Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

by Lawrence Durrell

  For a time he stood at the mirror, watching his own smiling face light up with every flash from the wide windows.

  Presently he went to his own room, leaving the window wide and the lightning playing upon the silk phoenix.

  That night Fonvisin could not sleep. Sick, wet, and weary, he had got back to his room in the tavern to find that the roof was leaking on his bed; and that one wall had absorbed the water like sugar, until its surface was coated in large dark stains.

  The frightened peasants refused to get up and do anything to help, so that he was obliged to move the bed to one side and sleep in it as it was.

  Outside, he could hear the rain and the wind playing their duet, and lying there, in the damp sheets of the great bed, he ground his teeth in rage and annoyance. He too heard the bell and wondered what it was; he did not think of the monastery at Leucothea, or the monk. Putting one arm over his eyes, he tried to sleep, but the dinning of the rain on the tin roof pierced his consciousness like riddling machine-gun fire. The lightning shone even through his closed eyes. From time to time, he was partially successful, sinking into a troubled state of semi-coma, but no sooner would he find himself slipping into clear sleep than he would start up again at some sound, magnified by imagination or the imperfect functioning of sense. A bough of a tree beat and beat against the loose panes of glass in the window.

  It seemed to him as he lay there that, sleeping, his mind was full of a nervous expectation, which these sudden wakings dispelled. There was something, just beyond the reach of his mind, which was tantalizing him with a message. What it was he could not tell.

  Presently it seemed to him that he was being called, though from where and by whom or what he could not tell. Across his closed eyes flowed a stream of disconnected images which gave him no clue. Sleep. He must sleep. He was still feeling sick.

  It seemed to him then that the face of the old monk rose up out of the darkness at his bedside, with an expression of demoniac concentration on it. The old lips were drawn back angrily talking, while no sound came from them.

  He reached forward to take the old man by the arm (for he should have been lying down, resting, not walking about in the rain) and found his own fist clutching vacancy. Immediately a cock crowed and he heard Walsh playing the piano. He reached out for the matches which lay on the chair beside his bed and lit a candle, thinking that these impressions must be produced by overdrinking and weariness. For a little while he sat, propped up in bed, reading, and then dozed off again, to the accompaniment of rain and the rapping at the window. The bell rang again, once, twice, in his dream, and, when he had begun to think that he was too far gone in sleep to be worried any more by the quirks and inconsistencies of his mind, he saw a sudden picture of the lightning flashing along the white sides of the Villa Pothetos. A voice said: “What was that?”

  “Nothing,” he croaked with a dry throat.

  “There’s something wrong.”

  “Nothing,” he said again.

  “In the light there.”

  “Nothing, I tell you. Nothing.”

  A black panel seemed to slide away before his eyes to show Francis and Gordon dancing round and round, madly, while above him, truncated, the figure of Marlowe laughed loudly. He laughed himself and dipped his fingers in the wine-glass, tilting his head and letting the drops run on to his tongue. They burnt like an acid. As he did so, there was a sudden confusion outside, a door was pushed open, and a voice said: “For Christ’s sake, Fonvisin, for Christ’s sake.”

  He had hardly realized he was awake before he found himself out of bed, in the centre of the floor, putting on his clothes in great haste. Taking the matches, he ran down the passage and out into the night.

  Out in the rain, for a moment the impulse which had been directing him seemed suddenly lost. He ran twenty yards down the road, and then halted, panting, in the shade of a tree. Drawing his coat round him, he felt the water spinning round his boots in the roadside puddles; the rain drilling his coat with spots of wetness. It was a terrible night and he cursed it, looking up to the sky and shouting in the face of the wind. As he waited, he knew that the impulse would return and govern his actions.

  All of a sudden he was off again, running heavily in his big boots, this time in the direction of the Villa Pothetos, without hesitation, and certain in his own mind of the direction. He crashed up the path, stumbling among the loose stones, and swearing as his footsteps threw up splashes of moisture on to his calves.

