Perhaps that is miracle enough, but the same woods and mountain slopes where Sappho mooned with her ‘violet-tressed maids’ and youths ‘like tender saplings’ also teemed with miracles of a more abrupt kind: here St Paul struck the earth and a spring bubbled forth; there an icon of the Virgin (‘Our Lady of the Sweet Kiss’) flew from a ship’s mast to the top of a rock on shore (twice); here Saracen pirates were foiled by a phantom wave miles from the sea; there a mosque kept falling down until a Christian cross was placed on the minaret; here an icon made with the blood of murdered monks casts out devils and heals the sick; there a ploughman who had lost his ox simply vanished into thin air every time a Turkish bandit tried to shoot him; and everywhere the bones of saints have been unearthed through the extraordinarily accurate dreams of the faithful. (One of the saints was the Byzantine Empress Irene, who had had her son’s eyes stabbed out in her lust for power, although this misdemeanour must have struck the saint-makers as forgivable.)
Down in the village the echoes of these wonders were now faint – at least, to my eye. The landscape of Lesbos, as every writer keeps telling you, has changed remarkably little over the millennia – the pines, chestnut, oak and olives are still thick on the hills, herons still stalk the salt-flat beside the gulf and goat-herds amble across the fields munching on pistachio-nuts as if Daphnis might still be smooching with Chloe among the poppies behind the next barn. But down at the water’s edge in Molyvos love and miracles wear modern dress. The sleek youths slouching across the handle-bars of their motorcycles in the sun would, I imagined, find Daphnis contemptible – poor, patient Daphnis, wooing Chloe with his eyes, and then his lips and hands, season after season, not even knowing (despite the antics of his goats) what else to woo her with, just knowing there was more; and it was hard to picture the surly waiters in the tavernas by the harbour calling on Christ to shield them from a Turkish onslaught except in the most perfunctory way, as a kind of superstitious tribal oath. Nor could I see the slightest link between the Texan lesbians striding about in their shorts and boots, thumbs in knapsack straps, all gender-theoried up to the eyeballs from courses they’d completed in Houston or Dallas, and Sappho of Lesbos, doting mother, dead for love of a handsome ferryman. She was tumbled like oak-leaves (as she put it) by love, she shuddered, ‘pale as the drying grasses’ from love … for girls in apple-groves, certainly, girls with ‘violet-sweet breasts’, girls in saffron blouses and purple dresses, ‘high-flying swallows’ lured to earth by her lyre … Still, I can see no connection – I don’t think any of these sturdy modern women, brimming over with well-being and bits of Foucault, could write a poem which simply said ‘Pain drips.’ Besides, down to the last crone on her death-bed, this is a fiercely heterosexual town, there’s a phallus rearing from every window in Molyvos. Texan lesbians don’t belong.
Apart from Achilles and Odysseus (who came here long before he reached that beach on Corfu), the Romans, Franks, Catalans and Genoese were here (indeed, I was sitting in their castle); and the Turks were here for over four hundred years, leaving behind them a bath-house, a mosque, all those hanging verandahs and (some would say) a certain cast to the eyes of the locals. Oddly enough, though, I had no sense of this Lesbos, let alone of Sappho’s or the saints’, while reading Kester’s book, Head of Orpheus Singing, set in that very town. It was bizarre.
He must have begun to write it, I now imagine, in his room down near the very wisteria-covered, cobbled street where I was staying, although he finished it on Corfu in the house with the high, wooden ceiling and whitewashed walls that Arthur had told me about. It appears to be about a middle-aged Australian widower who comes to Molyvos to teach English, becomes the inseparable friend of a teenaged peanut-vendor called Euripides and then, when Euripides and his weeping mother move to Australia, gets married to a tedious, clinging woman he feels no passion for (a student of his from Australia called Claire – a pretty but watery name) and settles down in Molyvos forever. He has a few ricocheting sorts of encounters with a clutch of other characters – a retired headmistress, the police, assorted foreigners – but basically that seems to be the story. Not for a moment, of course, did I think that that was what the book was about, so I quickly read it twice.
