by Norman Lewis
I went back to my driver. Together we made a small donation to the temple funds and the men who collected it daubed our foreheads with grey sandalwood paste carried in a jam-jar. The driver asked for a little extra, and this was given him in a twist of paper. He was a religious man, and in the car he spread a little on each of the two idols fixed to the dashboard, sparing a trace for an icon of the Virgin and Child which, thus anointed, he replaced in the glove box. We set out on the return journey, and he offered to show me round the city for a cut price; but I told him that I had already seen the sights.
1989
Looking Down the Wells
I WAS STUDYING THE endemic lizards of the island of Kos when I spotted an intriguing news item in a Greek newspaper. This reported an investigation by the police into rumours that women on the small island of Anirini in the Cretan sea were disposing of unwanted husbands by throwing them down dry wells. It was a moment when, after some months of largely routine and statistical work, I felt in need of stimulation and variety. I looked into the shipping situation, finding that there were no ferries to Anirini but that sponge-fishing boats from the nearby island of Kalimnos touched there with fair regularity on their way to North African waters. It turned out that one would be leaving in a matter of days, so I went over to Kalimnos and arranged a passage.
What fascinated me about this story of homicidal wives—and raised so many questions—was that what was supposed to have happened here in the Cretan sea bore a remarkable resemblance to sinister occurrences elsewhere in the Mediterranean. Something of the kind had been reported from an ex-penal island off the coast of Sicily, and while I was in Ibiza some years before, the police had investigated the cases of several married men said to have emigrated to Argentina whose remains were found at the bottom of wells. Here again the wives fell under suspicion, and although the evidence proved insufficient to bring them to trial, the view of the islanders was that boredom had probably driven the wives to desperate ends.
I raised the question of boredom with the sponge fishermen with whom I travelled, but it was a subject of which they showed little understanding. What to us was an exceptional and usually temporary frame of mind was to them a normality to which they surrendered themselves without protest. There were three of them, in addition to the crew of two, all in their forties, with torsos and limbs brine-cured like hams, and given to long hours of silence. They carried a prostitute with them, a sharp-faced waif called Penelope from the Piraeus waterfront, whom they indulged like a spoiled child and decked with cheap jewellery and rare and extraordinary coral collected from the depths of the sea. They spent the three days of the crossing from one island to the next eating, sleeping and making love—the last on a strict rota—in this way preparing themselves for the stresses to be faced when the diving began. There were a few second-quality sponges to be fished in the shallow waters surrounding Anirini, then they would move on to Benghazi to venture into the great depths and fish with the blood vessels exploding behind their eyes and fighting off the cheerful apathy induced by the nitrogen forced into the blood.
Anirini was all I expected it to be: a brief sketching of cypresses and rocks on a glassy sea, silence, whiteness, harsh scents, egglike domes and a slow-moving, calm yet histrionic population, like bit-part actors waiting to go on stage in a Theban play. The earth that sustained life had been brought here and unloaded from boats over the centuries; subsequently it was enriched with the manure of donkeys, which were a principal form of wealth. The islanders grew figs and olives of the bitter kind and made cheese from the milk of their goats. On this plain fare, enlivened in spring by fledgling seagulls collected from their nests on the cliffs, and at other times by the small, spiny fish to be netted in these waters, they lived on in a vigorous fashion into ripe and supremely uneventful old age.
A locanda provided a tiny white dungeon of a room for use by the occasional tax collector from the mainland, and I was the first guest to occupy it that year. It was run by a woman called Eleni, recognisable from the Greek journalist’s description, although not mentioned by name, as one of the suspects in the case of the missing husbands. For two days the sponge fishermen went off to dive in shallow waters, coming here in the cool of the evening to fraternise with the locals in the bar. These elderly, tongue-tied, motionless, closely related men accepted the sponge fishermen’s gifts of live crabs, which they caught in abundance, tore off their legs and chewed at them thoughtfully. It later appeared that the locals were disconcerted by the enormous Yugoslav watches worn by the visitors, preferring not to be reminded too directly of the passage of time. Once a sponge fisherman turned to whisper to me, ‘Now I know what you meant. Yes, this is boredom.’
