Corelli's Mandolin

by Louis de Bernières

  But Dr Iannis squeezed her hand, repenting already of his rude humour, and inspired to compassion by no more than the undeniable fact that it was another beautiful day. He rotated the end of his forefinger in one extremity of his moustache, and detachedly observed his daughter’s attempts to produce a tear. He commenced a lengthy monologue:

  ‘It’s a fact of life that the honour of a family derives from the conduct of its women. I don’t know why this is, and possibly matters are different elsewhere. But we live here, and I note the fact scientifically in the same way that I observe that there is snow on Mt Aenos in January and that we have no rivers.

  ‘It’s not that I don’t like the captain. Of course he is a little mad, which is quite simply explained by the fact that he is Italian, but he is not so mad as to be completely risible. In fact I like him very much, and the fact that he plays the mandolin like an angel makes up in great measure for him being a foreigner.’ At this point the doctor wondered whether or not it would be constructive to reveal his suspicion that the captain suffered from haemorrhoids; the revelation of physical imperfections and infirmities was often a powerful antidote to love. Out of respect for Pelagia, he decided against it. One should not, after all, place dogshit in Aphrodite’s bed. He continued:

  ‘But you must remember that you are betrothed to Mandras. You do remember that, don’t you? Technically the captain is an enemy. Can you conceive the torment that would be inflicted upon you by others when they judge that you have renounced the love of a patriotic Greek, in favour of an invader, an oppressor? You will be called a collaborator, a Fascist’s whore, and a thousand things besides. People will throw stones at you and spit, you know that, don’t you? You would have to move away to Italy if you wanted to stay with him, because here you might not be safe. Are you ready to leave this island and this people? What do you know of life over there? Do you think that Italians know how to make meat pie and have churches dedicated to St Gerasimos? No, they do not.

  ‘And another thing. Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don’t blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being “in love”, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two. But sometimes the petals fall away and the roots have not entwined. Imagine giving up your home and your people, only to discover after six months, a year, three years, that the trees have had no roots and have fallen over. Imagine the desolation. Imagine the imprisonment.

  ‘I say to you that to marry the captain is impossible until our homeland is liberated. One can only forgive a sin after the sinner has finished committing it, because we cannot allow ourselves to condone it whilst it is still being perpetrated. I admit this possibility, indeed I would be happy with it. Perhaps you do not love Mandras any more. Perhaps there is an equation to be balanced, with love on one side and dishonour on the other. No one knows where Mandras is. He may not be amongst the living.

  ‘But this means that you have a love that will be indefinitely delayed. Pelagia, you know as well as I do that love delayed is lust augmented. No, don’t look at me like that. I am not ignorant or stupid, and I was not born yesterday. Also I am a doctor and I deal not in impossible moral commands but in demonstrable facts. No one can tell me that just because someone is young, good-looking, well-educated and sensible, they are not also inflamed. Do you think I don’t know that young girls can be eaten by desire? I am even resigned to the possibility that my dear little daughter may be in such a state. Don’t hang your head, you should not be ashamed. I am not a priest, I am a doctor, my attitude is anthropological, and besides, when I was young … well, that’s enough of that. Suffice it to say that I am not prepared to be a hypocrite or to affect a sudden and amenable amnesia.

  ‘But this gives us even more problems, does it not? When we are mad we lose control of ourselves. We become driven. This is why our forefathers chose to control the natural madness of the young by tarring it with shame. This is why in some places they still hang out the blotted sheet on the bridal morning. I saw one in Assos last week when I was called to that broken arm, remember? If we were not made ashamed of this beautiful thing then we would do nothing else. We would not work, we would be inundated with babies, and because of this there would be no civilisation. In short we would still be in the caves, mating relentlessly and without discrimination. If we had not reserved a time and a place, and forbidden it in other times and places, we would be living like dogs, and life would possess little beauty or peace.

  ‘Pelagia, I am not telling you to be ashamed. I am a doctor, not a maker of civilisations who wants people to stop enjoying themselves so that a village might be built. But imagine if you got pregnant! Stop pretending to be shocked, who knows what one might do in a moment of passion? These things are possible, they are natural consequences of natural things. What do you think would happen? Pelagia, I would not help you to abort a child, even though I know how. To speak plainly, I would not be a party to the murder of an innocent. What would you do? Go to one of these midwives or wise-women who kill half their clients and leave the rest permanently sterile? Would you have the child, only to find that no man would ever marry you? Many such women finish up as prostitutes, take my word for it, because suddenly they find that they have nothing left to lose and no way to keep body and soul together. But Pelagia, I would not abandon you as long as I live, even under such circumstances. But imagine if I should die. Don’t grimace, we all owe a death to nature, it can’t be helped. And what if the captain could not marry you because the Army forbids it? What then?

  ‘And are you aware that there are foul diseases attendant upon improvident actions in this regard? Can you be completely sure that our captain has not been visiting that brothel? Young men are infinitely corruptible in this one matter, however honourable they may be otherwise, and the Army has made it easy by supplying a brothel. Do you know what syphilis can do? It makes the body disintegrate and the brain go mad. It causes blindness. The children of syphilitics are born deaf and cretinous. What if the captain goes there and closes his eyes and imagines that it is you in his arms? Such a thing is very likely, although it pains me to say so, young men being what they are.’

