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

by Lawrence Durrell

  The child himself wears a cold original chalky bloom; he breathes, but there are long spaces between each breath, during which he gazes with an expression of almost voluptuous detachment and purity at the outer night, giving little visible sign that it is exactly here—in the spaces between breaths, that the intrusion of something so unforeseen as death is to be feared. Yet each sip of the spicy air is drawn to his lungs with a languorous burden—a deep sigh, hanging like a bead of water to the lips of a pitcher: it trembles and falls; and after a long wait another is drawn from the inexhaustible treasury of the darkness, to fill his veins with oxygen. It is scarcely visible, this process. He breathes as a flower is said to breathe. I can see the white tip of a pointed ear above his collar. His hair has been cropped close, like that of all village children in summer, to guard him against ringworm. The two dark eyes—one cannot say that they are expressionless: it is rather that their range of focus, the depth of their experience, has suddenly widened to include a new horizon, a wealth of new preoccupations based in a magical stillness, a terrific but unstudied world weariness.

  In the earlier darkness and confusion which reigned during the setting up of the outer encampments on the slope a lorry had swerved aside and passed over him as he lay asleep. The little fringe of faces moves slowly, heavily from side to side—like the movement of a shelf of seaweed in some submarine calm. In the face of that terrible considered breathing the breath of these frightened peasants has itself become shortened—too precious to waste on the usual whispers or lamentations. As for the child, he seems already to be entering that class of material objects whose context has been torn from them by the force of the tragedy—all these bottles held half-empty in still fingers, the idle propeller of celluloid which his brother still holds in a thoughtless fist, the burning candle stump. His mother repeats his name from time to time under her breath but without conviction—as if she were trying it for the first time. Though she crouches with lowered head most of the time there are moments when she will straighten her back and, as if to knock the memory forever into her reason, as one would drive a nail into an oak, she bangs upon her forehead twice with the knuckles of a clenched fist, uttering a hoarse cry of pathetic incomprehensibility, which fades out into the deafness of that death-divining circle of faces as soon as it is uttered.

  It is strange how passion held in restraint bursts, so to speak, upwards into the very musculature of the human body, as if it must at all costs exteriorize itself. The heavy rope-like muscles of Manoli’s body, already swollen and contorted by rheumatism, have further tightened under the pressure of unexpressed feeling and of shock. It is as if in some old house, ruined by damp, the arterial system—the plumbing—had been revealed by a fallen wall, or by the incursions of damp or snow. Yet he crouches limply, hands unclenched, gazing with a dumb and sightless longing at the boy stretched under the blanket. It is as if someone had drawn a wet sponge across everything else in the world leaving only this circle of fading light and the characters which peopled it as the whole content of his thoughts.

  All this, which takes so long to describe in words, is seen and apprehended in the space of a few seconds—for in a dozen short paces I have reached the crowd, which has the curious (sour earthbound) smell that I recognize as the smell of human beings suffering from anxiety. Mills is already there; but he is crouching on his knees and is hidden by the onlookers. Those quick sensitive fingers have already explored his subject with the tact and deftness that is their special gift. He kneels for a second to watch the child, his chin on his hand, his face puzzled. Then he rises to his feet and turning catches sight of me. He clears his throat and shoulders his way through the crowd to me, to take my arm and lead me into the darkness beyond the tableau, saying: “Good. You can help.” We were already hurrying down the slope when he adds: “Someone’s gone to phone for an ambulance, but I don’t trust them. Or the phone may be locked. It may take ages. Will you take the car and go up to the Hospital and see that they get the message? I think the kid’s had it.” He stops in surprise for we are suddenly bathed in the moonlight, which has brimmed over and is filling the dark bowl of the valley, dredging up solid objects and giving them shape—as if some great lake of darkness were being slowly drained: cars, shining bicycles, tents and hoardings are being reclaimed one by one. “I needn’t come any further. You can see the car under the trees there. Take the keys.”

  The wheel of the little racing car is slippery with dew, but she starts readily enough. In a moment I am bumping and chattering down the coast road towards the sea, which swims up towards me in the moonlight, glittering and peaceful. The hills begin to skim away on every side now, taking up new positions to the north and south, until at last I clear them and reach the coast road which turns sharply right and runs along through the mulberry groves and sleeping villages towards Rhodes. On the long road leading to Trianda I catch sight of a white floating object out there on the coast road, flickering between the hedges as if recorded on a strip of old moving film. It is the ambulance. I draw across the road and hear the sweet tinkle of its bell gradually becoming louder as it approaches through the trees. It flutters towards me like a great white moth and stops. The driver and the duty nurse are perched up in the front seat waiting for me. The message got through. I tell them as briefly as I can what they are to expect and they nod curtly. The driver crosses himself. Then I stand back and the ambulance plunges off down the road to Soroni, its sweet cloying bell ringing it away into the distance like a messenger from the stern world of duties and penalties let loose upon this elegiac God-befuddled landscape.

