Corelli's Mandolin

by Louis de Bernières

  Pelagia sat on a rock and watched as the little girl hurried from one patch of scrub to another, closing her plump fingers over thin air as the crickets took evasive action. ‘How old are you, koritsimou?’ Pelagia asked suddenly.

  ‘Six,’ said Lemoni. ‘Just. After the next feast I am going to be seven.’

  ‘Can you count to ten yet?’

  ‘I can count to thirty,’ said Lemoni, who then proceeded to demonstrate. ‘… Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-thirty.’

  Pelagia sighed. She reckoned that before the elapse of two more feasts, Lemoni would be set to work in the house, and that would be the end of hunting for small creatures in the maquis. It would be a question of lapsing into the monotony of spoiling the menfolk and only being allowed to discuss important things with other women, when the men were not listening or were in the kapheneia playing backgammon when they ought to be working. For Lemoni there would be no freedom until widowhood, which was precisely the time when the community would turn against her, as though she had no right to outlive a husband, as though he had died only because of his wife’s negligence. This was why one had to have sons; it was the only insurance against an indigent and terrifying old age. Pelagia wished that there was something better for Lemoni, as though it were idle to wish better things for herself.

  Lemoni wailed suddenly, startling Pelagia out of her reflections. It was a sound very like that of a wauling cat. Tears started from Lemoni’s eyes, and she clutched a forefinger, doubled over, and rocked back and forth. Pelagia ran forward and uncurled the little girl’s fingers, saying, ‘What happened, koritsimou? What hurt you?’

  ‘It bit me, it bit me,’ she cried.

  ‘O dear, o dear. Didn’t you know that they bite?’ She put her fingers next to her mouth and waggled them, ‘They’ve got big jaws with pincers. It’ll stop hurting in a minute.’

  Lemoni clutched her finger again. ‘It stings.’

  ‘If you were a cricket, wouldn’t you bite people who pick you up? The cricket thought you were going to hurt it, and that’s why it hurt you. That’s the way it is. When you’re older, you’ll find that people are very much the same.’

  Pelagia pretended to do a special spell for curing cricket bites, and led the placated Lemoni back to the village. There was still no Mandras, and everything was unusually quiet as people crept about, nursing their hangovers and inexplicable bruises. A donkey brayed ridiculously and at length, receiving a ragged chorus of ‘Ai gamisou’ from the dark interiors of the houses. Pelagia set about the preparation of the evening meal, thankful that tonight it would not be fish. Later, as she sat with her father after the customary peripato, he said quite unexpectedly, ‘I expect he hasn’t come because he’s feeling as sick as everyone else.’ Pelagia felt herself flood with a kind of gratitude, and she took his hand and kissed it. The doctor squeezed her hand and said sadly, ‘I don’t know how I’ll manage when you’ve gone.’

  ‘Papakis, he’s asked me to marry him … I told him that he’d have to ask you.’

  ‘I don’t want to marry him,’ said Dr Iannis. ‘It would be a much better idea if he married you, I think.’ He squeezed her hand again. ‘We used to have some Arabs on one of my ships. They always said “inshallah” after every sentence; “I’ll do it tomorrow, inshallah.” It could be very annoying, because they seemed to expect God to do things when they couldn’t be bothered themselves, but there is some wisdom in it. You will marry Mandras if that is what providence decrees.’

  ‘Don’t you approve of him, Papakis?’

  He turned and looked at her gently. ‘He’s too young. Everyone is too young when they marry. I was. Also, I have not done you a favour. You read the poetry of Cavafy, I have taught you to speak Katharevousa and Italian. He isn’t your equal, and he would expect to be better than his wife. He is a man after all. I have often thought that you would only ever be able to marry happily with a foreigner, a dentist from Norway or something.’

  Pelagia laughed at the incongruous thought, and fell silent. ‘He calls me “Siora”,’ she said.

  ‘I was afraid of something like that.’ There was a long pause whilst they both gazed at the stars over the mountain, and then Dr Iannis asked, ‘Have you ever thought that we should emigrate? America or Canada or something?’

