Reflections on a Marine Venus: A Companion to the Landscape of Rhodes

by Lawrence Durrell

  But, already as I write, the weariness of that late arrival begins to melt the clear outlines of the detail. I vaguely remember the vast entrance hall littered with shed equipment, the buzz of conversation from the dining hall which served as a mess, the smashed marquetry panels of the lounge, and the timid Italians who serviced the hotel. I remember too the draughts of pure sea air that stole in from the terrace, bearing with them the scent of spring flowers, and the desire for sleep which struggled against the urge to walk into the garden and smell the darkness which stretched away across the straits to Anatolia. But it was no good: the journey had been too much for us.

  We lay upon adjacent sofas in the gaunt lounge with its foggy mirrors, waiting for our rooms to be prepared by a sleepy maid with a harelip. I remember Gideon lying there, his monocle almost touching the floor—it had rolled out of his eye to the end of its cord, his feet clad in a pair of much-darned socks, his whole body slack and unstrung, snoring.

  So we slept.

  Much later we were awoken, and blind with sleep followed the clerk to our rooms. The open windows gave directly on to the sea, whose melodious sighing was the perfect accompaniment to a landfall as felicitous as a Greek island, to a sleep as blankly anonymous as that which welled up around us.

  I speak for myself. Some centuries later (or was it back—had one traveled backwards into sleep like history?) I woke to feel the warm early sun in my eyes, reflecting the running dazzle of water from the white roof of the room. Gideon was already standing on the balcony, clad only in a monocle and a towel, doing his exercises with the rapt devotion of a yogi, watched by his little dog.

  Presently we scrambled across the garden, and still half drugged with sleep, burst into the Aegean water, clear and cold as wine. Before us, across the straits, the Anatolian mountains glowed, each one a precious stone. Icy though the water was, we stayed awhile in it, speechless with gratitude—rubbed by the salt until our skins felt as cold and smooth as the pebbles which tesselated the shining floors of that magnificent beach.

  To the memory of that first bathe I should add the memory of that first breakfast (mere bully beef and dry biscuit) eaten in the company of our fellows at the long trestle tables which filled the once fashionable dining room. Both were commonplaces no doubt—but translated into miracles by the feeling that, after all, we had arrived. The morning fairly danced and sparkled. Outside the hotel (whose desolate corridors, chipped marquetry, smashed fittings and marble cornices suggested nothing so much as a carnival which had ended in an earthquake)—outside, the blue race of the sea swirled round the stone lighthouse and deployed crisply across what must be one of the finest shingle beaches in the world. The sunlight freckled the foreground of things with blue and gold, while the gaunt backcloth of Caria, only tipped as yet with sunshine, seemed to be softly sifting itself through a spectrum. Utter peace.

  “Heavens, I feel well,” said Gideon. We had carried our third cup of tea out on to the terrace, and were full of the warmth and well-being of that spring sunshine.

  Idling there upon that terrace we first began our exploration of each other. My own task here was prosaic enough. I had been accredited to the occupying forces as an Information Officer. Gideon’s own business was more obscure; he made several mumbling attempts to describe it. Finally he squared his shoulders and produced a crumpled movement order which he handed me to read. I could see nothing very strange about it. It informed me that Captain A. Gideon was proceeding to Palermo via Rhodes on duty. “You don’t see anything odd about it?” he said with a chuckle, and with a touch of fatuous if innocent pride. “Neither did the provost marshal.” He beamed at me and explained. He had long ago noticed that the legend “will proceed from X to Y” on a movement order was sufficiently well-spaced to allow him to insert the word “via” followed by the name of any little corner of the globe that he might wish to visit. He had spent a good part of the war traveling unwillingly “from X to Y”—but always “via” somewhere or other where he really wanted to go. “It’s my form of revolt,” he said coyly. “For God sake don’t tell a soul.” I promised gravely. “You’ve no idea what a difference it makes to go from one hellish place to another when you can go and spend a few days ‘in transit’ in a place you really like.” Rhodes, I gathered from subsequent conversation, was an old love, first visited before the 1914 war; more than that, Gideon was hoping to find himself a billet in the administration which would enable him to escape from an O.C. he detested in Palermo. He seemed quite confident that a few days of lobbying in Rhodes would produce something suitable. Behind the idea of a transfer, too, lay another—more deeply cherished: he intended to settle in Rhodes after demobilization. This was interesting. We were, it seemed, both islomanes.

