Corelli's Mandolin

by Louis de Bernières

  He picked up his pen and a line of Homer occurred to him: There is nothing so good and lovely as when man and wife in their home dwell together in unity of mind and disposition.’ But why this thought at this moment? What did it have to do with the Venetians? He thought briefly of the adorable wife that he had so cruelly lost, and then realised that he was thinking about Pelagia and Mandras.

  Ever since the latter had so abruptly departed, he had watched his daughter evolving through a series of emotions, all of which struck him as unhealthy and worrying. At first she had been in a whirl of panic and anxiety, and then in storms of tears. The tempests had given way to days of ominous and nervous calm, where she would sit by the wall outside as though expecting him to arrive at the bend of the road where he had been shot by Velisarios. Even when it was very cold she might be seen there with Psipsina curled up on her lap as she caressed the soft ears of the animal. Once she had even sat out there in the snow. Later on she had taken to remaining silently in the room with him, her hands motionless on her lap as tears followed each other silently down her cheeks. Suddenly she would be seized by a mood of compulsive optimism and activity, and would work furiously on a coverlet that she was making for her marriage bed, and then, just as abruptly, she would spring to her feet, cast her work to the ground, kick it, and proceed to dismantle it with a ferocity that amounted to violence.

  As day succeeded day it became clear that not only had Mandras not written, but that he never would. The doctor scrutinised his daughter’s face, and realised that she was becoming bitter, as though inferring with increasing certainty that Mandras could not love her. She permitted herself to be imprisoned in apathy, and the doctor diagnosed the evident symptoms of depression. He broke a lifetime’s habit, and took to making her accompany him on his medical visits; he found her to be full of happy chatter one minute, and profoundly silent the next. ‘Unhappiness conceals itself in sleep,’ he told himself, and he sent her to bed early and let her sleep in the mornings. He sent her on improbable errands to places that were unfeasibly distant in order to ensure that physical tiredness would be a prophylactic against the inevitable insomnia of the young and miserable, and he made a point of telling her the funniest stories that he could remember from his years of listening to garrulous men in the kapheneia and in the wardrooms of ships. He perceived shrewdly that Pelagia’s state of mind was such that she considered it both logical and dutiful that she should be sad, passive, and remote, and so he made a point not only of making her laugh against her will, but also of provoking her to fits of rage. He persistently took the olive oil from the kitchen in order to treat cases of eczema, and deliberately failed to replace it, considering it to be a triumph of psychological science when her exasperation led her to flail at his chest with her fists whilst he restrained her by grasping her shoulders.

  Curiously, he felt a sense of shock when his treatment began to work, and he considered the resumption of her normal cheerful equanimity to be a sign that she had given up her passion for Mandras altogether. On the one hand he would have been glad of this, since he did not truly believe that Mandras would make a good husband, but on the other hand Pelagia was already betrothed, and the breaking of a betrothal would cause much shame and disgrace. The awful possibility occurred to him that Pelagia might finish up by marrying out of a sense of obligation to a man she no longer loved. The doctor found himself hoping guiltily that Mandras would not survive the war, and this led him to the uncomfortable suspicion that he was not as good a man as he had always deluded himself into believing.

  All this was bad enough, but the war had caused any number of difficulties that he could not have foreseen. He could put up with the loss of supplies of things like iodine and calamine lotion, since there were alternatives that worked just as well, but there had been no supply of boracic acid ever since the outbreak of the war, since that particular substance had always come from the volcanic steam of Tuscany; it was the best drug he knew of for coping with infections of the bladder and foulness of the urine. Far worse than this, there were cases of syphilis that required bismuth, mercury, and novarsenobenzol. This latter had to be injected once a week for twelve weeks, and no doubt all the supplies had been diverted to the front. He cursed the singular pervert who had first contracted the disease by copulating with a llama, and the hispanic brutes who had brought it back from the New World after cutting a swathe of rape through the territories that they had subjugated.