  Pelagia closed her eyes and sighed. ‘Mandras,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. Mandras. And this is our home. There isn’t any other. In Toronto it is probably snowing, and in Hollywood no one would give us a part.’ The doctor stood up and went inside, re-emerging with something in his hand that gleamed metallically in the semi-darkness. Very formally he handed it to his daughter. She took it, saw what it was, felt its ominous weight, and dropped it into the lap of her skirts with a small cry of horror.

  The doctor remained standing. ‘There’s going to be a war. Terrible things happen in wars. Especially to women. Use that to defend yourself, and if necessary use it against yourself. You may also use it against me if that is what circumstances demand. It’s only a little derringer, but …’ he waved his hand across the horizon, ‘… a terrible darkness has fallen across the world, and every one of us must do what we can, that’s all. Maybe you don’t know it, koritsimou, but it might happen that your marriage will have to wait. We must make sure first that Mussolini does not invite himself to the wedding.’ The doctor turned on his heel and went into the house, leaving Pelagia to the fear that was growing in her breast, and to a most unwelcome solitude. She remembered that in the mountains of Souli, sixty women had gone to one of the peaks, danced together, and thrown their children and themselves over the precipice rather than surrender to the slavery of the Turks. After a few moments she went to her room, put the derringer under her pillow, and sat on the edge of her bed, absently caressing Psipsina and imagining once again that Mandras was dead.

  On the second day after the feast Pelagia repeated the same slow ballet of pointless tasks that failed to counterbalance the absence of her lover, but became instead a kind of frame to it. Everything – the trees, Lemoni playing, the goat, the antics of Psipsina, the self-important, cumbersome waddle of Father Arsenios, the distant hammering of Stamatis as he made a wooden saddle for a donkey, Kokolios’ raucous rendition of the ‘Internationale’ with half the words missing – all was nothing but a sign of what was missing. The world retreated and gave place to a pall of hopelessness and dejection that seemed to have become a property of things themselves; even the lamb with rosemary and garlic that she prepared for dinner embodied nothing other than a poignant lack of fish. That night she felt too exhausted and dispirited to cry herself to sleep. In her dreams she accused Mandras of cruelty, and he laughed at her like a satyr, and danced away across the waves.

  On the third day Pelagia went down to the sea. She sat on a rock and watched an enormous warship steam portentously away to the west. It was most probably British. She thought about war, and felt her heart grow heavy, reflecting that in the old days men were the playthings of the gods, and had advanced no further than to become the toys of other men who thought that they themselves were gods. She played with the euphony of words; ‘Hitler, Attila, Caligula. Hitler, Attila, Caligula.’ She found no word to accompany ‘Mussolini’ until she came up with ‘Metaxas’. ‘Mussolini, Metaxas,’ she said, and added, ‘Mandras.’

  As though answering her thoughts, a movement caught the corner of her eye. Below, to the left, a body was diving about in the waves like a human dolphin. She watched the brown fisherman with a pleasure that was entirely aesthetic, until she realised with a small shock that he was completely naked. He must have been a hundred metres away, and she knew that he was arranging a buoyed net with a mesh tiny enough to catch whitebait. He was diving for long moments, arranging his net in a crescent, and all about him the gulls wheeled and plunged for their share of the harvest. Guilefully, but without guilt, Pelagia crept closer in order to admire this man who was so sleek, so at one with the sea, so much like a fish, a man naked and wild, a man like Adam.