  Pelagia wept real tears. She had never felt so crushed and humiliated. Her father had reduced all her rosy reveries to common sense and medical sordidities. She looked up at him through her tears and found him looking at her with enormous sympathy. ‘You’re in a fix,’ he said simply, ‘you’ve put us both in a fix.’

  ‘You make everything squalid,’ she reproached him bitterly. ‘You don’t know how it is.’

  ‘I went through a lot of this with your mother,’ he replied. ‘She was betrothed to someone else. I do know how it is. That is why I am talking to you as one person to another, and that is why I am not striding up and down shouting at you and forbidding everything, as a father should.’

  ‘You don’t forbid everything then?’ she asked hopefully.

  ‘No, I don’t forbid everything. I say you must be very mindful of what you do, and you must act honourably with respect to Mandras. That is all. You must look at the good side of this. The longer you know the captain, the better you will be able to decide whether or not you have roots that may grow together under the ground. Don’t give in to him at all. Deny yourself. Because then your eyes will not be clouded by a madness that you cannot control
, and then you will be able to learn to see him as he is. Do you understand?’

  ‘Papakis,’ she said softly, ‘the captain has never tried to compromise me.’

  ‘He is a good man. He knows that he is in a bad position. Pray for the liberation of the island, Pelagia, because then everything becomes possible.’

  Pelagia stood up and took the tin of tobacco. ‘Honey and brandy?’ she asked quietly, and her father nodded. He said, ‘Don’t let anything I have said diminish you. I did not intend to upset you. I was young once.’

  ‘Not everything was different in your day, then,’ she said tartly as she left the room. Her father smiled with satisfaction at this Parthian shot, and sucked very tentatively on the pipe; he had judged that a pert response signifies an undiminished daughter. It was probably easier to be a father than to be an historian. He turned to his sheaf of papers and wrote, ‘The island passed into the hands of the Byzantine Empire, which had the merit of being Greek and the demerit of being Byzantine.’

  48 La Scala

  ‘It’s true, Antonio, some of your men are running a racket, and in my opinion and the opinion of my brother officers, it reflects very badly on you. Not you personally, but on the Army of Italy. It’s as scandalous as that pamphlet about the Duce that everyone’s reading. It’s part of the same disease.’

  Corelli turned to Carlo, ‘Is this true, as Günter says?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. You’d have to ask a Greek.’

  ‘Iatre,’ called Corelli, ‘is it true?’

  The doctor came out of the kitchen, where he had been carefully sharpening the blades of old scalpels on a whetstone, and asked, ‘Is what true?’

  ‘That some of our soldiers are buying goods from the hungry with ration cards, and then some other people come in and confiscate the cards back again because they were acquired illegally.’

  ‘It’s not “some other people”,’ said the doctor, ‘it’s just the other half of the same gang. It goes round in a perfect circle. Stamatis got stung like that last week. He lost a valuable clock and two silver candlesticks, and ended up with no ration cards, and a belly as empty as before. Very ingenious.’ The doctor turned to go, and then stopped, ‘And another thing, your soldiers are stealing from people’s vegetable patches. As if we were not all dying of hunger.’

  ‘We Germans do not do this,’ said Günter Weber smugly, enjoying a little schadenfreude at Corelli’s expense.

  ‘Germans can’t sing,’ riposted Corelli irrelevantly, ‘and anyway, I’ll get this investigated, and I’ll put a stop to it. It’s too bad.’

  Weber smiled, ‘You are very famous for defending the rights of Greeks. I wonder sometimes if you understand why you are here.’

  ‘I’m not here to be a bastard,’ said Corelli, ‘and to be perfectly frank, I do not feel good about it. I try to think of it as a holiday. I don’t have your advantages, Günter.’

  ‘Advantages?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t have the advantage of thinking that other races are inferior to mine. I don’t feel entitled, that’s all.’

  ‘It’s a question of science,’ said Weber. ‘You can’t alter a scientific fact.’

  Corelli frowned, ‘Science? The Marxists think they are scientists, and they believe the exact opposite of you. I don’t care about science. It’s an irrelevance. It’s a moral principle that you can’t alter, not a scientific fact.’

  ‘We disagree,’ said Weber amiably, ‘it’s obvious to me that ethics change with the times as science does. Ethics have changed because of the theories of Darwin.’

  ‘You’re right, Günter,’ interjected Carlo, ‘but no one has to like it. I don’t like it, and neither does Antonio, that’s all. And science is about facts, and morality is about values. They are not the same thing and they don’t grow together. No one can find a value on the slide of a microscope. It might be true that Jews are evil or inferior, for instance, how would I know? But how does that mean that we should treat them with injustice? I don’t understand the reasoning.’

