The Tree of Idleness: The Villa's Curse

For fifty years men come to the island of Cyprus, a Mediterranean paradise split and war torn by a marathon ethnic struggle between Greek and Turk, to the villa where British novelist Lawrence Durrell wrote his acclaimed Alexandria Quartert. Each one comes pulled by his own desires and by the whisperings of the villa itself and each is enticed down to the Tree of Idleness cafe on the Bellapais square. There they ogle and are, in turn, ogled by the young Turkish Cypriot men there-and take those men back to the villa for hours of unfettered, wanton pleasure, oblivious to any threat of personal damage or to the rending of the delicate balance of the island's social structure.

And it is not only the foreign visitors to Bellapais who are affected by the enticement woven by the Bellapais villa. The local men, as well, the young-and maturing and aging-men in the Tree of Idleness cafe are caught up in the constantly reweaving web of desire and wanton lust, island sexual customs, and doomed relationships.

Just when it appears that the villa is willing to put the cycle to rest, to offer solace to those who have found each other again and chosen constancy over wantonness, the villa's enticing whisperings of the delights of the Tree of Idleness cafe down on the Bellapais square begin anew."