Pain certainly drips. Little by little, page by page, everyone drops away. Gradually, the gentle widower from Sydney loses everybody: his American painter friend, his wild, footloose German friend Monika and her drugged admirer, and, of course, Euripides (a sort of male Eurydice, spirited away to the underworld of Australia) … everybody leaves, dies or disappears, one after the other. He even loses his homeland, in a sense, marooned at the end in Molyvos with a ‘wife’ he feels nothing but a vague affection for and his humble ‘lyre’ – the voice of Orpheus singing on and on in his greying head. At certain moments and in certain places, he also had what he curiously describes as Unitive Experiences.
So it’s about loss and the kind of inner grace you need to bear it. It’s about contentment, even though life’s most precious gift – friendship – slowly seeps away. Everyone grows smaller and smaller and then disappears.
This is the nub of it – friendship in its many guises. All those meat and onion stews in the book, all those fishermen he writes about with their wine-red nets, the green figs in syrup, the molten sea – none of that is what its about. Nor emigration to Australia or never going home.
Its about that many-hued, subtle, fragile art we call in our hale and hearty way ‘friendship’: the teacher’s for his pupil, the adept’s for his guru, the neighbour’s for the man next door, one villager’s for another, even the casual diner’s for some bird of passage at his table. And woven in and out of all these friendships is an erotic thread – barely perceptible, except, perhaps, when Euripides turns somersaults on the beach and rushes over to sit beside the English teacher, shining and dripping, his naked chest heaving – but it’s there. Erotic like a peacock’s tail, erotic like red shoes – not sexual. (Perhaps in real life the erotic and the sexual overlap from time to time, but not in this book – not even in marriage.)
In an ancient Greek village there was little space for friendship in the delicious, modern, urban sense of the word – that completely voluntary sense of ‘I just like you, that’s all, and feel more fully me when I’m with you’. In ancient Methymna – and I suspect things aren’t as different in Molyvos today as one might think – there was kin and there was the village, walled against a hostile world.
Odysseus, we notice, doesn’t seem to have had any friends in the modern meaning of the word at all, just his household and his companions in adversity – his ‘mates’, we would have said in Adelaide when I was younger. I suppose that’s why in The Iliad the passionate friendship of Achilles and Patroclus (the ‘dearest life’ he has ever known) seems so shocking – people have been sniggering and smirking about those two, calling them sodomites and lovers, for over two thousand years (especially the Romans).
I suppose, too, that this lack of space for voluntary friendship in the traditional village accounts for that surge of delight we foreigners often feel at the sudden intimacies that flower as we pass through on our travels. Of course such attachments flower – we’re neither kin nor comrades, we’re a virgin space in which innocence can be lost simply because of liking somebody. Old habits die hard, though: the locals usually find it difficult to think beyond friendship as a mutually advantageous arrangement, while the foreigners’ minds are apt to drift towards sex. No wonder the result is all too often bonking for payment (a gift or a stolen wallet) on the beach.
No wonder, too, that the Romans, with their love of great cities, glimpsed other possibilities and marvelled at them. In a city like Rome there were lots of spaces for attachments outside the family and the ‘village’ – that tight little hub of comrades, colleagues and associates every life revolves around. Cicero, I remember from my brief flirtation with the classics, called friendship ‘the greatest thing in the world’. The pleasure to be had in a friend, according to Cicer
o, left wives, orgies, fame and wealth in the shade. Horace too, a few years later, said that so long as he was in his right mind, he knew he’d find nothing to compare with a ‘pleasant friend’. Nothing!
In Adelaide, when I was young, none of us would have said a thing like that, even under torture. Nor, I suspect, would anyone in Clive’s North London flat. Health, a good job, a loving family, even money … none of those things would have raised an eyebrow. But friendship?
