4. NORTH OF THE GULF
“ARE THERE any lobsters?”
Without looking up from the front page of the Akropolis and swatting irritably at the whirling flies, the keeper of the taverna clicked his tongue against his palate, tilted his head wearily backwards and lowered his eyelids in the economical and uncompromising negative that runs east from the Drin and the South Danube Bend to the Great Wall of China.
“Why?”
“There are none.”
“No lobsters?”
“None at all.” Then, after a pause, he said, “There are some lobsters in the sea.”
“Yes, I know. But I meant, to eat.”
“Only in the sea.”
“Don’t they ever catch any?”
“Never. Very rarely. It’s not the custom. Den to synithízoune. Only every few years.”
“Then why is the town called Lobster?”[1]
“It’s just a name, like Athens or Preveza.”
“A funny name for a town with no lobsters.”
“It’s just the name they call it by.”
The Akropolis claimed him and he went on deciphering the headlines to himself in a low and halting monologue. A crone in clogs who was scraping dirty plates with a ladle, came to the rescue. “I’ve never even seen one,” she said. “Only in a photograph once, in a book, and I’m over seventy.”
“I wonder why it’s called Astakos?”
“It was named after a king’s son. Long, long ago. Long before the Turks even.” She made a gesture with her spoon. “Perhaps a hundred years ago.”
There was no fish either, she went on. No red mullet, even? No. Only in the sea. The sea glimmered tauntingly at the end of the street. We ordered fried eggs and chips and settled under an acacia among the cats. Even at nine in the evening, the town was hardly cooler than at noon, and the taverna and the streets were deserted. As the local vineyards seemed as unhelpful as the sea, we sipped hot beer.
It had been a day of heat, glare, loss, breakdown and illness. Only a splendid dinner and a flood of wine could have effaced its memory. Deluded by the name of our destination, we had consoled ourselves with the prospect of lobsters; now this prop had been smitten away. The cats, which had been prowling round the table like Midianites, sat and waited and so did we. After half an hour the old woman clip-clopped out of the shadows with a plate in either hand.
“I’m sorry they’ve been so long,” she said kindly. “It’s not the cooking,” she sighed, “it’s the cooling that eats up the time.”
“The cooling?”
“Hot food is bad. It makes people ill.” I remembered that this belief prevails in certain remote regions. Hot fried eggs are especially dangerous and a prudent cook sets them aside until they seize up. The yolks stiffen to discs of yellow cardboard in a matrix of white glacé kid islanded in cold oil that must have been poured from the sanctuary lamp of a disaffected shrine, and beside them the pale prisms of fried potato form an elastic and frigid magma. So it was now: time had changed our two plateloads, the only cold things in Astakos, into collectors’ pieces of freak geology. We asked for goats’ cheese and bread; then, prising the eggs loose and fragmenting them, we covertly scattered the shards among the cats. Fifteen leapt forward; a few moments’ scrutiny dispersed them again. Their eyes were wide with disillusion. One long black cat of more commanding aspect remained behind and a suppliant forepaw touched my knee as he fixed us with a gaze of injury. A mew of desolation went up, too harrowing to be borne; a massed wail followed our departure. From my room I could hear them turning on each other in recrimination, as if each one were telling his neighbour that had he played his cards differently, all might have gone well. They too wanted lobsters.
The little port of Astakos lies in a wide inlet of Acarnania, the south-westernmost province of Roumeli. Ithaca, Cephalonia, Levkas and Zante blur the western skyline, and to the south, the other side of the entrance to the Gulf of Corinth, the north-west corner of the Peloponnese shoulders its way into the Ionian. A tortuous journey had brought us here. The minarets of Yanina, the storks’ nests and the mountain-reflecting lake were a long way behind us now. Moving by slow stages, we had gazed at the ruins of Dodona and halted, like Byron and Hobhouse, at the monastery of Zitza and penetrated the Pindus as far as Metsovo; we crossed the Thesprotian plain to the mouth of the Acheron and Parga. Taking to the mountains again, we climbed to Souli, the wrecked stronghold of the Epirote Klephts against the armies of Ali Pasha. Two days’ trudge over the mountains of Epirus had brought us to the enormous precipice of Zalongo. (It was here that the Souliot women, in flight from their burning home and the Moslems of Ali, had flung themselves to their deaths in one of the strangest hetacombs in history.) The valley of the Louros, flickering with trout under its giant planes, led us downstream to Preveza and the waters round Actium where Antony, like a doting mallard, breaking off the battle against Augustus to follow Cleopatra’s fleeing galley, had changed the history of the world. Thence, our road followed the reedy and bird-haunted shore of the Ambracian Gulf to the many-legended bridge of Arta. Here, among the giant Frankish debris and the Byzantine churches of the Despots of Epirus and the croaking of frogs, we halted for a day or two’s reading and exploration.
