Reflections on a Marine Venus: A Companion to the Landscape of Rhodes

by Lawrence Durrell

  Kostas, the Greek editor, comes staggering out of the mêlée to greet us breathlessly. “The usual has happened,” he says, when he can get his breath. “There are forty people with tickets and only twenty seats. The bus company is always doing this.” At this a little man, quite beside himself with rage, comes up and shakes his fist at the boy, shouting: “I tell you that is not true. I am in charge of the tickets. I can tell you that we only issued twenty. Here is my own.” He thrusts a soiled ticket under my nose. Kostas raises his shapely hands deprecatingly. “Have you no shame,” he says, “to shout so before foreigners?” The little man swallows and turns purple. “They must hear the truth,” he splutters.

  Christ has been edging his way towards us from the opposite corner of the crowd. He beckons to me, holding his straw boater in his hand. There is something he wishes to confide in me. We move to one side and put our faces together under his hat. In all that swelling hubbub we are like people trying to light a cigarette in a high wind; his voice is grave and troubled. “May I tell you something in complete confidence?” It seems an unlikely place for an exchange of confidences but there is little to do except to agree. “Manoli,” he says, “is responsible for the trouble. You know we print the tickets for the bus company in books of five hundred? Before dispersing the type last week he took the serial numbers of the tickets and printed twenty extra for himself and his friends. He is taking a large party with him to Soroni and they are all traveling free—perhaps he has told them that he bought the tickets for them as a present—but it is more likely,” and here Christ’s voice sank to a dark and diabolical register, “it is more likely that he made them pay him.” His dark eyes dilated as he watched my face for reactions. “If,” he goes on, “you wish to prove it you will see that he has printed his own tickets on different paper—the coarse Italian newsprint. The bus tickets are on the imported paper.” Having delivered himself of this vital piece of information he replaces his hat and retreats to a far corner of the crowd to see what will happen—like a man who has lit a fuse and wishes to keep a safe distance from the explosion.

  Gideon groans when I pass on this piece of information. “It would be Manoli again. I suppose it’s up to you to quell him.”

  The problem is how to get at him through the press, for the argument has reached renewed heights of violence. Manoli’s grandmother has appeared, a whiskered old lady who brandishes a rolled umbrella over his shoulder at the conductor, and who is backed up by a couple of old beldams—nuns from the convent, carrying baskets. Things are getting lively. The conductor is getting rattled too, and shows some disposition to make use of the starting handle of the bus which lies behind him on the step. I take a deep breath and wade into the crowd pushing and scrambling breathlessly forward inch by inch until with my outstretched fingers I can just grab the sleeve of Manoli. He shakes me off impatiently once or twice until he realizes who I am. Then he grins and turns sheepishly towards me and enables me to shout: “You have forged the tickets. All is known.” A momentary flicker of astonished anger flits across his face and is almost immediately replaced by an expression of desperation. The crowd heaves once more and we are swept apart, Manoli to plunge into the midriff of the bus conductor, I to be sucked back into that sea of vociferous holiday makers. Manoli faces a terrible dilemma now, for if his friends find that he has sold them non-existent places on the bus they will most likely dismember him; on the other hand it must be clear that if he persists in his folly Gideon and I will either expose him or call a policeman. For a moment or two he marks time as he thinks over these alternatives, plunging forward with every push from the crowd behind, and shouting just as vigorously. Then the situation is saved as if by a miracle by the appearance of a completely empty bus which draws up alongside with a shriek, while a tousled head leans out and a voice shouts the equivalent of “Any more for the Skylark?”

  This is a bus which has been taken off the road for repairs; but the festival of St. Soulas has proved too tempting for the solitary mechanic to whom the repairs have been entrusted. Half way through the morning he has decided to defer the work and to visit Soroni on his own. But a natural generosity of spirit, plus the fact that he has been drinking, caused him, on seeing the surging crowd round our bus, to stop and offer a lift to those who could not find places. Manoli is overcome with relief and joy and loses not a moment to save his face and his pocket. “This way,” he shouts, and grabbing his grandmother hustles her in the direction of the empty bus, while his rumpled party of guests follow suit with all dispatch. We mount our bus now with comparative ease and sink breathlessly into our seats, to watch Manoli’s party swept gesticulating and shouting out of sight. Our conductor expresses his relief by crossing himself. “Another moment,” he says, “and I should have had to hit him.”