  It was in this context that we began to share reminiscences of the pre-war world and unearth common friends. Gideon, too, had been a tramp in the Eastern Mediterranean before the war, had lived in Athens and Alexandria.

  His figure was undergoing a transformation in my eyes. It was to suffer many others, but none so radical as this first one, from that of the average sightless soldier to the man of culture and comparatively wide reading. One element only was missing from the picture. I supply it from subsequent experiences. I had no idea what an old rogue he was. I was taken in by that air of benevolence, of courtly gentleness. I was tempted to shake my head sadly over the innocence of a man who imagined he could cadge himself a job after a few days in Rhodes. How wrong I was! I realized it a month later when I glanced at a circular which named him the newly-arrived director of—Agriculture, of all things. But none of this could I have foreseen that spring morning as we walked down to the harbor to pay our respects to the military rulers of the twelve islands. I was not to foresee Gideon’s numberless state visits in his broken-down old car—visits undertaken with the greatest urgency to consult me upon a Point of Style, or an infinitive that had somehow split like a string bean in the heat of composition. Nor could I foresee how much pleasure I was to derive “putting some style” into those fatuous concoctions titled PROGRESS REPORT ON THE BEER or THE WATERCRESS OUTLOOK FOR NEXT YEAR. We lavished the combined treasure of our not inconsiderable intellects on those reports. To read Gideon on Beet was a new literary experience. Everyone was pleased except the Brigadier, who pronounced Gideon’s style abominable and refused to grant him his majority until he had read and studied Swift.

  That morning, however, we made our first sortie into Rhodes town, Gideon “en pèlerinage,” as he expressed it, and I very much on duty—for I had to locate the printing plant which was to be the greatest part of my inheritance from the Army. Rumor had it that the linotypes were buried somewhere in the castle and accordingly we set off along the sparkling waterfront in the direction of the Street of the Knights, Gideon talking discursively on everything under the sun, and exclaiming with pleasure at every new sight and sound.

  Taken in by the uncritical eye of a visitor the town looked lovely that morning despite the infernal wreckage of war—and there was plenty of it. Transcribed from a letter which remained unposted in the back of an old writing pad, these few lines give an impressionist view of Rhodes as I found it:

  Absolute chaos still reigns. The esplanade along Mandraccio, the ancient harbor, is studded with pillboxes and long rows of iron staples from which grave Indian infantrymen are unwinding the barbed wire. Groups of German prisoners, still whey-colored from starvation, are busy filling in the bomb craters in the asphalt, dressed for the most part in shorts and forage caps only. We have thousands of them on our hands. Clouds of violet smoke hang over Monte Smith from some disposal squad’s morning offering to the Gods—exploded enemy mines. I have not had time to look at the medieval town as yet, but it looks fearfully disappointing from the harbor with its spattered administrative buildings and truncated statuary: the old walled town looks like a wedding cake with all the icing chipped and cracked. A deserted marketplace. An empty mosque. A very few white-faced civilians picking over garbage tins for food. Mo
st of the population has fled to the islands of Symi and Casos. The streets are empty of all but troops and forage gangs of German prisoners.

  Less impressionistic, but as factually relevant to this first view of the island which I was to come to love so much, were extracts from a report which no doubt still lies moldering somewhere among the archives of a department in Cairo, whose representative I was then.