We had friends, naturally – people we just liked – or would have said we had. If we’d been pressed to say why we liked them, though, we’d have been nonplussed. Cicero, two thousand years ago, was astonished by precisely this carelessness: everyone takes great pains to select their sheep and goats, he wrote, and knows exactly what qualities to look for in their livestock, but ask them what they look for in a friend, infinitely more precious, and they’re struck dumb. It would have been much the same in Adelaide – not that anyone ever asked: we’d have happily rattled off our requirements in a dog, a house, a car or a good accountant, but why we liked somebody … it would have seemed too obvious and at the same time too vague to bother finding words for. So-and-so is fun, we might have said, if really nailed down, so-and-so is interesting (not boring, in other words) – clued up on football, wine, rock music, fishing, whatever subject was thought to be interesting. Easy to get on with, too – good-natured, tolerant (of us), reliable (wouldn’t let us down), generous … Then we’d have tried to change the subject, obscurely anxious that someone might think we had a lurking desire to do to this friend what Daphnis eventually did to Chloe.
If we were clear about anything at all, it was that ‘love’ for a friend had nothing whatsoever to do with ‘love’ of the kind that climaxes in ‘getting big and ready for action’. I’m not sure that women have always quite understood the difference, but we males have no doubts.
4
Who should I see waving at me from a restaurant table on the cobbles down by the harbour the following evening but my witch, Elvira!
‘Why, hello!’ she called. ‘Come and join the coven!’ At her elbow Andy giggled. Together with half a dozen other women, Elvira was waiting for the moon to rise before setting out for the site of an ancient temple to Aphrodite, somewhere in the mountains to the south,
‘What’s going to happen?’ I asked, squeezing in at their table.
‘A major ceremony. Obviously I can’t tell you the details, but believe me, we’re expecting big things tonight.’ I glanced around at the eager faces of the women at the table, all rosy in the early evening light. The sky was an extraordinary green, streaked with orange.
It was details I wanted to hear, though. What would these witches actually do at the temple under the swollen moon? Chant ancient litanies? Summon up the goddess in her shell of foam? Sacrifice a she-goat? Would spells be cast? Images of flaming torches, blood-smeared foreheads and drifts of aromatic smoke flicked across my mind. Here on Lesbos, in point of fact, the aroma of divinity traditionally reaches the nostrils well before the tapers are lit: if a goddess has a mind to make her presence felt on some mountain peak or in some hallowed grove, she’s wont to charm her worshippers with a whiff of something sacred as a curtain-raiser. It’s a Lesbian speciality, apparently. Or so I’ve been told.
‘We’ll be worshipping the Mother Goddess – that’s all I can tell you,’ Elvira said. ‘She’s present everywhere, of course’ – and here she gestured at the mountain ridges etched against the sky, the gleaming bay, the postcard stands, the empty coffee cups – ‘but we have ways of making her presence real in our bodies now.’
‘Yes,’ said Andy, all in blue tonight, ‘ancient ways.’ Everyone smiled at me in a knowing manner.
‘The veil between the worlds is very thin tonight, you see,’ Elvira said. ‘We aim to pierce it.’
I wished, when they set off, I could have stowed away in their minibus, under the pile of black-handled knives, star-spangled gowns and hazlewood wands I imagined they had lying at the back. I’d have loved to see the piercing of the veil. I’d never really had a truly Unitive Experience.
And then I had one.
Well, it wasn’t exactly Unitive, but it was definitely an Experience. Right there on the quay in Molyvos I suddenly saw Leila. In fact, I smelt her first, catching the whiff of her cigarillo. I looked up and there she was, candle-lit, risen up before me in the flesh.
‘Darling!’ she said. ‘Just been talking about you – and all of a sudden there you are! Are you sure you’re not an apparition?’ She bent to kiss me, and in a flash, in the cloud of warm Leila smells I knew so well (the perfume, the smoke, her lightly powdered skin), I saw the blue neon glare of the Shalimar, heard the thud of axes in the cherry orchard, caught the squish of the coffee-plunger, glimpsed the Horus-eye, the spiky hair … in the blink of an eye I was in North London, looking back at Leila on the waterfront in Molyvos through a spyglass across months and even years.
‘Leila! What are you doing here?’
