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

by Lawrence Durrell

  The sound of singing is beaten out thin upon the late afternoon air. I can hear Spiro’s bass notes sounding like the eructations of a giant. The Count sits for a while on the garden wall with one slipper off and lights a cigarette. “And perhaps we shall have an engagement or something to remind us that we are getting old men.” Caroline pretends she does not hear.

  Bocklin has brought his flute. Its quaint twirls and flourishes sound unearthly on the empty lawns where the nymph stands. The Count walks slowly down the garden path.

  There is going to be a war, of course. But on days like this one feels that it will go on for ever—I mean this lovely lambent weather: no sense of time, except that the fruit upon our tables changes. By the way, figs are in. Let us hope they will outlive your foreign policy, my dear boy. I see you have been reading Mackenzie. It will be just the same. The Royalists will let us down all the way along. Don’t you see that Nimiec and Caroline are falling in love with each other? There is that subtle unspoken polarity of feeling you can see when they are together. They both know it will happen. They both know that the other knows. They both avoid each other’s company. And yet the invisible cobweb is drawing tighter. That is happiness—the certainty and inevitability of an attraction like that. It remains for the lock to turn on the event and already it is spoiled. They have had a hundred opportunities to confess themselves—and there he is walking round with the Doctor, holding his test tubes, while she sits and plays patience and imagines that she does not want him to come and find her there. You know, there is no philosophic compensation for growing beyond the reach of love—that is the one wall one never breaks through. To think that that will never happen again. That that moment, the germinating half-second during which you recognize your complement in someone else, will never happen again.… Any of the peasant girls would supply the physical simulacrum of the event. Ah, but the thing itself is gone. Let us have a glass of wine, shall we? It’s thirsty work talking like a Norman Douglas character. Caroline, have a glass of wine with us and let me tell your fortune.

  Just after dawn the cries of the pickers wake us. The grass is still heavy with dew and the sun not yet above the trees. A long line of colored women are setting forth for the vineyard with their baskets. Mark and Peter are the overseers, and they follow with lordly strides behind them smoking and talking, proud in their blue smocks and straw hats. Spiro follows with the brindled puppy. As we watch the procession the window below us opens and the Count puts his head out to cheer them with some parting pleasantry. The early breakfast daunts everyone but Zarian, who has eaten himself into a state of feverish indigestion and cannot sleep. Spiro sits on the terrace, cap in hand, and prophesies a sunny day in the voice of such heartiness that Zarian becomes all at once quite peevish. The Count, having reassured himself that the pickers have set out to gather the favorite robola vineyard, sleeps on for a couple of hours.

  By mid-morning we are all up on the hillock overlooking the vineyard, surrounding our pyjama’d host like staff officers watching a battle. On the brilliant dappled sunlight of the slopes below the women have put on their wimples and are moving with swift grace from shrub to shrub, cutting the long branches with their sickle knives—branches of crimson robola which droop in their baskets with the weight of human limbs.

  In the shade of an olive cloths have been spread, and here the women converge, each with her blooming basket load. Two donkeys with panniers stand by apathetically, flicking flies with their tails. Everything goes with a terrific pace for this the first day of picking and the Count himself is looking on.

  Presently, when the Count has been reassured as to the picking, we retire to the arbors by the house to drink coffee and pass the long morning in idle talk. Bocklin plays his flute. And gradually, by journeys, the donkeys bring in the fruit which is emptied into the great wooden vat under the careful eyes of Niko himself. The Count cannot sit still until he has supervised everything himself, and seen everything with his own eyes. “Niko is a wonderful boy” he says. “Don’t think that any oaf can tread wine. No, he is pure as island water. Don’t imagine that the wine-treader doesn’t transform the wine with his feet—that there isn’t a communication I mean between his style and technique and state of soul and the response of the fruit. It’s an aesthetic performance. No, Doctor. It is no use you smiling in that ironical scientific manner. We could easily use a machine-treader and you would soon see what sort of wine my robola had become. Niko treads a part of himself into the vat. He is an angel on earth. Ah! dear me. How over-exotic one sounds when one translates from Greek to English.”