  The position in the capital is very far from normal. Most of the population has fled leaving behind them shattered buildings and a gutted market. Those who remain have suffered from the prevailing starvation. Malnutrition cases are coming in at the rate of sixty a day. All public services are at a standstill; the buses were put out of order by the Germans, the post office deserted, and only the little news sheets issued by the Army Propaganda Executive in two languages maintains a tenuous local distribution. The engineers have nearly completed their work, however, and it is hoped that the electric light plant will be functioning again this week. The island is stiff with mines which await the attention of the Sappers.…

  Civic order was indeed to be a long time coming; the restoration of postal services with the outside world, the establishment of newspapers, the patching up of shattered dwellings—upon all these was “order” in its twentieth-century sense conditional. It is only if one has seen a town reduced by siege that one can get any feeling of how much our sense of community is founded in these small amenities. I was nearer, I realize, to Demetrius Poliorcetes that June morning than I shall ever be again; I was near, I mean, to seeing something like the historic Rhodes as it must have been after the great siege, after the attack by Mithridates, after Cassius had gutted it; a Rhodes dispersed into a million fragments, waiting to be built up again.

  Mandraccio Harbor (“The Sheepfold” of the Ancient Greeks) presented some odd contrasts; fully half of its surface was covered by wrecked boats and skiffs, huddled together, as if against fear of bombing—or perhaps blown gradually together by the force of frequent bombardments. In a clearer anchorage, under the fort of St. Nicholas lay a number of island caieques in good repair—visitors no doubt which had been ferrying back refugees. They floated languidly in the sticky mirror of the harbor water which was now viscid with oil from a German launch which lay on its side, its tanks squashed by a bomb, deep in the sludge. The whole length of the waterfront was picketed and wired with a thoroughness that left one in no doubt as to the original determination of the enemy; stakes driven into the rocky bases of the piers trailed underwater wires, while the shallows bristled with concrete blocks and underwater defenses. Shrapnel had peppered the buildings and snipped off fragments from the maudlin row of bronze Caesars with which the Italians had thought to dignify the port area.

  We sat for a while upon a cracked slab of masonry and contemplated all this desolation as we listened to the innocent lapping of the water along the harbor wall. Then we pursued our way across the deserted marketplace and entered the old walled town of the Crusaders, passing by the lovely and undamaged gothic tower of St. Paul. At the spur of a gentle incline we turned into the famous Street of the Knights at the top of which lay the Castello—that monument to bad taste executed by the latest Italian governor. By now the hideous archness of the restoration work was becoming fully apparent. Gideon, who had seen the island under a kindlier dispensation, became plaintive and fretful. “This will never do,” he said reproachfully. But there was worse to come. The Castello, perched on the marvelous spur where once the temple of Helios stood, commanding the whole shallow spade-like tongue of land below, was in the most tasteless of traditions. Sergeant Croker led us round it, a little puzzled no doubt by our behavior. I do not think that the most liberal of conventions would allow me to transcribe half the oaths that Gideon shed as we walked from room to garish room, from chapel to chapel, corridor to corridor; wherever you turned you were greeted with ugly statuary, tasteless hangings and tapestries, and the kind of marquetry work that suggested the lounges of passenger steamers. The sweep of Gideon’s rage took in the Italian governor, the architects, the stonemasons, and the decorators who had shared in the ignoble deed. He spitted them with every thrust of his outraged forefinger. He had them dragged apart by wild horses. He pursued their ancestors back as far as the fourth century BCE and beyond. Croker, the duty sergeant, was a trifle annoyed; he had bothered to memorize a few items about the history of the place and was anxious to act as guide. But Gideon would not hear a word of his patter. “My dear man,” he said testily, “it is no good you rambling on about it. The thing is horrible. A design for a Neapolitan ice perhaps.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  “Anyone who thinks it’s beautiful is an idiot.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  “And stop repeating ‘Very good, sir,’ like a parrot.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Homer followed us everywhere with a sage, judicial and disapproving air. He obviously shared Gideon’s views.

  Yet the views from the slitted windows, and from the parapet of the roof, were superb. The town lay below us, splashed with sunshine. Swallows and martins dipped and swerved in the warm spaces of the gardens. The tangerine-laden trees of the foreground dappled the landscape with dancing points of fire. The air was charged with all the sulphurous odors of spring. The sea was calm again and blue—bluer than any metaphor could express. “Well, I don’t know,” said Gideon propping his elbows on the warm stones and wrinkling his nose to taste that tangerine-scented wind. “If you wanted a thesis about totalitarian art, why here it is.” The duty sergeant looked reproachfully at the back of his head; he was a north countryman with a long sandy lugubrious face and pent-up cheek. His hair grew like a mastiff’s and was trained down across a pale forehead into a sort of quiff. He kept his horny thumbs strictly in line with the seams of his trousers, his shoulders square. It was obvious that he thought us a couple of frightful highbrows.

