Corelli's Mandolin

by Louis de Bernières

  Lepada Bay is found near Lixouri, beneath the monastery where Anthimos Kourouklis conversed with God, overlooked by the ruined Corinthian hill-city of Pale, where in classical times there flourished an innocent cult of Persephone. The beach curves elegantly, and at one tip there is a striated rock that has every appearance of a listing, ruined galleon. It is a stone ideally designed by nature for sitting on in the sun, or for peering over the edge into the ungarnered sea at the hundreds of tiny fish that dart amid the weed.

  It was on the sterncastle of this petrified ship that Günter Weber was sitting when he heard the Italian truck arrive beyond the fringe of stiffened grasses and disgorge its merry cargo of songsters and whores.

  One would have described these whores as fresh from North Africa, were it not for the egregious inaccuracy of the term ‘fresh’. Having been devoured by stinging insects and obliterated by the unfeasibly dry heat of the grey desert, this party of stale but amiable pussycats had recently arrived in their new island paradise, and still could not believe their good fortune. In skimpy dresses, their faces plastered with powder and rouge, their lips fashioned into caricatures of the Cupid’s bow, they adored the manner in which the mouths of old peasants dropped open as they flounced by with their parasols. They adored the fresh taste of the water, the silky feel of the sea as they swam shamelessly naked, the miraculous way in which the sun cured blemishes of the skin, and the companionable lethargy of their idle moments in the military brothel, when they lay about painting their nails and complaining about men in general and in particular. Most of all they adored it when they caught diseases that would oblige the military doctors to order periods of recovery that could allow them weeks off at a time. It was a break from getting up early and being transported like cattle from one base to another, only to come home to further bouts of thrusting athletics and unvarying repertoires of grunts. Their existence was nothing but friction (no wonder their skins were smooth) and an eternity of ceilings.

  Like the young German grenadier, the whores all wanted to be blonde, but they achieved with violent peroxide the end that he pursued by means of the sun. The inch of black roots at the parting of their brittle, coarsened hair gave them a disappointed and disappointing air, as if they had lacked, like a talented but unmotivated artist, that final impulse that might have consummated the illusions of artifice.

  The beauty of these jaded but heliotropic flowers was entirely self-generated and self-perpetuated. Their gossamer gloss of youth and loveliness seemed to shimmer upon them like the loose glamour of a tentative spell, but was in truth created by their own efforts, efforts conscientiously made, more the product of perseverance than of hope. Theirs was a vanity in which they struggled to believe. The dutiful exercise of their profession kept their bodies slim and lithe, but there were ineradicable lines at the corners of their eyes, little pouches beneath their breasts where they had begun almost imperceptibly to sag. Their teeth were white and clean, but their smiles were automatic even when sincere. Their legs and armpits were shaven, they smelled of a greenhouse crammed with hyacinth, and they trimmed and shaped their pubic hair so religiously that soldiers who liked to burrow and disappear into a good, abundant, honest muff would come away feeling flat and cheated, as though penetration had not occurred. The women were scrubbed and shining, and Corelli and his opera club sometimes took them to the beach in a lorry because he thought it would cheer them up. The women, well-versed in the varieties of male idiosyncrasy, came along because life had always washed over them and propelled them hither and thither like weed at the edge of tide, and men were the browsing fish that ate them.

  Günter Weber watched from his rock as the party of Italian soldiers opened their bottles of wine and began to wave their arms about and sing. He watched the naked nymphs separate themselves and run into the sea, squealing and splashing each other inefficiently, and he smiled with superiority as he reflected that all Italians were mad. It was agreed in the mess, agreed by the whole nation of the reunited German peoples, that the Italians were like children who would eventually be sent home at the end of a party, clutching a balloon and a lollipop in their sticky fingers. They’d get Albania and anything else that the Führer could not see any point in having.

  Weber was twenty-two years old and had never seen a naked woman before; he was not one of the diehard and compulsive immolatory rapists such as the Croats and the German Czechs who had joined up, and in any case military rape did not require the removal of a woman’s clothing; its brutality was perfunctory, and it was concluded with a killing. Weber was still a virgin, his father was a Lutheran pastor, and he had grown up in the Austrian mountains, capable of hating Jews and gypsies only because he had never met one. He wandered over to the group of Italians, motivated by a desperate desire, disguised as unconcern, to see a naked woman.

