Prospero's Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfu

by Lawrence Durrell

  The discreet picnics among the olive groves, the memoranda, the protocols, the bustles, sidewhiskers, long top boots, tea cosies, mittens, rock cakes, chutney, bolus, dignity, incompetence, bookkeeping, virtue, church bazaars; you will find traces of all of them if you look deeply enough. The flash of red hunting coats through the olive groves as the officers galloped over the island on their dangerous paper chases; the declarations of love among the cypresses, the red-faced sportsmen setting out for Albania. Big Tom, Adams, Leech, and “Fusty” Andrews; Lockler, Jones, and Jervis White-Jervis. Dr. Anstead fussily visiting these “embayed seas” to record the lamentable venality of the islanders. Edward Lear’s gloomy pictures of Perama and the Hyallic Gulf. Caught once and for all and absorbed into the atmosphere and line of the landscape with its arbors, mountains, and Byronic moonlight; preserved in a style of moustache among the peasants, or in the top-hatted moments of the Karaghiozis pantheon, or in the fragmentary touching love of the small urchins who will run crying beside the antiquated horse carriages which no taxis can ever oust, offering “flowers for the Englishman’s lady” in accents no German or Frenchman has ever heard. Nothing has been lost of England’s inner accent; yet the forts lie empty of ordnance and cannon-balls. The battleships come now as visitors. And Turnock’s Royal Hotel where Anstead met with “food, civility, and moderate prices” has left: no trace behind it.

  12.1.37

  The French burned the Golden Book in which the names of the Venetian families were inscribed, and the aristocracy died in the flames to be reborn, phoenix-like, in titles stiff and unreal as old brocade.

  The British did their best to reinstate the aristocratic tradition—as the Count would say “by abstract principles.”

  When Britain left the abrupt fierce history of the island seemed to cease, and the gradual decay of communications and facilities made it more than ever remote, mysterious, and hard to reach. The landscape reverted to its own prolix disordered pattern. The stout roads have remained to this day; and the water supply of the town, despite periodic hitches, still operates as smoothly as when Adams first devised and carried out its building. But there is one English eccentricity remarked by the natives which the Count has missed; the English demand for houses with lavatories. An “English” house in the island, has come to mean a house with a lavatory, and the landlord of such a house will charge almost double the ordinary rent for so remarkable an innovation. Bathrooms are even rarer and are considered a dangerous and rather satanic contrivance. For the peasants a bath is something you are sometimes forced to take by the doctor as a medicinal measure; the idea of cleanliness does not enter into it. Theodore often quotes the old peasant who reverently crossed himself when shown the fine tiled bathroom at the Count’s country house and said: “Pray God, my Lord, that you will never need it.”

  Nimiec has an anecdote, unsavory if illustrative, which should find a place in the appendix to Harington’s Metamorphoses; he arrived at a fishing village in Merlera on one of his fishing jaunts, and was housed in a small cottage with an earth lavatory, primitive and so full of flies that he drew the attention of his host to its condition. His host said briskly, “Flies? Of course there are flies. If you could do as we all do and wait until just before the midday meal you would not find a fly in the lavatory. They all come round to the kitchen.”

  1.3.38

  Jervis states that there are only three considerable historians of the island, but if one must speak the truth, there is only one history of the island written in the true Corcyrean spirit, gay, mendacious, and self-assured. This is by Andrea Di Marmora, who published it in Venice in 1670. His record of Corcyra’s history is justly considered a standard work by Zarian. “I confess,” says Jervis, “to have been rather starded when I read in this author that the Romans conquered Britain and defeated the Parthians owing to the assistance received from the Corfcyreans, but there was a certain charm in reading the history of Rome in such a new light.”

  1.4.38

  The Saint does not seem to have played a great part in the age of British Protection; it is presumed that he was sulking since on one occasion the Governor (a dull and brutish fellow) refused the islanders the use of a military band to celebrate Spiridion’s festival.

  Yet I am happy to find in Kirkwall that a certain Colonel Wright of the Royal Artillery, set matters right with the old fellow. He obtained leave for the saluting battery in the fort to remain untouched as, says Kirkwall, “he thought it hard that the Corfiots should be denied the pleasure of saluting St. Spiro.”

