Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

by Lawrence Durrell

  But now the town was approaching and here once more the early sunlight traversed to pick up the curves of the Venetian harbour, the preposterous curvilinear shapes of its belfries and balconies. We docked to the boom of the patron saint’s bell—Saint Spyridon of holy memory who was still working his miracles. I felt quite weak at the knees as I stepped ashore and took one of those little horse-drawn carriages with their fixed parasols bobbing up above. The horse wore a fine new straw hat carefully pierced to allow his ears to stick through; he looked like a prize cuckold on holiday as he jogged and cantered his way up into the town.

  I had forgotten how beautiful it was in the early morning sunlight—the preposterous long arcades of the French Esplanade. The deep shade of the trees, the tables, the silence.

  It was too early for morning customers, and the waiters were still watering down the pavements and chasing the dust from the gravel of the Esplanade; but there were quite a few youngsters having breakfast, and among them the inevitable painter with his characteristic baggage of easel and colour box. Though the town is a series of unfinished intentions, Venetian, French, British, it remains a masterpiece; I doubt if there is any little town as elegantly beautiful in the whole of Greece. Each nation in turn projected something grandiose to beautify it—and then fell asleep. The Venetians fell asleep over the citadel, though they remembered to leave the winged lion there; the French built half the Rue de Rivoli and then discontinued it. The British elaborated the stylish Government House with stone especially imported from Malta—but did not stay long enough to enjoy its amenities fully. Yet all these motifs blend perfectly and become in some subtle fashion neither Venetian, British, French, nor even Greek. They become Corfiote. Day was breaking and shutters were slowly beginning to open like flowers, like eyelids. Nothing appeared to have received even a cursory lick of whitewash in the nearly twenty years of my absence; the rains, like a master colourist, had dappled and fused and smudged and darkened the long facades. The spectrum of their colours slowly changed with the mounting sun—as it always had. I walked about the sleepy town, astonished to find that I was ravished by it all anew. I almost sat down there and then to write another Prospero.

  But it was dangerous to linger, for I had many friends waiting eagerly to greet me, and I wanted to cross the island without seeing anyone—to devote my first day to a return visit to the lonely house in the north which had meant so much to me. I felt it almost as a duty. Later I would return and find Marie A. and discuss the little edition of Lear’s drawings we were editing together; later I would find the valiant and formidable Countess T. of the sapphire eyes who had once thrown open the hospitable gates of her country house to two gluttonous, penniless, and unknown writers called Durrell and Miller. But now, by the logical order of things, it should be Kouloura and the humble peasant family with whom, through whom, I had first got to know what Greece was.

  I humped my bundle of gifts and betook myself to the taxi rank, half fearful that I might be greeted by a roar from a fat dusty figure emerging from a battered blue Buick. No, but Spyro Halkiopoulos is dead. Nevertheless his roar remains behind, for a younger Spyro greeted me with it—bounding like a lion from a blue Chevrolet. I did not bother to bargain with him but told him that I wanted to go north and to be dumped at Kouloura. My fluent Greek puzzled him. He looked at me narrowly and said: “Who are you, sir? I seem to know your face.” I replied evasively. At that moment a colleague called his name and I realized that we did know each other. He had been a boy often when I had seen him last; his father had taken me and my brothers fishing with the lamp and trident. But it was pleasant to live for a moment in an anonymity which would soon be stripped from me. A small island is like a small market town. Sooner or later you are recognized. In Greece, at least, the hospitality begins—an unending flow of drinks from the ouzo fountain which plays perpetually in the depths of the Greek soul. Then there is nothing to do but surrender yourself. Strong-willed men break down and cry like babies. No good. The steady flow of hospitality ends only when you are lovingly hospitalized or carried aboard a departing ship on a stretcher. I knew that to declare myself in the town of Corfu at this stage would untruss me entirely. It was not only I who would be fêted, but through me the whole Durrell family which had once inhabited these idyllic shores; I should have to eat and drink for five—my brothers, my sister, my mother; I should have to empty at least a can in each of their names. I might never reach the north at all if I allowed all this to break loose around me.… I tried as far as possible to look like an uncommunicative Swiss Baptist who had arrived at the wrong island by mistake.

