Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

by Lawrence Durrell

  Perhaps one of them will recover for us the meaning of the oracle we so much need today?

  Troubadour

  Published in The Sunday Times. London, 1960.

  Reprinted in Gazebo. Bath. June 1963.

  POVERTY AND POETRY have been regarded as bedfellows for so long now that I doubt whether I shall be believed in saying that I once knew a poet who made a living from his work. Nevertheless it is so. He was a wandering ballad-maker of Cyprus called Janis, and he travelled about on a moth-eaten motorbike with his saddle-bags stuffed with broadsheets. The Mediterranean has always been full of poets and every village in Cyprus has at least two. It is a communal gift rather than a personal one, and poetry has not yet been completely banished to the parlour as it has with us, though modernity (in terms of movements and periodicals) is fast catching up with feudal life. But village poetry is based upon spontaneity of rhyming, and every year there is a sort of Cypriot Eisteddfod on the Troodos mountains to which each village sends its best poets. They compete in an open contest of sixteen syllable rhymes, the challenger hooting out the first line which must then be capped without hesitation by his rival. Public applause decides the winner. Sometimes these wit contests continue interminably, all through the night, until the winner is declared. The arena is wired for sound and the contestants dress up in the full glory of their traditional attire, proud as peacocks. First one will advance to the microphone and hoot out his line, accompanying it with a vaunting gesture as befits a challenger—twirling his moustache or rubbing his boots on the ground like a bull when it is about to charge. Then his rival must take his place and cap the first phrase with something better. The best poets are full of dirty tricks and frequent linguistic fouls are committed, though there are no referees beyond the audience. Quite a high proportion of the verses are below the belt, which used to raise awful broadcasting problems: for what is regarded as joyful poetic licence in a community gathering was often deemed a trifle indecorous to put out on the radio in the course of a community programme.

  But poetry is also still regarded as a solace and a fitting art with which to enshrine marriages, funerals, and births. The professional keener still exists. Once I saw an elderly man standing outside Kyrenia post office plaintively singing a song of woe which had something to do with his son being unable to get a pension from the Army authorities. He had had it printed and was selling copies at a millieme each. It was a mournful little thing entitled “The Sad Case of Aristides Koutsos and his plaint against the British Empire.” It was in the traditional village metre which goes something like this:

  Now listen all ye villagers and I will now

  rehearse

  The sorrows of a family which went from

  bad to worse

  Because the British Empire has denied my

  boy his pension

  And filled our hearts with agony and awful

  apprehension.

  The old man, after finding that he had no redress in law for his grievance, had decided to solace himself in this artistic fashion. He was listened to with deep sympathy and his ballad sold well.

  But Janis, compared to these, was a professional writer and the greater part of his ballads were news-ballads as were those of our own early ballad-makers like Nat Elder-ton (he of the “ale-crammed nose”). Janis wrote them with the greatest facility and had them set up on credit by a printer in Nicosia. Stuffing the saddle-bags of his motorbike with them he set off on an island circuit made familiar by many years of ballad-selling. He was careful to base his circuit on such country fairs as were taking place at the time, since he knew that a fair tended to draw all the villagers of neighbouring localities into town for the day. In the main square he would set up shop. Putting his bundles of broadsheets around his feet he would start in his pleasant singsong voice to half sing, half declaim, his latest production. He was a small good-looking man in his early forties, always clad in a neat black suit and spotless white shirt open at the neck. Long practice had taught him the strength and staying power of his own voice, so that he was careful always to husband his energies, and never try and compete with raucous hucksters or café loudspeakers. He chose his position just out of the central melee where he could be best listened to. He nearly always began with a juicy murder.

  Now listen men and maidens all, at what last

  week befell

  A virgin maid, Calliope, in a lone Paphos

  dell.

  The river ran with blood for weeks,

  and blood stained all the grass

  A virgin’s blood for vengeance cries to

  heaven up above.

  In darkness was the dagger sheathed, in

  silence stole away

  The ravisher of Paphian youth, he did not

  stop to pray

  As if the fiends of hell were there to hiss him

  on his way,

  While the poor girl, her life blood spent, just

  gurgled where she lay

  Now who would cut that soft white throat

  so neat from ear to ear

  But Hadjilouk the barber with a shop right

  next the pier.

