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

by Lawrence Durrell

  “And I?” I say. “What sort of picture will I present of Prospero’s Island?”

  “It is difficult to say,” says the Count. “A portrait inexact in detail, containing bright splinters of landscape, written out roughly, as if to get rid of something which was troubling the optic nerves. You are the kind of person who would go away and be frightened to return in case you were disappointed; but you would send others and question them eagerly about it. You are to be forgiven really, because you have had the best of your youth in the island. And it is only very much later that one grows the courage to return. I noticed that you did not drink of Kardaki’s well the other day. I particularly noticed.”

  “I do not like being bound by charms,” I say.

  At this point Theodore, who has been listening with some impatience to this dissertation upon character, suggests a stroll, and soon we are walking down the avenue of cypresses together, smelling the strong tobacco from the Count’s pipe.

  “Ah no, Doctor,” says the old man, as if continuing aloud an argument which has been going on quietly in his mind, “thought must be free. Let us dispense with the formalist whose only idea is to eliminate the dissonant, the discrepant. Let us marry our ideas and not have them married for us by smaller people. Only in this way will our ideas produce children—for the children of ideas are actions. Dear me,” he adds, “I am hardly in a position to moralize. I live here quietly without children, on money which my grandfather earned. It would be useless my justifying myself to an economist by explaining that I am exercising my sensibility through loving greatly and suffering greatly in all this quietness. Don’t you think?”

  Insensibly his footsteps have led us across the green unkept lawns to where the nymph stands in her rotunda. Her loins fall away in their heavy inevitable lines to her shapely feet. The torso is heavy with its weight of lungs and bone. The breasts ride superbly, held by the invisible thongs of the pectorals.

  “An old man’s love” says the Count. “Look at her. There you have desire which is quite still, retained inside the mind as form and volume—like the grapes for lunch which were still warm and a little drowsy from the sun. It is the speechless potence of the old man, the most terrible kind of desire in stillness which this Mediterranean sculptor has impressed in the rock. Was he happy or unhappy, moral or amoral? He was outside the trap of the opposites. It was a mindless act of coition with the stone that made him describe her. Critics would be interested to know if it was his wife or his eldest daughter. Their speculations would lie right outside the realm in which this sixth-century Pomona stands. It is not desire as we know it—but an act of sex completed by looking at her. The weight of her. Feel how cold the stone arms are.”

  The moon is up now among the trees, and the first screech of the owl rings out across the meadow.

  “Ah! but I see they have lighted the candles and laid the table” says the Count, suddenly conscious of the dew as he moves his toes in his battered felt slippers. “And is it our function simply to stand about here making bad literature? Doctor, we are having brain cutlets in your honor this evening; and my dear Zarian, a bottle of Mantinea red wine for you.”

  Seated at the great table by the sedate light of his own candles, the Count turns to me and says:

