Corelli's Mandolin

by Louis de Bernières

  ‘But I don’t want him,’ thought Pelagia, over and over again, as she sat near his bed crocheting the matrimonial bedspread that had never grown beyond the size of a towel.

  Mandras had begun his exile into inaccessibility by dramatising the idea of death. As though he had frozen into rigor mortis he lay in his bed, utterly rigid, his arms held into the air in a contorted position that no ordinary person could have sustained for a single minute. Saliva dribbled from his mouth, down his chin, across his shoulder, and soaked into the bed. Drosoula placed a cloth to soak it up, and when she returned she found that he had shifted and that the saliva was dripping from the other shoulder. Because of the position of his arms she had had the most intractable difficulty with dressing and undressing him. The doctor had tested him for katatonia by sticking pins into him; he had made no reaction, and had not closed his eye when the doctor made to prick that too. He had been fed with soup poured down a tube into his gullet, and he had neither urinated nor defecated for days until the very time that Drosoula stopped trying to make him do it. Then he had soiled the sheets so copiously that she had had to run outside and gag in the street.

  On March 25th Mandras had got out of bed to celebrate National Day, had dressed himself and gone out, returning drunk and exhilarated at three o’clock in the morning. Drosoula and Pelagia held hands and danced together in circles, whirling and laughing from pleasure and relief.

  But the next day he was back in bed, passive and speechless. His rigidity had gone, to be replaced by a condition in which he seemed to have disowned his body. The doctor had raised his arm, and it had fallen back to the bed as though it were a stocking loosely stuffed with rags. His temperature fell and his lips swelled and turned blue, his pulse raced, and he breathed so shallowly that it seemed that he spurned the air.

  On the day after that Mandras mimicked the condition of the day before, except that now he struggled wildly yet expertly against every attempt to move him or feed him. Drosoula called in Kokolios, Stamatis, and Velisarios, and not even the two tough old men and the giant could make him open his mouth and eat. It seemed that he was determined to starve himself and die. Kokolios suggested whipping him, the traditional cure for the mad, and demonstrated its efficacy by slapping the patient hard across the face. Mandras sat up suddenly, put a hand to his cheek, said, ‘Shit. I’ll get you, you bastard,’ and sank back into the sheets. Everyone present was by that time so enraged and frustrated that the idea of whipping him did not seem such a bad one.

  Mandras continued his policy of resistance and starvation until the evening of April 19th, when he recovered miraculously, in time for the great celebrations of Easter. On Holy Thursday the lambs had been killed and hung, the eggs had been painted red and polished with olive oil, and he had nearly succumbed to the traditional lentil soup. On Good Friday the island had drifted with the aroma of the women’s Easter bread, and on Saturday the men had roasted the lambs on spits, teased each other, and become indecently drunk whilst the women laboured to make soup and sausage. During all of this Mandras had lain motionless in bed, shitting himself and pissing whenever Drosoula had just changed the sheets.

  But on Saturday night he got up, and then, dressed in black, bearing an unlit black candle, he joined the sombre procession of the icons to the monastery at Sissia. He seemed to be completely normal; when Stamatis wished him a good recovery he replied, ‘From your lips to the ear of God,’ and when Kokolios clapped him on the back and congratulated him on his sudden appearance amongst the living, Mandras had grinned his old grin and replied with the proverb, ‘I am a Greek, and we Greeks are not subject to the laws of nature.’

  In the absolute darkness and silence of the church Mandras waited with growing anticipation. The suspense was unbearable, and the lowering war had already rendered that Easter a poignant one; does Christ still rise when Greeks fall? There were many there who wondered whether this might not be the last of their passiontides upon earth, and they held the hands of their children with an extra strength and a deeper emotion. Those with watches noticed that minutes were longer than they used to be, and people craned their necks to get a better view of the iconostasis.

  At last the priest appeared with his lighted candle, and his voice boomed: ‘Christos anesti, Christos anesti.’

  A great shout of joy arose from the pilgrims, who answered him, ‘Alithos anesti, alithos anesti,’ and set about lighting each other’s candles. ‘Christ is risen,’ exclaimed Drosoula, embracing her son. ‘Risen indeed,’ he cried, and kissed Pelagia on the cheek. Shielding her flame with her hand, Pelagia wondered, ‘Mandras anesti? Is Mandras risen?’ She caught Drosoula’s eye, and realised that they had both been having the same thought. The bells rang out all over the island, the people shouted and leapt in triumph, the dogs howled, the donkeys brayed, and the cats wauled; a surge of exhilaration and faith lightened the heart, and people greeted each other, ‘Christos anesti,’ never tiring of hearing ‘alithos anesti’ in reply. The fasting of the last week was over (a fast that in truth had been obligatory for months) and there was about to be a new miracle of the feeding of the five thousand as people brought out the feasts that they had saved for and improvised, feasts to be interpreted as a poke in the eye for the Duce, as acts of defiance and resistance.

