by Irwin Shaw
VI
CORFU
The fishermen turned out to be correct. The wind died at four and by six we were on our way. The Captain did not plot a direct course to Corfu, but made across the mouth of the Gulf, so that if the weather kicked up again, we could make port in Gallipoli, on the heel of the boot. As it turned out, we ran into some wind and were tossed about rather badly for two or three hours in the middle of the night, but we continued on, and when I came on deck in the morning the first islands of Greece were in sight, bare, lonely hills set in a calm, glittering sea, and the flag of Greece had replaced the Italian flag on our mast and was fluttering brightly in the sunshine.
I had made one visit to Greece before this one. Up to that time I had regarded the writings on Greece of American and English travelers with a mixture of irritation and suspicion, as being gushingly rapturous about the beauties of the land, the quality of the light, the color of the sea, and the charm of the people. After my visit I changed my mind. The travelers had not exaggerated. What I had supposed to be flights of fancy were in fact sober reporting.
Though Corfu was not really Greece, according to our Greek deckhand, who came from Athens, and though the people were really half Albanian and half Italian, I found my reaction to both the place and its inhabitants exactly the same as my reaction to the other places and people I had seen in Greece; that is, continuous delight.
To get to the city of Corfu by sea one has almost to scrape the hills of Albania, which loom over the straits, bare, steep, unpopulated, and somehow blindly menacing, like the walls of a fortress. The knowledge that Greece to this day is still technically at war with its neighbor, and that in American passports there is a stamp warning that the passports are not valid for travel in Albania, adds to the feeling of uneasiness as you glide through the sea in the shadow of that forbidding escarpment.
By contrast, Corfu seems to be opening white welcoming arms as you come into the harbor, and a succession of graceful arches beyond the little park on the waterfront seems to invite you into the interior of the city.
We arrived in the middle of a blazing afternoon, when the place was deserted and the fiacre horses were dozing in the shade of the trees. We went ashore for lunch, moving slowly under the punishment of the heat. The banks were closed for the siesta hours and we changed some Italian money into drachma in an establishment that rejoiced in the name of the Spoty Dog Bar.
The best way to see a new place on a hot afternoon is in a fiacre. You are in the shade, you go at a leisurely pace, your feet do not ache, and you get a chance to look into the faces of the people you pass. We went along the handsome seaside promenade, examined an impressively luxurious new Swiss-run hotel facing the sea, saw with some misgivings that at the bathing club there was a net to keep out sharks. We had ignored the idea of sharks on the whole voyage. Our Captain insisted that in his forty years in and out of the Mediterranean he had never seen any swimmer molested by one, and he himself blithely jumped off the prow of the boat in any waters when we stopped to swim. Still, the memory of that ominous-looking net remained with us, and from that time on, I think we all stayed a little closer to the boat when we swam in deep water.
Continuing on our way, we passed women striding, sandaled and erect, on the baking roads, carrying jars on their heads. Heavily burdened minute donkeys with their tragic braying shattered the somnolent peace of the green fields and drowned out the afternoon chorus of the cicadas. Houses were tiny, whitewashed, or painted pastel pinks and blues, flowers were everywhere, fields were green, well-watered and rich-seeming. Cars (mostly ten-year-old Pontiacs and Chevrolets) came almost to a full stop as they passed each other on the narrow roads. I have been told that Greek drivers are all suicidal, but my impression of them was completely different. Their courtesy was so impressive after the streets of Paris, the roads of Italy and wheeled Germans wherever you find them, that if it were feasible I would have Greek chauffeurs sent out by missionary societies all over the world to teach other races how to drive. They seemed to me to be the last polite drivers on the face of the earth. I would certainly contribute to such a cause. For an agnostic, saving pedestrians seems like a more praiseworthy occupation than saving souls.
We were driven past the airfield, where DC-3’s take off regularly for Athens. The word is, alas, that next year the field will accommodate jets. Tourism, spurred on by the movie Never on Sunday, has become a major industry in Greece, and Corfu is not being neglected, even though it is a good many sea miles from the street in Piraeus where Miss Mercouri entertained her many friends. The dowdy and hilarious palace of the Empress Elisabeth of Austria on Corfu was to become a gambling casino, I was told. This, I suppose, is a just fate for that pompous pile, adorned with some of the worst paintings and sculpture of which the late nineteenth century was capable, and in which there still is the desk and the curious saddle-seat where, according to our guide, Kaiser Wilhelm sat, a mock, persistent, indoor cavalryman, and drew up the plans for the conduct of the First World War.
With the approach of evening we walked around the town. The shops are modest in the goods they display, but there are quite a few well-stocked bookstores, and the streets themselves are adorned by that most welcome of urban features, arcades. Arcades somehow humanize a street. They make it more useful in sun and rain, and generously extend the idea of shelter, which is a city’s first function, to native and barbarian alike.
