Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

by Lawrence Durrell

  “This is Dr. Appolyon Fonvisin. Mr. Marlowe.”

  In the red glare, their eyes met, and Fonvisin’s smile belied the sober stare of the eyes, considering, criticizing, assessing.…

  “You must really forgive,” said Rumanades nervously, “my preoccupation with the ceremony. The day of our Patron Saint, you know. If you don’t mind …” and he fussed off.

  Fonvisin lay back on his rock, and his nostrils gushed cigarette smoke. Pillowing his head on his arms, he stared fixedly up at the sky. Marlowe sat down near him and presently Walsh came and joined him with a casual: “Hullo, Fonvisin. You still alive?”

  For a minute the Russian smiled grimly up at him. “I am alive,” he said. “Yes. I am alive. If you want to know.”

  “So am I,” said Walsh with a sigh, perching himself on the rock and swinging his legs.

  Yellow, green, and red, flight after flight of rockets fumed up to the dark ceiling of heaven, and loosed their showers of coloured rain. The hollow bay flung back tremendous echoes in the face of the still water. The roar of applause swelled with the crash of clapping from the olive-covered slopes above them. A great throbbing pall of red smoke wavered among them, and with each successive flash the bright silhouette of the priest, standing with his chin on his breast, was lit with a bright phosphorescent outline.

  Flight after flight of rockets. The darkness, which, undisturbed, gave the illusion of being limited to the small radius of sight, bulged elastically in all directions. Each new comet plunged its colour, like an avenging knife, into the black. Great lovely, faltering trajectories were carved out above the cynic impassivity of the sea; and from the natural amphitheatre terraced upon the cliff-top round after round of applause seeped into the vacant seconds of silence, demanding more and yet more.

  Francis danced up from the confusion, her face an unholy cipher of delight in light, a shadow against shadow in darkness.

  “Isn’t it lovely? Oh, isn’t it miraculous?”

  For a long moment their eyes met and she stared down upon Marlowe’s small, rather fine ascetic head, lean and pointing away to the chin: his eyes were small but very bright, a clear salt blue, and seemed to be built deep in under the heavy ledges of bone. They were full of that evasive anguish of his generation; and the evasion in them made her smile and counterfeit ease.

  Through the reek of gases the voice of Rumanades called vaguely: “Nearly over now. Nearly finished. Finale.”

  There was a moment’s lull. Then the last fuse began to giggle and splutter, and, gathering impetus from the fiery commotion in its vitals, lurched up into the night with a wheeze, splendidly bound for heaven in defiance of all gravity. Up it went to the top of its curve, unfaltering, and then, after a preliminary stutter, shot a loop of gold stars outwards towards Epirus and the hills. Neatly and cleanly the stars lapsed, waned, and were extinguished and only the reek remained, and the faint slap of a discarded stick on the dark water. Then a grudging applause broke out, disturbing the night.

  There was a sudden gap at the heart of things. Speech, which had been keyed to its highest pitch to carry in the inferno, sight, which had been tormented by alternating noon and midnight, hearing, which had been well-nigh blasted—these faculties were suddenly restored. Quite what to do or say they did not know. The applause from the olives, gradually growing in volume, gave them their cue.

  “Finished. All over.” Rumanades lowered his head and peered in their direction. “All over,” he said, “my dear Mr. Marlowe. Please forgive my bad manners, but I am a sort of high priest to-night.” Marlowe made the appropriate reply, in the appropriate voice.

  “Bed for me, I think,” said Walsh, yawning and knuckling his eyes.

  The peasant audience were on the move. Laughter and animated talk, mingled with the fresh scent of flowers, came clearly down to them; the priest bade them good night in his rich voice and swept off into the darkness; the ledge on which the two monks had sat was empty. Fonvisin yawned and stretched with insolent ease, and picked his teeth with a matchstick. “And I,” he said in his careful exact English, “have a little adventure waiting for me before I go to sleep. Eh?” He smiled vaguely around him and unknotted the handkerchief from his bald head. “A little adventure.”

  “You and your conquests,” said Francis, with a certain contemptuous emphasis.

  “Conquests!” he mocked, twinkling with glee. “What a Puritanical woman. ‘Your conquests,’ she says.” His imitation of contempt was delightful. Puffing out his lips, he gave a snort of laughter.