  By four o’clock the vat is heaped full and from the sheer black weight of the fruit the must has begun to force the crude spigot. The Count is extremely excited, for it is the moment to begin the treading. Niko has been standing in the trough by the well, washing himself in the icy water. Now he advances to the vat, clad only in a white shirt which is knotted at the thighs. His pale face looks remote and far-away as he hoists himself up. His white feet dangle for a second in the sunlight and vanish. The Count is hoarse with emotion. “You remember everything now,” he says nervously. “The old way—as you have done it always.” Niko does not answer. He smiles, as if at some remembered joke, and nods. Gently moving his feet he begins by treading a small hole to stand in and begins to work into it the grapes piled above the rim.

  The spigot is now uncorked and the must begins to come out in an opaque crimson spurt. This beautiful color stains the trough, lacquers the tin measure, and stabs the shadows of the magazine with splashes of red. Keeping the same tireless pace Niko labors deeper and ever deeper into the great vat until by the latest dusk his white face has quite vanished into the depths and only his two crimson grape-splashed hands can be seen holding the edges of the vat. He perches himself up every now and again and rests, hanging his head like a bird. He has become almost intoxicated himself by the fumes of the must, and by the long six-hour routine of his treading—which ends at ten o’clock. His face looks pale and sleepy in the red light of the lanterns. Mark encourages him with gruff pleasantries as he measures the must back into the vat. Since the wine is red the skins and stalks are left in. Now the huge wooden lid, weighted with stones, is floated upon the top, and by tomorrow morning all the leavings will have risen up under it into a scarlet froth of crust, from under which the liquid will be crackling with fermentation. For ten days now the fermentation will go on, sending its acid smell on the gusts of wind from the meadow, into the bedrooms of the great house.

  Now that the robola is safely on the way, the Count can turn his attention to the kitchens with their gleaming copper ware and dungeon-like ovens. Here he busies himself with Caroline and Mrs. Zarian in the manufacture of mustalevria—that delicious Ionian sweet or jelly which is made by boiling fresh must to half its bulk with semolina and a little spice. The paste is left to cool on plates and stuck with almonds; and the whole either eaten fresh or cut up in slices and put away in the great store cupboard.

  Sykopita, Zarian’s favorite fig cake, will come later when the autumn figs are literally bursting open with their own ripeness. But for the time being there are conserves of all kinds to be made—orange-flower preserve and morella syrup. While the Count produces for the table a very highly spiced quince cheese, black and sticky, but very good.

  The ravished vineyards are a sad sight on the brown earth of the property. The Count pauses from time to time in his passage between the kitchen and the dining-room terrace to contemplate them. He is happy with the full weight of his resignation: because October is coming with its first sweep of rain and mist. The remaining vine-leaves and fig-leaves—strange butterfly-like shapes against the massive platinum-grey trunks—will be gathered for fodder. The earth will die shabbily and dully in russet patches, tessellating the landscape with its red squares and octagons. In November the cleaning of guns, the first wood fires, and the putting away of summer clothes. Then the earth will spin inexorably into winter with its gales and storms—the wild
duck screaming from Albania, the seas shrieking and whistling off the barren northern point beyond Turtledove Island.

  These few days pass in a calm so absolute, that to regret their passing would be unworthy of them. Zarian is bound for Geneva next week. Nimiec for Poland until next spring.