  There is no statue to Colonel Wright on the esplanade. But it is to be hoped that his name has been passed up by Spiridion for inscription in the Golden Book—not of St. Mark, but of St. Peter.

  1.5.38

  Shooting rabbits on the island of Vido my brother records the following conversation with a man about to embark in a rowing boat for the mainland.

  “Good morning.”

  “Good morning.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “From the prison.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Home. I get every weekend off?’

  “What is your sentence?”

  “A life sentence. I am a murderer.”

  Vido was once nobly wooded; but the French cut down all the trees in order to facilitate military operations. The prison is a pleasant white-washed building standing back from the sea. The prisoners themselves keep up a steady trade in little carved objects of wood and beaten metal; workmanship of a stylized Byzantine kind, but sensitive and pleasant in its crude way.

  1.6.38

  The flying-boats of Imperial Airways have discovered Govino, where the earthworks and embrasures of the Venetian port sink yearly deeper in the silt. Here in the shadow of Pantocratoras the big-bellied Shorts circle and hover until their keels suddenly rip open the emerald lake surface, and the long shavings of water curl up on each side. Spiro is the favorite taxi driver of the pilots; they like his Brooklyn drawl, his boasting, his coyness; he combines the air of a chief conspirator with a voice like a bass viol. His devotion to England is so flamboyant that he is known locally as Spiro Americanos. Prodigious drinker of beer, he resembles a cask with legs; coiner of oaths and roaring blasphemies, he adores little children, and never rides out in his battered Dodge without two at least sitting beside him listening to his stories. We never see “his pilots”—as he calls them—yet one of them lives in our memory as the author of a gesture in keeping with the spirit of the island. One of these English boys on the homeward trip takes back a bunch of Corcyrean flowers for his wife; at four in the morning, an hour before the departure, he and Spiro drive out to Canoni and gather flowers in the light of the headlamps from that dew-drenched sward above Mouse Island. With the first light of dawn he is in the air, heading for England, with his wet bunch of narcissi or grave asphodel. It is the kind of little devotion that touches the raw heart of Spiro as he pants and grunts up the slopes of Canoni, his big fists full of wet flowers, and his sleepy mind thinking of the English girl who tomorrow will touch this lovely evidence of the island’s perpetual spring. Spiro is dead.

  Landscape with

  Olive Trees

  1.10.38

  DOMINANT IN A landscape full of richer greens, the olive is for the peasant both a good servant and a hard master. In the good olive year whose harvest stretches across from January to May, the whole country population is busy attending to the tree which provides the island with its staple diet—olive oil.

  Throughout the spring months, through the gales of March and the hard sunspots of April, the tireless women are out with their soft: wicker hampers gathering the fruit as it falls. In the other islands the fruit is beaten from the tree and the tree itself pruned; but in Corcyra this has been, for hundreds of years, considered harmful. Prolix in its freedom therefore the olive takes strange shapes; sometimes it will swell and burst open, ramifying its shoots until a whole clump of trees seems to grow out of the breast of the parent;
in some places (there is one particular grove between Kouloura and Kassopi) the trees grow tall and slender, with bodies not rough, but of a marvellous platinum-grey, and branches aerial and fine of attitude. In the northern crags again the olive crouches like a boxer; its roots undermine roads; its skin is rough and wormy; and its pitiful exhausted April flowering is like an appeal for mercy against the conspiracy of rock and heat.

  There is no estate without its oil magazine—a low building with stamped earthen floor which houses the presses and all the machinery of the trade. It is here that the long lines of colored women come, bearing their baskets full of the sloe-shaped fruit, now covered in bloom, and here they stand, gorgeous as birds, they shake the rain from their dresses and receive their dole of bread and piercing garlic.

  Built up against the wall of the magazine lie the cold stone bunkers which slowly brim with the fruit; while monstrous in the shadows stands the massive and primitive mill. This has a stone bed with a gutter about three feet high. From its center a beam supports a granite millstone. A smaller beam standing at right angles to this can be harnessed to the neck of a pony which supplies the millstone’s power.