  Corelli looked up at the open young face, and liked it. It was ingenuous and friendly. ‘Heil Hitler,’ said Weber, and held out his hand. ‘Heil Puccini,’ said Corelli, extending his own.

  ‘I am Leutnant Günter Weber, with the Grenadiers at Lixouri. I saw your party, and I thought that I would come and introduce myself.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Carlo, winking, ‘you wanted to come and look at the women.’

  ‘It is no such thing,’ lied Weber stiffly. ‘Naturally one has seen such things before.’

  ‘I am Antonio Corelli,’ said the captain, ‘and naturally, one cannot see enough of such things if one is a man.’

  ‘Just so,’ lied Carlo, who found the presence of the women a cause of deep spiritual discomfort and perplexity. He was still remembering Francisco and hanging a new loyalty onto the captain, certain that with the captain it was bound to be an affection that would have to constitute its own reward. He had never been entirely sure of this with Francisco, even though Francisco had been married and had expressed vehement aversion to homosexuals. Carlo was glad that Corelli was not an aficionado of the brothel, and had not, as others had, ever pressed him into visiting it. Carlo knew that Corelli had fallen for Pelagia before even Corelli knew it for himself, and this, along with his love of music and his adoration of children and his mandolin, was promiscuity enough for one man.

  ‘You wouldn’t be descended from the great composer?’ asked Corelli, and the German replied, ‘I said “Weber”, not Wagner.’

  The captain laughed, ‘Wagner is not a great composer. Too overblown, too windy, too pompous and overbearing. No, I mean Carl Maria Von Weber, the one who wrote “Der Freischütz”, and the two clarinet concerti, and the Symphony in Doh major.’

  Weber shrugged his shoulders, ‘I regret, Signor, that I have never heard of him.’

  ‘And you are supposed to ask me if I am descended from the great composer,’ said Corelli, smiling with anticipation. Weber shrugged again, and the captain supplied, ‘Arcangelo Corelli? The “Concerti grossi”? You are not a music lover?’

  ‘No, I like …’ the lieutenant paused, unable to think of anything that he did like. ‘You forgot to tell me your rank.’

  ‘I am the breve, Carlo here is the semibreve, he is the crotchet, he is the quaver, and that lad in the sea is a semiquaver, and little Piero here is a demi-semiquaver. In the opera club we have our own ranking system, but otherwise I am a captain. Thirty-Third Regiment of Artillery. Please join us, we have plenty of wine, but the girls are off-duty, and I’m sure you’ve got your own. By the way, your Italian is excellent.’

  Günter Weber settled himself in the sand, wary of all these dark jovial foreigners, and replied, ‘I come from the Tyrol. Many of us speak Italian.’

  ‘You’re not German then?’

  ‘Of course I am a German.’

  Corelli looked puzzled, ‘I thought the Tyrol was in Austria.’

  Weber felt his temper beginning to fray; it was bad enough having to hear slurs on the reputation of Wagner, one of the greatest of proto-Fascists. ‘Our Führer is Austrian, and nobody says that he is not a German. I am German.’

  There was a diff
icult silence, which Corelli broke by handing him a bottle of red wine. ‘Drink,’ he said, ‘and be happy.’

  Günter Weber drank, and was happy. The wine, the coruscating heat of the sun and the mitigating balm of the breeze, the smell of aloes, the rousing choruses, the ever-incredible nakedness of the girls, the Morse code of virgin light glancing after the perpetual motion of the waters, conspired together and unknitted the dry bones in his heart.

  He permitted Adriana to fire a round from his Luger, he fell asleep, he was thrown from the rock into the sea, he basked in the admiration of the naked girls who loved his golden tan and his blond hair, and he was delivered to base that evening, his uniform sandy and askew, a fully paid-up member of the opera club, having drunkenly agreed that if ever he should express admiration for Wagner he would be shot, without trial, and without leave of appeal. He was the only one who could not sing a note, and his rank was dotted demi-semiquaver rest.