  It is the pleasantest form of affection to be able to tease one’s friends. You perhaps do not know the history of the Society of Ionian Studies and the brain cutlets?” At this Theodore shows the faintest signs of impatience, and remarking it, the Count pats him laughingly on the arm. “The Doctor’s well-known passion for brain cutlets is something of which you will have undoubtedly heard. Well, some years ago, he was asked to become President of a small informal society of local savants, who were bent on the pursuit of Ionian studies. They were a sombre and bearded collection—for the most part doctors and lawyers of the island: these being the two classes which have the least work to do. At this time our friend was pursuing some studies upon forms of idiocy at the local asylum; and he was particularly interested in the mental condition of an inmate called Giovannides, whose brain he had been coveting off and on for a number of years. In those days he used to speak about Giovannides’s brain with ill-concealed cupidity, and explain what a splendid time he would have when the patient died. You see, he had been promised the brain for dissection. Now it so happened that this long-awaited event took place upon the very day when the inaugural lunch of the society was due to take place at the Doctor’s house; Theodore was in a state of great excitement. He found himself unable to be patient, and spent the whole morning extracting the brain from its braincase, remembering all the time that he must get home and prepare his speech for the Society. By midday he had succeeded in removing the brain, and, having wrapped it carefully in greaseproof paper, he had managed to reach home with it held in his arms like a precious treasure. On entering the house he realized that the day was exceptionally warm, so he entered the kitchen, where he popped the lunatic’s brain in the ice-box, and retired to his study to prepare his speech. All went well. The guests arrived and were seated at table. The speech was delivered and met with restrained applause. And a steaming dish of the Doctor’s favorite brain-cutlets appeared, which was greeted with delighted exclamations. As the guests were helping themselves the telephone in the corner of the room rang. It was Theodore’s wife, who had rung up to apologize for having been unable to provide him with his favorite dish for lunch. There was, she said, no brain to be bought anywhere in town. An involuntary cry burst from Theodore’s lips. To do him justice, it was not really of his guests that he was thinking so much as of his brain. With a muffled cry of “Giovannides’s brain” he sprang to the kitchen and opened the icebox. The brain had gone. Speechless with anxiety the good doctor returned to the banqueting room and found that his guests were all looking either uneasy or downright ill. Where a lesser man would have carried it off without telling them anything definite, and where a greater would have wrung his hands for science, Theodore simply stood, trembling from head to foot and pointing at the dish of excellent brain cutlets and repeating: “I get a brain and this is what you do. I get a brain and this is what you do.” By this time the truth had dawned upon the Ionian Society; their dissolution was so sudden as to be amazing. The maid threw her apron over her head and burst into sobs. The inaugural lunch was a failure. But that was not the unkindest thing of all. The brain of the lunatic was at this moment safely upon Theodore s desk, in the study; the cook, who was devoted to Theodore, had spent the whole morning searching for brain, and had found some in the nick of time. The cutlets served to the Society were perfectly genuine brain cutlets. But do you think he has ever managed to persuade anyone of the truth of this? No. The Society is now referred to as the Brainfever Society, and its members are all supposed to be suffering from aberrations brought on by this meal.

  This anecdote, which we have heard perhaps a dozen times, always sinks Theodore into a profound gloom; for Zarian laughs so immoderately that he spills his wine, and has a fit of coughing until he almost rolls under the table. This is the Count’s cue, and turning to him on the backwash of his laughter he says: “But perhaps Zarian will permit me to tell you the story of his explorations into Greek wines.” At this, it is Zarian’s turn to look uncomfortable, while Theodore’s face is lit by a shy smile. “You will have noticed,” says the Count, “that Zarian champions everything Greek except the wines. It is true they are not very good, but you would expect a few romantic notes to be blown from time to time on his trumpet. No, I might go so far as to say that he is definitely against Greek wine, and I often wonder whether the little incident of the Mantinea 1936 had anything to do with it. May I repeat the story in my own way?” he asks Zarian with elaborate courtesy. The latter runs his fingers through his mane of silver hair, braces his shoulders as one about to bear a burden, and humbly nods. It is charming to watch him ill-at-ease, picking at the tablecloth, searching for non-existent matches in the pockets of his waistcoat, or shaking his finger in his ear with an
expression of simulated pain. The Count sips his wine twice, fills my glass, and continues.