  On wet days when a big wood fire is built at which the women can dry themselves as they come in from olive gathering, the shadows leap and flap against the gloom of the archways, throwing into sudden relief the strings of onions and tobacco hanging from the roof, the unruffled chickens lying in the straw, the weaving loom, and perhaps the sagacious evil face of the billygoat munching in a corner.

  The olive gathering is an all-weather business; in the blinding February storms you hear the little hard berries dropping to the ground, and, if you happen to be standing on high ground looking southward you can see the visible track of the north wind as it strikes the valley, turning the olive trees inside out—so that they change from green to silver and back to green. Under the shelter of archway and wall the women stoop in circles steadily filling their hampers while the rain rattles like small shot in the leaves about them and the first thirsty wild flowers stir in the cold ground under their feet.

  But the olive tree has hardly suited its internal economy to its position, for its attenuated white flowering commences in April, just when it is most occupied with the ripening of its fruit; so that if its previous year’s blossom has been prolific, it has hardly the strength to blossom again. Its crop is irregular, and the lean years for the harvesters are very lean indeed. Bread and oil as a diet hardly leaves any margin for thrift.

  After the first pressing in the mill bed the men come with their wide-mouthed baskets and gather up the magma, piling its greyish mass into a wooden press; the pony, whose efforts at the millstone are now no longer necessary, is unharnessed and turned loose in the paddock. Taking up the long wooden lever, the men begin to screw at the pulp, helping the oil away if the weather is cold, by pouring boiling water upon it. As the pressure becomes stronger, they fasten a rope to a sort of primitive windlass, and give the creaking structure their whole weight. It is like the birth of something in the gloom of the great magazine; their groans echo through the cypress floors of the house. The windlass creaks. The fowls cluck nervously about the feet of the men. Appreciatively sitting in the great fireplace with the light playing upon his beard, the abbot of the local monastery lends moral support as he sips his glass of wine.

  The oil itself spurts dirtily in the stone gutters and slips drop by drop into the underground stone tanks where it will be left to settle itself into purity; while the madder colored acid refuse is run off into the gutters—where its pungent smell and the scorched herbage of its course are familiar characteristics of the landscape.

  After many settlings in the various stone tanks the oil is considered pure enough to send to the town to the bulk dealers, poured into leather skins, which bobble and gulp, it is loaded into carts which rumble slowly off down the circuitous paths to Corfu. Bright and greasy in the sunlight the skins jog hideously together like so many truncated corpses.

  The cakes of the refuse, now dried brown and stiff, and empty of juice, are stacked in the dry corners of the magazine, to be used later for fuel. Broken up they burn with a subdued smoldering warmth, and added to wood and coal, give our winter stove fuel enough to carry us through the three worst months.

  Though the olive is an undependable friend its role never varies; dipped into it, the coarse peasant bread tastes dense and foul—yet the children of the fishermen have warm brown skins and dazzling white teeth. Everything is cooked in it. And it is only poetic justice to observe that every saint’s shrine has lamps which are replenished by the offering of the poor, who have slaved nearly the whole year round in varying weather to gathering the yield of the tree.

  The whole Mediterranean—the sculptures, the palms, the gold beads, the bearded heroes, the wine, the ideas, the ships, the moonlight, the winged gorgons, the bronze men, the philosophers—all of it seems to rise in the sour, pungent taste of these black olives between the teeth. A taste older than meat, older than wine. A taste as old as cold water.

  The olive in Corcyra is the smallholder’s pride, and in the wooded parts of the island land values are usually computed on the basis of the number of olive trees. It is usual for the larger proprietors to let out the season’s oil crop to the peasant living on the property, who works the crop and receives half the oil in return. But in the poorer villages holdings can amount to as little as two or three trees—and prospective property speculators take great care when buying a piece of land, to find out who owns the olive trees, as their possession confers right of way.

