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

by Lawrence Durrell

  Rodd has a chapter on Nereids which is worth reading. I understand now why the whole countryside folds up like a flower during the midday hours; why the self-respecting husbandman and townee alike prefers a carefully shuttered room to the intensity, the silence and brilliance of the southern afternoons. It is a weird time of day when everything seems to succumb to the silence—everything except the tireless cicada. It is the hour, says Rodd, when Pan takes his rest, and he quotes the swain in Theocritus:

  O Shepherd, not at noon, we may not pipe

  at noon,

  For Pan we dread, who then comes from the

  chase

  Weary and takes his rest.…

  Hence the haunting fear of the tree’s shade; no laborer will sleep under the shade of an old tree, or one that is supposed to have grown a spirit. For it is here in the shadows of trees, at crossroads, by running water, that Pan’s assistants, the contemporary Nereids, lie in waiting. Flash of naked bodies between the trees of Siana and the noise of the spring interrupted by the sound of drinking! Sweep of skirts as the dancers line out on the daisy-clad slopes by St. Nicholas!

  Christ is one of the bears. There are only six all told who merit this wonderful old printer’s appellation—I suppose because the ceaseless walking back and forth, picking up and examining type, which are part and parcel of the handsetter’s work, are reminiscent of a bear’s movements in a cage. He is the youngest of them, but by far the quickest. A pale youth of some twenty odd years, he is dying of phthisis which has given his eyes a preternatural brilliance. He has long periods of illness, but such is his grace and charm that none of his fellows complains at the extra work his absence involves. This year he has by far exceeded the sick leave allowance stipulated by his contract, and I have been forced to turn a blind eye to it, because Christ is supporting his mother and two younger children by his work.

  But the most interesting thing about the boy is that last week he discovered himself to be a writer. The air bag was delayed and we were short of material. I do not know how it happened, but some say the ebullient Manoli suggested scornfully that the paper would be better if the printers wrote it and the editorial staff printed it. Christ pulled out a sheef of loose galley and in ten minutes had written a column on this theme which reduced his fellow typesetters to tears. Enquiring what all the noise was about, Kostas, my Greek editor emerged from the printing house with Christ’s work which he read to me with delighted giggles. “Good,” I said, “Set it up.” Kostas was aghast. “Print it?”

  “We’ve always needed a live columnist on this moribund sheet,” I said. “Open up a column on the left hand side of the second page. Call it ‘O (a delightful expression which may be translated ‘The Little Man’s World’). Tell Christ he must fill it four times a week on any topic he likes except politics. We will pay him thirty drachmae a line.”

  Kostas took this news down to the typesetting room. A pregnant hush fell. Earnest debate took place in low voices throughout the morning. It was as if the news had shocked everyone.

  That afternoon work took me back to the office in time to see the first pulls come off the machine. It was a feast day, and according to custom Chronos was made up with a colored head. It looked very handsome. In a dark corner by the machine stood Christ with a copy of the paper held in his trembling hands. He was speechless with pleasure. He hung his head with shame when he caught sight of me. Kostas was proofreading the final page before roaring “Fire” through the hatch into the machine room.

  Below us in the darkness Christ was waiting at his station (it was his duty afternoon) to throw the switch and set the great machine in action. “That boy has been in a dream all morning,” said Kostas. He finished vetting the last page and threw back the hatch into the printing room. “Okay,” he said, and gave my arm a sympathetic squeeze before shouting “Fire.”

  The great grunting and swishing began below. Christ unbolted the outer door and let in the horde of urchins who were to collect and distribute the paper for us. The newborn writer stood with hanging head beside the machine, smiling to himself. He still looked dazed.

  By next morning his fame had spread throughout the poor quarter in which he lived. On his way to work, Kostas told me, at least a dozen people came up to congratulate him on his article. His fellow printers receive him with the same jokes and jibes now, but there is a touch of apprehension, of respect in their attitude. There is nothing like cold print for commanding the respect of the ordinary. Christ has entered the most impoverished aristocracy in the world.