  ‘Do you remember,’ said Weber, leaning back in his chair, ‘how you pulled a pistol on me when I was going to club that pine marten for its skin? I didn’t kill it. I didn’t know it was a pet in any case. I couldn’t argue with a pistol. That is the new morality. Strength needs no excuses and doesn’t have to give reasons. It is Darwinism, as I said.’

  ‘It has to leave reasons to history,’ said Corelli, ‘or else it stands condemned. It’s also a question of being at ease with oneself. Do you remember when that bombardier tried to rape that girl who was cured by the supposed miracle? Mina, that was her name. Do you know why I did that?’

  ‘You mean when you made him stand to attention in the sun with nothing on except a tin helmet and a haversack?’

  ‘A haversack full of rocks. Yes. I did it because I imagined that woman was my sister. I did it because when he was well-cooked I felt a lot better. That is my morality. I make myself imagine that it’s personal.’

  ‘You’re a good man,’ said Günter, ‘I admit it.’

  ‘By the way, I stopped you from clubbing Psipsina in order to save your life,’ said Corelli. ‘If I hadn’t stopped you, Pelagia would have killed you.’

  ‘Aaaaaagh,’ spluttered Weber, pretending to strangle himself. ‘Where is Pelagia? I thought she liked our singing.’

  ‘She does, but it’s embarrassing for her to be the only woman in a bunch of boys. I expect she’s listening in the kitchen.’

  ‘No I’m not,’ she called.

  ‘Ah,’ said Weber, ‘there you are. Antonio was just saying that we ought to bring some of the girls from the Casa Rosetta, to balance the numbers. What do you think of that?’

  ‘My father would throw La Scala out, and you’d have to go back to singing in the latrines.’

  ‘We could bring two armoured cars, and come anyway,’ said Weber. He looked around at the faces that were not smiling at his remark, and said, ‘Only a little joke.’

  ‘Our armoured cars wouldn’t be able to get up the hill,’ said one of the baritones, ‘we’d have to borrow one of yours.’

  ‘Lies and slanders,’ replied one of the tenors, ‘they go very well if you take the armour off. Come on, let’s sing something.’

  ‘ “La Giovinezza,” ’ suggested Weber enthusiastically, and all the rest of them groaned. ‘OK, OK, I’ll get my gramophone from my vehicle, and we can all sing with Marlene.’

  ‘And afterwards we can sing love songs,’ said Corelli, ‘because tonight is a beautiful night, and everything is peaceful, and we should be thinking about being romantic.’

  Weber went to to his jeep, proudly and proprietorially returning with his gramophone. He set it on the table, and twisted down the needle. There was a sound very like the stirring of a distant sea, and then the first martial bars of ‘Lili Marlene’. Dietrich began to sing, her voice full of languid melancholy, worldliness, the sadness of knowledge, and the longing for love. ‘O,’ exclaimed Weber, ‘she is the incarnation of sex. She makes me melt.’

  Some of the boys joined in the song, and Corelli began to pick up the melody on his mandolin. ‘Antonia likes this,’ he said, ‘Antonia is going to sing.’ He began to introduce grace notes, and then rapid sections of fingerwork that filled in the scale between the notes. On the last verse he broke into a tremolo that soared above the music in a descant, embellished it with sly glissandos, rests and ritardandos, climbed ambitiously towards the highest and thinnest pitch of the instrument, and then fell back deliciously upon the sonorous middle range of the third and second strings. In the village the people stopped what they were doing and listened to Corelli fill the night. When the music stopped they sighed, and Kokolios said to his wife, ‘The man’s mad, and he’s a wop, but he’s got nightingales in his fingers.’

  ‘It’s better than listening to you snorting and farting all night,’ she said.

  ‘A proletarian fart is greater music than a bourgeois song,’ he said, and she grimaced and said, ‘You wish.’
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  Pelagia left the kitchen, her slender silhouette ghostlike in the dim light of the candle from the kitchen. ‘Please play that again,’ she requested, ‘it was so beautiful.’ She came out and stroked the polished wood of Weber’s gramophone. The machine was another wonder of the modern world, like Corelli’s motorbike, that had escaped the world of Cephallonia until the war years came. It was something fine and glorious amid the loss and separation, the deprivation and fear.

  ‘Do you like it?’ asked Weber, and she nodded wistfully. ‘All right,’ he continued, ‘when I go home after the war, I’ll leave it with you. You can have it. It would please me very much, and you will always remember Günter. I can easily find another in Vienna, and you can accept it as an apology to Psipsina.’

  Pelagia was touched, almost overjoyed. She looked at the smiling youngster with his smart uniform, his clipped blond hair and his brown eyes, and she was filled with pleasure and gratitude. ‘You’re so sweet,’ she said, and kissed him very naturally on one cheek. The boys of La Scala cheered, and Weber blushed, hiding his eyes with his hand.

  49 The Doctor Advises the Captain

  The doctor and the captain were sitting indoors at the kitchen table, the latter removing a broken string from his mandolin, and lamenting the fact that new strings were impossible to obtain.

  ‘How about surgical wire?’ enquired the doctor, leaning forward and inspecting the defunct string through his spectacles, ‘I think I’ve got some of the same gauge.’