‘I’m having a dirty weekend, darling. Well, a dirty week, actually. I met this delicious man – literally edible, let me tell you – in a phone-booth on St Pancras station. Terribly Greek and masterful. He said I simply must go to Molyvos with him before the summer hordes arrive – he’s got a house here, up near that ruin on top of the hill. Pops over all the time.’
‘Who were you talking to about me, then?’
‘Why, William, of course, the poor dear is absolutely – But here’s Yanni!’
Still looking through my spyglass, quite dazed now, I stood up to shake the hand of a middle-aged, slightly pudgy man I took an instant dislike to, partly because he’d broken off Leila’s sentence, partly because I didn’t find him remotely edible and partly because of that irritating animal tautness that grips men while they sniff the air for a rival.
‘Have you eaten? Let’s all have dinner together here, then,’ Leila said, ‘and catch up on the gossip.’ Yanni said nothing, but sat down anyway, calling out and nodding to this one and that on the busy quay. He was at home. ‘God, it’s amazing, running into you like this! It’s like seeing a ghost. Now, you must tell me everything, absolutely every little thing that’s happened since I last saw you.’
As it turned out, I had very little chance to say anything at all during the first course, what with Leila’s tales about who was doing what, and to whom, in London, and Yanni’s long and lively discussions in Greek with every passing male. I also suspected that in some mysterious, Leila-like way she already knew every little thing that had happened since she’d last seen me.
Then suddenly, just as the waiter dropped my almond fingers onto the table, Leila caught sight of the book beside my plate. ‘Head of Orpheus Singing! Fancy that! So you’ve been reading Kester.’
‘Yes, have you read it?’
‘Read it when it first came out, darling. I’ve known Kester for years.’
So. All of a sudden things were kaleidoscoping into place.
‘It’s set here, you know, in Molyvos, although he calls it something else.’
‘So I gather.’
‘It’s not very good, is it.’
‘It’s interesting.’
‘That ghastly wife who pops up at the very end … God, I laughed!’
‘That amused you, did it?’
Leila considered me for a moment, a tiny smile at the corner of her lips. ‘A wife drops down like the final curtain at the end of practically everything the dear man’s written. Needless to say, there’s never been a wife, wives aren’t his thing. That wife’s a penance. Kester’s a lovely man – the gentlest, sweetest man, a saint, really – not my type, of course, but lovely.’ Leila’s ‘type’, as we all knew, ran more to Costa Rican shark-fishermen and Brazilian cattle-ranchers. She was always off on package tours to South America.
‘I was a student of his, you see, at the acting studio he ran in Hammersmith years ago – in the late fifties, just before he threw it all in and moved here, as a matter of fact. I g
rew quite attached to him, really. But no, Kester isn’t the marrying kind.’ She doodled with her fork in the honey oozing from her baklava. ‘The whole book’s a sham, really. I thought he’d have more courage.’
‘What do you mean? It’s a novel.’
‘What I mean is, Kester wasn’t here to teach English, darling – that was an accident. He was here to escape. And somehow or other, I doubt he was just a father-figure to the peanut-sellers of Molyvos.’
‘But you’re fond of him.’
‘Oh, yes. I adore him. So does Yanni, in his fashion. It was Kester, believe it or not, who taught him his first English. Half the town went to his classes in the early sixties.’ She glanced over at Yanni, who was deep in conversation with a passing local, telling beads as he talked. ‘Do you want to know why Kester really came to Greece in the first place?’
‘To escape, you said.’
‘Well, obviously to escape – why else would anyone come to Greece? To live a more fulfilling life? Just look around you.’ We both turned our heads to peer into the gathering dusk. Knots of tourists wondering where to eat. Greeks smoking. Iridescent water. A molten horizon. ‘No, what I meant was: would you like to know what he was escaping from?’
It grew quite dark while she told her tale, sitting beside me in a pool of yellow light on the cobbles. The moon came up behind us, high above Turkey, and one by one the fishing-boats stole out of the harbour, lanterns swaying, to prowl for octopus across the bay.
Corfu Page 10