  * Chronos, the Greek daily, still exists.

  * The latest Fascist governor of the island whose florid and tasteless rebuilding of monuments has all but ruined the splendid thoughtful work of Mario Largo who devoted half a lifetime to governing and beautifying Rhodes.

  * He was banished for a satirical poem.

  The Little Summer of

  Saint Demetrius

  TOMORROW I AM to visit my parish for the first time. On the great ordnance map which hangs above my desk I have traced and retraced the outlines of my islands until I know the distinctive shape of each of them. Rhodes might be a flint arrowhead; Cos a sperm whale; Leros an octopus; Patmos a seahorse; Symi an expended meteor rubbed smooth with air; Kalymnos a mussel.

  Of their products, their climates and their inhabitants I already know a good deal, thanks to a brief but intensive period of study with the Army in Cairo. Even the tables of industrial statistics which fill the little army source books seem to hold some undertones of magic for me with their cold hints of sponge, emery, currants and white cherries. Now I am to marry my theoretical knowledge to that of an eyewitness.

  I have chosen the Little Summer of Saint Demetrius for the journey, counting upon its last fine days to enable me to travel as far as Leros and back on equable seas.

  Symi

  Moving northwards through this marvelous Aegean landscape lit by the intense white light of the sun, I feel the kick and plunge of the little island caieque as she aims for Cos. The mountains sweep down into the sea, planted here like the feet of petrified elephants, to revolve slowly as we pass them, as if on some great hairy turntable. On the way to Cos you come across whole hillsides littered with debris from Maillol’s studio—half-finished ankles and heads, breasts and toes. Dawn had not broken when we entered the great cobweb of stone which is Symi, so I have no clear picture of it—only a series of impressions. It lies there like a black rusk upon the water—but rock so pitted and perforated by the tongues of sea thrown out by Anatolia that you would think of it as most like some black stone lung. Everywhere the sighing and blubbering of blowholes, the sound of water breathing and snuffling in that black honeycomb. On this unpromising foundation a town was built, by an idle youngster in colored bricks. It started up the mountain but soon tired of the gradient and dissolved into a scrabble of ruined plaster and heaps of stone which nobody will use now. A human voice launched across the noise of the water and the wind from the open sea sounds small, ant-like—as if you were to scratch upon a rubber bladder with the point of a pin. “Kalo Taxidi—a good journey to you.…”

  Kalymnos

  In Kalymnos the infant’s paintbox has been at work again on the milky slopes of the mountain. Carefully, laboriously it has squared in a churchyard, a monastery, and lower down repeated the motif: a church, a monastery, a town; then, simply for the sake of appropriateness, a harbor with a shelf of bright craft at anchor, and the most brilliant, the most devastatingly brilliant houses. Never has one seen anything like it—the harbor revolving slowly round one as one comes in. Plane after stiff cubistic plane of pure color. The mind runs up and down the web of vocabulary looking for a word which will do justice to it. In vain. Under the church the half-finished caieques stand upon a slip—huge coops of raw wood looking for all the world like the skeletons of dismembered whales.

  Three little girls in crimson dresses stand arm in arm and watch us. The harbor liquefies under the keel as we throttle down and move towards
the port, our engines now puffy and subdued, yet quickened like our heartbeats as we sit and watch the island. The echo of our passage—the hard plam-plam-plam of the exhaust—bounces gravely off the rusted iron hull of a steamer which lies on its side in the shallows, its funnels sticking up like nostrils, but all the rest of it submerged in water as clear as the purest white gin. This is Kalymnos. High up, under the walls of the Church of the Golden Hand a woman is singing, slowly, emphatically, while from the wharves across the way a man in a blue overall is hammering at a coffin. Uncanny isolation of sound and object, each dissimilar, each entire to itself. Detached from the temporal frame. A song and a hammering which exist together but never mix or muddle the hard outlines of each other.

