Prospero's Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfu

by Lawrence Durrell

  From this small hillock the prospect stretches away—vineyard, orchard and wood, with its insinuating lines: to the last bluffline of limestone crags beyond which the sea coils and uncoils its silver meshes. From Paleocastrizza the fishermen are setting out with their coracles of straw and wood.

  “One sleeps lightly these moonlight nights” says the Count. We pass an arbor in which, sitting like statues at a deal table, we see a peasant and his wife. Their low voices sound clear and rich upon the breathless night. “Tomorrow we shall ride down to the sea together. I have a horse for you each.”

  And so quietly back to the house, and through the great doorway. The candles have burnt down to their guttering ends. The Count distributes them like blessings. We make our way to our several rooms in silence.

  Closing the shutters against the staring moon, I pick up a book from the pile lying on top of a cupboard in the corner of a room; it is a commonplace book, full of entries in the fine small hand of the Count. More than half of it is given up to accounts, which are entered in Italian. There is a list of Greek peasant proverbs, a rough drawing of a strip of coast over the legend “Dodona’s Shrine?”, two designs for sailing boats, and the following quotation:

  Lingering perdition, worse than any death

  Can be at once, shall step by step attend

  You, and your ways, whose wraths to guard you

  from,

  Which here in this most desolate isle, else falls

  Upon your heads, is nothing but heart’s sorrow,

  And a clear life ensuing.

  10.28.37

  Goodisson records the existence of a “fine quarry of marble under the western peak of St. Salvador, of a very fine grain, and well adapted to the use of statuary.” Niko has made us a garden table and seat from this lovely stuff, which is of a deep salmon pink and shot with lines of rust-red.

  10.29.37

  William Goodisson, A.B., whose “Historical and Topographical” essay on the island was published in 1822 is sometimes interesting, but often dull and moribund. He charms us most when he is most scientific—and surely no more charming feat than his measurement of the “Chemical Properties of Sappho’s Leap” (in Leukada) could be imagined. “Chemical Analysis of Sappho’s Leap” would make a charming subtitle for the following piece of information: “External properties: of a clear sugar whiteness, with a few glimmering points in the internal fracture resembling that of fine loaf-sugar. Sp. Gravity.2.263.”

  11.2.37

  Cressida has left her name and her legend to grace the reed-fringed edges of the Hyallic Lake; but the force of the stream seems much diminished since 1822, when the speed of the current is said to have turned a mill at 300 meters from the source.

  11.7.37

  The discovery that Judas Iscariot has a direct connection with Corcyra has provided a great deal more grist to Zarian’s mill. Theodore happened to be discussing a first edition of Petrarch which has just been discovered in the uncatalogued jumble of rarer MSS. belonging to the Library with the curator, when the name of Pietro Delia Valle was mentioned. The quotation, as it appears in Zarian’s essay, is as follows: “Here also lives a man reputedly of the race of Judas.… I remember a servant of ours who resided at Corfu affirming that some of the Apostate’s descendants still existed there, and that a house he inhabited was pointed out.” The date was 1614.

  Walking through the verminous and crooked streets of the Hebraica with Theodore we discuss the problem from all its angles. The cobbled alleys are slippery with excrement. The little shops, made for the most part of the flimsiest materials, are worm-eaten and decayed. Yet counters groan with cheap dress materials, mounds of sweets, and everywhere the tap of shoemakers’ hammers emphasizes the gnome-like quality of the place. It is natural, of course, that until today we have never noticed the name of Theodore’s shoemaker: ISCARIOTES. It is painted in lopside capitals on a sagging board. The man himself is a deaf mute with some of the lowering gloomy aspect of Dr. Faustus. He works from a skilful and pedantic set of brown-paper patterns which Theodore has cut out for him. The skin of his face and hands is ingrained with dirt and cobbler’s wax. He never smiles. The hair on his face grows high up on the cheekbones so that, unshaven, he seems to be suffering from powder-markings—as if from the discharge of the gun. “His eyebrows,” says Zarian with disappointment, “do not meet in the middle.” (Popular superstition suggests that this is one of the signs of the Evil Eye.)

