Corelli's Mandolin

by Louis de Bernières

  Corelli continued to wait. The doctor passed by on his way to the kapheneia, in an anticipatory state of annoyance on account of the fact that the coffee being served these days tasted of river mud and tar, and was becoming more expensive by the second. ‘Buon giorno,’ called the captain, and the doctor turned. ‘I trust that you slept badly,’ he said.

  The captain smiled resignedly, ‘For some reason I dreamed about animals made of bakelite. They were like dolphins with sharp edges, and they were leaping about. It was very disturbing. Also, your cat bit me.’ He held out the wounded finger, and the doctor inspected it. ‘It’s very swollen,’ he said, ‘and it will probably go septic. Pine martens can have a nasty bite. If I were you I would show it to a doctor.’ With that he went on his way, leaving the captain to repeat foolishly, ‘Pine martens?’ He realised that Pelagia had only made a small joke at his expense, but, curiously, it left him feeling let down and very gullible.

  When Pelagia came out she found the usurper of her bed throwing Lemoni up and down in the air by the armpits. The child was whooping and laughing, and it appeared that what was transpiring was a lesson in Italian. ‘Bella fanciulla,’ the captain was saying. He was waiting for Lemoni to repeat it. ‘Bla fanshla,’ she giggled, and the captain threw her up, exclaiming, ‘No, no, bella fanciulla.’ He dwelt lovingly upon the doubled L, waited for Lemoni to descend, and raised an eyebrow as he awaited her next attempt. ‘Bla flanshla,’ she said triumphantly, only to be launched skyward again.

  Pelagia smiled as she watched, and then Lemoni saw her. The captain followed the cast of her glance, and straightened up, a little embarrassed, ‘Buon giorno, Kyria Pelagia. It seems that my driver has been delayed.’

  ‘What’s it mean, what’s it mean?’ demanded Lemoni, whose faith in the omniscience of adults was such that she was sure that Pelagia would be able to tell her. Pelagia patted her cheek, cleared the strands of hair from her eyes, and told her, ‘It means “pretty puss”, koritsimou. Off you go now, I’m sure that someone is missing you.’

  The little girl skipped away in her usual capricious and erratic manner, waving her arms and chanting, ‘Bla, bla, bla. Bla, bla, bla.’

  Corelli reproached Pelagia, ‘Why did you send her away? We were having a wonderful time.’

  ‘Fraternisation,’ answered Pelagia. ‘It’s indecent, even in a child.’

  Corelli’s face fell, and he scuffed the toe of his boot in the dust. He looked up at the sky, dropped his head, and sighed. Without looking at Pelagia, he said with heartfelt sincerity, ‘Signorina, in times like this, in a war, all of us have to make the most of what little innocent pleasure there is.’

  Pelagia saw the resignation and weariness in his face, and felt ashamed of herself. In the silence that followed, both of them reflected upon their own unworthiness. Then the captain said, ‘One day I would like a pretty puss like that, for my own,’ and without awaiting a reply he set off in the direction from which he expected Carlo to come.

  Pelagia watched him leave, thinking her own thoughts. His retreating back had about it a poignant air of solitude. Then she went inside, took down the two volumes of The Complete and Concise Home Doctor, opened them out on the table, and guiltlessly read the sections about reproduction, venereal infections, parturition, and the scrotum. She proceeded at random to read about cascarilla, furred tongue, the anus and its disorders, and anxiety.

  Fearing the return of her father from the kapheneia, she finally replaced the books on their shelf, and began to think of reasons for delaying her necessary trip to the well. She chopped some onions, unclear as to what recipe she was intending them to be a part of, but anxious that her father should be able to perceive some concrete evidence of activity, and then she went outside to brush her oblivious goat. She found two ticks and a small swelling in the loose skin of the haunch. She worried about whether or not she should be worried about this, and then began to think about the captain. Mandras caught her dreaming.

