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

by Lawrence Durrell

  This theme, sufficiently exciting to wake Zarian from the abstraction into which his weekly Armenian article always throws him, also wakens Theodore in whom there lives a vague Edwardian desire to square applied science with comparative religion. The Count listens with exquisite politeness to a dissertation upon peasant lore. No one could guess that he has already heard it on several occasions. Throughout lunch, which we eat in the shade of the grape arbor, Theodore unloads his evidence of pagan survivals in Greece—informtion which Zarian notes down excitedly on his cuff, on the tablecloth, in the battered notebook. Zarian’s inveterate note-taking is a charming trait in his character—especially as he has never yet been known to succeed in reading his own notes afterwards, so cramped and illegible a hand has he. Theodore spends hours helping him to decode his own notes every Tuesday when the massive and erudite Armenian article must be begun.

  During the afternoon, while the worthies of my Corcyrean pantheon are sleeping in shuttered rooms, I slip down to the house of the peasant family and borrow the Count’s placid little mare, which will take me through the vineyards and woods to what is perhaps the loveliest beach in the world. Its name is Myrtiotissa. Lion-gold sand, of the consistency of tapioca, lies smoothly against the white limestone cliff, thrown up in roundels by the force of the sea, which breaks upon a narrow sand bank some sixty yards clear of the shore. The rocks here are pitted and perforated into natural cisterns, sluggish with weed, and which the receding tide has left full of seawater and winking fishes; water which the sun has heated to greater than the temperature of human blood. Lowering myself into these natural baths, holding softly to the ladder of many-colored seaweed, I feel the play of the Ionian, rising and falling about an inch upon the back of my neck. It is like the heartbeat of the world itself. It is no longer a region or an ambience where the conscious or subconscious mind can play its incessant games with itself; but penetrating to a lower level still, the sun numbs the source of ideas itself, and expands slowly into the physical body, spreading along the nerves and bones a gathering darkness, a weight, a power. So that each individual finger bone, each individual arm and leg, expand to the full measure of their own animal consciousness in this beneficent and dangerous sun-darkness. The scalp seems to put forth a drenched thatch of seaweed to mingle with the weeds rising and falling around one’s body. One is entangled and suffocated by this sense of physical merging into the elements around one. Blinded by this black sunlight, nothing remains of the known world, save the small sharp toothless kisses of fish on the hanging body—now no longer owned; a providential link with feeling, like the love of women, or the demands of the stomach, which tie one to the world of simple operations. One could die like this and wonder if it was death. The density, the weight and richness of a body without a mind or ghost to trouble it.

  Here sometimes I come across Matthew, the lame dynamiter of fish, whose illegal operations in these bays have already cost him the sight of an eye and two fingers of his left hand. I help him to dive for those of his fish which for some mysterious reason sink instead of staying on the surface. On a fire of twigs in the evening we have often watched him grilling his fish with the absorbed air of a specialist, while Zarian stood by with the salt, and the Count with his little bottle of lemon juice. Matthew chooses the afternoon for his fishing, as the noise of the detonations cannot then dissipate the heavy sleep of the policeman in the little guard house up the hill. He is an admirable companion because he never speaks. Clad in patched clothes and the conventional woollen vest, he moves slowly along the rocky galleries above the sea, his prehensile black toes (now swollen and bloated with damp) gripping the rocky ledges. In his right hand he holds the homemade depth-charge, which is made from a cigarette tin and short length of fuse wire. I follow him at a safe range, to allow for any mechanical faults in this piece of machinery.

  At about three o’clock he will invariably climb the cliff above the bay, to where the monastery stands in its dazzling white sunlight, and fall asleep in the shadow of the main gate with his silver catch lying in his old felt hat upon the grass.