  Nevertheless the occasion is too good a one to miss, and Zarian draws his notebook from his pocket. Just how to interview a deaf mute, however, is a problem which none of us can solve. Iscariotes can only move his pinkish tongue in his mouth with a faint snake-like composure; he can groan through his nose. And to complete the record of our misfortunes he is illiterate. He appears to have no family, and nobody in the surrounding shops knows anything about him except that he has been working at his little skin-covered bench for many years. Voluble and excited, Zarian falls into the Venetian dialect which the Jews in this quarter use among themselves, but without result. Iscariotes shakes his head and attempts a laugh; he does this noiselessly by inflating his throat as a snake its hood—until you can see his pink tongue moving among the yellow stumps of teeth. It is rather a failure.

  Yet later in the alcove of “The Partridge” Zarian recovers his composure as he proceeds to give us an account of the Jewish Colony of Corcyra.

  When Benjamin of Tudela visited the island in 1160 he found only one Jew there—a dyer.

  In 1571 Venice expelled the Jews from her dominions; yet by some chance the Jews of Corcyra were left undisturbed. In 1760 they were a colony 1,171 strong, while when the first French warships arrived to claim the island fortress for France some 2,000 were recorded in the census figures. By 1860 the colony numbered some 6,000 souls according to British computations.

  Yet where does the ceremony of casting out Judas originate? At eleven o’clock on Good Friday every year, the unwary visitor is suddenly terrified out of his wits by the discharge of masses of crockery into the streets, pots, pans, and cauldrons, while the air is made hideous by the banging of pistols. This is supposed to be a ceremony for the casting out of Judas; and the banging and yelling continue (with pauses for refreshment) throughout the day.

  The Hebraica still guards its isolation and its language, and its members play little or no part in the life of the island. Yet the age of persecutions is by no means over; Zarian has observed how during Easter Week you will never see a Jew outside the confines of their settlement. But the finest wedding embroideries come from the Hebraica, and the greatest range of pottery and the tinsmith’s wares are to be seen there.

  On the 13th February 1386 Corfu was once more a Venetian possession.… On the 20th of May the people of Corfu, at a public meet ing to appoint five ambassadors to submit to the Venetian senate, for confirmation of the treaty already made, had included a Jew in the Embassy named David Somos.…

  Howell in his Travels mentions the Venetian dialect which they speak even today.

  11.10.37

  “To Napoleon,” says Zarian, who rejoices in great names, “Corfu was the keystone to an Empire in the East. If he had been exiled here instead of in St. Helena there is no knowing but that his proud stony heart might have been softened.”

  In his diary the French conqueror wrote: “Venice must fall to those to whom we give the Italian continent, but meanwhile we will take its vessels, strip its arsenal, destroy its bank, and keep Corfu and Ancona.…” “With Malta and Corfu we should soon be masters of the Mediterranean.” And later, in a letter to Talleyrand he added: “I think that henceforth the chief maxim of the French Republic should be never to give up Corfu, Zante, etc.”

  In 1815 the Ionian Islands were created a single, free and independent state under the sole protection of Britain; and the era of the larger lunacy began. For the curious, the hyperborean prose of Napier will provide an effective counterblast to any suggestion that British colonies are, in the nat
ure of things, perfectly governed. Yet Adams brought the town water, and the remains of the solid and beautiful roads built by the British still remain. Solomos was accepted and even petted. The Earl of Guilford, surely one of the most remarkable eccentrics of the last century, was persuaded to relinquish Ithaca as a home for his Ionian Academy, and to found the University of Corfu in 1823. The relief of the elegant Jervis White-Jervis is exhaled in every line. “What would it have been,” he writes, “if Lord Guilford had succeeded in carrying out his object of establishing the University at Ithaca. Visionary ideas of academical groves and of the birthplace of Ulysses do not form men to be useful citizens; and from one student who would have been sent from there, a hundred men would have been turned out upon the world with their ideas confined to a barren rock and a few goats.”