  My driver was still puzzled but disinclined to probe; he drove through the sleepy town, turning me over in his mind, so to speak. Once or twice he glanced at me in the mirror and then shook his head and sighed. No, he couldn’t place me. This was all to the good, as it left me free to plunge back into my private reverie, matching the sunlit present with the past. It was as if a film of the Corfu of 1940 had suddenly been stopped in mid-frame and waited for me to come back after twenty years in order to resume playing. Nothing at all seemed to have changed, but nothing. There is, if you wish, the carcass of a new theatre, and the outer shell of a new clinic. But in the long, winding road which leads away through the cypress and lemon groves toward Ypsos there were gentlemen bartering calves against kegs of wine, there were still the sacred idiots being teased by urchins, and the whole symphony of street cries still echoed around us in hallowed cacophony. Plenty of costume, too, and real costume at that; not the detestable, government-subsidized folklore get-up of Provence. Tourists in Corfu still get an honest cameraful for their money, whatever else they may have to complain about. And talking of complaints, I must not forget the holes in the road. I’m not joking when I say that I remembered many of them from my youth—the identical holes. This will sound farfetched, but four years of almost daily motoring over twenty-odd kilometres of road is enough to make you familiar with every bump. Moreover, motoring with Spyro offered an extra method of mastering and retaining a mental hole-map; he had a different swear for each type of hole. The whole family knew the holes by their swears. Once I drove from my mother’s villa into town in the dark, and my passengers were able to recite all Spyro’s swears like a multiplication table at the appropriate places. Well, they are all still there. In the summer, too, the same crisis still hits the Ministry of Public Works, for the King still visits Corfu to spend the dog days in his summer palace. He must not be allowed to bump his spine, they always think. An army of gnomes with teaspoons comes out one night and very deftly fills the holes with a light mix of cement and clinker—like filling cavities in teeth. This just passes the test of summer weather, but the first thunderstorms of the autumn deftly wash out the fillings and leave us once more with the original road surface—a sort of confluent smallpox effect. But by this time, of course, the King is safely back in Athens and the island can relax again for the winter. I am writing now about the macadamized section of the road only; the rest (and the network of roads left behind by the British is a pretty extensive one) could best be described as one prolonged act of God.

  It will sound masochistic to say that I took pleasure in the rediscovery of the ancient hole system of the island. Nevertheless it is true.

  Deftly threading our way along, we made excellent time to Ypsos, which lies along the softly curving line of creeks and inlets, chapel-crowned and cypress-stippled islets and lagoons, until with a bump the road comes up against the first scrawny shoulder of mountain rising steeply into the air beyond Nisaki. Here a sleepy policeman flagged us down and advanced to take a suspicious look at us. He recognized my driver easily enough; then he took a look at me and his face flattened out into a huge grin. “Welcome back,” he said, thrusting a large brown paw into the car. “I have telephoned to the police at Kouloura to tell Athenaios you are coming.” For a moment, so firm was my belief in my own anonymity, I thought that he had mistaken me for somebody else; but no, he uttered my name, an
d grabbing my hand pressed it to his cheek. It was like black magic. “I am married to Kerkira’s daughter,” he explained.

  At this my driver also gave a yelp of mingled consternation and delight and made a grab for me over the front seat. My presents were in danger of being crushed by the force of his embrace. “And you didn’t tell me,” he said reproachfully. “You didn’t say a word. My father, God rest his soul, would never have forgiven me.”

  There was nothing for it but to dismount and to be led like a sacrificial lamb to a nearby table, where already the whiskered tavern-keeper, scenting a celebration, had spread his striped cloth and unstopped his ouzo keg. Here I was, then, unmasked at last by the Greek secret service. We broke into a torrent of reminiscences, punctuating our memories with fiery gulps of the national drink. My driver was able to recount whole sections of my forgotten life on the island—shooting trips, fishing trips, feats of drinking and dancing. Some of these episodes he remembered only from his father’s conversation or from hearsay, but some he had witnessed. In small islands, where people do not read very much, the powers of memory never seem to fail, and individual actions take on semi-mythological proportions. We romanced thus with pleasure and emotion for a good hour until at last the ouzo bottle had a sadly punished look. “Never mind,” they cried, “there is a whole barrel inside.” I stifled a groan. I was now surrounded by four other policemen, some unidentified fishermen, and a neighbouring tavernkeeper whose little hotel (according to the scholarly researches of my friend Peter Bull) promises the wayfarer “Hot and Cold Running Waiter.”

  I was still curious to find out how (when my anonymity had stood the acid test of the town) I had been recognized in this remote place. The answer was so simple. It amounted to the eternal family bush telegraph of Greece. The policeman explained patiently. “The uncle of my sister’s second cousin was at the pier and saw your name on your passport. He knew you would come back here and he telephoned me. You could imagine how delighted we were after so many years. Have a drink.”

  But the sun was well up now and it was time to face the horrors of the road beyond Varvati. We disentangled ourselves from our hosts with some difficulty and after many hirsute embraces we climbed the steep road and catapulted off the macadam into a series of holes large enough to bury an ox. Our average speed was reduced now to about five miles an hour; the shock absorbers whimpered like whipped dogs; dust rose in sheets. My driver swung about, manipulating the car as if we were on a trapeze, and talking with animation of the meals he planned to give me once I returned to town. But how beautiful the drive still is, despite the holes and the dust, for the road runs, now concave, now convex, above the still, hard mirror of the sea, and the silver olives slide breathlessly down in groves below one as if to plunge into it and to swim for dear life out into the blue. Albania frames the whole picture with its huge flesh-coloured scarps. As you climb you realize that the island has two faces, not one. The indolent, luxuriant lowlands with their Venetian scenery give place now to the rocky archaic north with its small bitten-out harbours and scant iron-stained soils. It might be Ithaca or Cephalonia; it might be any of the more rugged island groups that lie to the south.