  “Er … Mr. Marlowe,” said old Rumanades nervously, “if you will take a little walk please, there is something I want to speak to you about.…”

  When they were out of earshot he sighed and shoved his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets so that his fingers dangled down across his abdomen. His jaws moved slowly as if he were chewing his tongue.

  “I would consider it a great honour,” he said at last, “if during your visit you would live in a little villa which I have empty. It is called Phaon, up there on the cliff, among the trees. It is a nice little place.…”

  Marlowe, who had been coached in his part by Gordon, stopped and protested that such generosity was more than he could allow. “I am already in your debt,” he explained. “I have landed on a private island, and you have given me permission to stay a while.…”

  Rumanades became exquisitely nervous, stabbing his pocketed thumbs downwards, and hanging his head.

  “Nevertheless,” he said doggedly, “I would consider it a great honour if you would accept my offer. It is really not very much to ask …” and Marlowe, taking pity on his embarrassment, accepted the offer with a gratitude which he expressed as delicately as he could. The gesture had been achieved. They shook hands with grave formality. “I can only hope that some day I will be in a position to return your hospitality,” said Marlowe, and Rumanades thanked him solemnly as an owl. “I am sure you would,” he said. “My dear Marlowe, I am quite sure you would.”

  Chapter Five: Moving In

  The move from the inn to the Villa Phaon fulfilled all the necessary conditions of a musical comedy finale. It was infectious with gaiety, and Marlowe, to whom ceremony—even such well-wishing and spontaneous ceremony—was anathema, was a trifle dazed by its extravagance.

  He awoke about dawn to the brief sight of sunlight topping the olives and moving across the sea, and was puzzled by the unfamiliar scent of flowers in the little room. Before he could bring his mind to bear on the subject, however, he had dozed off, and it was only the familiar roar of Gordon’s laughter that shocked him into a sitting posture, hands to his head. Embarrassed by the intrusion of faces in the low doorway, he stared about for signs of their laughter, still half asleep; and was aware that he lay, couched in an absolute nest of flowers, fruit, vegetables, and eggs; orchids and anemones, cherries and wild strawberries, beans and giant tomatoes—the room was swarming with them. On his trousers lay a pyramid of red festival eggs. A bunch of vermilion pomegranate blooms sprouted from the pocket of his coat.

  “Gordon,” he said, “what is all this?”

  The wrinkles crowded about Gordon’s laughing eyes, and crawled upwards across his forehead. Leaning sideways against the door-post, he answered: “Bribery.”

  Marlowe soberly crossed his arms over his chest and stared.

  “It was magnificent,” said Gordon: “you lying there sleeping, surrounded by a harvest festival.”

  A dado of grinning faces bobbed around his head in the semi-gloom of the passage-way, corroborating the laughter. Marlowe was suddenly filled with a shy annoyance. He huddled down in the clothes and frigidly requested privacy. The faces vanished like snuffed candle-flames, and Gordon, serious of a sudden, apologized fervently and closed the door, leaning his broad back to the wood as a safeguard against intrusion.

  In silence Marlowe began to dress, carefully examining his clothes for signs of the ubiquitous vermin which had tormented him all night. Pausing as he lifted his shirt to hi
s shoulders, he half turned, and caught the eye of the young man. Gordon smiled mildly and apologized again. “It was thoughtless of me.”

  “My dear man,” said Marlowe, “that’s not what worries me—it’s all this.” Standing there, between perplexity and annoyance, he swung his arm wide, indicating the tumbled bed, with its load of market-produce, the chair, the floor.…

  “Its all this,” he added, and smiled gradually.

  Gordon crossed to the bed, and cleared himself a place to sit on. Elbows on knees, he said: “It’s bribery. You’ll find this stuff useful, though, if you’re moving into Phaon to-day. Save you a trip down to Christ’s place.”

  “But, good Lord, do I accept it?”

  A brief examination proved that the donors had left no clue whatsoever to their several identities; fruit and vegetables, as Gordon remarked, could hardly be traced back to their owners.

  “It’s pure formality. I imagine they want to bribe you to buy fruit and vegetables and stuff from them. Anyway, we’ll see.”