  At the edge of the plateau, he stopped and listened, holding back his own gusty breath to enable him to hear more clearly. Nothing. Only the wind in the cypresses. He stumbled on, his hands stuck in his pockets, his hat pulled down over his eyes.

  As he came out of the crowding shrubbery, he happened to glance upward, and knew what his forebodings had tried to tell him in their imperfect way.

  It was like this:

  The French window was wide open, and the room behind it bright with electric light which cut a broad yellow swath on the darkness. On the terrace stood the old man, naked, holding the parapet with both hands. He was staring out to sea with a fixed and gentle concentration which nothing could shake. Even the ugly lightning could not make him flinch. He looked very nice and naïf standing there, his naked body pouring with rain, and the drops hanging in his sodden beard.

  Fonvisin called, Fonvisin whooped, Fonvisin danced about on the path raging at him, but it made not the slightest difference. He stood, looking out at the tormented sea, moving his lips very silently as if repeating a prayer.

  Seeing it was no good, the Russian ran round the side of the house to the front door, swearing. The door refused to open, so he drove his fist through the coloured glass panel, and, shoving his arm in, unbolted it. The hall was dark territory which he crossed in a couple of bounds. Up the staircase he went in the dark, not thinking to switch on the lights, which must then have been working. He burst into Rumanades’ room and ran to the old man’s side, putting an arm on his shoulder, his mouth drawn up in anger. The skin was wet and cold, and unresisting.

  “Come,” he said imperiously, and the old man, turning, wavered, as a tree wavers before it falls, and put his arms across the Russians shoulders. He was very happy in a gentlemanly way.

  Once inside the room (the few steps took him an age to accomplish, even with the Russian’s help), he leaned sideways with one hand on the dressing-table, looking mildly at his own reflection in the glass. He began to tremble slightly and his teeth to chatter in his mouth. He seemed vaguely reproachful, and his lips still moved very slowly.

  Fonvisin forced him down on the bed and, seizing a rough towel, enveloped him in it, and began to curry his pleasant old body, hissing between his teeth like a groom at work.

  “What … did … you do that … for?” he grunted at last, towelling the bony back. And the old man sitting there quietly, jogging his body about under the roughness of the Russian’s fingers, only smiled sweetly, as one who does not properly understand, and scratched his neck.

  “The rain,” he said at last, like a child between ecstasy and wonder. “It was only the rain.” And he drew a deep shuddering breath from the very bottom of his lungs and lay back softly with his mouth twitching among his beard.

  Fonvisin left him there, on the bed, and ran down the corridor, switching on the lights as he went. In the music-room the bottles of wine and spirits lay in different places, where the party had left them, and running here and there, he found a bottle of brandy, lying on its side half empty, in Gordon’s chair. He grabbed it and, taking a wineglass in the other hand, went back to give the old man a stimulant.

  He opened the door, only to find the bed empty, the covers laid back. The window he saw at a glance was still as he had left it, fastened shut, but the other door into the corridor was wide open. He dropped the glass and the bottle on the bed and ran back into the passage. Empty. Looking down from the head of the stairs, he saw the old man below him, walking down with great slowness and caution,
chuckling as he did so. It was a splendid joke.

  Fonvisin skipped down the flight and caught him up, talking to him as one would to a child. He carried him back to his room and put him in the bed, soothing the hair of his brow with his own hard hand.

  “Ha. Ha,” said old Rumanades playfully, and began to cough inside himself.

  “Now you stay where I tell you,” said Fonvisin roughly, wondering whether his forehead was hot enough for him to have a temperature. “That’s right.”

  He went into Manuela’s room and with great difficulty managed to bring her precious bed in and place it beside that in which the old man lay. Then, slipping off his sodden clothes, and taking a sip of brandy, he crawled in between the delicious sheets, and prepared himself to doze beside his patient.

  The night passed very slowly, and by the time the first faint inches of dawn had reached the sky behind the hills of the mainland, the rain had slackened off a bit, and the thunder had slowly begun to roll southward.