  We picnic for supper on these warm nights by the Myrtiotissa monastery. Spiro lights a fire of pine branches and twigs, and the three wicker hampers of the Count are brimmed with food and drink. In the immense volume of the sea’s breathing our voices are restored to their true proportion—insignificant, small and shrill with a happiness this landscape allows us but does not notice. The firelight etches the faces so clearly. The Count with his bright eyes looking over N.’s shoulder as she draws. Theodore’s golden beard lowered over a pool in complete abstraction. Nimiec and Caroline walking with linked fingers into the sea. Zarian’s lips shiny with wine, his silver scruff of hair flying like a halo round his head. Spiro’s great charred features. Everyone. The night around us edges slowly on towards the morning, silent except for the noise of the sea, and the sleepy chirp of cicadas in the planetree who have mistaken our fire for sunlight. “You have noticed how we talk less and less together as the days go on,” says the Count. “It is not because we have less to say to each other, it is because language becomes inadequate to our parting. I do not know when we shall meet again. Will you all be back by next spring I wonder?”

  It is already very late, and the donkeys have stumbled off home with the hampers. Theodore lies asleep in the firelight. His lips move slowly. Zarian has taken the guitar from Bocklin and has started to play it inexpertly. He is trying to find the key for the little island song which Theodore has taught us.

  Sea, you youth-swallower,

  O poison-bearing element, Sea,

  Who make our island folk

  Always be wearing their black clothes.

  Have you not had enough of it,

  Sea, in all this long time,

  With the bodies you have swallowed

  Down in your insatiable waves?

  Presently Theodore will wake and ask Caroline to sing “Greensleeves” and “Early One Morning”—airs sounding in all that emptiness so Lydian and remote coming from those American lips with their limping southern drawl.

  Tomorrow we are separating.

  1.1.41

  A postcard from the Count:

  Christmas Day. I spent it alone in happy memory of the year before when we walked across the northern marshes and you were attacked by a wounded hare—remember? To remind myself (and hence you also) of our perpetual spring I gathered a bunch of flowers from the valley—flowers from every season. Cyclamen and snowdrop. February’s irises and a jonquil, cinquefoil, bugloss, corn marigold, orange blossom, clover, and wild roses. Spiro has asked one of his pilots to fly them to you so you will have them by now. They are my invitation for next year. Don’t forget us.

  Epilogue in Alexandria

  THE SIGHTLESS PHAROS turns its blind eye upon a coast, featureless, level and sandy. One thinks of Nelson on his column turning a blinded eye across the miles of English mist to where by the deserted gun batteries of Aboukir the sea runs thin and green. In these summer twilights the city lies in its jumble of pastel tones, faintly veined like an exhausted petal. Flocks of pigeons wheel in the last sunlight, turning and falling, like a shower of confetti when the light strikes against their wings. The last landmark on the edge of Africa. The battleships in their arrowed blackness turn slowly in the harbor. The loss of Greece has been an amputation. All Epictetus could not console one against it.

  Here we miss Greece as a living body, a landscape lying up close against the sky, suspended on the blue lion-pads of mountains. And above all, we miss the Eye: for the summers of indolence and deduction on the northern beaches of our island—beaches incessantly washed and sponged by the green Ionian—taught us that Greece was not a country but a living eye. “The Enormous Eye” Zarian used to call it. Walking in those valleys you knew with complete certainty that the traveler in this land could not record. It was rather as if he himself were recorded. The sensation of this immense hairless recording eye was everywhere; in the ringing blue sky, the temples, the supple brushes of cypress, the sun beating in a withering hypnotic dazzle on the statues with curly stone hair and blunt sagacious noses. Everything was the subject of the Eye. It was like a lens fitting into the groove of the horizon. Nowhere else has there ever been a landscape so aware of itself, conforming so marvellously to the dimensions of a human existence. At Epidaurus, for example, it is not the theatre that obsesses one or the temples, but the enfolding circle of small hills, as if the very land had conformed to the architect’s plan: all contours, no edges, and only the faintest engraving of ilex and olive along the sky.