  So we set out. After a perilous journey (for Paul the driver is known for his competitive spirit), we approach Soroni. One by one the lorries rumble forward throwing up a wave of dust on either side. Countless walkers are met and passed on this strip of the road, for the most part peasants bearing baskets of fresh fruit to sell at the fair. Merrily honk the horns. Despite the choking clouds of dust the shouting and banter between those in the lorries and those on foot is continuous. We pass a dilapidated old cart in the back of which Manoli the fisherman lies at ease, surrounded by his family and a few select friends. At one point we are pelted with flowers by a dozen young girls. At another an elderly peasant, with a crate full of turtle doves on his head, flings a handful of sweets in through the window, one of which cracks a lens in the Baron Baedeker’s spectacles. He is most provoked, and for a moment one has the feeling that he is going to say something peculiarly offensive and to the point. He restrains himself however and says: “What people. What people,” in sad and reproving tones as he turns the damaged spectacles over and over in his fingers.

  We bowl over the crown of the last hillock and there before us lies the site of the shrine; the ground slopes away on all sides in a series of thinly-forested hillocks, leaving a level space of perhaps four acres. Here the villagers of Soroni have performed their usual task in digging a dozen large pits which will be filled with glowing charcoal and over which sheep and oxen will be roasted. At strategic points, too, huge bundles of dry brushwood lie piled, waiting for the night. Lofty pine trees give a good deal of shade, and here outdoor cafés have sprung up all round the shrine, which looks something like a small provincial bus station. Paul jockeys us out of the line of lorries and we bump across the dusty soil toward the cover of the trees where he draws up with a triumphant smile. Everybody piles out of the bus into the sunny afternoon light, eager to see what is going on.

  The sky above the eastern hollows is suffused with clouds of pinkish dust kicked up by the heels of mules; apparently some of the races have already started, as one can discern the gesticulating figures who ride them, with colored scarves tied round their heads. The course itself has been squared out neatly with tent pegs, and in one corner, on a wooden dais, sit the Brigadier and senior members of his staff, half choked with dust, and busily trying to memorize speeches in demotic which they will have to deliver at the prize giving. To the westward, under the pines, stand groups of black-coated figures—each looking for all the world like a spiny black hedgehog in the shadow; this must be a cluster of choirs from various parts of the island. The low grumble of their chanting can be dimly heard above the prodigious hubbub of the crowd which fills the middle distance. They too have a dais from which prizes will be distributed, gaily decked with Greek and English flags stenciled all over it in water paint. Overhead is a roof of plaited palm leaves which contributes a faintly central-African flavor to the scene. Around the shrine itself (which resembles an anthill) streets have begun to improvise themselves as if a boomtown were suddenly growing up under one’s very eyes. Yet the streets are lined, not with houses, but with stalls packed to the sky with sweetmeats, lemonade, almonds, cheese. There is hardly an unfamiliar face here, for every itinerant peddler of R
hodes has made the pilgrimage on foot. Here for example is the old one-armed man who trundles a barrow about the town, loaded with chestnuts which he roasts on a brazier; I have often watched the skill with which he fills the little paper bags, shouting all the time in a deep croaky voice, “Chestnuts … Chestnuts.” Next to him stand several of the itinerant freshwater sellers, each with his little white municipal cart shaded by a cluster of green. Next again come the sweetmeat sellers, shouting as if their hearts were broken “Sweeeeets… Sweeeeets.” There is chocolate, nougat, almond paste, marzipan, pistachio nougat as well as those heavier confections like galactobouriko and baklava, which Gideon claims are made from waste blotting paper and honey. At intervals too stand the loukumades experts, their long spoons at the ready to seize the roasted doughnut when it is fried brown and crisp, and then to duck it in honeyed sauce. Small children stand round these stalls breathing in the flowery scent of the ovens with appreciation, each holding a slip of paper on his small brown palm, waiting for the hot sweetmeat to be plumped into it. Here, too, pine nuts are being roasted, and there spools of mastic (the Aegean chewing gum) are being wound out and pressed into shapes, or being merely loaded into spoons and dropped into glasses of water.

