast between Vavrona and Porto Rafti where the water is clean and clear and there’s a good fishtaverna there where you can have a seafood lunch with ice-cold beer after your swim. How about it?”
He looked at me pityingly and said:
“I haven’t tested the water there, but considering there’s a promontory with a caravan camp at the north end of Hamolia and a Ministry of Welfare summer camp for children at the south end, Lord knows what you swim in when the wind blows from either direction.
And tell me, can you swim off those rocks when the north-east meltemi is blowing during most of July and August and bringing over all the flotsam from Euboea across the way?”
I admitted there were days when swimming at Hamolia was not very pleasant and sometimes not possible because of the pounding waves, unless one went to the sheltered bay below the children’s camp by walking past piles of garbage, negotiating a precipitous narrow path and coming to a beach decked with more garbage and tar.
“Now you’ve made me feel depressed,” I told my friend.
“Oh, don’t let me put you off Hamolia. If you’ve been swimming there for years and haven’t caught anything serious, chances are you’ve either built up an immunity against the bugs that flourish there or you’re just plain lucky. But don’t recommend it to other people, and especially to me.”
Then, trying to cheer me up, Dionysios said:
“Look, old man, I don’t mind looking pale and wan. I’d rather look pale and wan naturally than become like that after a couple of months in a hospital. Also, all you brown and suntanned Apollos don’t seem to realize that even if you escape the hazards of enteritis, colitis, hepatitis and the rest, skin cancer’s always there, waiting round the corner to get you in the end.”
Alec Kitroeff is on holiday so we are reprinting this month his piece which appeared in our issue of August, 1989 and which, two years later, is still very much apropos.
