Corelli's Mandolin

by Louis de Bernières

  The two women, whose souls had been so continuously tempered in the crucibles of bereavement and unhappiness, found in Antonia a new and poignant focus for their lives. There was no penury too grievous to endure that she did not make sufferable, no tragic memory that she could not efface, and she took her place in that providential matriarchy as though designed for it by fate. In all her life she never asked a question about her father, as though it had fallen to her naturally to arrive by parthenogenesis, and it was not until she was applying for a passport to take her abroad on her honeymoon that she discovered the extreme weightlessness of finding that officially she did not exist.

  She did have a grandfather, however. When Dr Iannis returned after two years, shuffling into the kitchen supported upon the arms of two workers of the Red Cross, utterly broken by the continual dread of daily brutality, forever speechless and emotionally paralysed, he bent down and kissed the child upon her head before retiring to his room. Just as Antonia did not speculate about a father, so Dr Iannis did not speculate about the child. It was enough for him to understand that the world had forked along a path that was inapprehensible, alien, and opaque. It had become a mirror that reflected dimly the grotesque, the demonic, and the hegemony of death. He accepted that his daughter and Drosoula would sleep in his bed and that he would take Pelagia’s, because, whichever bed it was, he would dream the same dreams of a forced march of hundreds of kilometres without his stolen boots, without sustenance or water. He would hear the cries of villagers as their houses burned, the screams of live castration and extracted eyes, and the crackle of shots as stragglers were executed, and he would witness over and over again Stamatis and Kokolios, the monarchist and the Communist, the very image of Greece itself, dying in each others’ arms and imploring him to leave them in the road lest he himself be shot. His mind echoed perpetually with the ELAS hymn, a panegyric to unity and heroism and love, and the sour irony of being addressed as comrade when his back was beaten and a barrel pressed upon the nape of his neck in the false executions that struck his guards as humorous.

  In his wordlessness, thinking in images instead of words, because words were too feeble and too far off the mark, Dr Iannis drew the same comfort from Antonia as he had drawn from his daughter after his own young wife had died. He would dandle the child upon his knee, arranging her black hair, tickling her ears, gazing intently into her brown eyes as if this alone was any way to speak, her every smile filling his heart with sorrow because when she was old she would lose her innocence and know that tragedy wastes the muscles of the face until a smile becomes impossible.

  Dr Iannis took up medicine again, helping his daughter in a reversal of their prior roles. It alarmed her to see the shaking of his hands as silently he dealt with wounds and sores, and she knew also that he worked only in the face of his own overwhelming sense of futility. Why preserve life when all of us must die, when there is no such thing as immortality and health is an ephemeral accident of youth? She wondered sometimes at the invincible power of his humanitarian impulse, an impulse as inconceivably courageous, hopeless and quixotic as the task of Sisyphus, an impulse as noble and incomprehensible as that which inspires a martyr to cry out blessings as he burns. In the evenings she wrapped her arms about him and held him as his mind revolved upon his past, his eyes wet with sadness, and she buried her head in his chest, understanding that it was his despair that lightened hers.

  She attempted to interest him in working on his History, and when she took the papers from the cachette and arranged them in front of him at his table, he seemed willing enough to work. He read through them, but at the end of a week Pelagia found that he had added only one short paragraph in a calligraphy that had transformed itself from the old firm hand into a spidery chaos of wavering spikes and attenuated loops. She read it and remembered something that her father had once said to Antonio. Diagonally across the bottom of the last page, her father had written, ‘In the past we had the barbarians. Now we have only ourselves to blame.’

