Corelli's Mandolin

by Louis de Bernières

  42 How like a Woman is a Mandolin

  How like a woman is a mandolin, how gracious and how lovely. In the evening when the dogs howl and the crickets chirr, and the huge moon hoists above the hills, and in Argostoli the searchlights search for false alarms, I take my sweet Antonia. I brush her strings, softly, and I say to her, ‘How can you be made of wood?’ just as I see Pelagia and ask without speaking, ‘Are you truly made of flesh? Is there not here a fire? A vanishing trace of angels? A something far estranged from bone and blood?’ I catch her eye in passing, her gaze so frank and quizzical, holding mine. Her head turns, a smile, an arch and knowing smile, and she has gone. I see her go for water, and then she comes, the urn upon her shoulder, a living caryatid, and as she passes she permits a splash upon my epaulettes. She apologises, laughing, and I say ‘Accidents will happen’, and she knows I know that it was no chance. She did it because I am a soldier and an Italian, because I am the enemy, because she is funny, because she likes to tease, because it is an act of resistance, because she likes me, because it is contact, because we are brother and sister before she is Greek or I am invader. I notice that her wrists remind me of the slender necks of mandolins, and her hand broadens from the wrist like the head that holds the pegs, and the place where the heel swells to meet the soundbox gives the same contour as her line of neck and chin, and glows the same with the soft polish of youth and pine.

  At night I dream of Pelagia. Pelagia comes, undressing, and I see her breasts are the backs of mandolins moulded in Napoli. I cup them in my hands and they are cold like wood and warm like yielding mother’s flesh, and she turns about and I see that each buttock is the rounded pear-shaped singing mandolin, swelling in tapered segments, purfled in pearl and slivers of ebony. I am confused because I am caught between looking for strings and the pain of the loins’ longing, and I wake up moistened by my own lust, clutching Antonia, pricked by the scratching ends of strings, sweating. I put Antonia down and say, ‘O Pelagia,’ and I lie awake awhile, thinking of her before I force myself asleep because then it will be morning sooner, and I will see Pelagia.

  I think of Pelagia in terms of chords. Antonia has three chords that live together in the first three frets, doh, re, and sol, and they all need two fingers apiece to stop them. I play sol, and I move it one space across and I make the doh, and they ring in each others’ aftermath like soprano and alto in the same key in a Tuscan song. I play the re, twisting my hand, making a double space, and it belongs with the other two, but it is sad and incomplete, it is like a virgin unfulfilled. It begs me ‘Take me back where I can find my peace’, and I return to sol, and all’s complete, and I feel like God Himself who made a woman and found His world perfected by a final and a consummating touch.

  Pelagia shares these simple, merry chords. She plays with a cat and laughs, and it is sol. She raises an eyebrow when she catches me observing, and pretends to reproach me and reprove me for the guilt of admiration, and it is doh. She asks me a question, ‘Haven’t you anything useful to do?’ and it is like re, requiring resolution. I say, ‘Il Duce and I are conquering Serbia today,’ and she laughs and all is brought back and clarified. She throws back her head and laughs, her white teeth sparkling, and she knows she is beautiful and that I find her so. I am reminded of sparkling whitewashed houses on a distant hill in Candia. She is glad and proud and withholding, everything has circled back upon itself. She has returned to sol. I find myself laughing also; we are octaves apart, laughing in octaves together, mandola and mandolin, and far away a gun roars at imaginary British planes, there is a spurious rattle of machine-guns, and behold, there is our timpani.

  Pelagia hears the guns and frowns. We were happy together, sitting on this balcony shaded by bougainvillaea visited by bees, but now it is the war; the war has returned, and Pelagia knits her brow and frowns. I want to say, ‘I am sorry Pelagia, it was not my idea, it was not me who stole Ionia. I was not inspired to take your goats and burn your olive trees for fuel. I am not a natural parasite.’ But I can say no such thing, as Pelagia knows. And she understands why I cannot say it, but still she blames me for a lack of will. She has heard me talking of the new pax Romana, the reconstitution of the ancient sway that brought order and peace to all, the longest period of civilisation known to man, and she frowns.

