I found myself in the care of an elderly woman, wizened yet spritely, with dancing eyes paled by cataracts. Her house, standing directly on the harbour, consisted of a single room, a spacious white cube with small shuttered windows and one door that opened onto the quayside. Leaning against the front of the cottage were an upturned row-boat, heaps of yellow fishing net, and a single chair with a sagging, rush-mat seat. A tall iron anchor stood rusting by the window and, next to that, a donkey with a rope connecting one front leg to a hind leg. A chipped enamel bucket of water stood next to the beast and a hammock of greens hung from a nail in the wall of the house.

The blue front door was in two parts, the top hooked open. The woman in black led me inside, and I was surprised to see the room had a compacted earthen floor, a quarter of which was taken up by the largest raised mezzanine bed I had ever seen. Three wide wooden steps, flanked by polished cupboards and drawers, led up to the sleeping platform. The small space on either side was filled by rough-plank shelves stacked with neatly folded linen.

Two feet below the beamed ceiling, another rough shelf fringed the room crammed with bric-a-brac. Gaudy painted plates, exotic flowers made of starched linen, feathers, and pine cones; china figurines, Jesus pictures complete with bleeding hearts and crowns of thorns, a silver crucifix, and ornate oil lamps that I doubted had ever been lit.

On crocheted doilies that hung, limp as Dali’s clocks, over the edge of the shelf, stood the most bizarre collection of fishing memorabilia. A spider crab, open claws raised towards the ceiling as if waiting to hug God, and a giant clamshell, pale as a dead circus clown, grinned lifelessly towards the door.

Below the shelf, even more out of sync with everything, hung a metre-wide tapestry of a Swiss scene depicting swans on a lake surrounded by snowy mountain peaks. Next to the tapestry, the contents of a dark-wood frame drew my attention. Outlined in chalk and charcoal, on heavy grey paper, was a simple, classical drawing of a naked young man with what appeared to be a pair of real white bird’s wings outstretched from his shoulders.

‘Icarus! ’ the old woman yelled in a squeaky voice when she noticed my interest. ‘Icarus! ’ She wagged a crooked finger at the picture. I recalled my father and his pigeons at home and longed to hear him yelling at me in his loud, bombastic way.

The room smelled of mothballs, bees wax, and basil.

The petite woman, clearly proud of her home, banged a fist against her heart. ‘Yiayá! ’ she cried.

I nodded, made a little bow, and mimicked her, thumping myself in the chest. ‘Gertie!’

She pulled in her chin and frowned. ‘Tee? ’