  While she had been in the cachette, Pelagia had rediscovered Mandras’ rifle, Antonio’s mandolin, and Carlo’s papers. The latter she read through in a single evening, beginning with the heartrending and prophetic letter of farewell, and continuing through the story of Albania and the death of Francisco. She had never once imagined that that virile and genial Titan had suffered so immensely from a secret woe that had transformed him permanently into a stranger to himself, drying up the source and springs of happiness. But at last she understood the true source of all his fortitude and sacrifice, and she understood that nothing is less obvious in a man than that which seems unquestionable. She saw that he had been as much intent on losing his life as he had been to save Corelli’s, and she realised that her own adopted child at risk would have prompted the same ineffable courage in herself.

  Antonia grew tall and slender, approximating daily to the classical image of the amazon athlete depicted on the vases in museums. When she walked she strode, springing lightly from the balls of her feet, and very early on she adopted white as the colour of her clothes. She was incapable of decorum, and when she sat in her grandfather’s armchair she not only sucked her thumb, but dangled one leg languorously over the arm of the chair, lolling in the most unladylike fashion, and reproving her mother’s and Drosoula’s reproofs with laughing cries of, ‘Don’t be so old-fashioned.’ Pelagia recognised that in a house run by eccentric women for themselves, she had only herself to blame if Antonia continued the process of becoming anomalous amongst the female sex that her father had inaugurated with herself.

  Eccentric they were seen to be. The empty-headed gossips of the village transformed Drosoula, with her extreme ugliness, and Pelagia, with her fearless lack of deference to men, into a pair of harridans and witches. The fact that the doctor was silent and impotent in the house was explained away by means of chemically emasculating potions and Ottoman spells, and the fact that Pelagia was driven by impecuniousness to resort to valerian and thyme rather than to sophisticated modern drugs merely served to exacerbate the certainty that their methods were suspicious and occult. Children stoned them as they passed, taunting them, and adults warned their children to keep away and encouraged their dogs to bite them. Nonetheless, Pelagia earned a living, because after darkness people would arrive furtively in the belief that her cures and lotions were infallible.

  The first great crisis of this life occurred in 1950, when the women of the house failed to accumulate enough money to bribe a public health official into ignoring the fact that the doctor and Pelagia were unqualified. Forbidden to practise, it seemed that they were destined to sink into the most abject destitution, and to return to a wartime subsistence of hedgehogs, lizards, and snails.

  But as though the fates were smiling upon them for the first time, a lugubrious Canadian poet who specialised in verses concerning suicide attempts and metaphysical laments, arrived on the island looking for lodgings. He was the first in the new vanguard of Western romantic intellectuals with Byronic aspirations, and he was looking for a simple house amongst simple people of the earth where he could get to grips with the truly gritty realities of life.

  What he got was a simple house amongst simple people of the sea. Ashamed and apologetic, Drosoula showed him around all two rooms of her unsanitised, damp, peeling, and faintly smelly little house on the quay which had been closed for five years and become a haven for cockroaches, lizards, and rats. She was bracing herself for a contemptuous refusal when he promptly professed himself delighted, offering a rent that was nine and a half times as big as she had tentatively proposed to herself. She concluded that the man was undoubtedly rich and mad, and the man himself could not believe his good fortune in having found a house at a sum so peppercorn that even a poet could live. He even felt guilty about it and would put too much money in the envelope that he would insert through the shutters, whereupon Drosoula would honestly return it.

  He stayed there for three years until the disaster of 1953, filling the ro
oms with neurotic bohemian blondes and fashionably Marxist novelists who expounded their conspiracy theories all night and with increasingly slurred vehemence, over bottles of coarse red wine whose alcoholic content and deleterious effect upon the intellect were significantly greater than they thought. The poet would have stayed after the disaster too, but he had come to realise with increasing clarity that relaxation, sunshine, and contentment were doing irreparable damage to his muse. It had at last become impossible to write depressing verse, and it had become a priority to return to Montreal, via Paris, where freedom was in the process of being recognised as the major source of Angst.