By the morning of the third day, the boat’s worn-out engine was coaxed into life once again, and the three divers, wearing their huge watches, and Penelope, glittering with necklaces, pendants and rings, stood together on deck as the boat ploughed a misted furrow of water across the harbour, making for the open sea once more, this time for the deep waters of Cyrenaica.
I trudged back through the empty, clean-cut light and shade to the locanda and watched Eleni rinse out glasses behind the counter. This she did, eyes averted, with a series of graceful, premeditated gestures. All her actions, whether busying herself with a broom, emptying a pail or replacing some object in its proper position, conformed to the movements of a vestal dance. Within hours of my arrival I had been offered, for the equivalent of £108, a supposedly ancient terracotta statuette of a goddess, said to have been unearthed in an island cave; the resemblance between Eleni and the figurine was extraordinary. Eleni was a Pallas Athena in the flesh, with the same almond eyes, the same long, classic nose pinched in at the tip, the same faintly critical half-smile and roped up edifice of hair framing her face. Stefanos—the man who had tried to sell me the statuette—had been evasive when I enquired into the disappearance of her husband. ‘I guess he emigrated,’ he said. ‘Anyone who can, does.’
Stefanos was thirty-nine. He had smuggled himself into the United States, and worked illegally for five years in a beer factory in Milwaukee before detection and banishment, excluded thus from a paradise he would never re-enter. Now he had settled—with huge reluctance—back on the island of his birth. In season he climbed the cliff faces to gather young birds for pickling. He acted as middleman in the collection and distribution of donkey manure, and he caught the squid used as bait for a handful of fishermen, receiving a few fish in return. His office of go-between had been inherited from his father, and once in a while he arranged a marriage and pinned the drachma notes on the bridal dress. But now the island’s population was falling fast and marriages had become rare.
‘How’s the investigation going?’ I asked him.
‘We have one island policeman,’ he said. ‘He is looking down the wells. We have one hundred wells on the island. Some of them are sixty feet deep. So far he has looked down three. If you want that thing I showed you, you can have it for 7,000 drachmas. Theoharis from Athens was over here when they dug into the cave, but the guys got away with this one.’
With the departure of the sponge fishermen there was a small problem with time. My own watch had ceased to work after a dousing in sea water, Stefanos was without one and there were few clocks on the island. ‘Let’s go and see if the old man has been fed yet,’ Stefanos said.
The old man was Eleni’s paralysed father, whose daily routine, followed in public, provided—along with the position and shape of the shadows on the walls—a rough guide to the hours. At exactly 6 a.m. he had himself carried out of doors and laid upon a bed in the shade of a great vine. From this position in the past he had taken pleasure in a view of damascened cliffs dominating a seascape etched on air, the occasional swoop of a raven over the polished waves, and the men far below casting their nets like discus throwers with the faint supplicatory scream that probably no longer reached his ears: ‘Almighty God, send me a fish.’ At 1 p.m. the old man would raise a hand, bringing Eleni with a
bowl of the beans upon which he lived; 3 p.m. was the time for the arrival of the odd-job boy with the bedpan, who would return precisely at 7 p.m. to assist Eleni with the task of getting her father back into the house.
When we arrived on the scene the bowl had been emptied of beans but not removed, and Stefanos’s observations led him to calculate that it was about 1.30 p.m. We moved back into the eternal twilight of the bar in which Eleni’s white-whiskered cousins, twice- or thrice-removed, were propped, rosaries in hand, like carved church images against the wall. ‘All day the search goes on for something to do,’ Stefanos said, ‘but outside work there is nothing. We tire of each other’s faces. That is why arranged marriages are bad, which I say although I have been in the business myself. For a woman this can be like being roped face to face with a stranger for the rest of her days. In Anirini there are no crimes—only illegal solutions.’