  All through their midnight feast and the eating of the lamb on Sunday, Mandras seemed to be his old self. The mayeritsa soup with its avgolemono sauce disappeared into his maw as if he had just returned from a day’s fishing, and the lamb, sprinkled with oregano and pierced with abundant slivers of garlic, was crammed down his throat with a ravenous appetite worthy of a Turk. But on Sunday evening he undressed and, inevitably, betook himself once more to bed.

  This time he managed not only to emulate death, but to do so with every appearance of the most extreme spiritual pain. He would neither move nor speak, his pulse softened, his breathing diminished to the minimum for life, and his facial expression was eloquent of the most acute and extraordinary misery. The doctor explained to Drosoula that he had probably lost the power of volition, and was promptly confounded when Mandras sat up and asked to see a priest.

  Father Arsenios found the small door of the house impossible to negotiate, and so Mandras was carried outside by his redoubtable mother and left on the quayside to talk with the clergyman.

  ‘I’ve done terrible things,’ he said, ‘things so terrible that I cannot name them.’ He spoke with enormous effort, struggling painfully to enunciate the words, his voice emerging almost inaudibly.

  ‘Name them anyway,’ said Arsenios, who was still perspiring on account of his long walk from the village and had always found situations such as this abysmally unnerving.

  ‘I committed adultery,’ said Mandras, ‘I fucked the Queen.’

  ‘I see,’ said Arsenios. There was a long silence.

  ‘I fucked Queen Circe because I thought she was someone else.’

  ‘The Queen isn’t called Circe, so that’s all right,’ said Arsenios, wishing that he had not agreed to come.

  ‘God help me, I’m not fit to live,’ continued Mandras, his voice a hoarse and confidential whisper. ‘And I’ve got this punishment.’

  ‘Punishment?’

  Mandras tapped his knee: ‘See? I can’t move my legs, and do you know why?’

  ‘I just saw you move your legs.’

  Mandras turned his head slowly, with a mechanical motion that resembled the rotation of a wheel of cogs: ‘They’re made of glass.’

  Father Arsenios stood up and returned to where Pelagia and Drosoula were standing discreetly apart. ‘I know what’s wrong with him,’ he said.

  ‘What is it, Patir?’ asked Drosoula, her voice replete with maternal anxiety and hope.

  ‘He’s completely mad. You should send him to the madhouse at the monastery of the saint, and wait for the miracle.’ The fat priest waddled slowly back up the hill, leaving the two women to exchange shakes of the head. To their surprise Mandras stood up and walked over to them
, his hips rigid, woodenly moving his legs only from the knees. He stopped in front of them, wrung his hands with remorse, tore a sheet of skin from the remaining eczema on his leg, waved it in their faces, fumbled with the buttons of his nightshirt, and croaked, ‘Made of glass.’

  He returned to his bed, and two days later there began a period of hysterical rage. It began with shouting, proceeded to a bizarre episode in which he attempted to amputate his leg with a spoon, continued to a stage in which he lashed out at Pelagia and Drosoula, and concluded on April 30th with a terrifyingly lucid wrath in which he appeared to have recovered his sanity completely, and insisted that Pelagia should read to him her letters. It was this that had reduced her to an extreme and anxious state of embarrassment and shame.

  She had begun with the first ones, the ones in which the love and the sense of separation had spilled out of her and overflowed onto the page in lyrical crescendos worthy of a romantic poet: ‘ “Agapeton, agapeton, I love you and miss you and worry for you, I can’t wait for you to come back, I want to take your dear face in my hands and kiss you until my spirit flies with the angels, I want to take you in my arms and love you so that time stops and the stars fall. Every second of every minute I dream of you, and every second I know more clearly that you are life itself, more dear than life, the only thing that life can mean …” ’

  She felt her cheeks flush with irritation, she was aghast at these geysers of emotion that seemed to be those of another, lesser self. She cringed in the same way as she did when her aunt reminded her of something winsome that she had done or said as a child. The loving words now stuck in her throat and left a taste of bitterness on her tongue, but every time that she paused, Mandras would glare at her, his eyes flashing, and would demand that she continue.

