Corelli's Mandolin

by Louis de Bernières

‘That’s funny,’ said Drosoula, ‘so did I.’

  They looked to Pelagia for some kind of reaction, but the latter continued merely to tear a piece of bread into tiny pieces.

  ‘He told me he was glad he was dead,’ said Antonia, ‘because now he can be with Mama’s mother.’

  ‘That’s not what he told me,’ replied Drosoula, whereupon Pelagia asked, ‘Why are you talking as though I’m not here?’

  ‘Because you’re not,’ observed Drosoula, brutally. ‘You haven’t been here for a long time.’

  ‘What did he tell you, then?’ enquired Antonia.

  ‘He told me that he wants Mama to write the History of Cephallonia that got buried in the earthquake. To get it done for him. He said it spoils all the fun of being dead, knowing that it’s got lost.’

  Pelagia eyed them suspiciously, and the other two continued to ignore her. Antonia was discovering that this play-acting could be tremendously amusing. ‘I didn’t know he was writing a history.’

  ‘O yes, it was more important than being a doctor.’

  Antonia turned to Pelagia and demanded innocently, ‘Are you going to write it then?’

  ‘No point in asking her,’ said Drosoula, ‘she’s too far gone.’

  ‘I am here,’ protested Pelagia.

  ‘Welcome back,’ said Drosoula sarcastically.

  Pelagia went back to the cemetery and renewed the oil in the lamp. She stood looking at the inscription (Beloved Father and Grandfather, Faithful Husband, Friend Of The Poor, Healer Of All Living Things, Infinitely Learned And Courageous) and it occurred to her that there was indeed a way to keep his flame alive, even if all this stuff about dreams was silly nonsense. She went into Argostoli, hitching a lift on the back of a mulecart, and returned with pens and a thick sheaf of paper.

  It was surprisingly easy. She had read through the manuscript so many times that all the old phrases rolled through the kitchen door and windows, made themselves heard inaudibly, and flowed down her arm and right hand, emerging from the nib of her pen and filling sheet after sheet of paper: ‘The half-forgotten island of Cephallonia rises improvidently and inadvisedly from the Ionian Sea; it is an island so immense in antiquity that the very rocks themselves exhale nostalgia and the red earth is stupefied not only by the sun, but by the impossible weight of memory …’

  Drosoula and Antonia spied on her, sitting at her table in a scholarly attitude, tapping her teeth with her pen, and occasionally staring out of the window at nothing in particular. The two conspirators crept away to a safe distance, hugged each other, and danced.

  Pelagia almost became the doctor. As in the time of her distress, and just as he had done throughout his life, she did virtually nothing about the house, leaving it all to the women. Of the few souvenirs of her father, dug from the ruins, there remained his pipe, and this she stuck between her teeth as he had done, inhaling the faded traces of tarry dottle, and impressing the stem with the indentations of her own teeth over the marks of his. She did not light it, but regarded it as an instrument of her mediumship, so that the old words now seemed to flow in through the empty bowl, gather in the stem, and sound directly in her brain. Tentatively she began to add a woman’s touch to the male prepossessions of the text, supplying details of manners of dress and the techniques of baking in the communal fourno, the economic significance of child labour, and the cruel but traditional contempt for widows. As she wrote, she discovered her own passions surmounting those of her father, passions whose existence she had never previously suspected, and out onto the page there soared thundering condemnations and acid verdicts to rival and outvenom his.