  Three hundred feet below, I cross the margin of scalding white sand, to the shadow of the great rock, and lie panting for a moment, too exhausted by running to move. Above me, leaking from the heart of the cliff, runs sweet water, down a shallow lip of maidenhair, into a sand-bowl; further to the left a mysterious spring rises in the very sand itself with little regular gushes, as if from some severed artery in the earth. At each soundless pulse a small cone of sand rises in the hollow and slowly spins back to the bottom. Clear and cold, the water plays with the regularity of a clock. It is the sweetest of the island waters, because it tastes of nothing but the warm afternoon, the breath of the cicadas, the idle winds crisping at little corners of the inert sea, which stretches away towards Africa, death-blue and timeless.

  In this little bowl I wash the grapes I have brought with me. They are the little early grapes, delicately freckled green, and of a pouting teat-shape. The sun has penetrated their shallow skins and has confused the sweetness with its own warmth; it is like eating something alive.

  Then after a rest another burst of running across the sand to where the cliff path winds upwards, vertiginous and rocky, among the myrtle groves. At the top of the cliffs, if you look back, you see the sea has become a deep throbbing emerald; the sand is freckled by long roaming silver lines across which an occasional lazy fish will move, indulgent of still water. In the shadows under the cliff a piercing nitric green. Far out across the water a brig moves southward into the sun; the noise of its engine is carried in the empty spaces of the air—a sound rubbed out as soon as registered, though nothing has breathed or stirred around one. A white butterfly wavers in across the blue spaces.

  The mare snorts in the shadow of the peasant’s house, glad to return. Half an hour later I am under the terrace upon which Zarian and Theodore sit, drinking tea from heavy Venetian-looking crockery, while the Count, an unfamiliar pipe alight in his mouth, sits and methodically cleans the coat of his favorite gun dog. It is inevitable that the discussion of this morning should be continuing. “But, my dear Doctor” the Count is saying placidly, “I do not know how you can reconcile current religious beliefs without dragging in the ancient Pantheon. Our saints are not canonized and forgotten. They walk. The hagiography of St. Spiridion is still being written in those little two drachma books you buy outside the church. And then, the confusions. You have made a study of the folk songs; have you found a very clear distinction made between the just and the unjust, or the idea of reward and punishment? No. The dead simply drink the waters of Lethe and enter into a sort of mirage life, troubled by vague longings for fleshly joys—everything which we sum up in that most beautiful of Greek words . And then, of course, you have the Underworld, the Abode of the Dead. It is also known as Hades and as Tartarus, just to complete our confusion. And Charon, as you know, still exists, though he has altered his habits. Sometimes black snake, sometimes black swallow or eagle, he is also the Black Cavalier of our modern imaginations, dragging the souls of the dead behind him into the netherworld. And even he is credited in modern mythology with a wife. No. The only return for the dead seems to be for the unlucky or the evil; they become vampires and roam for a short while, until the Church catches up with them.”

  Zarian is wearing his spectacles which means that he is paying extra close attention. Meanwhile Theodore nods his golden beard and, pouring out his tea into a saucer, blows upon it to cool it. The methodical fingers of the Count move through the shaggy coat of the animal, pulling off the fat white ticks, pursed with blood, one by one. “And then the naiads” says the Count again, with his peculiar sweetness of voice, “and the nereids that haunt our fountains and wells—what would we do without them? The shadow of the cypress which at noonday can drive a sleeper mad? The sea maiden that winds her arms about those poor fishermen whom the full moon has overtaken on the strands?” Theodore is giving his famous grunt of disapproval which we have all learned
to imitate. It is a kind of humming behind closed lips. “You cannot, my dear Doctor,” continues the Count ruthlessly, “make them compare with your scientific findings, yet we are glad to own them, even if they are lapses from the material attitude. They are part of the fantasy of this remarkable country and island, are they not?”