  Late one night last year I received a telephone call. The voice was so full of suppressed excitement that I had difficulty in recognizing it as that of Zarian. He had, he said, something of the utmost importance to tell me. The revelation was too secret to be mentioned on the phone, but I gathered that something very frightful or very wonderful had happened to him. At that time I was in the town house, so I agreed to walk across the Esplanade and see my friend. To be frank, I thought he had simply written a poem. As we all know, when Zarian writes one of his rare poems, he telephones to all his friends and asks them to come round and have it read to them. It was not a poem or an accident When I climbed those tottering stairs to the top floor of the St. George Hotel I found my friend sitting in a room at a table, staring with considerable rigidity at an open bottle of wine. A single candle gutted beside it on the table. Catching sight of me, he beckoned me speechlessly into the room and into a chair opposite. For a moment he said nothing but continued to stare at the bottle of wine. Then at last he spoke in accents positively strangled by excitement. “My dear Count,” he said, “I have at last discovered a Greek wine comparable to anything grown in France.” He tiptoed to a cupboard and brought me a glass which he filled very gingerly, holding his breath as he did so. I sipped it. It was a very fine Beaune, ringing on the palate like a note of music. The bottle said MANTINEA 1936, and I knew that Mantinea was an ordinary table wine. I congratulated him and drank some more. Zarian was by this time walking up and down in a state of considerable excitement. “A wine for the Gods,” he kept repeating. I noticed that he was in his socks. His feet, he said, hurt him. He had been walking round the town since four in the afternoon buying up all the wine of this name and date he could find. My impulse there and then was to warn him against undue optimism, but his pleasure was so warming a sight that I let him ramble on. Finally he led the way into his wife’s bedroom, holding the candle high, in order to let me see the seventy or eighty bottles of the wine lying snugly upon the bed. I remember that he held his finger over his lips and spoke in whispers, for all the world as if we were in danger of waking the bottle up. It took us an hour to finish the bottle with our conversation growing more and more exalted. Zarian felt that the last link to bind him to Corcyra had been forged; always fussy about wine, he had been unable to get used to the heavy sweet products of Greece. When we had disposed of the first bottle his magnanimity led him to tiptoe into the bedroom and come back with another. He opened it with a flourish, poured some out, and sipped. An expression of disgust came over his face. He held the wine for a moment only in his mouth before bounding to the window and spitting it out. It was obviously a faulty bottle. With a dawning look of alarm on his face he retired and fetched two more bottles. They were both full of superior vinegar. He opened a dozen. They were all the same. I left him that evening surrounded by opened bottles of Mantinea, which he was pouring away down the kitchen sink. The glorious Beaune was never repeated. And now when I offer him a glass of Mantinea—which is after all not a very bad wine as wines go—you observe the face he makes.

  Zarian, to whom the subject of wine is sacred, does not find the story in very good taste, one can see. Yet he suffers it admirably, and later upon the dazzling white terrace, sipping his cognac, he confesses that he is developing a taste for retzina. “It is not to be drunk alone, but with meat and vegetables cooked in the peasant manner. Lamb with onions, eggplant, potatoes, and that red sauce which you all know. Then it tastes like a divine turpentine.”

  “But speaking of intoxicating drinks,” says Theodore, “I wonder, Count, if you have remarked that arbutus berries are among the things which can also intoxicate. During the campaigns of Macedonia during the last war I noticed that on several occasions battalions of our troops became quite drunk through eating the berries of the shrub. In some cases their wits seemed turned by the habit. I often wonder whether in Xenophon the mysterious outbreak of madness among the troops could have come from the same cause.”

  It is ten o’clock and the moonlight is dazzling. Across the valley I can see the shallow glare of Spiro’s headlamps flash as he brings N. to me. We are off to explore the caves near Paleocastrizza and spend the night in the small hotel there. The demented honking with which Spiro always announces his approach sounds sweet and muffled across the silver trees.

  Loath to disrupt the speculative calm of my three philosophers I get up and say goodbye. The Count insists on accompanying me the length of the terrace to send a message to N. Faint interior preoccupations stir behind his composed features. “And you are coming for the vintage don’t forget,” he says. “Bring her with you. It is a time for women.” Then he adds almost apologetically, “We do not consider them enough perhaps,” And I know all at once that his thoughts have turned to the Roman nymph standing in the rotunda with the leaves turning over around her feet. I would like to say something that was not redundant or out of place but can find no words. The very fabric of this candid and beautiful landscape forbids it. I shake his hand and walk down the long avenue to the gates where the great car stands panting with Spiro jovial behind the wheel.

  The western waters of Paleocastrizza will be icy cold tonight; and under the castle of St. Angelo the silver race will be combing out its long strands. Soon there is to be a war.

  4.7.38

  Coming over the crest of the hill behind Kastellani we see that a dance is in progress. From the grassy glades below, the shadow of the olive tree is broken by clouds of dust, and the afternoon silence by the terrific giggling of donkeys—like pantomime comedians. Smoke from the fires, upon which whole kids are turning upon spits, rises lazily. Through the hum of human voices one can hear the scratch and squeak of the violin and guitars, and the hollow beat of the drum, resonant and vulgar as a full stomach struck with the palm of the hand. “Ah look,” says N. “Just look at the dancers.”