  The joy of it transformed her. Her act of filial devotion metamorphosed into a grand design involving trips to the library and earnest letters of enquiry to learned institutions, to maritime museums, the British Library, experts on Napoleon, and American Professors of The History of Imperial Power. To her amazement and gratification she discovered that all over the world there were enthusiastic people so enamoured of knowledge and its coherent explanation that they would actually spend months making enquiries on her behalf, and eventually send her much more than she had asked for, with personal notes of encouragement and lists of other experts and institutions to consult. As the piles of correspondence mounted, she began to feel in danger of finishing up by writing a ‘Universal History of the Entire World’, because everything connected to everything else in the most elaborate, devious, and elegant ways. Finally Pelagia compressed her sheaves of paper into a large boxfile, and wondered what to do next. It ought to be published, under the joint names of herself and her father, but it seemed an unbearable wrench to part with it, to send her intellectual baby out into the world without its mother there to defend it. She would want to be beside each reader in order to answer their objections and tell them not to skip any sections, to adduce additional proofs. Nonetheless she made tentative enquiries of four publishers, who expressed sympathy and support, advised her that such a book would have no market, and told her that the best thing to do would be to donate it to a university. ‘I will when I’m dead,’ thought Pelagia, and she left it on her shelf as visible evidence of the now undeniable fact that she was a substantial intellectual in the great Hellenic tradition.

  The project had kept her busy right up to 1961, the year in which Karamanlis won the election from Papandreou, and at the end of it she looked through her massive document and realised that throughout its composition and compilation, a transmogrification had been unfolding within herself.

  The calligraphy near the beginning was as spidery and unhinged as that of her father during the long years of his silence, but as time progressed it had become firmer and more rounded, more confident and affirmative. But more importantly than this, the process of writing had crystallised opinions and philosophical positions that she had not even known that she had held. She discovered that her basic understanding of economic processes was Marxist, but that, paradoxically, she thought that capitalism had the best ways of dealing with the problems. She considered that cultural traditions were a stronger force in history than economic transformations, and that human nature was fundamentally irrational to the point of insanity, which accounted for its willingness to embrace demagoguery and unbelievable beliefs, and she concluded that freedom and order were not mutually exclusive, but essential preconditions of each other.

  Drosoula had too much common sense to listen to grand theories, and so Pelagia bludgeoned the budding Antonia with these ideas, the two of them sitting up late into the night, too intoxicated with philosophising to drag themselves away to empty bladders that were bursting with mint tea, or to go to bed and close eyes that were burning with fatigue.

  Antonia, now in the most fresh and perfect stage of an adolescent’s beauty and natural perversity, opposed all of her adopted mother’s ideas not only for the sake of argument, but as a matter of principle, and Pelagia soon discovered the extreme delight of forcing an opponent into contradicting a position she had held the day before. It left Antonia speechless and enraged, hedging her comments carefully with qualifications and provisos that involved her either in further contradictions or in arriving at a conclusion so tempered that it amounted to no opinion at all. Pelagia exacerbated the girl’s frustration and annoyance by informing her repeatedly, ‘When you’re my age, you’ll look back and see I was right.’

  Antonia had no intention whatsoever of reaching Pelagia’s age, and said so. ‘I want to die before I’m twenty-five,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to get old and crusty.’ She foresaw an eternity of infinite youth stretching out before her, and, with fire in her eyes, she told Pelagia, ‘You old people caused all the problems in the first place, and it’s up to us young ones to sort them out.’

  ‘Enjoy your dreams,’ commented Pelagia, who was not surprised but was still shocked when Antonia, at the age of seventeen, announced not only that she was going to get married, but that she was henceforth a Communist.

  ‘I bet you cry when the King die
s,’ said Pelagia.

  69 Bean by Bean the Sack Fills

  It was at about this time that mysterious postcards in rather truncated Greek began to arrive from all over the world. From Santa Fe came one that said, ‘You would like it here. All the houses are made of mud.’ From Edinburgh: ‘The wind at the top of the castle knocks you off your feet.’ From Vienna: ‘There is a statue of a Russian soldier here, and everyone calls it “The Monument to the Unknown Rapist”.’ From Rio de Janeiro: ‘Carnival time. Streets full of urine and heartbreakingly beautiful girls.’ From London: ‘Mad people; terrible fog.’ From Paris: ‘Found a shop that only sold trusses and hernia supports.’ From Glasgow: ‘Knee-deep in soot and fallen drunks.’ From Moscow: ‘Works of art in the metro.’ From Madrid: ‘Too hot. Everyone asleep.’ From Cape Town: ‘Nice fruit, rotten pasta.’ From Calcutta: ‘Buried in dust. Abysmal diarrhoea.’