  Between Trianda and Mixi the road reaches the sea for the first time, and here the beaches have been swept by the moon until the floor of pebbles and sand glitters as if it were slippery with the mucus of frogspawn. It is warm and there is not a soul about. In a moment I have shed my clothes and am swimming out across the golden bars of moonlight, feeling the soft foamy commotion of water drumming on my sides—the peerless warmth of that summer sea. The light filters down a full fathom or more to where, on the dark blackboard of weed, broken here and there by dazzling areas of milk-white sand, the fish float as if dazed by their own violet shadows which follow them back and forth, sprawling across the sea’s floor. Or perhaps it is the blinding shimmer of phosphorus which outlines my own swimming body as it plunges towards them throwing out sparks. I swim for a moment or two and then turn on my back to watch the sky through wet eyelashes and lying there, arms behind my head, on that resilient tideless meadow of water, I see in my mind’s eye the whole panorama of our Rhodian life, made up of a thousand different scenes and ages, all turning before me now as if on the slow turntable of the four seasons.

  In Rhodes we have been the willing bondsmen of the Marine Venus—the figure that sits up there alone in the Museum, disregarded, sightless; yet somehow we have learned to share that timeless, exact musical contemplation—the secret of her self-sufficiency—which has helped her to outlive the savage noise of wars and change, to maintain unbroken the fine thread of her thoughts through the centuries past. Yes, and through her we have learned to see Greece with the inner eyes—not as a collection of battered vestiges left over from cultures long since abandoned—but as something ever-present and ever-renewed: the symbol married to the object prime—so that a cypress tree, a mask, an orange, a plough were extended beyond themselves into an externality they enjoyed only with the furniture of all good poetry. In the blithe air of Rhodes she has provided us with a vicarious sense of continuity not only with the past—but also with the future—for surely history’s evaluations are wrong in speaking of civilized and barbaric ages succeeding or preceding one another, surely they have always coexisted—for one is the measure of the other? Everywhere the dualism of the human personality has created side by side profanity and piety, truth and falsehood, hate and love. Time is always aspiring to a dance measure which will entangle the two in a dance, a dialogue, a duet; dissolve their opposition. The radiance of that worn sto
ne figure carries the message to us so clearly.…

  Arriving back in Rhodes, I leave the little car in its usual place under the plane trees and walk slowly down the hill towards the Villa Cleobolus. In a field a horse stands asleep, its coat aglitter with dew. As I reach the esplanade I see that there is a light on in the duty room. This is unusual except when, for one reason or another, the Cairo plane is delayed, and the mail is sorted at night. I climb the staircase and push open the door to the duty office. Sitting at a table, facing one another, sit the two Sergeants Manners and Kirkbride, puffing pipes and playing Rummy. They are inseparable friends, and by consequence always elect to share tiresome guard duties together; also as elderly married men they prefer a quiet life to the more meretricious joys of festivals and balls, so that one usually finds them on duty late at night or when the whole administration has had to turn out for some function or other, “It’s come, sir,” says Manners, taking his pipe out for a second and making a sort of token gesture of standing up before he subsides again. Kirkbride, who has some of the middle-aged, matronly spread of a natural beer drinker, copies his fellow and adds: “Just come off the wireless room, sir. Order to pack up. I sent the signal clerk up to the Brig’s villa.”

  So it has come at last. The islands are to be handed back to Greece. I am delighted as I picture the beaming figure of General Gigantes when he hears the news. But my happiness is touched with regret, for this means yet another separation from a country which I have come to recognize as my second home.

  I turn and go slowly downstairs and by the narrow gate into the heavy darkness of the Mufti’s courtyard—so dark that I must grope my way past the tomb of Hacmet; the goat awakes in alarm and swings out on the end of its cord, scattering droppings with its hooves. In the silent garden the leaves are still dropping. They are not inclined to wait for autumn this year. My thoughts turn to E and I walk across the garden to the hotel to see if there is a light in her room. The shutters are open but the room is dark.

  In my familiar room at the Villa Cleobolus I strike a match and the Turkish lovers leap off the counterpane towards me—as if they had been asleep. Yet the serenade has not ceased for an instant. The viol has been playing all the time in the darkness, touched by those long saintly fingers; she has been smiling idly up at him; the bird in the branches above their heads has been on duty all the time, singing as if its heart were broken. The two white vases filled with lilac raise their long graceful throats above the fireplace. I remember so vividly the thump of the clay on the wheel, and the gradual emergence of their fine stems under the broad thumbs of Egon Huber as he said “Something for you two,” trimming them with a fine knife as they turned; and then moving them off the wheel still wet, to the shadowy pottery where they would be given their glaze. They had stood there for two years now, fronting the shelf of sea-stained books and indifferent water colors, the rolled tent, the tinned food, the anchor. I think I have never loved a room so much. Here I have spent all my spare time—a whole winter—working on a play which is never destined to be published or played, stopping from time to time to pitch a resin-scented log on the fire, or look up a reference in a book. Here, too, I have been visited by friends who dropped in like swallows from the sky: Paddy and Xan, the Corn Goddess, John Craxton, Patrick Reilly, all bringing with them the flavor of the outside world; Romney Summers, Tricoglou and Jim Richards, who stayed and remembered; Mary Mollo and Katy P., who nearly died here; and Boris, who thought I should get a job with Unesco and said that “this cult for islands was becoming deplorable.”