  The dog whimpers softly as the strong antiseptic is applied to the little raw wounds left by the ticks; the Count’s shapely hands cherish and soothe it. He looks up smiling, and watches Zarian disposing of a cake in short order. “And think of the piercing lamentations of the professional mourners. I have made a collection of them—all spontaneous poetry, and some of the best known to the language. But there is no trace of the good-and-evil preoccupation. No, we Greeks are not religious, we are superstitious and anarchic. Even death is less important than politics. There is a kind of old Mother Hubbard who lives on the hill there; she is much in demand at funerals because of her poetic gift. Last year when Taki the fisherman died you should have heard her singing. It would have moved a stone.”

  My silver boy, My golden one,

  Softer the down on his face

  Than breast of the woodcock;

  Keener his mind than a snake striking.

  The silver person has left us.

  The golden man has gone.

  “We carried him in his open box to the cemetery on the hill, and all the time this poetry was flowing out of Mother Hubbard in a continuous stream, keeping pace with her tears, for she really loved Taki.”

  “Was the coffin open?” says Zarian

  “Yes. There again a point is proved.”

  “Is that a religious custom of the island?”

  “No. But under the Turks it was a law to prevent the smuggling of arms in coffins under the pretence of carrying corpses to the grave. In some places it has lingered on among the superstitious. So Taki’s pale aquiline features were visible all the way as the ragged little procession wound up the hill. He looked as if he were about to smile. Of course no sooner was he dead and buried than Mother Hubbard, who was some vague relation, took out an injunction against his mother, to prevent her disposing of Taki’s twenty olive trees, which, she said, had been given to her as a gift. You see, there seemed to her no incongruity in making poetry for a dead man whom you love, and whose heirs you are trying to swindle. The case dragged on for months and I believe she lost it.”

  As we talk we are watching out of the corner of our eyes the little party of sprayers which moves slowly down the rows of olive trees. The foremost man holds the long canister with the tapering spout, through which he sprays a jet of arsenic and molasses, in a light cloud over each tree, to preserve the bloom against the ravages of its special pest.…

  “It is fortunate” says the Count, “to have a rich language. Look at my olive trees. How immeasurably they are enriched by the poetic symbolism which surrounds them—the platonic idea of the olives. The symbol for everything enriched by the domestic earth and private virtue. Then again, we use the word for those small dark moles which our women sometimes have on their faces or throats. And of course, being Greek, I find myself thinking at one and the same moment of all these facts, as well as the fact that the olive brings me in some eight hundred pounds a year on which to philosophize. Poetry and profit are not separated at all. For the Greek there is only the faintest dividing line.”

  The evening light mellows very softly into its range of warm lemon tones, pressing among the close bunches of ripening grapes, and washing the tiles of the peasant houses in the valley. The turtledoves croon softly in the arbors behind the orchard. The cicadas are dying out—station after station closing down. The two great plane-trees are already silent, and only in the meadow where the sun still plays do they keep up their singing. In the altering values of sound one becomes aware of the chink of teacups as the servant girl clears away.

  “The great god Pan,” says the Count, reverting suddenly to his original theme, which has been running as an undercurrent in his thoughts all this time, “was first announced as dead off Paxo, some miles south of us. This island must have been among the first to get the news. We have no record to tell us how the islanders received it. Yet in our modern pantheon we have a creature whose resemblance to Pan is not, I think, fortuitous. He is, as you know, called the kallikanzaros. He is the house-sprite, a little cloven-hooved satyr with pointed ears, who is responsible for turning milk sour, for leaving doors unlocked, and for causing mischief of every kind. He is sometimes placated by a saucer of milk left upon a window-sill, or a kolouri—one of those quoit-shaped peasant cakes. He also is dying out. But there is one story about him which you, my dear Zarian, will enjoy recording. It is said that on the ten days preceding Good Friday, all the kallikan-zaroi in the Underworld are engaged simultaneously upon the task of sawing through the giant plane-tree whose trunk is supposed to hold up the world. Every year they almost succeed, except that the cry ‘Christ has arisen’ saves us all, by restoring the tree and driving them up in a chattering throng into the real world—if I may call our world that. Perhaps you will be able to find classical origins for the story. I give it to you for what it is worth.”