  When Pelagia frowns at distant guns, it is like a chord of mi minor seventh with a flattened fifth; strike it hard and it is martial and angry, a chord for guerrillas and partisans. But stroke it softly, and it is a chord of infinite, yearning gloom. Pelagia is sad, and I pick up Antonia and play re minor. She looks up and says, ‘That was exactly how I was feeling. How did you know?’ and I would have liked to have said, ‘Pelagia, I love you, and that is how I know,’ but instead I say, ‘Because you are wistful and waiting.’

  ‘Waiting for what?’ she asks, and I say, ‘You tell me, Pelagia,’ but I know that she will never tell me that she is waiting for a new world where a Greek may love an Italian and think nothing of it.

  ‘I am composing a march for you,’ I say, ‘listen,’ and I play re minor, one two, and then doh major, one-and-two-and-, and back to re minor, one two … and I tell her, ‘The trouble is that I need another player to put a Greek melody over the top, perhaps a rebetiko of some sort. Maybe I can find someone in the battalion with a mandolin, and I can play the chords an octave lower on a mandola. I think that would sound very good.’

  ‘Someone must have a guitar,’ offers Pelagia, and I tell her, ‘A chord or a tune that sounds one way on the mandolin will sound completely different on a guitar; it’s one of the inexplicable facts of musical life. Those two chords sound banal beyond belief on a guitar, without drama of any kind, unless played by a Spaniard.’

  Pelagia smiles, and I know that she doesn’t understand a word of what I have been saying, but it doesn’t matter. I start to think of a melody in tremolo to dance above the chords. Pelagia loves it when I play tremolo; she says it is a most moving and exquisite sound.

  But it offends her to be moved by an invader and an occupier, someone who requisitions cheese and Robola wine, and suddenly she stands up and I see that her soul is on fire. She points a wavering finger at me and begins to shout through gritted teeth, ‘How can you be like this? What’s the matter with you? How can you, a musician, an educated man, come here with your mandolin and make beautiful tunes to a Greek, when all around you the island is pillaged and despoiled? And don’t give me any of that shit about the restoration of the Roman Empire. If you really want to know, it was Greece that educated Rome, and we didn’t do it by conquest either. What’s the matter with you? How can you stand to be here? Orders? Orders from whom? A vain megalomaniac with a silver tongue who was given Cephallonia by a mad brute of another black-haired megalomaniac who wants everyone except himself to be blond? It’s you who’s mad, don’t you know that? Don’t you know that you’re being used? Do you think that Hitler’s going to let you keep your new Roman Empire when he’s finished everyone else? How can you sit on a bomb, playing the mandolin? Why don’t you take your guns and leave? Don’t you know who the enemy is?’

  And Pelagia runs down the Venetian steps and out into the sun. She stops and looks back up at me, her eyes welling with tears of rage and bitterness, and I know that she hates me because she loves me, because she loves me and I am a man who lacks the courage to take an evil by the throat and throttle it. I am ashamed. I play a diminished chord because I am diminished. My flirtation and my attempt at charm have exposed me. I am a dishonourable man.

  The rounded, breasted belly of the mandolin slips in its place above my belt, as it always does, and as always I think, ‘Maybe I need a flatbacked Portuguese mandolin that doesn’t slip,’ but I suppress such stupid thoughts; where does one get a flatbacked Portuguese mandolin in times of war? Instead I think again, ‘How like a woman is a mandolin, how like Pelagia is a mandolin, how gracious and how lovely,’ and I have the further thought, a paradox worthy of Xeno himself, that it was the war that brought u
s together and the war that prises us apart. The British call it ‘giving with one hand and taking away with the other’. What have I got against the British that I have had to come to Greece? Pelagia is right, but who will be the first to say it? So far only Antonia has said it, ringing with ‘Pelagia’s March’, singing beneath my fingers.

  43 The Great Big Spiky Rustball

  Pelagia did not greatly enjoy the preparation of snails. For one thing, she had received much conflicting advice about the proper technique for rendering them palatable, and she detested the feeling of insecurity engendered by her own confusion; she dreaded the idea of serving up something that would turn out to be slimy and repulsive, and was fearful that if she cooked a bad meal she might be lowered in the captain’s estimation. The warm and jubilant glow which she felt after the discovery of their mutual love was now being threatened not only by the furtive guilt of it, but also by the appalling thought that if she did the wrong thing with the snails she would at best revolt him, and at worst perpetrate a poisoning.