  Once or twice, the old man woke and, sitting up in bed, gave a short, discursive and intelligible lecture on the flora and fauna of the island. And once Fonvisin woke to hear him weeping away to himself, snuffling under the bedclothes, and talking in snatches to a woman. By four o’clock, however, he had sunk into deep insensibility. At six, to his own and (subsequently) everyone else’s surprise, he was dead.

  Very weary, and with a foul taste in his mouth, Fonvisin lurched over to the window and unfastened it, intruding his bleary and drink-smelling carcase on the morning. The air was sweet as spring water, and the scents which the storm had crushed out of the flowers and foliage came up to the balcony in great whiffs like incense. To the east was the omnipassionate morning, opening its rifts of blood upon the water. The air was bitterly cold. From the east, the light opened in long chinks and filters of wounded red, as if the morning were a pomegranate, casually prized open by the childish world.

  In the hills, the water still flooded the banks of the springs, sucking at the stones, skipping the rock-torrents. The shepherds, still fearful of snow, drowsed in their sheepskin cloaks. The sun, which must be shining on the domes and minarets of Constantinople, would soon shine for them too.

  Nearer, there was the rough sound of footsteps on the road below the house. A man in a coloured smock, yawning, passed on his way to the village, praising the light. Fonvisin called to him, telling him to take the news of Rumanades’ death to Christ. As he talked, he found himself smiling and stretching his arms, gulping in the icy air, purging his weary and dirty body. The man crossed himself and, dropping his spade, ran down the hill with tears on his cheeks to call the priest and deliver the message. Fonvisin turned back into the room, laughing with tenderness at the morning, and patted the dead cheeks of the old man, saying: “Now if you don’t mind, I’ll have a bath.”

  He bathed at leisure, and, when the priest came, made him wait in the room while he dressed. The poor man was snivelling with cold, and aching in every bone with rheumatism and the fear of death. They sat on the bed beside the dead man and drank what remained of the brandy, while Fonvisin neatly disposed the slack limbs and performed all the necessary duties.

  The priest stood for a long time at the window, saying: “Death is a terrible thing. It comes so suddenly. Death is a terrible thing.” But he drank his brandy to the last drop and enjoyed it as a creature should.

  While the priest prayed loquaciously at the white bedside, Fonvisin stood on the balcony consumed with the freshness and tenderness of everything, humming to himself an old song which he had not sung since he was a child. In the village the dogs had begun to bark, and a man’s voice shouted something, indistinct. From the bay came the tattering of an engine and in a few minutes Christ’s boat came nosing out into the still choppy water, heading for Corfu. He had instructions to wire the news to Rumanades’ lawyers in Athens, who would notify the dead man’s relations, if, indeed, he had any.

  The Russian folded his arms tight, gripping his fingers under the arm-pits with a kind of ecstasy to feel his own life so secure in his body; from somewhere deep inside him the laughter poured gently up through his lungs and his mouth, as if from some fountainous source of warmth and mellowness. The stone was wet with dew and the rain which still hissed along the wide gutters of the house. He put his arms inside the sleeves of his faded corduroy jacket, running his fingers along the newly washed flesh of his arms, so smooth and warm and hairy. Presently he went to Manuela’s dressing-table and dashed sweet-smelling talcum on his freshly shaven jowls: and pinched a drop of eau de Cologne in his fingers before applying it to his nose as if it were snuff. Then back to the terrace again, to draw the icy morning into his very bowels and sing for well-being.

  The priest came and stood beside him with a long face, telling him that the old monk had died in the night. It had been too wet to go up, but a shepherd had brought the news in at early dawn. At this Fonvisin laughed outright.

  “It is a terrible thing,” said the man reprovingly, “a terrible thing.”

  “Yes?” said the Russian and turned to stare curiously at the grubby man, with his belly-to-earth mien, his tangled black hair, and his festering shoes. “Yes?”