On the great main square, with its dozens of cafés and restaurants, an enthusiastic crowd had collected to watch a cricket match. The field was of bare, sun-pounded earth, innocent of grass, but there was a tent located in the most proper style at one end and a matting stretched between the wickets as a pitch. Some units of the English fleet were due in port in a day or two and the local teams were getting ready for the challenge match. While I watched, one of the bowlers retired three straight batsmen without yielding a run. I imagine that if this had been America, he would have been signed, with a bonus, by the New York Yankees, before nightfall.
At sunset we watched from the deck of our boat, as the flag was hauled down at the naval headquarters under the fortress, to the blare of a bugle. Everybody within earshot stood stiffly at attention during the ceremony, laborers on the docks, taxi drivers, beggars, old ladies in black, waiters with trays in the cafés, and their customers with their drinks, all frozen for a minute or so into rigid patriotism. Our Captain, remembering the Royal Navy, ran down our Union Jack at the same time, and told me of a retired naval officer for whom he worked before the war who, with all hands and passengers ordered to be present, conducted the flag lowering ceremony on his yacht each day to the sound of “The Last Post” on a phonograph.
Some American friends of ours, a man and his wife (writers, naturally), who had come to Corfu to work in seclusion and fine weather for a year, came on board for drinks. The fine weather had not quite materialized. It had rained steadily all winter, they said, and they were going to try Norway next. We hired a taxi and went out of town to a restaurant in a garden overlooking the sea. En route we passed a rustic tavern, almost lost in flowers, where a whole lamb was turning on an outdoor spit, while men danced with each other, separated by a twisted handkerchief, to the twanging music that has become so familiar to us since the showing of Miss Mercouri’s movie. The scene was different from Crotone in that women, though not dancing, were at least present and drinking, and could, ostensibly, join the men for dinner when the lamb was ready.
The restaurant to which our friends led us was lit softly by lanterns hung from the branches of shadowing trees. The meal was delicious, the wine good, the night air fragrant with jasmine and salt. It was hard to understand, that evening, how anyone could contemplate Norway after Corfu.
When I wanted to pay our driver at the end of the evening, he asked, in Italian, how long we were going to stay on the island. When I said three or four days, he waved away my money and said he would keep an account for us and we could pay it just before we sailed. I intend to sugg
est this amiable system of transportation on credit next time I take a taxi in from Kennedy Airport and see what the reaction will be.
PALEOKASTRITSA
There were some repairs to be made on a broken intake valve, so we got hold of our driver the next morning and had him take us to a little hotel on the other side of the island, at Paleokastritsa, which is one of the several places claimed as the spot where Ulysses was washed up and discovered by Nausicaa. The hotel is small and shares the beach with one other equally small hotel and a modest restaurant. In contrast to Viareggio, it is just the sort of place that anyone, poet or not, living or dead, would be delighted to be washed up on.
The beach makes a gleaming semi-circle at the end of a narrow cove, whose deep waters reflect the steep cliffs that hem it in. Oleander, bougainvillaea and jasmine are everywhere, a monastery shines white on a cliff high above the water, and centuries-old olive groves stretch off, silvery and green, in park-like symmetry, to other beaches and other hidden coves nearby. Langoustes are kept alive in large, slatted viviers underwater, and you are rowed out by a boatman, accompanied by your waiter, who unlocks a padlock and fishes in the crate for the size langouste you indicate. Outside the crates, lobsters are kept, tethered underwater on ropes, because if they were put in with the langoustes they would damage them with their claws.
Twenty minutes after you have made your choice, the langouste is served, broiled, with melted butter and lemon, flakily tender and tasting of the depths. We drank white wine without resin, as the taste of turpentine is not as romantic to me as to other Northern Greekophiles.
To keep the place from being inhumanly idyllic, certain annoyances were provided. There were wasps everywhere who like freshly caught langouste as much as you do and who duel you cleverly for each morsel. One wasp, frustrated at table, followed me out to the beach, and taking an approximate fix on the assumed location of my langouste at the moment, dove at my abdomen and, in a burst of suicidal morbidity, well and truly stung me. Greek wasps, I discovered, are like Greek soldiers in one respect. They sacrifice themselves, but they do not sacrifice themselves in vain. I had an angry little red lump under my belt and it lasted for more than a week.
Further to prove that perfection in this world is never absolute, a radio blared forth an incessant stream of sound. Rock and roll, bazouki, Beethoven, and political speeches followed each other without pause or plan, because from the time the radio is switched on at eight in the morning until it is shut at midnight, nobody bothers to turn a dial on it. And a group of about fifteen French people, boys and girls in their early twenties, who had bicycled over for a swim and lunch from a French holiday camp on the other side of the island, did all the things that people of that generation do to make people of my generation despair. They talked loudly, using, with numbing frequency, the word which in French is supposed to be less objectionable than its English translation but which still does not fall on the ear with grace, especially on Ulysses’ beach. They wore less clothes than they should have and the girls more eye makeup than they should have and they necked in public and amused themselves at the table by pouring water over each other, to the accompaniment of gales of laughter.