  Drosoula told her emphatically that what you had to do was leave the snails overnight in a pot full of water, with the lid on to prevent escape, and in the morning you had to wash them thoroughly. Then you heated them alive in water, and waited for froth and scum to appear on the surface. At this precise moment you had to throw in some salt and begin to stir them clockwise (‘If you stir them anti-clockwise they’ll taste horrible’). After fifteen minutes you had to pierce a hole in the back of each shell, ‘to let the devil out and the sauce in’, and then you had to rinse them clean in the water in which they had boiled. She did not explain to Pelagia how it was supposed to be possible, when performing this operation, to dip one’s fingers into water that was still boiling hot. Drosoula also maintained that you could only eat snails that had been feeding on thyme, and Pelagia, whilst not believing this for a minute, became yet more anxious nonetheless.

  Kokolios’ wife told her at the well that this was all nonsense, because she remembered how her grandmother had done it: ‘You don’t want to listen to that Drosoula. The woman’s almost a Turk.’ No, what you had to do was pinch each snail, and if it moved it was alive. ‘But how do I pinch it when it’s gone inside?’ asked Pelagia.

  ‘Wait for it to come out,’ replied Kokolios’ wife.

  ‘But if it comes out, then obviously it’s alive, and so I don’t have to pinch it.’

  ‘You still pinch it. It’s best to be sure. Then you take a pointed knife and clean around the mouth of the shell, and then you take clean water and wash each snail twenty-one times. No more because that will wash away the flavour, and no less because then they will still be dirty, and then you leave them to drain for half an hour, and then you put salt in the mouth of the shell and all this disgusting yellow bubbly slime starts to come out, and that’s how you know they’re ready. Then you fry them one at a time in oil, with the mouth downwards, and then you add wine and boil them for two minutes, no more no less. And then you eat them.’

  ‘But Drosoula says you ought to …’

  ‘Don’t listen to that old witch. Ask anyone who knows and they’ll tell you the same as I did, and if they tell you anything otherwise, then they don’t know what they’re talking about.’

  Pelagia asked Arsenios’ wife, and she asked Stamatis’ wife. She even looked up ‘snails’ in the medical encyclopaedia, and found no entry for it. She felt like throwing them down onto the floor of the yard and stamping on them. In fact she felt so frustrated that she wanted to cry or shout. She had been told five different ways of preparing the gastropods themselves, and had heard four different recipes: boiled snails, fried snails, Cretan snail stew, and snails pilaf. There was no rice, so the pilaf was out. At the memory of rice her mouth began to water, and she wished all over again that the war would end.

  But how do you know how many snails to use? Drosoula said a kilo for four people. But was that with the shells or without them? And how on earth were you supposed to get them out of their shells anyway? And how did you weigh them without getting slime on the scales? The kind of slime that would not even wash off with hot water and soap, and just transferred itself to everything you touched it with, as though it had some mystical ability to multiply itself to infinity.

  Pelagia looked down at her shiny cargo of mucilaginous animals, and poked them with her finger when they tried to crawl out of the pot. She began to feel terribly sorry for them. They were not only very grotesque, with their erectile horns and their helplessly slow weaving of the body when you held them upside down, but they were also deeply pathetic in their sad and pitiful faith in the safety of their carapace. She was reminded of herself as a child, when she had honestly believed that if she closed her eyes, then her father would not be able to see her doing something naughty. Prodding at the snails, she was saddened by the cruelty of a world in which the living can only live by predation on creatures weaker than themselves; it seemed a poor way to order a universe.

  Her practical and ethical quandaries were broken by an excited cry of, ‘Barba C’relli, Barba C’relli,’ and she smiled as she recognised the voice of Lemoni in a state of high excitement and pleasure. The little girl had taken to calling the captain ‘Old Man’ and coming every evening to relate to him in breathless and childish Greek every event of the day. ‘Barba’ Corelli would listen patiently, failing to understand any of it, and then he would pat her on the head, call her ‘koritsimou’, and begin to throw her up and down in the air. Pelagia could not see what possible pleasure there was in this for either of them, but some things are inexplicable, and Lemoni’s piercing shrieks of joy were a conclusive testament to the improbable. Pelagia, glad of a distraction, went out into the yard.