  Fortunately the excitement of the war had diminished the number of those with imaginary diseases, but nonetheless he had found himself running repeatedly to his medical encyclopaedia in order to find out how to cope without all those things upon which he had always relied. He had found his Complete and Concise Home Doctor (two massive volumes, cross-indexed, fifteen hundred pages, including everything from ptomaine poisoning to beauty tips on the care and shaping of the eyebrow) in the Port of London, and had even learned English in order to understand it. He had memorised it from front to back with even more enthusiasm and dedication than a Muslim learns the Koran in order to become a Hafiz. Even so, his memory of it had by now diminished somewhat, since he had only ever had to employ parts of it regularly and had come to the realisation that most afflictions pass away by themselves, regardless of anything that he might do. Mostly it was a question of turning up and looking suitably solemn whilst performing the rituals of inspection. Most of the exotic and thrilling afflictions that he had read about with so much morbid curiosity had never turned up at all in his part of the island, and he had realised that whereas Father Arsenios was a priest to the soul, he himself was little more than a priest to the body. Most of the truly interesting ailments seemed to occur in animals, and it always gave him the greatest pleasure to diagnose and cure the problems of a horse or an ox.

  The doctor had not failed to notice that the war had had the effect of increasing his own importance, as it had that of Father Arsenios. In the past he had grown accustomed to his status as a fount of wisdom, but the questions had often been philosophical – Lemoni’s father had once sent her to ask him why it was that cats cannot talk – but nowadays people not only wanted to know all about the politics and progress of the conflict, but needed urgently to ask his opinions about the optimum size and disposition of sandbags. He had not elected himself as a leader of the community, but had become one by a process of invisible franchise, as though an autodidact such as himself must possess uncommon common sense as well as recondite knowledge. He had become a kind of Aga to replace the Turkish ones that the island had once briefly possessed, except that, unlike the Ottoman headmen, he had no particular interest in lying about on cushions all day in between filling the orifices of pretty little catamites who would eventually grow up with similarly unnatural predilections for buggery, narcotics, and prodigious extremes of idleness.

  The doctor heard Pelagia singing in the kitchen and took up his pen. He reached a finger to twirl his moustache, experienced a peculiar irritation when he remembered that he had shaved it off as a gesture of defiance against Hitler, and then looked down at the black armband that he had worn ever since the death of Metaxas. He sighed and wrote:

  ‘Greece lies on both a geographical and cultural faultline that separates east from west; we are simultaneously a battleground and a site of cataclysmic earthquakes. If the islands of the Dodecanese are eastern, however, Cephallonia is undoubtedly western, whereas the mainland is simultaneously both without being entirely either. The Balkans have always been the instruments of the foreign policy of the Great Powers, and have failed since ancient times to reach even a resemblance to advanced civilisation because of the natural indolence, fractiousness and brutality of their peoples. It is true to say that Greece has fewer of the Balkan vices than other nations to the north and east, however, and it is also undoubtedly the case that, of all the Greeks, Cephallonians have the greatest reputations as wits and eggheads. Readers will remember that Homer came from these parts and that Odysseus was famed for his cunning. Home
r also describes us as fierce and ill-disciplined, but we have never been accused of cruelty. There are occasional deaths due to disputes over property, but we possess little of the bloodlust that is the characteristic defect of neighbouring slavic peoples.

  ‘The reason for our occidental orientation is that the island was occupied by the Turks for only twenty-one years, between 1479 and 1500, when they were expelled by a combined Spanish and Venetian force. They returned only for one raid, in 1538, when they left with thirteen thousand Cephallonians to be sold into slavery. The short period of their stay, combined with their genius for torpor and inertia, ensured that they left behind them no permanent legacy in cultural terms.

  ‘Apart from this brief period, the island was Venetian from 1194 until 1797, when it was taken by Napoleon Bonaparte, the notorious warmonger and megalomaniac, who promised the island union with Greece, and then perfidiously annexed it.