  At one end of this gallery of smells and sound is a section inhabited by a number of ferociously unshaven gentlemen, each stripped to the buff and liberally coated with soot. They dwell in an absolute forest of entrails out of which they stick their heads from time to time in order to utter a shriek before they return to their work at the spits; all round them on biscuit tins loaded with fine charcoal roast the entrails of Gideon’s luckless sheep and lambs. Every sort of offal is here accorded expert treatment; tripe is wound round and round a giant spit, plugged with clove, nutmeg and garlic, and is roasted slowly; sheep’s entrails receive horizontal roasting, being basted quickly with fat and lemon juice as they turn. Testicles, hearts and livers are all given an exacting professional attention and distinctive treatment on spits of various kinds. The cooks themselves carry long knives between their lips which gives them a terrifying look, and they dart from side to side of their stalls, now shaving off a tiny piece of beef to see if it tastes right, now banging a whole cluster of kebab off a spit on to a tin plate. They seem never to stop shouting for a moment, even when their knives are between their teeth. The attitudes they strike are magnificent, gladiatorial. Pools of hot dripping fall in the deep dust beneath the stalls, and here whole colonies of cats and dogs lounge, waiting for tit-bits. The pandemonium which reigns the whole length of this street is indescribable; but set back twenty yards on either side of it, the cafés are less noisy. Chairs and tables have sprung up like mushrooms everywhere, and here the peasant families have seated themselves in bright semicircles to drink and eat. Here and there, too, small bevies of musicians are tuning up their accordions, guitars and violins, standing back to back to play a few stray phrases from time to time. Somewhere a big drum is banging, slow and paunch-like, which suggests that already a dance has begun, but I cannot see where; meanwhile the upper air is hoarse with the sickening braying of asses and the fever-shrill bleating of sacrificial lambs. On the high ground where the green grass is thickest and a where the line of myrtle and arbutus begins, lorries are slowly straying, like lost camels, looking for good camping sites. Here whole families have unpacked their belongings, spread colored rugs and pillows, and have settled down with no intention of moving before tomorrow. Stately peasant matrons are unpacking their squamous litters of small children, and their saddlebags full of bottles and cans and immense loaves of homemade bread. I wander in this forest of human beings with the loving detachment of a child in a familiar countryside, drinking it all in—even the savor of the harsh reddish dust which coats the air and dries the throat; all the weird mixture of smells which together compose the anthology of a Greek holiday under the pines—petrol, garlic, wine, and goat.

  For a while I sit myself down under a tree, the better to study this crowded canvas, in every corner of which simultaneous and totally disconnected scenes are being played. Mehmet Bey, who has obviously succeeded in running a good cargo into Trianda bay, is busy unloading an enormous chest into the gaping suitcases of the dozen or so peddlers who are doubtless his agents; beads, mirrors, rings, combs, cards of Turkish embroidery, and various childish confections in celluloid, like small propellers mounted on sticks. (Waved from side to side, the propellers revolve with a satisfactory furry noise.) The children have thrown themselves upon the cart like dogs at a bear. They are beaten off. They return. Mehmet Bey pulls off his gaucho’s hat and makes ineffectual sweeps at them as he tries to calculate with one half of his mind how much stock he is giving to each peddler. A little to the left: some children are pelting with crusts a lunatic, who is doubtless attached to one of the cafés as a luck bringer; or perhaps he has come to he healed by the Saint. To the west, I observe the Baron Baedeker working like a beaver. Business is evidently booming. Everyone wants his or her photograph taken. The Baron has set up his headquarters against the whitewashed side of a dais—which makes an admirable reflector. On to it he has put up his only backcloth which is, I must say, most suitable to the time and place. It is a garish picture of an aero plane with holes cut in the canvas in which the sitter or sitters can insert their heads, and so be photographed in flight, as it were. The peasants are delighted by this fantasy and argue furiously with each other about whose turn it is next. The aero plane itself is of a very improbable kind: I doubt whether Bleriot would have dared to cross the channel in it. Nevertheless the whole conception is most successful and attracts admiring smiles from everyone.