  It is almost forbidding in its stern, unwinking masculinity, this northern end of Corfu. Even the costume changes to chime with its mood—black kirtles and head coifs. This is an island of the seafarer, and wherever you hit the sea and the people who make their living by it, you come upon something hard, something always in mourning, something devout and disciplined.

  The faces hereabouts were older and more wrinkled, the smiles quieter, the expressions more sage and more penetrating. Yes, it was in this landscape that I learned many important lessons: the kind you cannot put into words. Even the driver had fallen silent now as we traversed these long, silent groves of ancient olive trees. Here in the north life was a struggle, not a self-indulgence. His face had become grave.

  But I had already outstripped our beetlelike progress as we crashed through those silent groves. I raced ahead in my imagination, leaping from cliff head to cliff head, swerving down like a kestrel through the still air to that silent balcony where I knew Athenaios would be standing, gripping the iron balustrade which, twenty years ago, I had myself helped him set in the wet concrete. I knew that from the white house by the water’s edge one can hear a car far off on that remote hillside; its noise swells and vanishes, growing gradually louder and louder as it approaches. Finally the sound flows down unimpeded as the car turns the last corner and runs—looking like a toy—along the Kouloura highroad. Yes, he would be there with his hands on the rail, his shoulders lightly hunched; he had always listened with such concentration that it gave him the stance of a blind man. Beside him in the upright chair Kerkira would be busy with her spindle or her darning. There was no time to waste for her: her hands had become almost autonomous in function. One felt that even when she slept they automatically went on working, knitting, plucking feathers, cleaning fish, sewing. At times, almost apologetically, they took a brief moment off to stifle a yawn.

  Nor was I mistaken. As the car reached the corner of the mountain I saw the little tableau on the balcony across the blue water. They had heard us, but it was too far off as yet to identify the visitor. We nosed down the steep road toward sea level, winding in and out of the olive groves. The sea lay asleep below us, lime green and enticing. The little hamlet seemed asleep, for nothing stirred in the thickets by the spring; there were no voices of children singing higher up among the olives. Everybody had obviously gone to town to shop. The road ended a good hundred yards short of the old house, and so it was that I approached it at last silently, on foot, with my parcels. By this time Athenaios and his wife had moved from the balcony to the end of the olive grove, from where they could watch the approaches to the house. They stood there in the green shadow of the trees, riveted in poses of concentration, their hands clutched before them. But at my call their concentration broke like a spell and Kerkira gave a sudden wild cry like a seabird. Her husband stood his ground with a tremulous smile on his lips, his arms thrown out as if to embrace not only me but the whole sea-enchanted world about us.

  “It is I.”

  “It is you.”

  “Yes, I.”

  “At last you come back.”

  One on either side, they put their arms about me and led me, a willing captive, into the house. There was so much to recount that for a moment we were all tongue-tied. But in the cool shadowy interior I saw a glimmer of white teeth as Niko the schoolmaster-fisherman rose like a great fish to embrace me. “We’ve been waiting all morning,” he explained, giving me a rib-cracking embrace. “Welcome.”

  Once more the balcony over the water with its plaster stained by the winter rain; once more the little coffee cups and the glasses of kumquat, the Corfu liqueur; once more the familiar voices raised in excited talk, piling memory upon memory, trying to replace the missing fragments of that twenty-year-old tapestry. I had been halfway around the world in this time, while they had stayed here, outfacing wars and floods and family deaths, gathering white hair. Athenaios had had a small stroke two years before which had half-paralysed one shoulder, but Niko, whose white hair betrayed his sixty-odd years, was still the raw-boned Hercules of the past, tanned and sturdy, with every white tooth in his head. The women watched us laugh and talk, rejoicing obscurely in our defiance of time. The past had dealt hard with the family. Heleni, the first wife, had died of starvation during 1940—died keeping her children alive. Some years later Athenaios had married Kerkira, a little village girl who came in to help. She had blossomed now into a plump and handsome matron of a flourishing household with a new daughter of her own to boast of: a policeman’s wife no less, which meant that she would one day enjoy a pension. Old albums of pictures now made their appearance, photographs yellow with age, and stained with ancient developing marks. This at least conferred upon the meeting a mild air of improbability. Who was this good-looking and rather cocksure young man who stared out
at me, fishing trident in hand? What had he been so damned sure about anyway? It was hard to say. The world he lived in, like our own, had existed under the threat of sudden doom. Everybody had known it.