  The priest returned to the dim room. The morning was too much for him. He knelt again, as one who was himself unworthy to perform the office. His beautiful voice, in tones of meek entreaty, began to pray for the spirit of the defunct Rumanades; the old man who lay there with many smiles on his mouth, enjoying some ancient and whimsical joke of his own.

  It is a pity, thought Fonvisin, as he stood and watched the sun come up, that a corpse cannot laugh.

  Presently Agathie came down the road, treading as proud as a peacock, with the pride which only that woman knows who has wearied and buried many husbands. Her skirt was prussian blue, spinning at her bare and lovely ankles, her loose blouse coffee-brown, with particoloured frills, and round her black and arrogant features she wore a vermilion head-cloth. In her left hand she carried a vast bunch of black grapes, with the dew still fresh on them; she sucked them one by one, spitting the pips grandly among the dust.

  “God praise you, woman,” said Fonvisin in a deep voice, and intensely. “Be happy. Your clothes are as beautiful as your body.”

  She turned up her bold face and stood there for a while, speaking to him, with the whole richness of life and fertility moving in her strong body. Then she raised her hand in agreement, with a powerful gesture, and went down the road again, sumptuous in the sunlight.

  The contract that they made, he standing on the balcony, and she below, with her face lifted to him, shall not be revealed. But he was satisfied, and later, walking down the road, he too flourished his body, turning its massive-ness from side to side, feeling the power to move in his loins and the heavy muscles of his arm. He too stopped and broke himself a hanging bunch of black grapes, wet on the skins and cold, and eating them, tramped onwards, ripe as nut for life, and content.

  Chapter Thirteen: The Curtain

  By tea-time that day, life for the five of them had ‘resumed its normal rhythm; but it was soon to be altered. Vague and evanescent their plans had been, and this simple one-act death on the part of the old man would force them to reconsider the chances. They were all at once a dispossessed court, left without a succession to save them. To Francis it mattered least: she had been going away in any case. Death she could not try to understand. Being told of death so near, she had gone frozen and mute inside herself, avoiding everyone except Walsh. To Gordon death had not very much force. He spent the day at the Villa Pothetos with Fonvisin, interviewing the hordes of peasants who came from the distant villages to make a gift to the dead man and weep at his feet.

  But Marlowe, curiously enough, spent the day working as he had never worked in his life. He had slept late into the morning, been woken with the news of Rumanades’ death, and after breakfast, without giving it much more than a passing thought, had sat himself down to his work of self-expression. Occasionally, from outside
the armour of his scurrying thoughts, the words came to him, “Rumanades is dead. Have you heard?” but they created hardly any impact.

  In the village there was weeping among the young and the middle-aged. The old men, glad of the sun, sat themselves outside under the trees with great placidity in their rush-bottomed chairs, lit their smokes, and fell into pleasurable drowses, occasionally waking to take their nip of ouzo or wine. These, the real darlings of death, had seen enough of life not to fear it.

  In the sunset, a scarlet seaplane of all things blew up from the south like a dove with an olive branch, and skidded into the Bay of Nanos. The entire peasantry of the island lined the cliffs and terraces to watch it disgorge two passengers: one, a specialist from Athens, complete with gold teeth, a fountain pen, a black suit, and a small bag; the other, Rumanades’ lawyer, sober and dour as a deathwatch beetle.

  Late into that night there were consultations with Fonvisin, and discussions with Gordon, and exhortations to the peasants. The two business men moved about the great house with the assured decorum of vultures or mourners, trailing their grave coat-tails behind them.

  A coffin was made, and while the doctor busied himself over the corpse, attended by the jaunty Fonvisin, the lawyer went about with a hammer and chisel breaking open cupboards and cabinet-desks with an air of slightly insane geology on his face. In the end, after he had cut his thumb and taken the creases out of his trousers, he found what he had been searching for—Rumanades’ will.

  Sitting down at the desk, he read it through several times, absently dusting the lapels of his coat with one hand as he did so. Nearly everything was left to Manuela [Rumanades’ wife]. He sniffed and raised his hands in the air, as one who would say: “What can you do with such a man?”