  It was in one of the cellars that we at last ran my printing presses to earth. In an atmosphere whirling with lead fumes and dense with the noise of clacking linotypes the daily news sheets were being put to bed under the eyes of a watchful young RAE officer. Here I transacted my business as briefly as possible, chatted to the compositors in order to try and assess their professional abilities, and scribbled a few notes. I learned with relief that the presses were to be moved back to their pre-war establishment; their present gloomy location in this crypt had been a measure taken against fear of bombardment. The semi-darkness here made proofreading and layout as exacting as invisible mending.

  Later the three of us walked down the hill into the old town to try and find a glass of wine. Among the loopholes and fents of the medieval town we finally discovered a little tavern called The Helen of Troy where we found a glass of inferior Chianti with the distinct flavor of paraffin. As a drink it was disappointing; nevertheless it must have contained some of the right ingredients, for in the corner of the tavern two Greek soldiers, very drunk, danced quietly together to the monotonous squibbling of a clarinet played by an old man in a greasy turban who lay, half asleep, upon a bundle of boxes in the corner of the shop.

  We were to separate, if I remember, about our various business, but it was here, at the Helen of Troy, that we met once more at sunset—one of those fantastic Rhodian sunsets which have, since medieval times, made the island so justly famed according to the accounts of Aegean travelers. The whole Street of the Knights was on fire. The houses had begun to curl up at the edges, like burning paper, and with each sink of the sun upon the dark hill above us, the tones of pink and yellow curdled and ran from corner to corner, from gable to gable, until for a moment the darkening minarets of the mosques glowed into blue ignition, like the light glancing along a sheet of carbon paper. No longer susceptible to a beauty become familiar, the dark shades of the refugees moved among their bombed houses, their voices clear and shrill as they lit lamps, or disposed their tattered furniture against the evening, shrilly chaffering. Gideon was holding a glass of some rosy wine up to
the red light of the sky, as if he were trying to imprison the last rays of the sunset within it. “Where by association” he said “would Homer get an adjective like rosy-fingered from—unless he had experienced a Rhodian sunset? Look!” And indeed in that weird light his fingers, seen through the wine, trembled pink as coral against the lambent sky. “I no longer doubt that Rhodes was Homer’s birthplace,” he added gravely. I could see that he was a trifle drunk. He motioned me impressively to sit and imitate him, and for a while we examined our own fingers through our glasses before solemnly drinking a toast to Homer. (“Not you, you fool,” he said to the dog.) For one moment now the whole street trembled with the unearthly light of a stage fiction, and then the darkness slid down from the hill. “A stained glass window shattered by a grenade.”