  Cos

  Cos is the spoiled child of the group. You know it Cat once, without even going ashore. It is green, luxuriant and a little disheveled. An island that does not bother to comb its hair. Hard by the port the famous tree of Hippocrates (to which Mills has promised himself a sentimental pilgrimage) stands, in a little arbor of greenery, like some Nubian woman stricken with elephantiasis. Whole trees have burst out of it in all directions, and with no reference whatsoever to gravity or proportion. The kindly worshippers have propped, here an arm, there a thigh, with votive pillars of bricks or stone. Somehow the whole improbable structure still stands—indeed its luxuriant foliage covers a whole courtyard like a tent. The children play wonderful games among the branches. “A stranger,” they cry, “a stranger.” I must be the first foreign civilian they have seen for some time. We exchange oranges against sweets and discuss life in Cos. Everywhere it is the same—conversation revolves about food. They look ragged and thin but not actually starving. We climb the Frankish castle with its mounds of rubble and shattered ravelins. Once more one comes upon mounds of twisted and rusting steel—machine gun ammunition and shells and empty petrol tins. There is no time to see the Aesculapium on this visit, as it lies some way outside the town, and the captain of the caieque is anxious to make Leros while the good weather holds. Our journeys must still be made in swept channels, as the whole sea hereabouts is mined, and I think he fears that bad weather might push us into one of these fields.₀

  Leros

  In Leros one always seems to be weather-bound, according to the captain. It is a beastly island without any character, despite its rather noble Frankish castle and picturesque village. There is, however, no pastoral or agricultural land worth the name. Simply gigantic port installations now crumpled with bombing, and rotting away in the damp—prodigious jumbles of copper, steel and brass. The harbor is choked with sunk craft, and the little town has been very badly bombed. A miasmic gloom hangs over everything. God help those born here, one mutters, those who live here, and those who come here to die. The water is brackish—like the wits of its inhabitants. As far as I am concerned I am wholeheartedly on the side of the poet Phocylides who used the name of Leros to throw mud at an enemy of his unlucky enough to be born here. An early example of literary mud slinging! And “Leros” still means dirt today. Yet weather-bound or not, there has been time to think, time to jot down some notes about poetry in the little black notebook E bought me, which is now stained with saltwater and brandy. Major France, who presides over the officers’ mess, is a delightful eccentric, an ex-commando who has spent many years of his life, in peace and war, traveling among these islands; in pre-war years he carried cargo in a small tramp steamer belonging to himself, while during the war he exchanged his role for that of secret agent. Clad in rubber boots with soles a span thick, and armed with the most fearful assortment of cutlery the mind of man can devise, he traveled about cutting throats, piloting one of the tiny caieques belonging to the Sea Raiding Forces. Now he sits at the head of a hospitable table, covered in campaign medals as thick as confetti, and pines for the rigors of the Burma campaign.

  In the smoky tavern whose frail walls quiver at each blast of rain and wind I spend half a day transacting business with the agent who is to handle distribution for me in Patmos and the other small islands. He is a little man whose appearance is one of extreme indigence, and of a cast of feature so terribly pessimistic that it is obvious one can hope for nothing in the way of efficient island distribution. While the Greeks have kept their language, only a very few can write it, and fewer still read it, he tells me. But that is not to say that they will not subscribe to a paper. No. He swigs tot after tot of burning mastika, settling his neck more deeply after each emergence into the collar of his ragged overcoat. People will buy the newspaper all right, but he cannot guarantee readers. Owing to the great shortage of wrapping paper, he says, almost any paper is welcome to the inhabitants of the island. They need it for wrapping fish in, or eggs. They need it for parcels and packages. So that my sales will be safeguarded by this great shortage in a way that even full literacy and the keenest interest in the affairs of the world could not achieve for me. It is one of the anomalies of war that the daily newspaper which we issue at a penny is worth two pence as wrapping paper, and already in Rhodes our receipts for scrapped issues are greater than our receipts on current sales. It puts journalism in its right perspective somehow. Meanwhile I am delighted to think of the inhabitants of these atolls subscribing faithfully to my newspaper simply in order to wrap fish in it. The agent does not smile. He is beyond that. As we part he depresses his cheeks into a sort of death mask of a smile and says: “At any rate you know the truth now.”