  A multi-colored circle of flowing headdresses and skirts moves slowly about the axis of the musicians, reversing and advancing with slow rhythmic measures. In the center of the circle, moved by the current, but free, the young men dance, each improvising his variations upon the theme, hand on hip, head thrown back, face devout and abstract. In the luminous shadows among the trees the crowds are laughing and chattering, the pedlars of ikons, talismans, or bread and sweets, resting for a while upon the boles of the olives in expressive poses. Whiffs of roasting lamb and wine come across the clearing where the old men and women are sitting in groups upon the grass like birds, eating and drinking. Father Nicholas is there in his blue trousers watching his younger son dancing, all dressed in white, with a fine new straw hat upon his square head. Sandos and his daughters are sitting under an olive tree. Socrates and Demosthenes are eating themselves silly by the turning lambs. Several of the girls from our northern village are in the outer circle; one recognizes them by the sobriety of their costume—black clothes with white headdress. Here districts still keep their distinctions of headdress; and in Corfu the women of Gastouri are justly renowned as the most beautiful and the most colorful. Here in the circle of dancers you can see the famous full pleated skirt of shot silk and the old-fashioned bodice, under a bolero heavy with gold stitching—the crust of embroidery. Gold drops dangle at the ear, while the coiffure is a marvellous erection—built up towards the back of the head in tiers, worked over little cloth pads, and tied with red ribbon. A lace-edged handkerchief turned back from the crown, frames the handsome olive face.

  “Ah,” says Theodore with pleasure, “it is a star dance, called the Corcyrean Dance. As you may know I have theories about the origin of these dances, some of which are very ancient.”

  The multi-colored wheel spins and reverses, spins and reverses, while the lone-moving satellites plot out their intricate measures. The fiddlers have their heads together in a conspiracy of rhythm. The two violins drizzle steadily. The son of Father Nicholas throws his head back from time to time and gives a
short excited cry of pleasure as his deft feet in their heavy boots glide and spin upon the green turf, now being beaten to dust by the moving feet of the women. Strange associations come to mind. The wheel of the heavens. The repeating tread of the women, as if caught in the labyrinth of the rhythm, the measure repeating itself, multiplied only by the free improvisations of the men. The mating dance of birds.

  “All the circular ones I call star dances,” says Theodore. “I read somewhere that dancing originated in a desire to imitate the movement of celestial bodies—the early clock as it were.”

  The boy in white is dancing now with the faultless inevitability of someone for whom nothing else exists. His head is thrown back and his sharp nostrils dilated. He has thrown his hat out of the circle, to roll unerringly at Father Nicholas’s feet under the olives. His brown hair rises and falls on his head. One hand is at his hip, upon the red sash he is wearing; the other is posed at full length like that of a conductor, expressing every subtlety of gesture and balance. He is dancing before the girl in yellow and blue—a swarthy Gastouri beauty—with heavy limbs. Her face is flushed as he reaches out the handkerchief for her to touch. The women, linked together, struggle and cry like gulls. Nearer he dances and nearer. He does not look at her but you feel at once a correspondence, a power, flowing between them. For a moment her face looks panic-stricken and dazed; and then she reaches out her strong brown paw and takes the hem of the handkerchief between her ringers. The music rolls over them. They rotate, buried in the rhythms, latched together by this fateful contact, revolving together in the communion of sound and action.

  Father Nicholas has been watching them with a strange mixture of pride and resentment in his face. Of course as a northerner he should not be making advances to a Gastouri girl. Seeing us, however, his smiles reappear and he hobbles across to greet us as quickly as his rheumatism allows. When he speaks I observe that his breath is heavy with wine. “The young are only young once,” he tells us several times in a voice deepened an octave by red wine. Kastellani is his favorite brew. “When they dance all the sins of the world dance with them. When I was young.…” But the uproar is too great for him to be allowed to reminisce. We are presented in quick succession to the mayor, two policemen, and three monks (who timidly hide their glasses of wine behind a tree before coming across to shake hands). N. begins making her slow painful notes for paintings—a donkey with panniers, an old woman, a policeman lying asleep under a tree with his tunic unbuttoned, a man making a drunken political speech which is completely inaudible above the music.