  11.16.37

  Sitting in the shade of the olive trees overlooking the dazzle of Mouse Island set in its burnished emerald sea, the Count discourses amiably upon the British occupation, with that quiet mordant turn of voice, while Zarian and Theodore feast upon green olives and white cheese. It is one of our many afternoons in search of lore; we have been scouring the lovely hill of Analypsis for traces of the Temple to Neptune, supposed to have been noted by British Naval officers towards the end of the last century. Now dropping down through the silver olive groves we have come to Canoni, where Lord Kitchener complete with side-whiskers and moustache keeps a small tavern; and where Edwardian ginger beer, made after an Edwardian recipe, is served in little stone bottles with a marble for a cork. This is known to the islanders as “Tsit-Tsin Beera” and provides a convenient point of departure for the Count, who has been supplementing Zarian’s store of anecdotes by an account of how Mr. Gladstone and the Bishop of Paxo, in an access of reciprocal politeness (in an attempt to kiss each others’ hands) banged their skulls together during a very solemn ceremony and were only restored by a bottle of ginger-beer such as we are now consuming.

  People in search of the vanished Imperial culture of England would find very little in Corfu: and that little curious. I do not speak about prevailing attitudes of mind; we have, of course, a certain number of Greeks educated abroad, who ape the English. I have inherited, for example, from my family—which once governed here under the British—a strong taste for good manners and fair dealing as a living part of my amour-propre, not as independent virtues of character. It is the great difference between French culture and British; the British have no character—they depend upon very highly developed principles. It is convenient because they do not have to think. But apart from this Britain’s legacy to Corcyra is an odd one; you have seen, have you not, in the dirty little alleys between the Hebraica and the port, a strange symbol chalked upon the walls? Wander into the alleys, and you will be suddenly surprised to see the wickets and bails of the slum cricketer everywhere; you will suddenly think you are in Stepney.

  Cricket lives on as independently as the patron saint. It is a mysterious and satisfying ritual which the islanders have refused to relinquish; and every year in August when the British Fleet comes in, cricket enjoys her festival. A ripple of anticipation runs through the groups of dawdlers on the sunny esplanade; and the two cricket clubs of the town can be seen practising ferociously at the nets on the hard red earth, in the shadow of Schulemberg’s statue. Groups of peasants, mysteriously drawn by their anticipation, stand in the shadow of the trees talking and observing. Meanwhile the British battleships ride squatly in the harbor and their fussy pinnaces throw up lines of ripples which, hours later, will disturb Father Nicholas at his lobster pots off St. Stephano and cause him mightily to curse “the cuckold British.” When the news comes that the challenge to a cricket match has been received, there is an audible sigh of relief and pleasure which runs the length of the town. At once a profound clamor of activity breaks out; a matting pitch is laid in the center of the esplanade; a marquee is hastily run up; the Ministry of Supply in Athens receives an incoherent telegram asking it to obtain from the British Legation the recipe for rock cakes, which has somehow been mislaid once again this year. The British Consul is to be seen in morning clothes. All British residents of the town gain face in a remarkable way. Some receive presents of fruit and poultry—for this is after all, not far short of a Saint’s Day. And when the teams, eleven aside, and clad in their ceremonial white, meet on the ground for the toss, excitement and admiration reach their height. Peasants come in to town and take the afternoon off to sit under the trees on those uncomfortable cafe chairs, gravely applauding whenever the specialists (who sit in the marquee among the naval representatives and the consuls, and whose role is that of officiating priests) think fit to give them the cue. The British chaplain, who looks like nothing so much as a half-drowned blackbeetle rescued from a water-butt, sits in the midst of the distinguished guests, confirming by his presence the religious quality of the ritual. Everybody except St. Spiridion himself appears to be present. And in the evening, by time-honored custom, a British Band in brilliant coats, marches to the bandstand and delights the crowds by its martial flourishes until the last light dies away and the fireflies come flashing out in their thousands. For the benefit of Zarian I must add here that the terminology of cricketers in Corcyra has suffered with the passage of years. In some curious way the cry “How’s that?” has come to mean “Out” while “runs” are known as “ronia.” The bails on the wickets are known as “rollinia” and the drive is called “pallia.” A yoker and a leg glide are known respectively as a “Primo Salto” and a “Sotto Gamba”; there are a few other small anomalies but I forget them for the moment. But while we are on the question of words I recall two English words which have been baptized into modern Greek. One is the verb “to cost” which is used with a conventional verb-ending and pronounced very much as it is in English; the other is an English draper’s measure “the peak” which has become “pika.” When you add to all this the private manufacture of apple chutney you have, I think, exhausted the subject of British cultural traces in the Ionian.