  We walked arm in arm down those narrow unlit streets, losing our way once or twice, until we stumbled upon the squat gate of St. Paul, and sneaked through its shadow into the twentieth century. A few sporadic points of light shone in the new town, but the street-lighting had not yet been restored and we walked in a deep calm darkness as the first stars began to take shape upon the evening sky. It was now, I remember, that we stumbled upon the little garden which encircles the Mosque of Murad Reis—a garden at whose heart I was later to find the Villa Cleobolus; and here we sat for a while perched upon Turkish tombstones, smoking and enjoying the darkness which had now (spring was advanced) an almost touchable smoothness, the silkiness of old velors. And here, I realize, we were very close to the spirit of old Hoyle—for later it was in this garden diat he took the deepest pleasure, lying out on the star-scattered grass to smoke his cigars, or dozing away the long golden afternoons in a deck chair. Hoyle has not put in an appearance as yet, though it is high time he was introduced, for seen across the false perspectives of memory it seems as if somehow we had already met him. Gideon, it is true, had known him years before; they were of the same generation. But his arrival in Rhodes post-dated this first week of Rhodian exploration by something like a month. He had been British Consul in Rhodes and was coming back. Apart from the printing equipment bequeathed to me by the administration there were a number of other articles which were reputed to belong to the late consul—a series of musty consular tables and code books, together with some old tin trunks. These we had carefully stacked in the cellar which held our stocks of captured newsprint, where they were a perpetual obstruction to everyone. We were always bruising our shins on them. We had fallen into the habit of kicking the trunks viciously whenever we had any work in this particular cellar, and Hoyle became by extension in our imagination as tedious and obstructive an individual as his personal possessions were to the staff of the newspaper. It was with relief, then, that I heard of his arrival one morning. He was, they told me, even at that moment examining his jettisoned possessions in the cellar. I hastened to present myself to him, and there ensued a meeting for which he, I think, was as little prepared as I. He was standing in the cellar clad in fragments of his consular uniform, an ancient dress hat on his head, gazing with myopic disgust through the wrong end of an ancient telescope. The floor was piled ankle-deep with fantastic objects, both consular and personal. I remember a string of signal flags, numberless cipher keys, volumes of birth certificates, a top hat, a birdcage, the remains of a consular uniform, detective stories, a sextant, a film projector, several tennis racquets, and heaven only knows what else. Hoyle looked for all the world like a startled puppy. He dropped the telescope and sheepishly removed the hat. “Extraordinary,” he said, “the sort of junk a grown man can collect around him.” I agreed. We introduced ourselves with a certain constraint. For my part I was dying to laugh, and Hoyle looked a trifle sheepish. He picked up a fencing foil and fell to making idle passes in the air as we talked. Hoyle was small and rotund, with a large head and luminous eye. His manner at first suggested affectation because he had a curious slurring way of talking, and a way of varying the register of his voice from treble to bass, which gave one the impression that he was being swung back and forth in a seesaw as he talked. To this he added a mannerism which strengthened the impression—that of sawing the air with the index finger of his right hand, and marking the periods of his sentences with full stops, poked, as it were, in the air. Later I was to discover that his conversation was manufactured for him by a mind which valued exactitude above all things, and a heart which had never outgrown some of the delightful shyness of childhood. But one might easily have been deceived by his slowness of utterance into thinking that it implied slowness of thought. Quite the contrary. Ideas came so fast to Hoyle that his eyes were suddenly irradiated with light; it was the mechanism of exact expression that caused him to halt to grope for the right word, and never to be satisfied with it. Coupled with this slowness of speech was a slowness of gait which also took some time to interpret. Hoyle walked with such exaggerated slowness, with such a sleepy air, that one might have been forgiven the sin of describing him as a slothful man. Here again one would be wrong. A weak heart which needed constant care was the reason for this octogenarian’s gait. But what was remarkable was the manner in which his intellect had used this physical defect for its own use. A man who cannot walk fifty yards without a rest might be forgiven if he were fretful of his infirmity. Hoyle was as equable and unruffled as a child; but since he must pause and rest after every little exertion, he had developed an eye for the minutiae of life which all of us lacked. Forced to stand for ten seconds until his heart slowed down, Hoyle would notice a particular flower growing by the road, an inscription hidden in some doorway which had escaped us, a slight architectural deviation from accepted style. Life for him was delightful in its anomalies, and no walk was possible with Hoyle without a thousand such observations which none of us could have made for ourselves. Gideon was always fond of explaining that he took a “bird’s-eye” view of life; by the same token one might describe Hoyle’s eye as being microscopic in its attention to particularities. “I wonder,” he would say, “why the Mufti’s shoes are too small? I saw him limping today.” Or “I wonder why in Rhodes they tie up their cats with string. I saw one attached to a front doorknob this morning.”* Gideon used to explode with mock exasperation at the preposterous frivolity of such observations. “Really Hoyle,” he would say, “I don’t know where you get it all from.” Hoyle’s answer never varied in tone or content. “I was standing having one of my little rests,” he would say, “and I distinctly noticed him limping.” Admirable Hoyle!