  Bats are now beginning their short strutting flights against the sky. In the east the color is washing out of the world, leaving room for the great copper-colored moon which will rise soon over Epirus. It is the magic hour between two unrealized states of being—the day-world expiring in its last hot tones of amber and lemon, and the night-world gathering with its ink-blue shadows and silver moonlight.

  “Watch for her,” says the Count, “behind that mountain there.” The air tastes faintly of damp. “She will be rising in a few moments.”

  “I am thinking,” says Zarian, “how nothing is ever solved finally. In every age, from every angle, we are facing the same set of natural phenomena, moonlight, death, religion, laughter, fear. We make idolatrous attempts to enclose them in a conceptual frame. And all the time they change under our very noses.”

  “To admit that,” says the Count oracularly, “is to admit happiness—or peace of mind, if you like. Never to imagine that any of these generalizations we make about gods or men is valid, but to cherish them because they carry in them the fallibility of our own minds. You, Doctor, are scandalized when I suggest that The Tempest might be as good a guide to Corcyra as the official one. It is because the state of being which is recorded in the character of Prospero is something which the spiritually rich or the sufficiently unhappy can draw for themselves out of this clement landscape.”

  “All this is metaphysics,” says Zarian a trifle unhappily.

  “All speculation that goes at all deep becomes metaphysics by its very nature; we knock up against the invisible wall which bounds the prison of our knowledge. It is only when a man has been round that wall on his hands and knees, when he is certain that there is no way out, that he is driven upon himself for a solution.”

  “Then for you, Count,” says Theodore, “the hard and fast structure of the sciences yields nothing more than a set of comparative myths, some with and some without charm?”

  “I would like to pose the problem from another angle. There is a morphology of forms in which our conceptual apparatus works, and there is a censor—which is our conditioned attitude. He is the person whom I would reject, because he prevents me choosing and arranging knowledge according to my sensibility. I will give you an example. I was once asked to write a short history of sixth-century Greek sculpture. My publisher refused the work because in it I had pointed out that sixth-century sculpture reaches it peak in Maillol, an artist of whom the man had not then heard. He informed me that I could not treat history in this manner. He informed me of the fact in the exact tone of voice used by my own censor when I first happened upon a Maillol statue, standing weighed down by its connections with the Mediterranean earth. Yet an instant’s observation will show one that Maillol does not belong to us in space and time, but to them; I mean to the Greeks of the sixth century.”

&nbs
p; At this point, according to time-honored custom, we chant in unison: “And if you don’t believe me there is a Maillol in the garden to prove it to you,” at which the Count smiles his indulgent smile and nods twice. “There is indeed” he says.

  The first bronze cutting-edge of the moon shows behind the mountain, traveling fast. “Ah, there she is” says Zarian.

  “And here we are” says the Count, unwilling to relinquish his subject, “each of us collecting and arranging our common knowledge according to the form dictated to him by his temperament. In all cases it will not be the whole picture, though it will be the whole picture for you. You, Doctor, will proceed under some title like The Natural History, Geology, Botany and Comparative Ethnology of the Island of Corfu. You will be published by a learned society in Vienna. Your work will contain no mention of the first edition of Petrarch in the Library, or of the beautiful mother of Gorgons in the Museum. As for you, Zarian, your articles when they are collected in a book will present a ferocious and lopsided account of an enchanted island which has seduced every historical figure of note from Nero to Napoleon. You will omit the fact that communications are bad and that all Greeks are liars, and that the fleas during the summer are intolerable. It will not be a true picture—but what a picture it will be. Hordes of earnest Armenians from New York will settle here to quote your poetry and prose to each other, and I will be able to charge two drachmae for sitting in the chair which you now occupy and which will certainly outlive you.”