  Something of all this lives on in the keen Athenian faces of our friends—faces so long turned towards the preoccupation of Greece that you can read everything in them: the dark uncombed blue of the Cydades slowly uncurling about the flanks of Mykonos and Delos: the dazzling windmills and the grey springs. But they are here now like ghosts of the old lucid past in the aura of that enormous Eye—Stephan sailing his boat like a demon, half seas over in blue and gold; girls like Elie with dark slanting arms and long olive legs; the shaggy islanders in their colored belts; caves echoing to the suck and swish of the water; the long rows of colored caiques snubbing at anchor in the oilgrey waters of the port; the church bells ringing. Meeting them in these crooked streets one is struck by the potentiality of the drama which the Greeks this time have offered to the world. Maro, the human and beautiful, in her struggle against apathy, the drawn face of Eleftheria with its haunting eyes reading the last few lines of her great poem; the solemn face of Seferiades with its candor and purity (“we are the dying limb, withering on the body of the tree cut down”); Alecco, Spiro, Paul. In them the thousand and one images of that Greece of ours crystallize into pinpoints of light: the book-lined room where the woman of Zante was read: the terrace with the figs and the sound of running water: Tinos where the red sails walk down the main street: Corinth with its vermin: Argos and Thebes with their retzina: Kalamata choked in vines: the warm scent of bruised sage on the Arcadian hills.

  I think of them all in Africa, in this unfamiliar element, as subtropical men, defeated by a world where the black compromise is king. I see them daily recovering by their acts, their songs and poems, the whole defeated world of acts and thoughts, into a small private universe: a Greek universe. Inside that world, where the islands lie buried in smoke, where the cypresses spring from the tombs, they know that there is nothing to be said. There is simply patience to be exercised. Patience and endurance and love. Some of us have vanished from the picture; some have had their love converted into black bile by the misery they have witnessed. Nimiec died in an Athens nightclub. Spiro died in his own vine-wreathed house. Theodore with British forces in Italy punctuates the silence by characteristic letters beginning “Do you remember?” Zarian is in Geneva. His silence is complete. Caroline, Mitsu, Rosemary, are in Cairo. The Count is somewhere in the mountains of Epirus—a philosopher with his pockets full of dynamite. Bocklin is on the Russian front. The white house has been bombed and the boats too. History with her painful and unexpected changes cannot be made to pity or remember; that is our function.

  The day war was declared we stood on the balcony of the white house in a green rain falling straight down out of heaven on to the glassy floor of the lagoon; we were destroying papers and books, packing clothes, emptying cupboards, both absorbed in the inner heart of the dark crystal, and as yet not conscious of separation.

  In April of 1941, as I lay on the pitch-dark deck of a caique nosing past Matapan towards Crete, I found myself thinking back to that green rain upon a white balcony, in the shadow of Albania; thinking of it with a regret so luxurious and so deep that it did not stir the emotions at all. Seen through the transforming lens of memory the past seemed so enchanted that even thought would be unworthy of it.
We never speak of it, having escaped: the house in ruins, the little black cutter smashed. I think only that the shrine with the three black cypresses and the tiny rock pool where we bathed must still be left. Visited by the lowland summer mists the trembling landscape must still lie throughout the long afternoons, glowing and altering like a Chinese water-color where the light of the sky leaks in. But can all these hastily written pages ever recreate more than a fraction of it?

  Appendix for Travelers

  Karaghiosis

  (see Chapter IV)

  C’EST À KARAKOUCHE, ministre de Salah Edine, que revient I’honneur d’avoir fait édifier la ‘ Citadelle. Il proposa en 1176 la construction d’un chateau où le sultan pourrait loger.… Karakouche, plus communément connu sous le nom de Kara-guez, avait fait détruire les petites pyramides de Gizeh et de Sakkara et employ ait leurs pierres à bâtir les rem-parts des édifices. II s’était rendu très impopulaire par les nombreuses vexations qu’il avait fait subir au peuple pour lui permettre de rèaliser les travaux d’utilitè pub-lique qu’il avait en vue. C’est pourquoi certains, pour se venger, commencèrent à brandir des fantoches à son image, auxquels ils donnèrent son nom. Ainsi, Kara-guez entrait dans le tourbillon d’une brillante carrière de pitre qui jusqu’aujourd’hui amuse les foules sur les place publiques.