  ‘The reader will readily see that to all intents and purposes the island was Italian for about six hundred years, and this explains a great many things that may puzzle the foreigner. The dialect of the island is replete with Italian words and manners of speech, the educated and the aristocratic speak Italian as a second language, and the campaniles of the churches are built into the structure, quite unlike the usual Greek arrangement whereby the bell is within a separate and simpler construction near the gates. The architecture of the island is, in fact, almost entirely Italian, and is highly conducive to a civilised and sociable private life on account of the shady balconies, courtyards, and external stair-cases.

  ‘The Italian occupation ensured that much of the development of the people was along western rather than eastern lines, even including the habit of poisoning inconvenient relatives (Anna Palaiologos killed John II in this way, for example), and our rulers were mainly ebullient and dishonest eccentrics in the authentic Italian mould. The first Orsini used the island for piracy, and repeatedly deceived the Pope. Under his tutelage the Orthodox bishopry was abolished, and to this day there is much animosity here towards Roman Catholicism, an animosity compounded by that faith’s historical arrogance and its deplorable preoccupation with sin and guilt. There were installed the Italian customs of levying taxes in order to raise money for substantial bribes, of hatching plots and machinations of labyrinthine complexity, of arranging catastrophically inappropriate marriages of convenience, of merciless in-fighting, of family feuding, of swapping the island between one Italian despotate and another (so that for a while we were part of Naples), and finally, in the eighteenth century there was such a prodigious outbreak of violence between the leading families (the Aninos, Metaxas, Karoussos, Antypas, Typaldos, and Laverdos) that the authorities deported all the agitators to Venice and hanged them. The islanders themselves remained above all these quaint Italian perversities, but there was much intermarriage, and we lost the habit of wearing traditional dress long before this occurred in the rest of Greece. The Italians left us a European rather than an eastern outlook on life, our women were considerably freer than elsewhere in Greece, and for centuries they gave us an aristocracy that we could both lampoon and imitate. We were immensely pleased when they left, unaware that there were worse things in store, but on account of the length of their stay they were undoubtedly, along with the British, the most significant force that shaped our history and culture; we found their rule tolerable and occasionally amusing, and, if we ever hated them, it was with affection and even gratitude in our hearts. Above all, they had the inestimable merit of not being Turks.’

  The doctor put down his pen and read over what he had just written. He smiled wryly at his last remarks, and reflected that under present circumstances it was unlikely that the gratitude was likely to survive. He went into the kitchen and moved all the knives from one drawer into another, so that Pelagia’s anger would find a new occasion for catharsis.

  It was easier to be a psychologist than to be an historian; he realised that he had just covered several hundred years in a couple of pages. He really would have to take it more slowly and relate the events at a properly scrupulous pace. He went back to his desk, gathered up the small sheaf of papers, went out into the yard, sniffed the air for intimations of impending spring, and stoically and resolutely fed the sheets one by one to Pelagia’s goat. The doctor was distressed by its philistine capacity for digesting literature. ‘Accursed ruminant,’ he muttered, and decided to go to the kapheneia.

  19 L’Omosessuale (6)

  Francisco’s mother was a small grey woman with a mole on one cheek and a brushing of black down upon her upper lip. She wore black, and all the time that I talked to her she twisted a duster in her hands. I could see that once she had been beautiful and that my beloved Francisco had inherited his looks from her; the same slavonic eyes, the same olive skin, the same jeweller’s fingers. Francisco’s wife was there too, but I could hardly bear to look at her; she had known the pleasure of his body in a way that I could never know. She sobbed in a corner whilst her mother kneaded the duster and questioned me.

  ‘When did he die, Signor? Was it a good day?’

  ‘He died on a fine day, Signora, with the sun shining and the birds singing.’

