A FORTUITOUS DEVIATION
Into the Ceraunian Mountains to Qeparo
On the agenda Monday was filing six thousand words to a magazine in New York by 9 a.m. Eastern Time, then taking a bus south from Tirana to Qeparo, where I planned to meet the Native Correspondent (NC) and the Native Correspondent’s Partner (NCP; also known as, the Sam Lipsyte of Albania (SLA)). The bus, really a minivan, to Qeparo was canceled because broken. So was the one to nearby Himare, where the NC had advised me to go instead and complete the journey in a taxi. I saw a bus to Girokaster. It was leaving in twenty minutes, and it cost 1200 leks (about 12 bucks or a bit more but let’s use the crude minimizing exchange rate I use in my head, shall we?). The SLA, who was born in Tirana but whose family Girokaster, calls Qeparo Girokaster-by-the-Sea, because he chilled out there as a kid in the 1970s, when ‘there were no lights’. Ismail Kadare was born there and I have read about it in his novels. When they were in school together the SLA’s mom got the soaking Kadare a raincoat. It is also the birthplace of Enver Hoxha. Kadare, Hoxha, and the SLA’s mom—a trifecta. I wanted to lay eyes on it. I figured there would be mountains, as in Utah, where I was last month. I was correct.
The drive out of Tirana was worrying because at first we seemed to be heading toward the Mother Teresa Airport, which is north of the city. But we veered west toward Durres and then south. The first two hours were boring, proceeding through an interior valley with foothills on either side. I was immersed in the excellent novel I was rereading. But the last ninety minutes of the drive were spectacular. I don’t have the vocabulary to describe mountains. They are high and steep and they plunge dramatically. I should reread Patrick Leigh Fermor. Along the way there are mostly gas stations or humble villages. We passed one fancy-looking resort hotel with Albanian and European Union flags lining its parking lot. It was a modernist structure in dark brown timber to mimic a cabin, and it might have made a nice set for Hitchcock if he had made North by Northwest in Albania. Then you sweep down into Girokaster, a modern city with palm-lined main drags.
As soon as I got out of the van I was approached by a taxi driver, and I asked him how much to Qeparo. His answer was reasonable for a two hour drive he’d have to return from. He didn’t speak much English, but he spoke Greek. I said, ‘Me lene Christos. Emina steen Athina enneneend-epta. Espousa arche Ellenika.’ (Mangled for: My name is Chris. I lived in Athens in ’97. I studied ancient Greek.) He said his name was A. We got in his sedan and headed north. When we reached the turn west, he stopped at a shop and said, ‘Cola?’ ‘Entaxi,’ I replied, all my Greek flooding back to me after twenty-five years, and I got us a couple of bottles of Coke and a couple of bottles of water. ‘Efcharisto,’ A. said. ‘Parakalo,’ I replied. We drove west into the Ceraunian Mountains, smoking cigarettes out the open windows as the sun began to set.
‘Ee Coca-Cola,’ I said, attempting a joke in Greek, ‘s’agapo!’
‘Ha ha,’ he said, ‘very funny. I like it too, very nice to drink on a hot day. Are you married?’
‘Ohi,’ I said.
A. told me he’s fifty-two and has two teenage sons. ‘You are lucky,’ he said, in Greek. (From here on our conversation is translated from the Greek, which was more and more coming back to me, as if better than I’d ever known it before.)
We came upon a tunnel bored deep into the center of a mountain.
‘Is this tunnel new?’ I asked.
‘Yes, only a couple years,’ he said.
The radio was playing Greek pop and Albanian rap. I thought it was good. It all reminded me of the 1990s.
‘Have you seen the movie Barbie?’ he asked.
Now dusk was approaching and the mountains began to obscure the sun.
‘I saw it in Tirana,’ I said.
‘I saw it too, in Girokaster. What did you think?’
‘I wrote something about it,’ I said.
‘Yes, I read your post,’ A. said.
‘You read my Substack?’ I asked.
‘Everyone in Girokaster reads your Substack,’ he said, ‘but none of us pay for it. An Albanian in New York you gave a free subscription to just forwards it to us. Always going on about sellouts. Very charming, very quaint.’
Then A. demonstrated his ability to light a cigarette while making a hairpin turn on a cliffside, one of many times he undertook this maneuver during our drive.
‘Well, as I was procrastinating over the weekend,’ I said, ‘I gave the film some more thought. I think the key restraint is sex. Its true allegorical subject is expressed through the dolls not being able to fuck. The original Barbie utopia is just a total goody-two-shoes sexless matriarchy. The toy designer giving Barbie thoughts of death is clearly trapped in a sexless marriage because her husband is a dipshit, a self-castrating couch potato. The reason why the hedonic bro-topia brought about by Ken is insufficient although clearly a happier place is because the Matchbox 20 song they all sing on the beach can never end—they keep singing into the night for four hours—because they can't bring about a romantic climax, they can’t even kiss, even though subconsciously that is what they want to do. The women end that through fake seduction, all a tease. The Robbie-Barbie becomes human at the end and the first thing she has to do in the last scene in the real world is go to the gynecologist—to obtain a birth control prescription. The whole thing is an allegory for the director’s inability and thwarted desire to make a big budget movie for other than adolescents within the current Hollywood landscape.’