>   She watched as the net was curled about the shoal, and, as he stood glistening on the beach, hauling hand over hand, his muscles tightening and his shoulders rhythmically working, she realised that it was Mandras. She put her hand over her mouth to suppress her shock and a sudden access of shame, but she did not creep away. She was still transfixed by his beauty, by the harmony and strength of his work, and could not resist the idea that God had given her a chance to look over what was hers before she took possession of it; the slim hips, the sharp shoulders, the taut stomach, the dark shadow of the groin with its mysterious modellings that were the subject of so much lubricious female gossip at the well. Mandras was too young to be a Poseidon, too much without malice. Was he a male sea-nymph, then? Was there such a thing as a male Nereid or Potamid? Should there not be a sacrifice of honey, oil, milk, or a goat? Of herself? It was difficult to witness Mandras slipping through the water and not believe that such a creature would not, as Plutarch said, live for 9,720 years. But this vision of Mandras possessed a quality of eternity, and Plutarch’s imputed span of life seemed too arbitrary and too short. It occurred to Pelagia that perhaps this same scene had been enacted generation after generation since Mycenean times; perhaps in the time of Odysseus there had been young girls like herself who had gone to the sea in order to spy on the nakedness of those they loved. She shivered at the thought of such a melting into history.

  Mandras reeled in his net and bent over to busy himself with extracting the tiny fish from the mesh, throwing them into a line of buckets arranged in a neat row upon the sand. The silver fish flashed in the sun like new knives, transforming their asphyxiation into a display of beauty as they flicked and leapt against each other and died. Pelagia noticed that his shoulders had peeled raw, and had not hardened to the sun despite an entire summer’s exposure. She was surprised, even disappointed, for it revealed that the lovely boy was made only of flesh, and not of imperishable gold.

  He stood up, placed two fingers in his mouth, and whistled. She saw that he was looking out to sea, waving his arms in a slow semaphore above his head. Vainly she tried to descry the object of his attention. Puzzled, she raised her head a little higher above the rock behind which she had concealed herself, and glimpsed three dark shapes curving in unison through the waves towards him. She heard his cry of pleasure and watched him wade towards them with three larger fish in his hands. She saw him throw the fish high into the air, and the three dolphins leap and twist to catch them. She saw him grasp a dorsal fin and sweep out to sea.

  She ran down to the edge of the sand and furrowed her brow in a desperate attempt to exclude the scintillating and shifting darts of light that the sun threw from the water, but could see nothing. Surely Mandras was drowned? She remembered suddenly that it was terribly bad luck to see a nymph naked; it caused delirium. What was happening? She wrung her hands and bit her lip. The sun burned her forearms with an intensity that amounted to vindictiveness, and she clasped them anxiously to her chest. She hovered for a few more moments on the shore, and then turned and ran home.

  In her room she hugged Psipsina and wept. Mandras was drowned, he had gone away with the dolphins, he was never going to come again, it was the end of everything. She complained to the pine marten about the injustice and futility of life and submitted to the rasping tongue as it relished the saltiness of her tears. There was a discreet knock on the door.

  Mandras stood, smiling diffidently, in his hand a bucket of whitebait. He shifted from one foot to another, and spoke all in a rush: ‘I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner, it’s just that I was ill the day after the feast, you know, it was the wine, and I wasn’t very well, and yesterday I had to go into Argostoli to get my call-up papers, and I’ve got to go to the mainland the day after tomorrow, and I’ve spoken to your father in the kapheneia, and he’s given his consent, and I’ve brought you some fish. Look, some whitebait.’

  Pelagia sat on the edge of her bed and went numb inside; it was too much happiness, too much desolation. Officially engaged to a man who was going to wrestle with fate, to a man who should have drowned in the sea, a man who jumbled a marriage together with whitebait and war, a man who was a boy who played with dolphins and was too beautiful to go away to die in the snows of Tsamoria. He seemed suddenly to have become a dream-creature of frightening and infinite fragility, something too exquisite and ephemeral to be human. Her hands began to shake; ‘Don’t go, don’t go,’ she pleaded, and remembered that it was bad luck to see a nymph naked, that it brought about delirium, and occasionally death.

  14 Grazzi

  I have had many regrets in my life, and I suppose that everyone else can say the same. But it is not as if I regret little things, childish things, things like arguing with my father or flirting with a woman who was not my wife. What I regret is having had to learn a most bitter lesson about the way in which personal ambitions can lead a man, against his will and against his nature, into playing a part in events that will cause history to heap him with opprobrium and contempt.