  (He died on a day when the snow was melting and when, from beneath that carapace, there were emerging a thousand broken corpses, knapsacks, rusted rifles, water-bottles, illegible unfinished letters drenched in blood. He died on the day when one of our men realised that he had entirely lost his genitals to frostbite, put a rifle barrel into his mouth, and blew away the back of his head. He died on the day when we found a corpse with its trousers down, squatting against a tree, frozen solid in the act of straining against the intractable constipation of the military diet. Beneath the fundament of the dead man lay two tiny nuggets of blood-streaked turd. The cadaver wore bandages in the place of boots. He died on a day when the buzzards came down from the hills and began to tear the eyes from those long dead. The Greek mortars were coughing over the bluff, and we were buried in the hail of mud. It was raining.)

  ‘He died in action, Signor? Was there a victory?’

  ‘Yes, Signora. We charged a Greek position with bayonets and the enemy were expelled.’

  (The Greeks had repelled us for the fourth time with a barrage of mortar fire. They had four machine-guns above us where they could not be seen, and we were being cut to pieces as we fell back. Eventually we received a command rescinding the order to take the position, since it was of no tactical significance.)

  ‘Did he die happy, Signor?’

  ‘He died with a smile on his lips, and told me that he was proud to have done his duty. You should be pleased to have had such a son, Signora.’

  (Francisco limped up to me in the trench with a wild expression in his eyes. He spoke to me for the first time in weeks. ‘Bastards, bastards,’ he shouted. He said, ‘Look,’ and he rolled up his trousers. I saw the purple ulcers of the white death. Francisco touched the rotting flesh with a glow of wonder in his eyes. He rolled his trouser back down again and said to me, ‘It’s enough, Carlo. It’s too much. It’s all over.’ He clasped me in his arms and kissed me on both cheeks. He began to sob. I felt him trembling in my arms. He took the mouse Mario from his pocket and gave it to me. He took up his rifle and clambered up over the lip of the trench. I grabbed at his ankle to prevent him, but he struck me on the side of the head with the butt of his weapon. He advanced slowly on the enemy position, stopping to fire at every five paces. The Greeks perceived his heroism and did not return fire. They preferred to capture courageous men rather than to shoot them. A mortar shell fell next to him, and he disappeared beneath a shower of yellow clay. There was a long silence. I saw something stir where Francisco had been.)

  ‘He died quickly, didn’t he, Signor? He was not in pain?’

  ‘He died very quickly of a bullet through the heart. He can have felt nothing.’

  (I put down my rifle and climbed out of the trench. The Greeks did not shoot at me. I reached Francisco and saw that the side of
his head had been blown away. The pieces of skull looked grey and were coated in membrane and thick blood. Some of the fluid was bright red, and some of it was crimson. He was still alive. I looked down at him and my eyes were blinded with tears. I knelt and gathered him into my arms. He was so emaciated from the winter and the hardship that he was as light as a sparrow. I stood up and faced the Greeks. I was offering myself to their guns. There was a silence, and then a cheer came from their lines. One of them shouted hoarsely, ‘Bravissimo.’ I turned and carried the limp bundle back to my lines.

  In the trench Francisco took two hours to die. His gore soaked into the sleeves and flanks of my tunic. His shattered head was cradled in my arms like a little child and his mouth formed words that only he could hear. Tears began to follow each other down his cheeks. I gathered his tears on my fingers and drank them. I bent down and whispered into his ear, ‘Francisco, I have always loved you.’ His eyes rolled up and met mine. He fixed my gaze. He cleared his throat with difficulty and said, ‘I know.’ I said, ‘I never told you until now.’ He smiled that slow laconic smile and said, ‘Life’s a bitch, Carlo. I felt good with you.’ I saw the light grow dim in his eyes and he began the long slow journey down into death. There was no morphia. His agony must have been indescribable. He did not ask me to shoot him; perhaps at the very end he loved his vanishing life.)