  31 A Problem with Eyes

  Pelagia treated the captain as badly as she could. If she served him food she would set the plate before him with a great clatter that sent the contents of the bowl splashing and overflowing, and if by any chance it did spill onto his uniform, she would fetch a damp clout, omit to wring it out, and smear the soup or the stew in a wide circle about his tunic, all the time apologising cynically for the terrible mess. ‘O, no, please Kyria Pelagia, this is unnecessary,’ he would protest futilely, and eventually she noticed that he had acquired the habit of not drawing in his chair until she had already slopped the food onto the table.

  His failure to remonstrate with her, and his complete reluctance to come up with the kind of threats that one might expect from an officer of an occupying force, only succeeded in irritating her. She would have liked him to shout, to command her to cease from her insolence, because her anger was so deep and bitter that only a confrontation seemed sufficient to purge it. She wanted to give it an airing, to throw her arms about like a protestant preacher; but he was bent, it seemed, upon frustrating her. He remained submissive and polite, and she would find herself practising in private all the narrowings of the eyes and hard pursings of the lips that would eventually accompany the hypothetical tempest of recrimination and contempt that every day she looked forward to heaping upon his head. After two months of passing her nights sleepless with rage, curled up in her blankets upon the kitchen floor, she had perfected several versions of the impromptu and vitriolic speech with which she intended to confound him. But when would the opportunity to deliver it arise? How does one explode with righteous rancour when the target of it remains circumspect and diffident?

  The captain did not seem to her to be a typical Italian. It was true that he sometimes came home a little inebriated, and that occasionally he suffered bursts of incorrigibly high spirits; sometimes he burst in and fell to his knees, presenting her with a flower which she would accept and then feed pointedly and conspicuously to the goat; sometimes he would suddenly grasp her about the waist with his right hand, and her right hand with his left, and whirl her vertiginously a couple of times as though executing a waltz, but this only occurred when his battery won a football match. So he was impulsive like a typical Italian, and he seemed to have not a care in the world, but on the other hand he appeared to be a very thoughtful character who was a master at disguising it. Quite often she would see him standing by the wall of the yard with his hands behind his back like a German, his feet apart, deep in contemplation either of the mountains or of some matter for which they were nothing more than a peaceful occupation for his eyes. She thought that he had a sadness that was very like nostalgia, without actually being it. ‘If only,’ she thought, ‘he was like the other Italians who hiss when I walk by, or try to pinch my backside. Then I could swear at him and hit him, and say “Testa d’asino” and “Possate muri massa,” and I would feel very much better.’

  One day he left his pistol on the table. She thought how easy it would be for her to purloin it, and perhaps blame it on an opportunistic thief. It came to her that she could actually shoot him when he came through the door, and then run away to join the andartes with it. The trouble was that he was no longer just an Italian, he was Captain Antonio Corelli, who played the mandolin and was very charming and respectful. In any case, she could have shot him with the derringer by now, she could have cracked his pate with a frying pan, and the temptation had not arisen. In fact the very idea was sickening, and it would in any case have been pointless and counter-productive; it would lead to horrendous reprisals, and it would hardly win the war. She decided to immerse the pistol in water for a few minutes so that its barrel went rusty up its inside and the mechanism would seize up.

  The captain came in and caught her red-handed just as she was lifting it out. She was standing with her forefinger through the trigger guard, moving the surprisingly heavy deadweight of it up and down so as to shake off the drips. She heard a voice behind her and was so startled that she dropped it back into the bowl.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘O God,’ she exclaimed, ‘you frightened me!’

  The captain looked down at his immersed pistol with an expression of scientific objectivity, raised his eyebrows, and said, ‘I see you’re engaged in a bit of mischief.’

  This was not what she had expected, but nonetheless her heart galloped painfully with fear and anxiety, and a sensation of extreme dread rendered her momentarily speechless; ‘I was washing it,’ she said feebly at last. ‘It was terribly oily and greasy.’