  Breakfast for Marlowe was purely an affair of coffee and a cigarette; and the duration today was determined by the perplexity caused by these agricultural phenomena; yawning lethargically from time to time, he sat beside Gordon on the bed, and puffed smoke up at the dingy ceiling.

  “Tomatoes and broad beans.”

  “Even, my God, a cauliflower. I must have had my head on it.”

  Prodigiously yawning, he followed Gordon out, to where the crowd of suitors talked together in the hollow echoing bar-room, and shuffled their bare feet on the flags. The room was swimming in colour against the vivid sunshine of the doorway. Christ’s cousin, more blowzy and drab than ever in contrast to the gay headdresses and the swirling skirts, dispensed equal quantities of black wine and garrulity, making the best of the time and the trade.

  At the moment of their appearance they became the focus of all interest, the pivot upon which the whole gathering circle of humanity turned and whirled, in its swarming and squeezing towards the door.

  Voices fluent with necessity beseeched, cajoled, insisted. Scarves danced and swayed, profuse with colour. The heavy dresses twirled and snapped at their ankles, instinct with a disturbing life. Heavy and sickening, the smell of garlic rose on the air. Gordon, head and brown shoulders above them all, laughed in the fresh laughing faces of the women, and shouted for them to make way. Maria, Chrysanthe, and a horde of others shouted him down, beseeching him, with a familiarity that horrified Marlowe at the time, but which he recognized later on as a natural trait of the peasants, to intercede on their behalf.

  Down the road they went, hedged in by the women and followed, at a respectful distance, by the men who carried the suitcases; a cavalcade of noise and colour centred on Marlowe, pale, blue-eyed, and nursing his northern reserve. Only Gordon was laughing unfeignedly, and bargaining noisily. The fine dust of the road rose in a cloud about their ankles, and the sun, as yet not uncomfortably hot, warmed their backs.

  “Chrysanthe will bring you eggs and milk.”

  Marlowe nodded perfunctorily.

  “Maria wants to be your servant.”

  “Which is Maria?”

  A broad figure, electrified by the mention of the name, pushed nearer to them, leaping across their path on a pair of stodgy brown legs. Leaning towards them and repeating her name, the woman smiled in a sort of humorous anguish of speechlessness, and drew her green head-dress back from her black hair. Her white teeth were set evenly in a broad, kindly mouth, devoid of almost everything but laughter and a certain casual sensuality.

  “Maria?” he said, and she, nodding her head in recognition, twinkled her brown eyes at him.

  “Malista.”

  Talking, and chattering, the women still followed them, across the path to the road, and down beyond the ruined stone bridge and the iron spring, from where Phaon was visible, glittering on the hillside.

  “It looks as if it were carved in salt,” was Marlowe’s comment, when Gordon pointed it out to him.

  “That,” said Gordon, grimacing, “is a poor compliment in this part of the world. They use sea-sand sometimes in the building, and in the winter the walls of your house have such a large quantity of salt in them, they suck up the rain like a sponge.”

  From the parapet flanking the road a path had been cut, and a white concrete stairway mounted to the villa’s porch. A trellis of vine, Marlowe noticed, shaded the cool green porch; and at the back of the little place a deep volume of colour, dashed with bright gold spots, receding to a pure sky, established the identity of the orange-groves—green freaked with gold, already dusty and tremulous in the heat.

  The procession followed them doggedly to the very terrace in front of the house, the men groaning under the weight of suitcases. In the shade of the vine-lattice, Marlowe turned to watch the womenfolk, brilliant in their colours, mounting the long flight of steps, casually conscious of their own kinetic beauty, direct and assured. An hour of negotiation followed, during which Gordon, with his mixture of lame Greek and fluent Italian, did the talking.

  Chrysanthe was to bring him eggs and milk when he wanted it; Agathie and Sophia romped off in delight at the thought of having a regular customer for their vegetables; Maria made a point of beginning her job at once, swaying off to the spring with a pitcher on her head, to get them a drink.

  Marlowe and Gordon sat down on the uncouth wooden bench under the dapple of sunlight.

  “By the way,” said Gordon, “what books have you got?” and Marlowe, kneeling on the ground, unhasped his battered suitcase and groped among his treasures. Molinos, Guyon, Bossuet, and a crowd of others he lifted and placed in Gordon’s brown hands, smiling up a trifle diffidently.

