Stuffed Peppers

Someone traveling alone … will see, within the context of his own capacity for observation … everything upon which he focuses his attention. If there are two travelers, each one will be able to see no more than half of these things; a quarter of them if there are four travelers. Carlo Levi

The island state is a state of remaining within one’s own boundaries, undisturbed by any external influence; it resembles a kind of narcissism or even autism. Olga Tokarczuk

The traveller cannot love, since love is stasis and travel is motion. If he returns to what he loved in a landscape and stays there, he is no longer a traveller but in stasis and concentration, the lover of that particular part of earth, a native. Derek Walcott

You should know, by now, that the three of you together in a foreign land means this: it means a cap at just 33%. In the context of a family holiday, you are (and you have tested this multiple times) no more than a coordinate on those asymptotic axes of delight and displeasure. Being on holiday is hard work, and if you don’t want to slide into the negative of Carlo Levi’s hyperbolic tourism, it is essential that you take precautions.

They are: Do not consult. Instead, make declarations. (Try it now and do not waver in times of need: “I am going to X place. I am going there now. You can join me now at X place, or later, or not at all.”) Hold fast to these declarations. Be fair and be flexible. You owe it to yourself to get 100% of your 33%.

However, you should know that this method works only 33% of the time; equal but inverse to the proportion of satisfactory absorption of this holiday experience you have planned for and promised to maximize. (And no, that wasn’t the word you used. You promised yourself only to make the most of it, by which you meant: something slightly higher than 33% spontaneity. Something inching above one-third of the sleeping-in unmolested, one-third of the accidentally-witnessed-daybreaks. A percentage immeasurable, because it takes just one encounter with a child in a window or a widow in a garden or an artist in the cemetery to boost your intake of observable things beyond the measure that one might have earned simply by paying close attention.)

33%. With diminishing returns. You will approach — but never arrive at — the mythical destination of your foreign traveling. You will see how others live and how you live among others, (ingratiating and bumbling but supporting the local economy.) Even if you vow to go almost nowhere and do almost nothing… 33%. This is the math of Carlo Levi’s hyperbolic tourism.

And so the other lesson you must learn is this: get rid of them — the two companions who, by their very being, reduce your observable world by 66%. That’s right: get rid of the man and his son who are, in theory, the people you love most in the world and therefore, in theory, the people with whom you most want to spend a week on a glorious island with nothing but food, drink, roosters, church-bells and aquamarine water and with whom you want to do naught but eat, drink, wake up and get salty. To embrace this island with all its irritants, you must also embrace your inner islander.

So get rid of them. Send them off to taste wine. And when you get rid of them, pretend you are an islander.

Here’s how: Wash the crust of sand of your forehead and from between your legs. Dry yourself slowly, with the smallest of towels wrapped around your newly brown body (it is brown only to you … you are not, in fact, an islander). Oil up. Use lavender oil if you are inclined towards the too-floral; olive oil if you were already prepared to do just that should you find nothing more overpriced. Dry slowly, once again, because oil catches the dust of late afternoon.

When you are less slick, put on harem pants, plastic shoes and a string of beads twisted once around your brown neck (I say brown because that’s a nicer quality than loose, which it also is, now that it is in its fifth decade of sun-soaked holidays.)

Now you are ready for the broad brimmed hat that you bought at a tourist stand on the mainland but that, now that you’ve got three days on the island under your belt and you know the back way through the stone streets to the outskirts where the supermarkets line up on their way to the next town, you believe cannot diminish your ability to pretend you are an islander who lives in this rented home halfway up the hill from the harbour. This terraced perch with its view of the sea and its worn wood and mustard fabrics marinated by years of smoking under an arbor and sun off the harbor. Outside of which, all day, the cicadas recite the local phone-book: ič, ič, ič, ič.

Set off, smile at children, turn right at each church you come to.

At the vegetable stand, choose three small yellow green peppers and two large red ones because that is too many, but also just enough. At the butcher, point to the meat grinder and ask for a mix of beef and veal and recall, too late, that a kilogram is far more than you need to stuff three small peppers and two large ones. Pay the man, encourage him to take it easy tonight, move on. In the supermarket, examine the packaging and wonder why here on an island, just like everywhere else in the world, there are so many varieties of rice in the world. Make a decision, stick with it. Buy the mass-produced pepper jam. Because you are on an island where olive oil and pepper jam are indigenous and therefore do not have to be homemade.

Climb the hill to your rented stone house slowly. The sun will still be setting as you unpack your purchases and arrange them on the counter. Open doors, turn on the television. Let the cadence and the syllables of the nightly news arrange themselves on the cutting board alongside the peppers: the minister of health, civic protest, unseasonable heat, municipal elections…Pour a cold beer into a parabolic glass and hear the cicadas down shift: ič čak ičičak nemoči ogoči.

Take that Carlo Levičak.

An hour is gone. Savor the hour to come: Observe carefully the induction stovetop that you have no mastery over. Celebrate that the context of your own capacity changes, not at all, the fact that you can’t work it out and that your son, with his natural capacity for electronics, cannot, at present alter that context. Go with the gas burners. There are two of them, after all.

Sauté onions, garlic, add meat. Cook the rice in bouillon and add tomatoes. Stir everything with long-handled wooden spoons and carefully select bowls to move the food along from stage to stage like in a cooking show. Remember your grandmother throughout. She was an ace with the stuffed peppers, though she was not an islander.

When the meat and rice are mixed and seasoned and when the peppers are decapitated and waiting, appealing — stuff them. Stuff them balanced in a saucepan with high sides and let them swim in more tomato broth. Put a lid on it, but do not turn the gas back on. Not yet. Your men are not home and no one likes a slimy pepper. Sit down with the end of the news. Enjoy the fuck out of that beer.

When the news is over, turn off the TV and take down the Hrvatska kuharica cookbook you’ve just noticed on the shelf. Marvel at the extraordinary things islanders will do with scampi: bake them in eggs, wrap their tails in bacon, leave their antennae poking out of every dish in a brazen insistence that when meticulous and photographed on glassy paper, the revolting becomes masterful. Take note that your stuffed peppers in stages look nicer. The colors more natural.

In the end, this is what will happen: your men, your family, will return from their wine tasting, and you will still be an hour away from laying the table because you are on island time. It won’t matter. They are dizzy on reds and whites and stuffed with salami and cheese and by the time your peppers are cooked they will have mellowed from post-wine-tasting enthusiasm to post-wine-tasting stupor and they aren’t big fans of stuffed peppers anyway. You have made too much food and you will have to eat their portion, too.

But this will be easy. You have already spent the last four hours stealing their share of the observable domestic evening and now you have excess capacity. You are stasis. You are a lover of a nicotine-stained harbor. No man is an island, but a woman without her men is an islander always.