  Her first thought was that her father’s maritime soul had taken to revisiting his favourite foreign climes, and was sending her communications from beyond the grave. But Moscow was hardly by the sea. Her second thought was that they might be from Antonio.

  But he too was dead, he had not known sufficient Greek to read or write it, and for what reason would he be whirling about the world from Sydney to Kiev even if he were still alive? Perhaps these anonymous cards were from someone with whom she had corresponded during the writing of the History. Puzzled, but intrigued and pleased, she bound her collections of quirky cards together with rubber-bands, and stacked them in a box.

  ‘You’ve got a secret boyfriend,’ maintained Antonia, who was pleased to entertain such a possibility because it might distract attention from her own romance, which both Pelagia and Drosoula were attempting to discourage.

  They had met whilst Antonia was earning a little cash by helping to serve coffee in a busy café on the plaza of Argostoli. There had been a noisy brass band from Lixouri playing in the square, and the gentleman concerned had had to rise and shout his order in the young girl’s ear, at the same moment realising that it was a splendid and appealing young ear that positively cried out for nibbling at night beneath a tree in a dark street. Antonia in her turn had realised that here was a man who smelled of the exactly correct admixture of virility and aftershave, whose breath was as cool and calming as mint, and whose perpetually startled brown eyes bespoke both gentleness and humour.

  Alexi idled conspicuously at the café day after day, choosing the same table for preference, his heart bursting with the longing to see the young and statuesque maiden with her perfect teeth and slender fingers that were made respectively for amorous biting and caressing. She waited for him faithfully, vehemently forbidding the other girls, the waiters, and even the proprietor himself, to serve him. One day he took her hand when she was putting down a cup, looked up at her with doglike adoration, and said, ‘Marry me.’ He rotated an eloquent hand figuratively in the air, and added, ‘We have nothing to lose but our chains.’

  Alexi was a radical lawyer who could not only prove that when a rich man evaded taxes it was a crime against society, but also that when a poor man did it, it was a valid, meritorious and powerful action against the class-oppressors, deserving not merely the support of every right-thinking citizen, but even the full approval of the law. He could reduce a judge to tears with his heartrending accounts of the unhappy childhood of his clients, and equally could bring a jury to a standing ovation with his acerbic condemnations of police who brutally and unreasonably sought to uphold the law in the course of their duties.

  Pelagia saw immediately that Alexi would become an arch-conservative in later life, and it was not his political affiliations to which she objected. The fact was that she could not abide the thought of Alexi and Antonia making love. She was very tall, he was very short. She was only seventeen, and he was thirty-two. She was slim and graceful, he was plump and bald, and inclined to trip over objects that were never there when he looked. She remembered her own passion for Mandras at the same tender age, shuddered, and forbade the marriage outright, determined to obviate a sacrilege and a blasphemy.

  The wedding day was nonetheless delightful. In early spring the fields and hillsides were clothed in crocus and viola, white stachys, and yellow sternbergia, and pale lilac colchicum nodded on exiguous stalks amid the already sere grass of the meadows. The couple followed the custom of having fifteen best men and women at the wedding, and Alexi even capered successfully through the dance of Isaiah without disgracing himself or falling over. Antonia, radiant and delighted, kissed even the strangers standing by to gawp, and Alexi, perspiring with alcohol and joy, made a long and poetic speech that he had composed in rhyming epigrams, much of it very wisely in praise of his mother-in-law. She would always remember the exact moment during the celebrations when she had seen suddenly what it was about him that had awakened Antonia’s heart; it was when he put his arm about her, kissed her on the cheek, and said, ‘We are going to buy a house in your village, with your permission.’ His sincere humility and his implied doubt that she might not want him near was enough to cause her to adore him. From that time onwards she devoted many happy hours to embroidering his handkerchiefs and mending the holes in the socks that Antonia always tried to persuade him to throw away. ‘My darling,’ she said, ‘if only you would cut your toenails, you would spare me so many scratches, and save my mother from so much pointless work.’