  “Mostly quietist people,” he said, without further explanation.

  Gordon was silent, turning the books over, opening and shutting them. Long slants of sun picked up the sheen in his head of unkempt yellow hair and his heavily marked eyebrows.

  “Oh! dear,” he said slowly, “I want something to read, and I can’t stomach metaphysical pinpricking.” He smiled up suddenly and leaned back so that the sun shone on his great gold thumbs.

  At that moment Maria reappeared with her pitcher and they followed her into the house to find glasses. It was small, but very clean and cool: a mere two rooms and kitchen, with a lopsided house or office added, it seemed, as an afterthought. It was scantly furnished for one, with good shaggy unpainted wood—a table and a single bookshelf—and sturdy peasant chairs. On the low bed lay a pile of utensils and odds and ends which Rumanades had sent down from the Villa Pothetos: a pair of sheets, some dusters, a saucepan, several earthenware pots, a tin oven for the charcoal fire, a kettle, and a bundle containing a knife, a fork, a spoon, and a tin-opener. These Maria took immediate command of, refusing positively to leave them where they were until Marlowe had made an inventory.

  “They don’t understand a conscientious soul like you,” remarked Gordon, and laughed at his glumness. “Never mind.”

  Pacing the bright tiling of the floors with a fine sense of ownership, Marlowe busied himself with the opening of windows, the throwing wide of shutters.

  “Good heavens, Gordon,” he said dramatically, “the Sea!”

  “It’s always there,” said the young man negligently, asprawl on the bed, “and it’s never the same.”

  Marlowe’s eyes followed the long line of the coast, laid out, it seemed, for his inspection, like a relief map: squared in colours that were bright and positive in sunlight. To the north there was a giant growing ruffle of tides, being pushed round the point of Lefkimo. Otherwise the long slab of water was immobile, impervious it seemed, to the single lateen-rigged fishing boat which rested upon it, showing no sign of trough or flaw. Eastwards the misty mountains brooded. Very faintly, as if doubtful of its powers, a wind, whose path had somehow missed the water, tested the suppleness of the two dwarf cypresses in the garden, rocking them.

  “I suppose it’s always like this,” he said at last, w
ith the uncomfortable feeling that he had broken the silence stupidly.

  “It’s taken for granted. For my part I’m sick to death of it.…”

  Turning, Marlowe saw the smooth abstraction of the brown face, and for a moment was himself filled with a gust of nostalgic yearning for greenness. The North, at that moment, as he gazed out from the vine-porch to the pure flamy landscape, ripe and positive in tone, seemed an inconceivable distance away, tucked down under obscure landscapes, misty and wet and remote in its forests and marshes: a land of gnomes and shadows, which could produce no vivid memory here, where the fruit burned ripe on the trees, and the glossed green of the olives achieved a hundred subtle gradations from green to green. No, the North was unthinkable, and as yet the South was barely comprehensible in its vividness.

  “It’s funny,” he said, “habit.”

  Sombrely Gordon agreed, his gaze fixed unwinkingly on the slender tips of the cypresses, which moved in a grave rhythm against the sea-line. In his imagination (the heroic deception of memory!) he was confronting a wide English prospect, lush and delightful undulations chequered with crop and arable and fallow. Wheat like gold foam; the ashy rectangles of oats, the mustard crop, spittlebright: these were tantalizing images of coolness and ease focused against the blue water and the distance that hid Epirus.

  Chapter Seven: Walsh

  Grey days in the south of England. Autumn with the long mounded fieldways in a crush of rotten, sweet-smelling leaves. Prodigious quilts set for the feet of winter. Down by the lake, on the damp margin of hummocks, pitted and perforated with old mole-burrowings, the decomposing stubs of horse-chestnuts indiscriminately littered, like the relics of feasts, significant of feasts to come. The lupins in the cottage garden were burnt out. Their colour heavy and patched with decay, sodden brown patches with the stumps rotten. Why is it that lupins burn up heavenward from the feet, like martyrs? How fine it must be, she said once, to feel the flame of life eating one away upwards, out into space: burning up the body from the toes to the face, and short life flowing electrically upwards. Baucis and Philemon should have been changed to asphodels, so that their mouths could meet finally above the flame that swept up their bodies. Trees are clumsy in death.