To even things up on a nationalistic basis, a troop of German boys in their teens arrived in a bus and wandered around the beach, making their presence felt. They were all dressed in leather shorts and carried what looked like daggers at their belts and they sang marching songs and started a malicious game which involved skipping stones at each other across the water, purposely close to other bathers. They were probably innocent boy scouts, but somebody ought to tell the Germans that they ought not to wear daggers when they visit foreign countries. Even with the best will in the world, one remembers the Hitler Jugend, and Strength Through Joy, and when the leader of the troop, a young man of about twenty-five, marched past me in his heavy shoes, I could not help but look at the leather map case swinging from his shoulder and wonder how many drawings of key military points were contained therein.
In the late afternoon, things improved. The French went off on their bicycles, with five or six volleys of their talismanic word. The Germans, some of them carrying guitars, although still bedaggered, took boats to a camping spot, and it was possible to find a spot on the beach out of range of the restaurant radio. There we could talk in peace to two ladies who had been our neighbors at lunch, one of them Australian, the other, as she put it, more or less mixed-up English. They lived in London and had spent most of their holiday in Paleokastritsa, and loved it. Neither of them had ever been married, and they were like charming heroines in the novels of E. M. Forster, intelligent, sensitive, formidably well-read, widely-traveled, gently mannered, and transparently good. Naturally, their favorite author was E. M. Forster. Ladies like these are to be found traveling resolutely all over Europe, and if they were ever to disappear, Europe would be much the poorer for it.
The older of the two ladies, who had a responsible job in a big London hospital, had been offered a similar post in a hospital in New Haven. She asked me what New Haven was like, and I tried to give her an honest answer. My memories of New Haven include having my nose broken badly in a football game there in 1931 (neither for nor against Yale, but playing against Arnold for Brooklyn College, neither of which teams has ever posed a real threat to Texas or Oklahoma for national honors). I had also been in and out of New Haven for the tryout performances of plays, which, for the most part, turned out to be much more painful than the broken nose. Since it was unlikely that the English lady would ever have to run back a kickoff or rewrite a third act in one night in the Hotel Taft, I told her that she would probably like New Haven, and that even if she didn’t, New York was only an hour away by train.
In the evening, we all strolled together through olive groves to another cove and had a glass of ouzo in a little fisherman’s restaurant there and talked to an American professor of English from Chicago who had published, inevitably, a thesis on Melville. He had just finished a year teaching in Greece on an exchange fellowship. He was starting back to Chicago the next morning with his wife and two sons and he was already suffering the pangs of nostalgia for Greece as we drank the ouzo and watched a boat full of large stones being unloaded at the water’s edge. The work was being done by women, but when a particularly heavy stone had to be taken from the boat one of the husbands lounging about would heave himself to his feet and help lift it and place it, with a loving smile, on his wife’s head before sinking down again among his fellows. “It’s a cinch,” the professor said, regarding this Ionian division of labor, “I won’t see anything like that in Chicago.”
There was a full moon that night and a cool green dawn in the morning, through which huge bearded monks with long hair done up in buns walked barefoot to market from the monastery on the hill, and it seemed foolish ever to leave this place for anyplace else. But our ship was waiting and it was a long way to Venice, where we were committed to surrender the ship before the 31st of July, and we had a last swim, a last langouste with our friends, and got into our still-unpaid-for taxi and drove slowly back to the city. En route we were doused twice with clouds of DDT, which was being sprayed impartially in thick clouds on town and countryside from an old biplane flying in a low methodical pattern over this section of the island. Our driver explained that this happened every year as a prelude to the visit of the King and Queen of Greece to their summer residence of Mon Repos near the city. The Royal Family has an aversion to mosquitoes.
When we got to the harbor we saw immediately that any idea we might have had of leaving port that afternoon was out of the question. A wild wind was blowing and all the small craft in the harbor were rolling at their moorings and pieces of paper and leaves were skirling across the square. The Captain had put down an extra anchor and secured extra lines astern, but even with that the craft was pulling with the wind, and when we slept in it that night, it was almost as uncomfortable as it would have been during a storm in the open sea.
By morning, t
he sea had calmed magically, and we pulled out of the harbor soon after saying goodbye to the ladies from Paleokastritsa, who had come down to Corfu to catch the handsome new Italian car ferry, the Appia, which is painted a striking dull gold and plies between the mainland of Greece, Corfu and Brindisi.
An hour or so out of port we came upon one of the camps of the Club Méditerrannée, a Parisian organization which has instituted some very attractive new ideas in low-cost holidays. The camp on Corfu is made up of groups of simply built Tahitian huts, set in a huge olive grove and fronting on a magnificent stretch of beach. The dining areas are all in the open air, as are bars, dance-floors and libraries. Most of the vacationers were young, in their twenties, but there were some older people and children, and while there were guests from all over Europe there, the only language I heard being spoken was French. Everything was neat and tidy and bright with flowers, and the Tahitian huts blended gracefully into the shade of the olive groves, so that from a little distance at sea they were hardly visible. On a dock in front of the camp there was a crowd of people waiting to be pulled around the bay on water skis by one of the two powerful outboards that buzzed in and out, picking up new skiers with hardly any slow-down, like a nautical assembly line.