  Pelagia waited impatiently for a grandchild, and Drosoula immersed herself in work. In the empty space by the quay that had once been her own house, she erected a straw roof and some romantic lanterns. She begged and borrowed some ancient, rickety tables and chairs, set up a charcoal stove, and grandly founded the taverna that she would run with eccentric and erratic diligence until the day of her death in 1972.

  The tourists were just beginning to ebb into Cephallonia. At first it was the rich yacht owners who passed on supercilious information to their friends about the quaintest and most ruritanian places to eat, and then it was the rucksacked spiritual inheritors of the lugubrious Canadian poet’s way of life. Connoisseurs and aficionados of Lord Byron trickled in, and went. German soldiers who had turned into prosperous and gentle burghers with vast families brought their sons and daughters and told them, ‘This is where Daddy was in the war, isn’t it beautiful?’ Italians arrived on the ferry via Ithaca, bringing with them their nauseating white poodles and their individual ability to eat entire fish that were large enough to feed the five thousand. As the owner of the only taverna in the little port, Drosoula earned enough in the summer to do nothing whatsoever in the winter.

  Lemoni, who was now married, stirringly fat, and blessed with three children, helped out with the serving, and Pelagia came down ostensibly to work, but in fact to have the opportunity to speak Italian. The service was not fast; it was dilatory in the extreme. Sometimes Drosoula would send away a child on a bicycle to fetch the fish that had been ordered, and if the oven had not fired properly it was quite possible to wait two hours whilst food was prepared and baked. The guests were treated unapologetically as members of a patient family which it was her business to discipline and supervise, and quite often there was no service at all if Drosoula happened to like a particular customer with whom she was deep in conversation. She soon discovered that foreigners thought of her as exotic, and she would sit at their tables amidst the skeletons of mullet and the torn-up shreds of bread, unselfconsciously and unashamedly feeding scraps of leftovers to Psipsina’s mewing and begging descendants, and concocting preposterous tales about local ghosts, Turkish abominations, and the time she had been to Australia to live amongst the kangaroos. The foreigners adored and feared her, with her bovine eyes, her slow shuffle, her turkey’s jowls, her bent back, her colossal height, and her spectacular spouts of facial hair. They never complained about her forgetfulness and her indefinite delays, and would say, ‘She’s so nice, poor old thing, it seems a shame to hurry her.’

  Meanwhile Pelagia waited for her grandchild that never came. She forgave
Antonia for taking up smoking and wearing trousers, and agreed with her that it was a good thing that dowries had been abolished. She smiled when Antonia cried in 1964 over the death of King Paul, even whilst maintaining between her sobs that the monarchy was a corrupting anachronism. She moved temporarily into Antonia’s house to comfort her when in 1967 Alexi was arbitrarily but briefly locked up by the Colonels, and again in 1973 when he was imprisoned for wrestling with a policeman during the student occupation of the Law Faculty at Athens University. Later on she would withhold her doubts over Antonia’s support of Papandreou’s socialist government, and even concede that Antonia had a point when she insisted upon going to the mainland in order to participate indecorously in feminist demonstrations. She felt that she could not pour scorn upon such touchingly utopian and optimistic faith, and in any case it was her own fault; she was reaping the inevitable whirlwind consequent upon having taught the girl to think. In addition, she still liked the idea that she had cherished in her own youth, that everything was possible.

  But she did object to Antonia’s insistence that she did not have to provide a grandchild. ‘It’s my body,’ maintained Antonia, ‘and it’s not fair to expect me to be constrained by an accident of biology, is it? Anyway, the world’s already overpopulated, and it’s my right to have a choice, isn’t it? Alexi agrees with me, so don’t think you can go and bully him.’

  ‘Everything is all right, isn’t it?’ asked Pelagia.

  ‘Mama, what do you mean? No, I’m not a virgin, and there isn’t a problem … like that. It’s still very good, if you must know. I don’t want to be mean, but you’re so old-fashioned sometimes.’

  ‘No, I don’t want to know. I’m an old woman, and I don’t need to hear. I just want to be sure. Don’t you think I have a right?’

  ‘It’s my body,’ repeated Antonia, turning the eternal wheel of their dispute back to its original point.