  For years he’d lusted for the lass, for years

  she had refused,

  Her brother once spat in his eye and he was

  not amused.…

  So the ballad would unroll in that pleasant unhurried voice, while the villagers gathered round in a tight circle, with many a pleasant shiver of horror, to listen to him. When he had finished he picked up a bundle from the ground, crying “Who will buy?” in a pleasant chirping voice. His sales were usually good, and his wares not expensive; two milliemes was a price of a ballad. They could be either recited aloud in the chimney corner or sung to traditional airs. He had several types of poem to offer and they were graded according to subject matter; there were folktales set in verse, or local news-events (usually murders of the Arden of Feversham type), and there were also a number of what he called “Erotika”—rather ferocious songs of naked passion and hopeless love. These were done up in rather a special way—for on each cover there was the reproduction of a Rank starlet which the printer had cunningly overprinted; sometimes she had a dripping heart with a dagger in it, and gouts of blood dripping down over her vital statistics. At other times there was a masked man peering over her shoulder with another dagger, preparing to let her have it from behind. Sometimes, too, she had a noose around her neck. I often wondered whether Janis had ever heard of copyright but my native tact prevented me from asking him. After all, what is such a small matter between poets?

  When he had sold all he could, he would usually retire to the tavern for a glass of wine before resuming his journey. Once I was able to sit for an hour with him and question him on his work. He answered my questions with good nature, and with a touch of the resigned weariness which comes over poet’s faces under questioning. He told me that his poetic skill was a gift which his father had handed down to him. His father, too, had sold ballads but had never been successful at it. He could never make ends meet while he, Janis, the son, was making a small but decent living. It was hard in winter, however. “What makes it possible,” he said “for the poet today is the motorbike. You see, in my father’s day he had to be content with a camel which is very slow. It took ages to get from fair to fair; whereas now I can often cover three or four fairs in a day and motor from one end of the island to the other in a couple of hours. This morning, for example, I began at Paphos and when I leave you I’ll run over to Larnaca this evening for the fair there. It makes a difference.”

  I had several meetings with Janis and we became quite good friends; and later that year I got him to agree to let me take some photographs of him to illustrate an article which I had in mind to write. But the wretched crisis intervened before I could do so, and his friendship, like that of so many Cypriots, was temporarily submerged in the hate and despair of the times. We nodded when we met, but I was careful not to force my company upon him lest his acquain
tance with a British official might earn him the unwelcome attentions of the nationalists. Once I was in his printer’s offices when I saw him come in to pay for his broadsheets. He looked tired and ill. He had a saddlebag full of millieme pieces which he poured out in a stream over the counter. They took an age to count. He did not see me as I was seated in shadow at the back of the shop.

  Later again I had news of him from a villager. He had been forced to give up poetry as all movement was hampered by troop movements and curfews. He had decided to retire to the home of an aunt at Paphos until he could once more resume his trade.

  The day before I left the island I bumped into him coming out of a church in Larnaca. “Janis,” I cried, “well met,” and for a moment he smiled. But then he checked the involuntary gesture of pleasure and his face clouded over. “I am leaving tomorrow,” I said. I made as if to shake hands with him but he placed his hands behind his back. He said quietly, “You did not write the article, did you? I am glad, for it would have made trouble for me.”

  “One day I will,” I said. “In happier times.”

  “In happier times,” he said gravely, and inclining his head turned and moved slowly off into the twilight.

  It seemed a hollow enough promise at the time, for the troubles were at their height, and no political progress seemed possible. And so Janis slipped out of sight and mind until last week when I received a postcard from a friend who had seen Janis at work again, reciting in Kyrenia. I wonder what he charges for a broadsheet today and whether the Rank starlets are still doing their stuff?

  Beccafico:

  A Tragic History

  Published in an edition limited to 150 copies.

  Montpellier. 1963.