  ‘I saw a great big spiky rustball,’ Lemoni informed the captain, ‘and I climbed all over it.’

  ‘She says that she saw a great big spiky rustball and she climbed all over it,’ translated Pelagia.

  Carlo and Corelli exchanged glances, and blanched. ‘She’s found a mine,’ said Carlo.

  ‘Ask her if it was on the beach,’ said Corelli, appealing to Pelagia.

  ‘Was it on the beach?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ said Lemoni gleefully, adding, ‘and I climbed on it.’

  Corelli knew enough Greek to recognise the word for ‘yes’, and he stood up suddenly, and then just as suddenly sat down. ‘Puttana,’ he exclaimed, taking the little girl into his arms and hugging her tightly, ‘she could have been killed.’

  Carlo put it more realistically; ‘She should have been killed. It’s a miracle.’ He rolled his eyes and added, ‘Porco dio.’

  ‘Puttana, puttana, puttana,’ chanted Lemoni inconsequentially, her voice muffled by the captain’s chest. Pelagia winced, and said, ‘Antonio, how many times have I told you not to use bad words in front of the child? What do you think her father will say when she comes home talking like that?’

  Corelli looked at her shamefacedly, and then grinned; ‘He will probably say, “What figlio di puttana taught my little girl to say puttana?” ’

  There was no one in the village who could resist joining the long straggle of the inquisitive that wound its way down the cliffs to the sand. When they saw it they pointed and cried, ‘There it is, there’s the mine,’ and there indeed it was, perched with a deceptive air of aptness and innocence at the very edge of the peacock sea. It was a sphere the height of a man, a sphere that was a little squatter than it was tall, studded with blunt spikes that made it look like an unnaturally gigantic horse chestnut, or like a vast sea urchin whose spines had freshly emerged from an encounter with a military barber.

  They gathered about it at a respectable distance, and the captain and Carlo went in close in order to inspect it. ‘How much explosive, do you think?’ asked Carlo.

  ‘God knows,’ answered the captain. ‘Enough to blow a battleship out of the water. We’ll have to cordon it off and explode it. I wouldn’t know how to make it safe.’

  ‘Magnificent,’ exclaimed Car
lo, who, despite the horrors of Albania, loved explosions from the bottom of his heart and had never lost his boyish delight in harmless destruction.

  ‘Go back to base and get some dynamite, a command wire and one of those electrical plunger things. I’ll stay here and get the villagers organised.’

  ‘It’s Turkish,’ said Carlo, pointing to the swirling characters that were still barely visible amongst the great flakes and pits of rust. ‘It must have been floating about for twenty years or more, ever since the Great War.’

  ‘Merda, that’s incredible,’ said Corelli, ‘truly a freak. I expect that all the explosive has decayed by now.’

  ‘Won’t it be a big bang then?’ asked Carlo ruefully.

  ‘It will be if you get enough dynamite, testa d’asino.’

  ‘I get the hint,’ said Carlo, and he began to walk back up the beach towards the village.

  Corelli turned to Pelagia, who was still gazing wonderingly at the immense and ancient weapon, ‘Tell Lemoni that if she ever finds anything, anywhere, that’s made of metal and she doesn’t know what it is, then she musn’t ever, ever, touch it, and she’s got to run and tell me about it straight away. Tell her to tell all the other children the same thing.’

  Corelli asked Pelagia to translate for him, and gestured to the villagers to gather round. ‘First of all,’ he told them, ‘we are going to have to explode this device. It might be a very big explosion indeed, and so when the time comes I want you all to go back to the top of the cliff and watch from there, because otherwise there could be a serious accidental massacre. Whilst we’re waiting for the dynamite, I need some strong men with spades to dig me a trench about fifty metres from this thing, over there, where I can get down in safety whilst I detonate the device. It has to be about the same size as a grave. Any volunteers?’ He looked from face to face, and the eyes in those faces were averted. It was not a good thing to help an Italian, and, whilst everybody wanted to see the big bang, it would have been a matter of shame to be the first to volunteer. Corelli saw those truculent faces, and flushed. ‘There’ll be a chicken to share between you,’ he announced.