  He had climbed out of bed, cursing and completely cured, on the day of the invasion. It was as if the advent of the Italians had been something so important, so weighty, that it precluded the luxury of indulging in his illness. The doctor had affected to be unsurprised, but Drosoula and Pelagia had agreed that there was something suspicious about an affliction that could be switched off with such a virtuoso flourish. Mandras had gone down to the sea and swum with his dolphins as though he had never been away, and had returned refreshed, the salt water drying in his tousled hair, a smile upon his face, the muscles in his torso uncontracted, and had climbed the hill with a mullet to present to Pelagia. He had ruffled Psipsina’s ears, swung briefly in the olive tree, and had left the impression on Pelagia of being madder in his new sanity than he had been when he was mad. She felt guilty now, whenever she saw him, and deeply uncomfortable.

  She started when he tapped her on the shoulder, and despite the effort to force a radiant smile he did not fail to see the flicker of alarm in her eyes. He ignored it, but would remember it later. ‘Hello,’ he said, ‘is your father in? I’ve still got some bad skin on my arm.’

  Glad of something objective upon which to focus her attention, she said, ‘Let me look at it,’ whereupon he said brightly, ‘I was hoping to see the organ-grinder rather than the monkey.’

  Mandras had heard this metaphor at the front, had liked it, and had waited a long time for an opportunity to use it. It had struck him as witty, and he had thought that what was witty was also likely to be charming. He wanted nothing so much as to be able to charm Pelagia back into the affection that he unhappily feared that he had lost.

  But Pelagia’s eyes flashed fire, and Mandras’ heart sank. ‘I didn’t mean it,’ he said, ‘it was a joke.’ The two young people looked at one another, as though sharing an appreciation of all that was gone, and then Mandras said, ‘I’m going to join the partisans.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  He shrugged, ‘I haven’t any choice. I’m leaving tomorrow. I’ll take my boat to Manolas.’

  Pelagia was horrified, ‘What about the submarines? And the warships? It’s madness.’

  ‘It’s worth the risk if I go at night. I can sail by the stars. I was thinking of tomorrow night.’

  There was a long silence. Pelagia said, ‘I won’t be able to write.’

  ‘I know.’

  Pelagia went inside a moment and came out bearing the waistcoat that she had so devotedly made and embroidered whilst her fiancé had been at the front. She showed it to him diffidently, saying, ‘This is what I was making for you, to dance at feasts. Do you want to take it now?’

  Mandras took it and held it up. He cocked his head to one side and said, ‘It doesn’t quite match up, does it? I mean, the pattern is a little different on each side.’

  Pelagia felt a pang of disappointment that tasted of betrayal. ‘I tried so hard,’ she exclaimed piteously, in a rush of emotion, ‘and I can never please you.’

  Mandras smote his forehead with the heel of his palm, screwed up his face in self-criticism, and said, ‘O God, I am sorry. I didn’t mean it the way it came out.’ He sighed and shook his head. ‘Ever since I went away, my mouth and my heart and my brain don’t seem so well connected. Everything is upside down.’

  Pelagia took back the waistcoat and told him, ‘I’ll try to put it right. What does your mother say?’

  He looked at her appealingly, ‘I was hoping that you could tell her. I couldn’t bear to hear her weeping and pleading if I tell her myself.’

  Pelagia laughed bitterly, ‘Are you such a coward, then?’

  ‘I am with my mother,’ he confessed. ‘Please tell her.’

  ‘All right. All right, I will. She has lost a husband and now she loses a son.’

  ‘I’ll be back,’ he said.

  She shook her head slowly, and sighed, ‘Promise me one thing.’ He nodded, and she continued, ‘Whenever you are about to do something terrible, think of me, and then don’t do it.’

  ‘I’m a Greek,�
�� he said gently, ‘not a Fascist. And I will think of you every minute.’

  She heard the touching sincerity in his voice, and felt herself wanting to cry. Spontaneously they embraced, as though they were brother and sister rather than two betrothed, and then they gazed for a moment into each other’s eyes. ‘God go with you,’ said Pelagia, and he smiled sadly, ‘And with you.’

  ‘I shall always remember you swinging in the tree.’

  ‘And me falling on the pot.’

  They laughed together a moment, and then he looked at her longingly for one last moment, and began to leave. A few paces away he paused, turned, and said softly, with a catch in his voice, ‘I shall always love you.’