  I sit for a while thinking about it all before undressing. I am half asleep when I notice something pinned to the counterpane. It is a signal addressed to my office. On a corner of the sheet of paper in E’s tall handwriting is a message. “Here it is at last.” The signal reads: “The date for the handover is to be announced on Saturday. You will complete preparations for winding up and report to Cairo by the first of next month, liquidating all our press responsibilities in the islands.”

  I get into bed and settle down to sleep; but the waning moon has moved over and peers in at me from an unshuttered window, so that after perhaps two hours I am awake again. So radiant is the night, and so rich with the scent of flowers and creepers that I am reluctant to waste it in sleep. The news of our impending departure has made me miserly. I dress and walk rapidly across the little town to the hospital. The white ambulance is parked outside in the drive and a sleepy duty nurse dozes under a weak yellowish bulb in the ugly stone entrance hall. I leave him asleep and climb to the first floor, tiptoeing through the long sleeping wards in the direction of Mills’s private room, which lies at an angle to the operating theater, on the shadowed side of the building. I open the door and make my way through the darkened room to the terrace. It is empty, but turning to my right, I can see shadowy figures seated around a table two terraces away. Very little moonlight penetrates the dense clump of pines which grows out of the side of the hill and all but hides the sky.

  I retrace my steps into the lighted corridor and meet my friend as he is about to enter a door. He looks pale and weary, and is stripping his hands of their rubber gloves. “He’s no right to be alive but he is,” he whispers with the ghost of a smile, untying the tapes which meet across his back and pulling off the little sterile mask from his mouth in one deft flowing movement born of long practice. From somewhere to our left comes the faint clink of steel on metal. I imagine that some operation must be going forward in the theater, but taking my arm he pilots me to the end of a corridor and into a small buttery where Chloe is cutting bread and butter. “Come in,” she whispers and I sit down on a chair by the sink.

  “Manoli and his wife are on the terrace. They’ve been crying, but they’re asleep now, both,” she says. A nurse’s head appears in the doorway and Mills jumps up with a muttered apology to vanish through the door. I say: “Chloe, our orders came through tonight. We’ll be leaving in a fortnight.”

  She looks up with a wistful and sleepy grace, her face full of sympathy. She looks very beautiful with her hair piled carelessly up on the top of her head, her face unmade-up, her body youthful and candid in the flowered kimono. “So have ours,” she says at last. “They came through last week. We are posted to Abyssinia. He wouldn’t let me tell anyone before it was necessary. We didn’t want to break up all this.”

  “Gideon will be sorry. I can see his face so clearly when he hears the news,” she continues. “He will soon be left with only Hoyle for company.” “But,” I say, “their families will come out. A new life will begin.”*

  “It is not the same,” she says, a little wistfully.

  The enamel plate is full of sandwiches now. “Will you take the plate and go and sit with Manoli, please? I must help Ray. They will be so hungry when they wake.”

  I step into a darkened room and cross it on tiptoe to the terrace, placing the plate silently on the table and sinking into the empty chair which stands between the two sleeping figures. Manoli sits in the wicker chair like a waxwork, bolt upright, only his head has fallen a little to the right and his mouth is open. His Italian wife has drawn her head under her flowered shawl, as a bird draws its head under a wing. Their breathing sounds utterly composed, utterly peaceful. Before them stand untouched glasses of cognac on the metal table.

  As I sit here between them I find myself sinking into that feeling of detachment, almost of peace, which visits me when I am alone in a great crowd of people all urgently occupied with their own affairs. Or else when I am an onlooker, at some drama which is going on before my eyes but in which I am powerless to take part. At such times one’s individuality seems to focus itself with greater emphasis; one overlooks the affairs of men from a new height, participating in life with a richer though a vicarious understanding of it; and yet at the same time remaining fully withdrawn from it.

  Sitting between these two sleeping figures, who will wake to a new meaning of life, a new daylight, I see them as symbols more than as human beings. Italy an
d Greece, if you like, the lovers: the Italy of the domestic arts, the passionate feeling for husbandry and family order, the feeling of a vineyard built with the fingers, pinch by pinch, into terraces of household wine: Italy that conquers as a wife or nurse, encroaching on nature with the arts of love. Then Greece: the vertical, masculine, adventurous consciousness of the archipelago, with its mental anarchy and indiscipline touched everywhere with the taste for agnosticism and spare living; Greece born into the sexual intoxication of the light, which seems to shine upwards from inside the very earth, to illuminate these bare acres of squill and asphodel. It seems to me so clear that their arts of life are not divergent ones, but the complementaries of each other. How unlucky that here, among the humps of Aegean stone, islets dropped red hot from the trowels of the Titans, among the windmills and the springs curdled by moss-grown cisterns, the truth should not have been made plain. They both belong to this sacred territory, husband and wife, as the myrtle and olive do.