  ‘I had no idea you were so touchingly ignorant,’ said the captain laconically. Pelagia flushed with a very curious emotion indeed, an emotion arising from his sarcasm, and his ironic imputation that she was a sweet and silly girl who did stupid things because she was too sweet and silly to know any better. He was pretending to be patronising, and that was easily as galling as actually being patronised. She was also still frightened, still apprehensive about what he would do, and still, far back in her mind, angry that she could not succeed in provoking him.

  ‘You are not disingenuous enough to be a good liar,’ he said.

  ‘What do you expect?’ she demanded, only to find herself immediately wondering what she had meant.

  The captain seemed to know, however: ‘It must be very difficult for you all to have to put up with us.’

  ‘You have no right …’ she began, employing the first words of her well-rehearsed speech, and immediately forgetting the rest of it.

  He fished the pistol out of the bowl, sighed, and said, ‘I suppose you have done me a favour. I should have dismantled it for cleaning and oiling a long time ago. Somehow one forgets, or puts it off.’

  ‘Aren’t you angry, then? Why aren’t you angry?’

  He looked down at her quizzically, ‘What’s anger got to do with cadenzas? Do you really believe I’ve got nothing important to think about? Let’s just think about important things, and leave one another in peace. I’ll leave you alone, and you can leave me alone.’

  This idea struck Pelagia as novel and unacceptable. She did not want to leave him alone, she wanted to shout at him and strike him. Suddenly overwhelmed, and cynically aware that she would herself come to no harm by it, she slapped him stingingly with all her force, right across his left cheek.

  He had tried to step back in time, but was too late. A little dazed and perplexed, he steadied himself and touched a hand to his face, as though comforting himself. He held out the pistol. ‘Put it back in the water,’ he said, ‘I might find it less painful.’ Pelagia was now enraged by this new trick, perfectly designed for the instantaneous annulment of her rage. Frustrated beyond human ability to suffer, she raised her eyes to heaven, clenched her fists, gritted her teeth, and strode out. In the yard she kicked a cast-iron pot with all her might, grievously injuring her big toe in the process. She hopped about until the pain subsided, and then threw the offending pot over the wall. She limped back and forth a little, with great vehemence and bitterness, and plucked an unripe green ol
ive from the tree. It was satisfying and consoling, so she wrenched off a few more. When she had sufficient for a good handful she returned to the kitchen and threw them hard at the captain, who had turned to face her. He ducked futilely as the hard fruits bounced harmlessly off him, and shook his head in bemusement as Pelagia once more disappeared. These Greek girls, such spirit and fire. He wondered why no one had ever set an opera in modern Greece. Perhaps they had, come to think of it. Perhaps he should write one himself. A tune entered his mind and he began to hum it, but it kept turning into the ‘Marseillaise’. He struck the side of his head in order to expel the intruder, and the tune perversely transformed itself into the ‘Radetzky March’. ‘Carogna,’ he shouted, in extreme annoyance. Outside, Pelagia heard him, feared a delayed reaction, and hurried away down the hill to escape to Drosoula’s house until he cooled down.

  As the months went by Pelagia noticed that she was losing her anger, and this puzzled and upset her. The fact was that the captain had become as much a fixture in the house as the goat or her own father. She was quite used to seeing him seated at the table, scribbling furiously, or rapt in concentration with a pencil stuck between his teeth. Early in the morning she anticipated with a small and familiar domestic pleasure the moment when he would emerge from his room and say, ‘Kalimera, Kyria Pelagia. Is Carlo here yet?’ and in the evening she would actually begin to become concerned if he were a little late, sighing with relief as he came through the door, and smiling very much against her will.

  The captain had some engaging traits. He tied a cork to a piece of string, and sprinted about the house with Psipsina in hot pursuit, and in the evening at bedtime he would go out and call her, because normally the pine marten judiciously and fair-mindedly began the night with him and concluded it with Pelagia. He was often to be found on his knees with one hand clamped about Psipsina’s stomach as he rolled her back and forth on the flags whilst she pretended to bite him and rake him with her claws, and if the animal happened to be sitting on a piece of his music, he would go away and fetch another sheet rather than disturb her.