We went on a tour of inspection of the wells hacked out by slaves, Stefanos said, in the days of the Turks. The wells were all over the mountainside, most of them long since gone dry, and in many instances the wellheads were covered with honeysuckle, which flourished in the cold, stagnant air breathed out from the depths of the earth. We found two men working with ropes and hooks, while a third—the island policeman—picked over the detritus they had recovered and piled it into a wheelbarrow. He was encircled by a chorus of black old women, and at the moment of our arrival the village priest came gliding into sight, his face carved with noble indifference. ‘Ninety-five more wells to be examined,’ Stefanos said. ‘Here it is impossible to waste time. A drunken man goes out for a piss at night and falls down a well. If anything is found, what does it prove?’
The great heat forced us back into the locanda, where the door had been thrown open and Eleni stood in an obelisk of sunbeams washing out her father’s bowl. ‘Next week the sponge fishers are back,’ Stefanos said. ‘You will be leaving us. We shall be sorry.’
‘So will I. It’s been a great experience.’
‘You look at that lady all the time. Before you come here every time you put on a clean shirt, but you never say anything to her.’
‘All she ever says to me is good morning or good evening.’
‘But you like her very much.’
‘I admire her. She’s very beautiful.’
‘She is the most beautiful Greek lady you have seen perhaps?’
‘I think she is.’
‘You are missing an opportunity.’
‘In what way?’
‘You sit here and you do nothing. It would be easy for you to know her much better.’
‘And how would I set about doing that?’
‘Nothing is possible on this island. Even the stones have eyes. You would have to take her somewhere else. Let us say Kalimnos.’
Eleni turned slowly, bowl in hand, as if placing herself on display in the drift of the bright motes. I could feel her eyes on us. Where was the motive hidden in this labyrinth?
‘There would be a high price to pay,’ I said.
‘There would be nothing to pay.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of money.’
‘What else is there to worry about? You want the woman—take her.’ He quoted a Greek proverb: ‘It’s the sins we don’t commit we regret.’
The island policeman gave up his profitless hunt, but a police launch chugged into the harbour next day bringing a plain-clothes inspector from Khanía. He was a grey, scuttling little man with a smile of the kind designed to screen secret thought. In a single day he questioned all the young widows and those women whose husbands had disappeared, pressing three of them including Eleni as to the reason for their being reported to have dropped flowers down certain wells. In the evening we drank ouzo together. Covering his mouth, the inspector raked delicately at his teeth with a gold toothpick and watched me intently over the arch of his curved fingers.
His life’s passion, he said, was sea fishing, but for one kind of fish alone—the majestic and somewhat mysterious dentex, once served only at pashas’ tables. When taken, in its last extremity and dragged within inches of the surface, he said, it glowed with a sudden marine incandescence—instantly extinguished in death. This mortuary outburst of colours was the devoted angler’s reward. To catch a dentex called for familiarity based on long study of the habits of the fish. It required special tackle, dedication and faith. ‘I know where they are to be found, and I go there,’ the inspector said. ‘Sometimes I fish for days and I catch nothing, but I am sure in the end of success. I am a patient man.’
The sponge fishermen were due back on Sunday, and on Saturday I went to Stefanos’s ruined house for our last meal together. Mention was made of the inspector.
‘He is from Ioánnina in the north,’ Stefanos said. ‘A cold place where the sea never warms the land. It is impossible to come to terms with such people.’
‘My feeling is he’ll be with you for quite a time.’
‘Did you think any more about my proposal?’
‘Yes, but in any case it’s too late. I see the island policeman has moved his quarters down to the port.’
‘My friend, you will never forgive yourself,’ Stefanos said. He unwrapped a newspaper package and took out the terracotta statuette. ‘This is something to remember her by,’ he said. ‘Take it and give me anything you like.’
I gave him 2,000 drachmas, the equivalent of £10, and when he jumped up and kissed me on both cheeks I knew it was the fake it turned out to be.