  1.14.38

  Abstemious in the matter of drinks, the Greeks produce their own light wines and cognacs in abundance. Yet during our whole stay here we have seen a drunk person not more than once; and more endearing still, we have discovered that these people have so delicate a palate as to be connoisseurs of cold water. The glass of water appears everywhere; it is an adjunct to every kind of sweetmeat, and even to alcohol. It has a kind of biblical significance. When a Greek drinks water he tastes it, and pressing it against the palate, savors it. The peasants will readily tell you which wells give the sweetest water, while even the townspeople retain a delicate taste in water, and are able to recognize the different sources from which the little white town handcarts (covered in green boughs) are replenished.

  Two days before Christmas we climbed the dizzy barren razorback of Pantocratoras to the monastery from which the whole strait lay bare, lazy and dancing in the cold haze. Lines of dazzling water crept out from Butrinto, and southward, like a beetle on a plate, the Italian steamer jogged its six knots towards Ithaca. Clouds were massing over Albania, but the flat lands of Epirus were frosty bright. In the little cell of the warden monk, whose windows gave directly upon the distant sea, and the vague rulings of waves to the east, we sat at a deal table and accepted the most royal of hospitalities—fresh mountain walnuts and pure water from the highest spring; water that had been carried up on the backs of women in stone jars for several hundred feet.

  1.15.38

  During the last summer visit to the Count D. we attended a ceremony which furnished the seed for a whole train of arguments about pagan survivals, which have since been incorporated in one of Theodore’s many unpublished monographs. The Count was halfway down the avenue of cypress trees when we came upon him, carrying in his hand a beautiful Venetian dish, full of something which only Theodore recognized as Colyva—the offering to the dead. “You will perhaps walk with me,” said the Count, turning aside after his usual greetings, “and assist me. I am making a small reverence to a cousin of mine who died two years ago today.” Noticing Zarian’s hungry eye upon the dish (for our walk had been a long and dusty one) he smiled and said: “It is a peasant custom still—and descended from who knows what pagan rite.” He removed the lid for us to look at the contents. “Pomegranate seeds, wheat, pine nuts, almonds and raisins, all soaked in honey. Here, it really tastes rather nice. Try some.” Together we walked with him thr
ough the wood, following the bridle paths, until we came to the small chapel, surrounded by tall cypresses. The Count undid the heavy iron padlock which secured the door to what appeared to be the family vault. The gloom was intense, and the shadow thrown by the cypresses gave it a greenish radiance. We entered down three earthen steps leading to the concrete floor upon which the uncouth stone tombs stood, primitive in their lack of ornament. “There is no need for the unearthly hush,” said the Count quietly. “For us death is very much a part of everything. I am going to put this down here on Alecco’s tomb to sustain his soul. Afterwards I shall offer you some more of it at home, my dear Zarian, to sustain your body. Is that not very Greek? We never move far in our metaphysical distinctions from the body itself. There is no incongruity in the idea that what fortifies our physical bowels, will also comfort Alecco’s ghostly ones. Or do you think we are guilty of faulty dissociation?” Zarian and Theodore, more at home in the gloom now, potter the length of the vault. While Theodore characteristically examines the moss upon the walls and attempts to recall its medical name, Zarian concentrates upon a tomb in the corner which appears to be empty; the cracked stone lid lies beside it, as if it had fallen off in the struggles of the body to re-enter life. “Ugly things, these tombs,” says the Count. “Like the bunkers of a merchant ship. Ah! you are looking at the empty one. It used to belong to my Uncle John, who caused us a lot of trouble. He became a vampire, and so we had him moved to the church behind the hill, where the ecclesiastical authorities could keep an eye on him. You did not know that the vampire exists?”

  Walking back to the house across the green grass of the meadow, Theodore and the Count exchange reminiscences of vampiredom. The vampire is still believed in. It is known as a Vrikolax and is the reward for an exceptionally evil life. In some cases vampires have been reported to have terrorized villages to such an extent that the Church has had to be called in to use its powers of exorcism. “Uncle John,” says the Count, “whom I remember as an old grey-whiskered ruffian in jack-boots, appears to have been an exceptionally wicked man. His reappearance was fully borne out by over two hundred witnesses, some of whose children had actually died. It was unpleasant, but they dug him up and put a stake into his heart in the traditional fashion. I felt that it was more politic to move him off the estate into the precincts of a church in order to avoid gossip.”