  It was with a sense of relief that almost made her feel sick that she reached the letters in which news gradually started to preponderate. Her voice lightened, and she began to relax. But Mandras suddenly yelled, and hammered at his thighs with his fists, ‘I don’t want that, I don’t want those bits, I don’t want to hear about how upset everyone is that I don’t write. I want the other bits.’ His voice, as querulous as that of a spoiled child, irked her, but she feared his strength and his vindictive madness, and she continued to read the letters, excising all but the parts in which she named the variety and quality of her affection.

  ‘The letters are getting too short,’ he shouted, ‘they’re too short. Do you think I don’t know what it means?’ He grabbed the last of the letters from the bottom of the pile, and waved it in her face. ‘Look at this,’ he exclaimed, ‘four lines, that’s all. Do you think I don’t know? Read it.’

  Pelagia took the letter and read it silently to herself, knowing already what it said: ‘You never write to me, and at first I was sad and worried. Now I realise that you cannot care, and this has caused me to lose my affection also. I want you to know that I have decided to release you from your promises. I am sorry.’

  ‘Read it,’ demanded Mandras.

  Pelagia was appalled. She fumbled with the sheet of paper and smiled appeasingly, ‘My handwriting is terrible, I’m not sure I can make sense of it.’

  ‘Read it.’

  She cleared her throat, and with a tremor in her voice she improvised: ‘ “My darling, please come back to me soon. I miss you so much and long for you more than you can imagine. Keep safe from the bullets, and …” ’ she halted, sickened by the necessary duplicity of her part in the charade. She surmised that this was what it must be like to be violated by a stranger.

  ‘And what?’ insisted Mandras.

  ‘ “And I don’t know how to tell you how much I love you,” ’ said Pelagia, closing her eyes in desperation.

  ‘Read the letter before that.’

  It was a letter that began with ‘Yesterday I thought I saw a swallow, and that means that spring is returning. My father …’ but she hesitated and began to improvise again: ‘ “My darling, I think that you are like a swallow that has flown away, but will one day return to the nest I have made for you in my heart …” ’

  Mandras made Pelagia read all the letters, handing them to her one by one, so that, with tears in her eyes, her voice quavering, she endured a purgatorial hour of utter panic, each letter a torment of Sisyphus, the sweat pouring down her face and stinging her eyes. She begged to stop, and was denied. She felt herself deaden inside as desperately she invented endearments for this man she had grown first to pity and then to hate.

  She was saved by the rhythmic drone of planes. Drosoula ran inside, shouting, ‘Italians, Italians. It’s the invasion.’

  ‘Thank God, thank God,’ thought Pelagia, realising almost immediately the absurdity, the bizarreness of her relief. She ran outside with Drosoula, standing arm in arm with her as the pot-bellied Marsupials lumbered overhead, disgorging their long trails of tiny black dolls that were jerked upwards into the air as their parachutes opened, parachutes that looked as clean and pretty as fresh mushrooms in a field of autumn dew.

  Nothing was as anyone had anticipated. Those who had thought that they would be filled with rage were afflicted instead by sensations of wonder, curiosity, or apathy. Those who knew that they would be terrified felt an icy calm and a rush of grim determination. Those who had long felt a terrible anxiety became calm, and there was one woman who was visited by an almost venial apprehension of salvation.

  She ran up the hill to be with her father, following the ancient instinct that decrees that those who love each other must be united when they die. She found him standing in his doorway, as everyone else stood in theirs, his hand shielding his eyes against the sun as he watched the paratroops descend. Out of breath, she flew into his arms, and felt him tremble. Could he be afraid? She glanced up at him as he stroked her hair, and realised with a small shock that his lips moved and his eyes gleamed, not with fear, but with excitement. He looked down at her, straightened his back, and waved one hand to the skies. ‘History,’ he proclaimed, ‘all this time I have been writing history, and now history is happening before my very eyes. Pelagia, my darling daughter, I have always wanted to live in history.’ He released her, went indoors, and returned with a notebook and a sharpened pencil.

  The planes disappeared and there was a long silence. It seemed as though nothing was to happen.

  Down in the harbours the men of the Acqui Division disembarked apologetically from their landing craft and waved cheerfully but diffidently to the people in their doorways. Some of them shook their fists in return, others waved, and many made the emphatic gesture with the palm of the hand that is so insulting that in later years its perpetration was to become an imprisonable offence.