  I had a very nice job, and it was pleasant to be the Italian Minister in Athens, for the very simple reason that Colonel Mondini and I had no idea until the war started that there was going to be a war at all. You would think that Ciano or Badoglio or Soddu would have told us, you would think that they would have given us a month or two to prepare, but no, they let us carry on with the normal pleasantries of diplomacy. It infuriates me that I was attending receptions, going to plays, organising joint projects with the Minister of Education, reassuring my Greek friends that the Duce had no hostile intentions, telling the Italian community that there was no need to pack, and then find that no one had ever bothered to tell me what was going on, so that I had no time to pack myself.

  All I had was rumours and jokes to go on. At least, I thought they were jokes. Curzio Malaparte, that idiotic snob with the ironic and twisted sense of humour and the lust for wars to fuel his journalism, came to see me, and he said, ‘My dear friend, Count Ciano, told me to tell you that you can do what you like, because he’s going to make war on Greece all the same, and that one day soon he’s going to lead Jacomoni’s Albanians into Greek territory.’ It was the way he said it, wryly and mocking, that made me think it was a joke, as well as the fact that this cockatoo will say anything whatsoever, however ridiculous, untruthful, or inconsequential, as long as it contains something to indicate that he is a personal friend of Ciano.

  The only other thing that I had to go on was when Mondini was called to the airport to meet an intelligence officer, who told him that war was going to break out within three days, and that Bulgaria would invade at the same time. He told Mondini that all the Greek officials had been bribed. Naturally I telegraphed Rome, and I also spoke to the Bulgarian ambassador. Rome did not reply, and the Bulgarian ambassador (rightly as it turned out) told me that Bulgaria had no intention whatsoever of declaring war. I was reassured, but I think now that Ciano and the Duce were just trying to confuse me or keep their own options open. Perhaps they were trying to confuse each other. Colonel Mondini and I sat in my office, oppressed by the deepest gloom imaginable, and we discussed the idea of returning to private life.

  Things became increasingly incomprehensible. For example, Rome asked me to send a member of my legation for ‘Urgent confidential instructions’, but Ala Littoria wasn’t providing any flights, so nobody could go. Then the Palazzo Chigi telegraphed to say that a courier was coming by special flight, and whoever it was never arrived. Everyone in the diplomatic community in Athens was making representations to me to do something about preventing a war, and all I could do was blush and stammer, because I was in the untenable position of being an ambassador who didn’t have a single notion of what was happening. Mussolini and Ciano humiliated me, and I will never forgive them for forcing me to rely on the propaganda of the Stefani Agency as my sole source of information. Information? It was all lies, and even the Greeks knew more about the impending invasion than I did.

  What happened was this; the Gree
k National Theatre put on a special show of Madama Butterfly, and they invited Puccini’s son and his wife as guests of the government. It was a wonderful gesture, a typically noble and Greek thing to do, and we issued invitations to a reception on the night of October 26th, after midnight. Receptions after midnight are a Greek habit I never quite adjusted to, I must confess.

  Metaxas and the King did not come, but it was a very fine party all the same. We had an enormous gateau with ‘Long Live Greece’ iced onto it, and we had the tables laid with the Greek and Italian flags, intertwined to symbolise our friendship. We had poets, playwrights, professors, intellectuals, as well as representatives of society and the diplomatic community. Mondini looked splendid in his full dress uniform covered with medals, but I noticed that as the telegrams began to flood in from Rome he was growing pale and seemed visibly to shrink inside his tunic until it looked as though he had disavowed it or borrowed it from someone else.

  It was a horrible situation. The people with the telegrams had to pretend to be guests, and as I read them, one after another, my heart sank to my boots. I had to make smalltalk with people as I became steadily overwhelmed by a wave of horror and disgust. I felt ashamed for my government, I felt anger at having been kept in ignorance, I felt embarrassment before my Greek friends, and over and over again I heard the same sentence repeating itself in my head – ‘Don’t they know what war is?’ A novelist asked me if I was quite well, because I had turned very pale and my hands were shaking. I looked from face to face and saw that everyone in our legation had experienced the same reaction; we were dogs who had been commanded to bite the hand that fed us.