‘Ha, ha,’ A. said. ‘Like all Americans, you are a stupid pervert and a total amateur about it. But you are a nice guy. I like you. Those aspects of the film are trivial and so obvious as to be irrelevant. Its real subject is Albania and its history. There is no doubt it was secretly written by Dua Lipa. The original Barbieland represents the rule of Enver Hoxha and a perfected Hoxha-ism. Barbie’s thoughts of death signify the death of Enver Hoxha in 1985.’
‘I have the same birthday as Enver Hoxha,’ I said. ‘October 16.’
‘Very good for you, you charming idiot, you silly malaka,’ he said. ‘It is also the birthday of Oscar Wilde. Time and its measurement are meaningless. Stop believing in it. Keep your mind on the subject at hand. Mattel in the film represents not Stalin exactly but the Stalinoid Marxism-Leninism that outlived him, putting the doll in the box and so on, a portable gulag. The coming of the Ken regime represents the onset of rapacious neoliberal capitalism in Albania during the 1990s, the fiasco with the pyramid schemes and so on, the civil war. In a way, you can tell that Dua Lipa, the secret auteur, is making a crypto-parody of the memoir written by the Albanian woman who teaches political philosophy at the LSE, clearly her rival. The ending with the enlightened restoration of the Barbie oligarchy is ambiguous. Keep in mind gender is all a smokescreen, truly a meaningless social construct. Does this new regime represent the ascent of Edi Rama’s administration or a future prime ministership that sees the country led by Dua Lipa herself? I’m not sure.’
‘Do you think that would be a good thing?’ I asked.
‘It could be worse,’ he said. ‘I like her music well enough, not as much as Rita Ora, though. Certainly I prefer these rappers. I can tell you like them too.’
He was right. I did. It was then that the Ionian Sea came into view through the mountains. Dusk was upon us.
‘Where are you from?’ A. asked.
‘Dimes Square,’ I said.
‘I knew that, of course,’ he said, ‘I just wanted to hear you say it. I very much enjoy reading these think pieces about the scene. They are always so stupid. Like this new one about a right-wing avant-garde. Ha, ha, ha, it seems neither potently right-wing nor an avant-garde. These little fascoid boys in America, all they’re doing is engaging in self-pity and writing self-help books. Boo-hoo. You don’t become Milosevic that way. You become a pathetic writer of diet books. As for Forever Magazine, I like it, very beautifully designed, but its editors seem like they would vote for Hillary Clinton while listening to NPR but perhaps cooler than normal and with superior prose styles. The problem with all current American literature, which I have spent a lot of time reading, even this fake avant-garde of yours, is that most of it devolves into a maudlin sentimentality of relatability like that radio program This American Life. First it’s oh, how nice it was to fall in love, despite all the odds, and start a family, so nice I had to write a memoir about it framed around my decision to stop taking too many pills and move away from New York City to a place with trees and creeks. Trees are boring and so are creeks. Then the writers get a little older and they inevitably write stories about how they’re losing their children, at an airport or elsewhere on vacation. Maybe the children are kidnapped. I wish my sons had been kidnapped! I’m sure they could handle themselves. The only American theme at this stage of history is anxiety over being an imperfected bourgeois. Nice work if you can get it, I suppose.’
A big rig barreling down the mountain almost took us out, but A. maneuvered the sedan adroitly to avoid a collision.
‘I am truly an excellent driver,’ he said.
‘Arete,’ I said. ‘Kallistos!’
‘Christos, now we are coming to the end of the journey,’ A. said. ‘I enjoyed meeting you. You will never understand anything about Albania. Everything you write about it will be meaningless. Your grandmother was born in Greenwich Village. Your great-grandparents may have come from Korce but you never met them. You don’t even know what their name was before it was anglicized at Ellis Island. Even if you did, you don’t even understand yourself. Maybe you should give up writing and just go to Hollywood and be an actor. All the best American actors are Albanian. Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, John Belushi, Jim Belushi, Marisa Tomei, Danny DeVito. Think about it. You could be next.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ I said. In truth I think about it every day.
‘I wish we could talk more, particularly about the recent debate in New Left Review about feminism and literary style, but here we are in Qeparo. The journey is over. Make sure you see the Cursed Eucalyptus and the Famous Shy Girl Tree. Have fun at the beach.’
‘Faleminderit,’ I said as I got out of the car, taking my Paris Review tote bag. ‘Efcharisto poly.’
The NC came to fetch me and we descended the steps to meet the SLA by the coast where for a week we have talked about etymology long into the night.