  The Mufti is wandering gravely in the crowd clad in a new turban and his elastic-sided boots; beside him I notice Hoyle and General Gigantes. They have been buying kolouria—bread cooked in circlets*—and each wears two or three of them on his wrist like bangles. Hoyle is discoursing with waves of his unencumbered hand, his spotted bow tie behind his ear, his coat flapping loose. If I am any judge of character I should say that he was hunting for the roast pits over which by now a dozen sheep are sizzling, and more than one whole ox. They lie beyond his field of vision, however, on the slope at my back. Here the heat has burnt a great shimmering hole in the atmosphere, for the charcoal is red hot. I am pleased to see that among the turnspits are some of the members of the printing house staff, stripped to the waist. They kneel about the pits, talking gravely, and from time to time making minor adjustments of height or speed to the spit. There are about a dozen of these pits scattered about in a rough semicircle. Two have oxen roasting on them fixed upon enormous cast iron bits which are turned by an old-fashioned spring-winding device such as one sees sometimes in old English farms. These spits revolve with a slow dry clicking sound until the spring runs down—a process lasting perhaps three hours. In this little corner there is no noise—or comparatively little; a heavy air of professional preoccupation hangs over the scene. The turnspits all wear piratical handkerchiefs round their heads, and lounge about outside the range of the heat, talking gravely to the sound of the ticking spits. Occasionally a volunteer approaches a pit, shielding his face, and cuts a slice of meat from the animal; this is gravely eaten by the jury of ruffians who sit around, shaking their heads, and offering ripe comment and advice. Once in a while the oxen are basted, when a terrific hissing is heard and a column of charcoal dust rises into the air, rich with the scent of fat and blood. “Ah!” cries everyone with satisfaction.

  Prolonged cheering and clapping to the east now suggest that the mule races are over, and through the clouds of dust vague figures can be seen to mount the dais and bow as they accept something from the hands of the Brigadier. It is too far to hear the speeches and the toasts. Gideon emerges from the press, panting, with a celluloid propeller whirring in each hand. He sinks down beside me to mop his brow and to grope in his pockets for some nougat. “Not bad, is it?” he says. “There must be fifteen thousand people here. Kostas says that Manoli’s bus ran into a tree and they all
had to walk.”

  There is, after all, some justice in the world, to catch up with the wicked. Luckily, however, nobody seems to have been hurt—at any rate Manoli at this moment is having his photograph taken, with a baby on each knee.

  Two more big drums have begun to beat with punctual emphasis and one circle of dancers is beginning to form below me on the slope. They are gathered round a cluster of music makers, drummer, violinist, clarinetist and guitarist, who stand back to back, heads inclined towards one another. The dances always unfold like this from the center, in a flower-like pattern. For a moment or so the participants stand in a semicircle about the musicians, listening with lowered heads and nodding to establish the time; then they begin, slowly, hesitantly, to dance, the subtle meshes of their footwork calculated, deliberate, matching this to the scribbling of the strings. Then, one by one, they appear to catch fire; their heads rise on their shoulders, their tip-tilted chins begin to carry upwards from the very ankles the smiles of recognition which light their faces. As the circle moves slowly about its center—the little statuary group of musicians—it begins to establish the authority of the rhythm, rising, you feel, as much from the warm dust of the earth as from the music that is being made. In a little while too, the musicians begin to feel the established circuit, and raise their heads with a sort of pleased relief, they relinquish the melody to its own created momentum and allow it to be carried away on the tide of the dancing feet. Meanwhile, the circle itself is growing as new dancers break into the circumference at every point, taking up the rhythms from the twinkling feet of their neighbors’, smoothly as candles taking a light from one other. Soon the whole organism has developed its own life and swallowed up the individuality of each of its members, accepting it into the rhythm of the whole, which now moves round and round the live hollow center of music with the queer archaic peristaltic movements of the kalamatiano—the most graceful and earth coaxing of all Greek dances. From where I sit I cannot hear the highly syncopated jabber of the violins with any clarity; but the spicy afternoon air begins to tremble at the thump of the big drum which marks the end of each bar with a cavernous wallop. The circle wheels and sways, ever widening as new dancers surrender to its magical appeal.