  THE SIGHT OF a tall glass jar hanging from the ceiling of a Greek grocery-store in Marseilles, crammed full of pickled birds, suddenly reminded me. Beccafico! I do not think there is any other place which exports this medieval delicacy today, and there is certainly no other island where this little fig-hunting marauder is trapped in such vast quantities. Those travellers who have penetrated the life of Cyprus at all deeply must, at one time or another, in a remote monastery perhaps or at a village wedding, come upon the delicacy to which beccafico has given its lovely name. In Crusading times it was a favourite comestible and even graced the banqueting halls of kings. The Knights of St. John, who had a very keen nose for business indeed, made it (together with the heavy sweet Cyprus wine called Commanderia) a famous item of export from the island. In Europe this minute bird, duly seasoned and pickled, became something of a gourmet’s fad. And even today—or perhaps yesterday—for I do not know if the tragic trade goes on—attempts were made to revive and expand this once flourishing line of business.

  The beauty and grace of this small island visitant, however, with its petal-like fragility and brilliantly coloured head makes its fate seem almost unendurably sad. For the beccafico appears in force during the months of September or October to rob the rich fig and vine areas around Paralimni, in the Famagusta area of Cyprus. The birds apparently come in from all parts of the world—Germany, Russia, Switzerland, Sweden: come in swarms like bees, in battalions and squadrons. The air of the villages rings with their chirping. And coming in so greedily they immediately fall victims to the cunningly arranged lime-twigs of the villagers. Paralimni is the great centre of the trade, and it is from here that the trappers set off just before dawn with their great baskets called “koukourka.” With a systematic care born no doubt of several centuries of practice they organize their limed traps in the trees, and then dispose themselves on long lines as one would do for a “beat.” The bird-swarms seem so deafened by their own chirping that they show little alarm. They ripple away from the beaters, pouring along the ground like locusts or pouring from tree to tree, until they suddenly find themselves in the traps which await them. At once the air is full of the anguished fluttering of their wings, and their pitiful screaming. And now the lines of villagers advance to gather them by hand, to wring their necks and toss them into the great queer-shaped baskets. “Once they settle it is like picking fruit,” I remember an old greybeard telling me; and adding “The bountiful God sends them like manna.” Paralimni virtually lives by this trade, and some idea of the market price of the birds will explain if not excuse the eagerness with which it is hunted. During a good beccafico season the revenue of the village used to be about six or seven thousand pounds. A single beccafico hunter during a fair season can make up to three or four pounds a day. A dozen of the birds used to fetch about seven shillings in the open market. The very lucrativeness of the trade raised a grave problem for the Colonial administration of the island which was most anxious to find a way of preventing this wholesale massacre. Considerations both political and traditional were the major obstacle. It was literally a trade by which at least half the villagers of Paralimni existed, as well as being an important traditional village activity. Many were the efforts made to evolve plans which might ransom the beccafico but none bore fruit.

  But to continue: The loaded baskets are then hoisted and the hunters set off for the village where the teams of pluckers await them. Scores of village women stand before the long tables covered in green fronds of palm-leaf. Quickly and deftly, under the attentive eye of the buyers the birds are shredded and cleaned, some to be boiled and some pickled. And so this minute bird, little larger than a wren or robin, finds its way to the table. I must confess that I never found it a great delicacy—for once or twice a Cypriot friend produced a small sealed jar and offered me “something to enliven the wine” which politeness made me accept. But there was no doubt of its popularity among seasoned village gourmets, and its exportation to various other places in the Levant suggested that the Cypriots were not alone in their taste for pickled birds. The lime-twigs, by the way, are simply treated with a mixture of stout packer’s glue and honey, and are freshly set every dawn for the heat of the sun at midday tends to melt the mixture and make it unstable.

  One hopes that the new Government of Cyprus will find some tactful way of ransoming this beautiful little creature from mass death every year. I do not know whether the beccafico deserves greater claims on our attention than any other animal, domestic or wild, but its beauty makes a deeper appeal to the heart.

  Oil for the Saint;

  Return to Corfu

  Published in Holiday. Philadelphia. October 1966.