  But Pelagia, Drosoula and Antonia revelled in the freedom of their unprecedented wealth. They ate lamb at least twice a week, and were able to buy beans that had been dried this year rather than the year before. Additionally, the daily bottle of wine had the salutary effect upon the doctor of healing his psychic wounds one by one, releasing his memories and making light of them, until at length he smiled and laughed even if he never spoke. He had taken to going for long slow walks with Antonia, watching the little girl taking delight in butterflies and skittering from one treasure to another in a fashion that reminded him of Lemoni when she had been a child. Nowadays the only complication in their lives was that they had adopted a cat.

  It was not a serious complication, but a confounding one nonetheless. It seemed that cats, for a very obvious reason, had been exterminated from the island during the war, but within a few years they had bred to their former number. Once more there were fat and contented creatures waiting on the quays for offcuts of fish, and once again there were pathetic, worm-infested, skinny and stunted cats begging from house to house in expectation of nothing but blows and kicks.

  It so happened that Drosoula had taken to calling Antonia ‘puss’ which was by no means uncommon nor unwarranted, and the name, in Greek ‘Psipsina’, had stuck and spread to Pelagia, until the girl had almost forgotten her real name. She had become completely accustomed to it, it suited her feline nature and her languid grace, and she was used to being called to dinner by the name. It took some time for the family to work out why, one evening and upon seven subsequent evenings, a small brindled cat leapt through the kitchen window and onto the table just after they had called Antonia in.

  At first they shooed it away with snapping dishcloths and waves of the hand, but of course it persisted, and of course eventually it stayed. It meant that Antonia would hear, ‘Psipsina, get off the table,’ when she was innocently playing in the yard, or, ‘Psipsina, dinnertime,’ only to come in and find that a small and uninviting dish of raw and bloody offal had been placed upon the tiles. If there was a sudden cry of, ‘Psipsina, don’t do that,’ she would freeze in the process of her mischief and wonder desperately whether or not it was she who had been caught. Drosoula sensibly proposed that Antonia and the cat should swap names, so that the cat became Antonia and the little girl became Psipsina, but it was tried and found unworkable.

  During all this time Pelagia became convinced that Antonio Corelli was dead, and like her father she became assured beyond doubt of the reality of ghosts.

  It had happened first in 1946 when, one day in October, at about the anniversary of the massacres, she was standing outside the house with the infant Antonia cradled in her arms. She was at the time making cooing noises and giving the baby her forefinger to suckle. Something made her look up, and she saw a figure dressed in black standing looking at her. He was in exactly the place where Mandras had been when he was shot by Velisarios’ cannon. The figure was looking at her, poised between a hesitation and a forward pace, and her heart leapt. He had about him the melancholy atmosphere of nine thousand grieving ghosts, and sorrow emanated from his face with the same distinctness with which a light breaks through the mantle of a lamp. She was sure it was him. Thin and bearded though he was, she saw clearly the scar on his cheek and the same brown eyes, the same fall of hair, the same symmetry of his carriage. Excited beyond all joy she put the baby down in order to run to him, but when she looked up he had gone.

  Her heart jumping and pounding, she ran. Around the bend of the road she stopped and looked wildly about. ‘Antonio!’ she cried out, ‘Antonio!’ But no voice responded and no man moved towards her. He had vanished. Her hands rose to the heavens in incomprehension, and fell down again to her sides in despair. She stood, watching and calling, until her shouts hurt her throat and tears blinded her eyes. The following morning she found a single red rose on the ground above where Carlo Guercio lay.

  The same ghost appeared at the same place in 1947, and every year thereafter at roughly the same time, but never exactly, and every year at some moment in October there would be a rose. It was by this that Pelagia was led to conclude that Antonio had honoured his promise to return and that it was possible to keep a vow and to continue to love even from beyond the prison of a grave. She was able to live satisfied, knowing that she had not been deserted and cast off, filled with happy reveries of being desired and cherished even in her dry and fading spinsterhood, and anticipating that her own death would restore all that had been stolen away in life.