  In the village, Pelagia and her father watched the platoons of paratroopers amble by, their commanders consulting maps with furrowed brows and pursed lips. Some of the Italians seemed so small as to be shorter than their rifles. ‘They’re a funny lot,’ observed the doctor. At the back end of one line of soldiers a particularly diminutive man with cockerel feathers nodding in his helmet was goose-stepping satirically with one finger held under his nose in imitation of a moustache. He widened his eyes and explained, ‘Signor Hitler,’ as he passed Pelagia by, anxious that she should perceive the joke and share it.

  In front of his house Kokolios defiantly raised a Communist salute, his arm outstretched, his fist clenched, only to be confounded completely when a small group without an officer cheered him as it passed by and returned the salute, con brio and with exaggeration. He dropped his arm and his mouth fell open with astonishment. Were they mocking him, or were there comrades in the Fascist army?

  An officer looking for his men stopped and questioned the doctor anxiously, waving a map in his face. ‘Ecco una carta della Cephallonia,’ he said. ‘Dov’è Argostoli?’

  The doctor looked into the dark eyes set in a handsome face, diagnosed a terminal case of extreme amiability, and replied, in Italian, ‘I don’t speak Italian, and Argostoli is more or less opposite Lixouri.’
r />   ‘You speak very fluently for one who doesn’t,’ said the officer, smiling, ‘so where is Lixouri?’

  ‘Opposite Argostoli. Find one and you find the other, except that you must swim between them.’

  Pelagia nudged her father in the ribs, fearful on his behalf. But the officer sighed, lifted his helmet, scratched his forehead, and glanced sideways at them. ‘I’ll follow the others,’ he said, and hurried away. He returned a moment later, presented Pelagia with a small yellow flower, and disappeared once more. ‘Extraordinary,’ said the doctor, scribbling in his notebook.

  A column of men, much smarter than most of the others, marched by in unison. At their head perspired Captain Antonio Corelli of the 33rd Regiment of Artillery, and slung across his back was a case containing the mandolin that he had named Antonia because it was the other half of himself. He spotted Pelagia. ‘Bella bambina at nine o’clock,’ he shouted. ‘E-y-e-s left.’

  In unison the heads of the troops snapped in her direction, and for one astonishing minute she endured a march-past of the most comical and grotesque antics and expressions devisable by man. There was a soldier who crossed his eyes and folded down his lower lip, another who pouted and blew her a kiss, another who converted his marching into a Charlie Chaplin walk, another who pretended at each step to trip over his own feet, and another who twisted his helmet sideways, flared his nostrils, and rolled his eyes so high that the pupils vanished behind the upper lids. Pelagia put her hand to her mouth.

  ‘Don’t laugh,’ ordered the doctor, sotto voce. ‘It is our duty to hate them.’

  24 A Most Ungracious Surrender

  I did not arrive in Cephallonia until the middle of May, and I was only transferred there, to the 33rd Regiment of Artillery, Acqui Division, because the damage to the muscles in my thigh left me temporarily useless for anything except garrison duty. By that time I was so disillusioned by the Army that I would have gone anywhere just for a tranquil life where I could revolve my memories and scratch my wounds. I was experiencing the kind of abject depression that comes to soldiers who have realised that they have been fighting on the wrong side, expending an infinity of effort and draining the sources of courage and sanity until it seems that there is nothing inside; in truth I was feeling that my head was hollow and that the cavity of my chest was a vacuum. I was still dumb with sorrow about the death of Francisco, and I was still shocked by my own stupidity in failing to foresee that my dreams of turning my vice to advantage had rested on an incomplete assumption; it was true that my love for Francisco had inspired me to great things, but I had forgotten the possibility that he would be killed. I had gone into the war a romantic, and had come out of it desolate, dismal and forlorn. The word ‘heartbroken’ occurs to me, except that this is inadequate to describe the sensation of being utterly broken in both body and soul. I knew that I wanted to escape – I felt envious of our soldiers in Yugoslavia who had changed sides and joined the Garibaldi Division – but finally it is impossible to escape those monsters that devour from the inner depths, and the only ways to vanquish them are either to wrestle with them like Jacob with his angel or Hercules with his serpents, or else ignore them until they give up and disappear. I did the latter, and this was made more easy by a small miracle whose name was Captain Antonio Corelli. He became my source of optimism, a clear fountain, a kind of saint who had no repellent trace of piety, a kind of saint who thought of temptation as something to play with rather than something to be opposed, but who remained a man of honour because he knew no other way to be.