  A long way down the road, Carlo and the captain, both of them covered in fine beige dust, ruefully inspected their vehicle. It had no wheels and the interior was piled high with a smoking stack of manure.

  That evening the captain noticed an exquisitely embroidered waistcoat hanging over the back of a chair in the kitchen. He picked it up and held it against the light; the velvet was richly scarlet, and the satin lining was sewn in with tiny conscientious threads that looked as though they could only have been done by the fingers of a diminutive sylph. In gold and yellow thread he saw languid flowers, soaring eagles, and leaping fish. He ran his finger over the embroidery and felt the density of the designs. He closed his eyes and realised that each figure recapitulated in relief the curves of the creature it portrayed.

  Pelagia came in and caught him. She felt a rush of embarrassment, perhaps because she did not want him to know why she had made the article, perhaps because she had been rendered ashamed of its imperfections. He opened his eyes and held out the waistcoat to her. ‘This is so beautiful,’ he said, ‘I have never seen anything as good as this that wasn’t in a museum. Where does it come from?’

  ‘I made it. And it’s not so good.’

  ‘Not so good?’ he repeated disbelievingly. ‘It’s a masterpiece.’

  Pelagia shook her head, ‘It doesn’t match up properly on both sides. They’re supposed to be mirror images of each other, and if you look, this eagle is at a different angle to that one, and this flower is supposed to be the same size as that one, but it’s bigger.’

  The captain clicked his tongue disapprovingly, ‘Symmetry is only a property of dead things. Did you ever see a tree or a mountain that was symmetrical? It’s fine for buildings, but if you ever see a symmetrical human face, you will have the impression that you ought to think it beautiful, but that in fact you find it cold. The human heart likes a little disorder in its geometry, Kyria Pelagia. Look at your face in a mirror, Signorina, and you will see that one eyebrow is a little higher than the other, that the set of the lid of your left eye is such that the eye is a fraction more open than the other. It is these things that make you both attractive and beautiful, whereas … otherwise you would be a statue. Symmetry is for God, not for us.’

  Pelagia pulled a sceptical expression, and prepared impatiently to dismiss his allegation that she was beautiful, but at that point she noticed that his nose was not perfectly straight. ‘What is this?’ asked the captain, pointing to an eagle, ‘I mean, how is it done?’

  Pelagia pointed with her finger, ‘This is fil-tiré, and that is feston.’ He was able to appreciate the articulateness of her forefinger and the smell of rosemary in her hair, but he shook his head, ‘I’m none the wiser. Will you sell it to me? How much do you want for it?’

  ‘It’s not for sale,’ she said.

  ‘O please, Kyria Pelagia, I will pay you in anything you want. Drachmas, lire, tins of ham, bottled olives, tobacco. Name a price. I have some British gold sovereigns.’

  Pelagia shook her head; there was little reason now why she should not sell it, but the captain had made her proud enough of it to induce her to want to keep it, and besides, selling it to him would have been, in some indefinable way, quite wrong.

  ‘I am very sorry,’ said the captain, ‘but that reminds me; how much rent do you want?’

  ‘Rent?’ said Pelagia, almost dumbfounded.

  ‘Did you think I intended to live here for nothing?’ He reached into his pocket and produced a large chunk of salami, saying, ‘I thought you might like to borrow this from the Officers’ Mess. I have already given a slice to the “cat”, and I think that now we are friends.’

  ‘You’ve turned Psipsina and Lemoni into collaborators,’ observed Pelagia wryly, ‘and you’d better ask my father about the rent.’

  A week later, after it had been reclaimed and given a new set of wheels, the engine of the jeep would explode spectacularly as it was being driven up the hairpin bends of the hill to Kastro. The driver was a very young lance-bombardier who had been a tenor in Corelli’s opera society, and had been waiting for the war to end so that he could marry his childhood love in Palermo.

  By that time Mandras was in the heart of Peloponnisos, widowmaking and rebuilding his dream of Pelagia.