  65 1953

  When Zeus wished to establish the exact location of the navel of the world he released two eagles from the furthest perimeters of it and made a note of where the flight of these birds crossed. They did so at Delphi, and Greece became the place where East divides from West, and North from South, the rendezvous of mutually exclusive cultures, and the crossroads of the rapacious and itinerant armies of the world.

  Pelagia had taken pride in the idea that she lived at the very centre, but now, if such a thing is possible, she gave up being Greek. She had seen with her own eyes the contempt with which Drosoula was treated merely because to have become a widow is to have ceased to exist. For her own conscientious idealism in attempting to heal the sick she had acquired the reputation of being a witch, and, worse than any of this, the barbarity of the civil war had knocked out of her forever the Hellenic faith which her father had instilled into her. She could no longer believe that she was heir to the greatest and most exquisite culture in the history of the earth. Ancient Greece may have been in the same place as modern Greece, but it was not the same country and it did not contain the same people. Papandreou was not Pericles, and the King was hardly Constantine.

  Pelagia pretended to herself that she was Italian, and from afar she was able to feel more a part of it precisely because distance and the fact that she had never been there permitted her never to discover that it was no more full of liberal humanist mandolin-players than Greece was. ‘After all,’ she told herself, ‘I was to marry an Italian, I speak Italian, and I expect that in Italy I could have become a doctor.’

  Accordingly she brought up Antonia to speak Italian, so that the latter learned Romaic Greek from Drosoula and never would speak Katharevousa, and she bought herself a wireless from someone who was happy to part with it for next to nothing, because something had gone wrong with its tuning mechanism and it would only pick up stations in Italy. She bought it in 1949, just after the battle of Vitsi had concluded the civil war, and was able to listen to it at the anniversary of the massacres in October. She loved it dearly, polishing its scratched veneer until it gleamed, and neglecting her obligations by sitting motionless before it for hours, not only listening to it, but watching it carefully as if expecting Antonio to seep suddenly like smoke through its bronzed mesh.

  She could hardly bear to leave it, and she would sit through hours of tedious nonsense just in the hope of hearing ‘Non Ti Scorda Di Me’, ‘Core’n Grato’, ‘Parlami d’Amore’, or ‘La Donna e Mobile’. But most of all she longed to be transported back to the days of La Scala by hearing ‘Torna a Surriento’, the favourite song of the club and the one they would sing the most, and she would close her eyes in the most blissful state of melancholy as she heard its melody and visualised the boys outside under the olive, scarcely aware of the melodrama of their gestures as they poured their hearts a
nd the full lust of their voices into the grippingly beautiful mordants and grace-notes of the final phrase, after which they would sit in a moment of nostalgic silence before sighing, shaking their heads, and wiping the tears from their eyes with their sleeves. It was also because of the radio that she discovered that there were beautiful songs for women, and she sang ‘O Mio Babbino Caro’ at the top of her voice as she scrubbed the floor on her hands and knees, investing it with oriental microtones and adorning it with ululations, thus abnegating in the very attempt her project of becoming Italian.

  She listened also and in particular for the sound of mandolins, and would remind herself that one day she must rescue that of the captain from the cachette. Once she had come in from gathering berries and could have sworn that she heard the last bars of ‘Pelagia’s March’, but she realised that she could not have done, since the captain was dead. No, it was just that this profligate world possessed other players who could supply his place. She wondered often where he had met his fate; most probably in the sea, in that little boat, but perhaps in Italy, at Anzio, or somewhere on the Gothic Line. It filled her with a sense of the utmost bereavement to conceive of his skeleton whitening beneath the ground, the muscles and tendons that had worked such music stilled and useless, contracting into rotting thongs. The ground above him was perhaps as still and silent as that which held the dead in the maquis, or perhaps it was a thoroughfare like that above Carlo Guercio. She herself did not like to walk above Carlo’s grave, and she teased herself at the ludicrous modesty of fearing that a dead man might peer through a depth of soil and see right up her skirts.