Six months later when I was back in England he sent me a clipping from an Athens newspaper for which he had provided a translation:
‘“Referring to the case of Eleni accused of the murder of her husband,” Judge Costandiadros said, “I am at a loss to understand why it was ever brought. There was no history of conflict in this relationship, and the injuries sustained were consonant with those to be expected from such a fall.”’ The judge added that it was not inconceivable that, disheartened by his unsuccessful efforts to emigrate, the husband might have taken his own life.
‘My dear friend, this is for your interest,’ Stefanos wrote. ‘We have been lucky. The judge is almost a neighbour—from the island of Karpathos. I am happy to say to you that our beloved Eleni is back with us once more and her innocence proved. She sends you warm greetings, and we are impatiently awaiting your return.’
1988
The Snakes of Cocullo
COCULLO SITS ON A hilltop in Abruzzo, on a level with Rome, but across the country from it, under the Apennines. This is a land of dark, lumpy mountains, empty roads threading through the valleys, and nothing in the silent fields to attract even carrion birds. An occasional village is crammed on to the top of a steep rock pinnacle, some half-empty, some wholly deserted. Fragments of the old southern customs survive where there are people. Guaratrici (female healers) and prefiche (professional mourners) still serve the needs of the local population. Makers of amulets and those who concoct love philtres carry on a semi-clandestine trade. This is the part of Italy where magic and Christian faith are hardly separable. The ‘Catholicism of the people’ exists alongside the authorised version of the religion.
It is very much a family affair. The saints are still rewarded for their successful intercession in village matters, blamed for failures, and carried in procession to pay one another courtesy visits. Some houses have protective formulae against the evil eye carved in the stone over their doors.
The fame of Cocullo lies in the survival here of a snake-cult dating from pre-Roman worship of the Angizia, goddess of agriculture and snake-charming in the ancient Marsican culture. On 19 March every year, the young men who have inherited or acquired the intuitions and skills required in the capture and domination of snakes go into the surrounding mountains for the ritual of the annual hunt. The snakes taken at this time are brought back to the village where—treated with a certain indulgence, even affection—they are prepared to adopt the principal role in the festival held on the first Thursday of May, when the proc
ession of the serpari (snake men) takes place. Before this they receive the blessing of the Church, and are then ‘offered’ to San Domenico. The saint—also a snake-charmer in his time—arrived in Cocullo in 996, to take over officially from the goddess. The ritual, however, seems to have continued much as before.
The pagan goings-on at Cocullo seem to have been practically unnoticed even in Italy outside Abruzzo until a visit paid to the village in 1909 at the time of its snake festival by a Mr W.H. Woodward, who thereafter gave an account of his adventures in the Manchester Guardian. Mr Woodward arrived as the proceedings were about to start. Making straight for the church, he was surprised to find, a half-hour before High Mass was due to be celebrated, that a number of shepherds were kneeling at the altar rail, each with several huge white wolfhounds held on a leash, their muzzles resting on the rail. The dogs were there to be blessed and at the same time to be ‘reverently’ touched by a relic left by San Domenico when taking his departure from the village. This took the form of a shoe from his mule. The shoe was employed as a talisman against rabies. An even more cherished gift made by the saint, Mr Woodward was told, was a tooth he had wrenched from his jaw on the moment of parting. Ever since, sufferers from toothache in Cocullo had been able to cure themselves by kissing the relic, attaching a cord to the troublesome tooth and then using this to pull the special toothache bell in the church.
There were more surprises in store for Mr Woodward. Next day the procession took place, and he was startled by the emergence from the church of the image of San Domenico entwined with numerous snakes, and followed by members of the clergy, each carrying a serpent. It seems likely that vipers were present among the snakes carried at this time, for Mr Woodward goes on, ‘The crowd hails him with prayers and invocations. Despite the seeming peril, hands are put forward to touch the saint…The venerable priest under the canopy carried his votive serpent with no sense of horror as being an evil thing, but rather with a caressing friendliness…’