  The evening comes down, smudged with rain, from a sky of dirty wool. We stand at the great bay window and watch the skirls and eddies roar into the landlocked harbor and dance like maniacs in the riggings of the caieques. A loose foresail cracks and cracks like pistol shots. Above us the shattered Frankish castle stands its ground as it has done for centuries; but each year a few more bricks are pried loose and come rumbling down the hill into the main street, a few more shreds are blown off the towers. As it gets darker the sheet lightning starts and France tries to take a photograph of us all sitting round the table playing pontoon by its blank staring stabs. By dawn, he says, it will have blown itself out and we shall be able to start for Patmos, the last island on my visiting list, and the one I most want to see.

  Patmos

  Just before dawn there were one or two flashes of lightning and I woke to see the hunchback standing in the dark hall, with a telephone in one hand and a lighted candle in the other. “Hullo,” he was calling in his cracked voice across the miles of water, “Hullo there Patmos!” A thin crackling came back across the German field telephone from the island, like the leaky discharge of a low electric current. The lightning flashed twice again—milky throbs of whiteness behind the dense clouds that covered Leros. “The storm has lifted a little,” shouted the hunchback, grimacing with the effort of maintaining that tenuous contact. “We are sending them over.”

  Outside, I thought I could still hear the roaring of the sea and the whack-whack of the wind in the palm tree up the hill. The hunchback entered the room and placed the lighted candle beside me with the cup of tea. “The sea is calm,” he said, and as if in sympathy with it, his own voice lost its harshness and became calm too. “They will be here in a little while to take you.” For four days we had been marooned in Leros by the weather. I said nothing, drinking my tea and exploring the warm corners of the bed with my feet. He stood looking down at me for a moment, and then taking his squat pipe from his pocket, lighted it at the candle. “Get up,” he said, and marched off in his creaking black boots to the kitchen.

  I lay and watched the whiteness of the daylight slowly leak into the sky, outlining the black paw of cloud that lay across the town and shrouded the top of the castle. The air in the room smelt stale and used up. The high cracked ceiling, the odd-shaped windows above which hung the pelmets of moldering brocade disturbed one by their associations: a Venetian etching. Lying here I felt that I was breathing in the desiccated air of another century; and the candle with its rosy pool of light added to the illusion. A room, you would say, in the hous
e of an exiled Prime Minister in the reign of King Otto. The assassins entered by the window. In the far corner, where the wallpaper has faded, stood the sofa on which they laid him.…

  The faithful E was awake, combing her dark head by the light of a candle and yawning. I sat and watched her dress eating some bread and butter, talking in whispers so as not to wake the others, who lay in odd corners of the old house, peacefully snoring. “Do you think we can make it?” she asked from time to time, dreading heavy sea as much as I did. “It’s only three hours,” I said. “It will be rough of course.”

  I was wrong as it turned out. We heard the rapid imperative note of voices in the hall, and tiptoed down the cracking staircase, packs on our shoulders, to where they stood waiting for us. We left the house like thieves.

  Beneath the darkness of the cloud the immediate foreground was wrapped in a dense ground mist, raw and chilling. It was not raining, however, and the boatman grunted his satisfaction at the fact. “The sea is calm,” he said, “too calm.” We walked down the avenue of chestnuts together towards the town, listening to the chilling noise of torrents which had swollen with the rains. A flash of lightning showed us the main street which the storm had turned into a swirling black stream; then the darkness came down, ominous and complete—the darkness that comes with the closing of a camera’s shutter. It is difficult to explain, for behind it, at the edges of the sky, the light advanced in degrees of dirty white. It was as if all one saw was the silhouette of the darkness itself.