  THE RETURN OF the native—a good thing or a bad? I am not sure. On principle I have always avoided retracing my steps unless absolutely necessary. It was not, I used to think, a good thing to return to places where one had been exceptionally happy or sad, or where events had taken place that could never be repeated. People vanish, after all; buildings disappear or are transformed, and the time scale begins to nag as one revisits those famous marble staircases that one could once take at speed, three steps at a time … the cathedral cat-walks that caused no dizziness.…

  The extraordinary thing is that Greece has somehow remained exempt from the flavour of such disappointments. Much has changed, yes, but more has remained obstinately and invincibly the same. The radical feel and temper of the land and its people are still what they were for me at twenty. Indeed, many of the changes bemoaned by others have only added amenities that the country sadly lacked before—the inter-island telephones for example, the new roads, the little tourist hotels. As for the people.… Memory does not grow older by a second per thousand years in Greece. Step off the ship and everywhere you will fall upon remembered faces, be instantly recognized and embraced: and I don’t mean only by friends, but by everyone who remembers you, even if his only knowledge of you is that once, nearly twenty years ago, you gave his son a lesson or let him shine your shoes. Because they remember you they possess you, and you belong to them.

  But in spite of this discovery about Greece in general, I still tended to regard Corfu as a special case. I avoided it as one avoids touching a sore tooth with one’s tongue. After all, this island was where I first met Greece, l
earned Greek, lived like a fisherman, made my home with a peasant family. Here too I had made my first convulsive attempts on literature, learned to sail, been in love. Corfu would have too much to live up to. Nevertheless I still had many links with the island and with friends who still lived there, so that it was also much less terra incognita than any other part of Greece. I plucked up my courage and decided to take the plunge in bright spring weather. There were no special omens or intentions; the idea of the journey had ripened, that was all.

  I was up on deck at dawn to watch the first brilliant strokes of sunlight racing along the brindled waves of our wake as we coasted the Forty Saints—once our winter shooting grounds and now barred to Corfiotes by the Albanian communists. The heavy, overpowering range of mountains had only just shed its snow, for the foothills were still green and fresh. The old Venetian seamark was still in place pointing up the deeper channel, and our vessel crossed it before veering south, turning sharply—on her heel, you might say—to point her prow at the hazy Venetian city which was as yet only a smudge of soft smoke. But the north of the island had been my home and here it was, its large-boned rounded scarps of rock and closely trimmed scrub looking like a succession of nude scalps on which the hair has started to grow again. How barren it looked and how strange in the early morning light! But the real strangeness was that it was all so recognizable, down to the smallest detail. It was not so much that it “came back to me”; I found now that, in a queer sort of way, it had never left me; I had never really forgotten it. The whole dizzy spiral of the road above Kalami and Kouloura veering away towards Kassiopi I had known like my own pocket; sweeping it now with my heavy field glasses it seemed to me that I recognized individual trees, individual sweeps of brake and arbutus. It must have been an illusion, yet it was to persist during the whole of my stay on this (now doubly) magical and precious island. I felt the salt stickiness of the rail under my elbows as I brought the glasses to bear on the sea line, sweeping slowly along the coast from Kouloura with its bird’s nest-harbour toward Agni. I was looking of course for the white house … but by now surely the rains had turned it black with iron stains? No, it came swimming into my field of vision as pristine and brilliant as it always had been; moreover, there, posed like hieratic figures, were my peasant friends. Athenaios was on the grey rock outside the house, watching the sun rise as he had always done, one hand holding the diminutive cup of Turkish coffee; from the upper balcony Kerkira, his wife, hung out the coloured blanket which would signal the morning caique (the equivalent of the village bus for us northerners) that there was a passenger to be picked up from the landing stage. An octopus hung from a rusty nail. A dog scratched at fleas in the deep dust of the roadway. The daughter of the house performed some unidentifiable task with vigour. (She had been five when last I had seen her in 1948.) A little farther to the left, Niko the sailor-schoolteacher had as always thrown back his green shutters to stand in a long moment of contemplation, glancing sunward and then sideways at his boat where it lay alongside the makeshift jetty. The boat was a new one, though the jetty had not changed. For a minute, caught in the spectrum of the silence, I drank in the whole scene—it was like happening upon a familiar handwriting. Then I shut away the glasses and went down to breakfast in a curious state of utterly calm excitement. The whole thing seemed to be there—quite indestructibly there. I knew that Heleni was dead and Sandos and several others; but their disappearance from the scene of the action had not succeeded in changing the fixed mythology of a glance built up over a lifetime, a taste for a dawn coffee, the cloth on the balcony. I began to wonder whether perhaps it would be I who would exhibit the greatest changes. How would I seem to them?