  27 A Discourse on Mandolins and a Concert

  The doctor awoke at his usual hour, and departed for the kapheneia without awaking Pelagia; he had looked at her, curled up in her blankets upon the kitchen floor, and had not had the heart to disturb her. It did offend his sense of the natural decency of arising promptly upon the hour, but on the other hand she worked hard for him, and had already become exhausted by the difficulties of coping with the war. Besides all that, she looked very fetching with her hair disarrayed upon the bolster, the blanket pulled over her nose, and only one small ear completely exposed. He had stood over her, appreciating the paternal emotions that arose in his breast, and then had not been able to prevent himself from leaning down and peering into the ear in order to check that it was in good condition; there was one very small flake of skin suspended upon the tip of a gossamer hair at the junction of the auricle and the external auditory meatus, but the overall impression was one of perfect health. The doctor smiled down upon her, and then made himself miserable by reflecting that one day she would grow old, bent, and wrinkled, the sweet beauty would desiccate and disappear like dry leaves so that no one would know that it had ever been there. Seized by an impression of the preciousness of the ephemeral, he knelt down and kissed her on the cheek. He went to the kapheneia in a tragic mood that sat oddly with the serenity of a cloudless morning.

  The captain, awakened by a sharp twinge from a haemorrhoid, came out into the kitchen, saw Pelagia fast asleep, and did not know what to do. He would have liked to have brewed himself a cup of coffee and eaten a piece of fruit, but he too was captivated by the appealing tranquillity of the sleeping girl, and felt that it would have been a desecration to awake her by clattering about. In addition he did not want to cause her any embarrassment that might arise from being in his presence in night-clothes, and, besides, it was terrible to be reminded of the shame of having displaced a rightful owner from her own bed. He looked down upon her and experienced the urge to crawl in beside her – nothing could have seemed more natural – but instead he returned to his room and took Antonia out of her case. He began to practise fingerings with his left hand, sounding the notes minimally by hammering on and pulling off with his fingers rather than by using a plectrum. Tiring of this, he took a plectrum and laid the side of his right hand across the bridge so that he could mute the strings and play ‘sordo’. It made a sound very like a violin playing pizzicato, and with great concentration he set himself to playing a very difficult and rapid piece by Paganini that consisted entirely of that effect.

  Half way between sleep and waking, Pelagia’s lucid dream took on the distant rhythm of the piece. She was remembering the day before, when the captain had actually arrived at the house on a grey horse that he had borrowed from one of the soldiers who performed the curfew patrol each night. This capricious beast had been trained to caracole, and his owner had taken to impressing girls by making the beast execute this pretty trick whenever he saw one. The horse had soon cottoned on to the idea, and now readily did it unbidden whenever he cam
e across a human in skirts who had long hair and bright eyes. All the soldiers were very envious of this animal, and its rider was always prepared to lend it to officers on the understanding that advantageous adjustments would be made to duty rosters. On the day that the captain borrowed it, its rider would be excused from latrine fatigues.

  When Corelli had arrived at the entrance of the yard and Pelagia had looked up from brushing her goat, the horse had pricked up its ears and caracoled. The captain had raised his cap, smiling broadly, and Pelagia had felt a dart of pleasure such as she had seldom experienced before. It was the kind of pleasure that one feels when a dancer who has been kicking his legs impossibly high suddenly somersaults backwards, or when an apple rolls off a shelf, strikes a spoon, and the spoon spins up into the air and lands in a cup, scoop downwards, and comes tinkling to a rest as though it had been tossed there on purpose. Pelagia had beheld Corelli and the exhibitionist horse, and she had smiled and clapped spontaneously whilst Corelli’s face had split from ear to ear in an enormous grin like that of a little boy who has at last been given a football after years of whining and begging.

  In her dream the horse caracoled to the tempo of Paganini, and its rider at one moment had the face of Mandras, and at another that of the captain. She found this annoying, and made a mental effort to reduce the faces to a single one. It became Mandras, but she found this unsatisfactory, and changed it to Corelli. Had there been anybody in the room, they would have seen her smiling in her sleep; she was reliving the jingle of brass, the creak of leather, the sharp sweet smell of horse’s sweat, the intelligent pricking of its ears, the tiny sideways motion of the hooves as they struck the dust and stones of the road, the tensing and relaxing of the muscles in the haunches of the horse, the grand gesture of the smiling soldier as he swept off his cap.