  11.26.37

  Viscount Kirkwall, who has written what the Count calls “the most exasperatingly friendly and honest book” about the British occupation, captures the Victorian atmosphere of sidewhiskers and sideboots in a disarming manner. He records the dislike of the Ionians for their bluff rulers—a dislike which has changed since their departure into a nostalgic love and admiration. Set in this décor of cypress grove and lake, his characters move creaking with gentility and imperial self-satisfaction. He records the paper-chases and the tea parties in this outlandish corner of the world; the splash of red coats moving under the fortress to the sound of bugles—beaten thin as gold by the winds across the straits. He records with complete fidelity the humors and trials of guardianship by an Empire which has never cared to condescend to its subjects by the exercise of understanding; but confirms them in its love through an exasperating solidity and shy humor.

  On the 9th of May there was a sham siege and assault carried on in the island of Vido: where a good luncheon was laid out in the tents for the officers and visitors. The affair, tho’ well arranged, was on a small scale; as only part of the garrison of Corfu reinforced for the occasion the troops at Vido. But from the picturesque nature of the ground the attack and defence maneuvers formed a pleasing spectacle which even ladies could appreciate. The interest was increased by the fact that some degree of risk was incurred by the troops; as the scaling ladders employed in the attack did not quite reach to the top of the ditch. But as regarded this difficulty no accident occurred. An artilleryman, however, was, by the hasty discharge of a gun, accidentally thrown into the ditch of the principal work.

  11.29.37

  When the Ionian Islands were ceded to Greece, and the evacuation began, the Ionians were horrified to learn that extensive demolitions were to be carried out on the forts. As they had contributed in taxation about two-thirds of the total cost of building the fortresses, they were naturally bitter. Kirkwall, who showed some considerable sympath
y for the Greeks, and for the Corcyreans in particular, is indignant too. His detailed description of the demolition work being carried out during that rainy February of 1864 is a brilliant piece of work.

  To the English colony it was as exciting as a prolonged firework display. “On the afternoon of Tuesday, 29th March, numbers of English ladies and gentlemen, in spite of wind, heavy rain, and rolling seas, crossed over to Vido in order to witness from the keep the destruction of the strong Lunette battery to the west of the island.”

  To the Ionians, however, all this earnest blowing up of “notable ramps, earthworks, embrasures” only underlined the bitterness of the departure. One disgusted Ionian is recorded to have remarked to Kirkwall as a puff of smoke and a jet of falling clods marked the blowing up of another “notable” rampart: “I wish Lord Roosel were on top of it.”

  “The earlier mines,” writes Kirkwall, “were fired by long trains of powder laid on the ground in furrows and slow burning fuses. But after the arrival of a Voltaic Battery from England the affair was arranged in the Scientific Manner which suited better to this Age of Wonders.”