In the ranges we had crossed and the villages where we slept, nothing substantial had changed since the pilgrimage of Childe Harold and little enough since the reign of Pyrrhus. Pleasure and exhilaration had attended every mile of unhurried progress. But, with our advance into Acarnania, our luck turned. Khaki undulations shuddered in the heat of the solstice, the villages were few, nondescript, mantled by dust and thinly and listlessly peopled; crestfallen dogs skulked across the middle distance and the threadbare donkeys looked near to death. Sparse fields of maize and sunflowers straggled on either side of the track and mean crops of tobacco drooped. The sun trampled over us roughshod, all was shadowless and bereft of colour, and we could almost hear the crackle of the withering and the death of every green thing. Greeks call the region Xeromeros, “the dry place”....It was a wonder, I thought, as we rocked along beneath that burning-glass of a sky, that the curling tobacco leaves didn’t catch fire and smoke themselves there and then; why wait to be gathered and redundantly strung up to dry and then rolled into cylinders in the wicked town of Agrinion? What could the cicadas find to feed on? Whenever we stopped for a glass of cloudy water in a village or for a puncture, their shrill noise, without the engine’s competition, became deafening. How odd that their preliminary notes—those tentative scrapes at daybreak, soon joined from tree to tree—can wax to this all-pervading clatter! Among olive groves, it is the very voice of the Mediterranean summer; one misses them when they vanish in autumn, leaving nothing but their ghostly shells along the twigs like celluloid violin-cases; but here they were a malediction. Could this be what is meant, in the last chapter of Ecclesiastes, by the words “and the grasshopper shall be a burden”?
The road uncoiled through a waste of nonentity far beyond the point of no return. But, as the afternoon hours wore on, a spark of hope kindled. A mirage of auspiciously-named Astakos, our journey’s end, began to dance in our brains like the thought of Mecca among pilgrims crossing the Empty Quarter. We began to describe to each other the cool anticipated town: the tables along the lighted waterfront, the jolly priest, the benign mayor, the schoolmaster versed in antiquarian lore, the friendly taverna-keeper emerging from a promising vista of barrels with a lobster clicking and snapping in either hand....There were welcoming burghers and perhaps the twang of guitars and nimble fishermen treading out the Butchers’ Dance....But the sunset guided us into a different kind of town. We swerved to avoid a dead dog which must have lain there for days and a cloud of flies swallowed us up. New houses of scorching concrete were already falling into ruin; others had been abandoned, half built. Huge cubes of cement littered the shore, destined to be assembled one day into a mole; they now sealed the sea from sight as though it were a drain. Surlier than a turnkey, a whiskered slatter
n showed us the dark chambers into which the melancholy little hotel was subdivided and we began to understand how wide of the mark our imaginary goal had been.
Now the ghost meal was over, prostrate in my dungeon, I tried to read a chapter of Edwin Drood by a bulb hanging faint as a glow-worm in the middle of the ceiling. In a minute or two it went out. The midnight town was silent except for the private lives of the cats....The first mosquito sailed with a whine through the stifling dark, a shrill herald of what the night held.
There is a morose delectation in recording, when it is all over, squalor and tribulation; Gissing’s Calabrian mantle settles momentarily on one’s shoulders. The temptation to luxuriate on our sojourn in Astakos is hard to resist: the fly-blown streets, the sluggish sea, the sirocco, the blighting heat, the stricken and the tormented nights. There are towns in transition which have lost touch with the difference between nice and nasty.
I wish we had known, at the time, that Byron had stayed here. Too late! I shall probably never return. Astakos, then, was still called by its mediaeval name of Dragomestri; it only reverted to the name of a nearby classical Astakos in recent times. (These changes make old maps and charts a deceptive guide.) It was his last stepping stone before Missolonghi. In flight from a Turkish frigate, the barque which was bringing him from Cephalonia took refuge behind a palisade of islets in the gulf, and Byron stayed in Astakos for three days. When the danger was over, the emissaries of Mavrocordato conducted him along the coast for his triumphal entry into the last town he was ever to see. I wonder where he slept? I might have struck luckier than in my search for the hypothetical lobster-prince: any link with Byron is a matter for pride in Greece. Only a week before, our guide at Zitza monastery had entertained us with tales of the poet’s two halts there which had been handed down from his own great-grandfather.
The only face in Astakos whose memory evokes a spark of pleasure is that of the old woman in the taverna. Later, I searched through many books to identify the prince she mentioned: a son of Poseidon and the nymph Olbia founded a town called Astakas in Bithynia; and a scholiast of the Iliad speaks of a Boeotian Astakos who sired a brood of heroes in the War of the Seven against Thebes. No mention of Acarnania. Where had that nice old woman heard of the untraceable prince? She couldn’t remember; none of her fellow-Astakiots had heard of him, and the mystery stands. But far out in the gulf and enthroned many fathoms deep in an apse of anemones, I think I see him. Lord of a blue-green realm, his young eyes are vigilantly a-swivel for injustice or danger. Antennae plume him. The right claw grasps a coral sceptre, the left a sea-egg orb and his greaved and vambraced limbs are flung wide like the arms of Krishna. He is a youthful and kindly despot in the dappled armour of a Samurai, the immortal tyrant of shell and tentacle and fin. Scaly counsellors, plated captains and sinuous aulic dignitaries attend his throne; shoals of citizens gleam in the peaceful arcades; they glide beneath triumphal arches of rococo and loiter among the columns and the obelisks and the slanting sunlight of the piazzas. None challenges his mild reign. No biped foes on shore, they know, can harm them while it lasts.
On the third morning the rescue ship sailed down the inlet. We set off east and our spirits lightened. Loaded with goats, the caïque trailed its wake through the alluvial islets of the Echinades and past the shoals that the Acheloös river, gathering silt on its long serpentine journey from the Pindus, has jettisoned before its wide and wandering mouths. Levkas, Ithaca, Cephalonia, Zante and the north-west cape of the Morea wheeled slowly astern to starboard. Many leagues beyond our bows, nearly invisible in the shaking heat, the great masses escaladed down from north and south and reached towards each other across the Gulf. The Straits of Lepanto turn the Gulf of Corinth into Greece’s own inland sea, a Mediterranean within a Mediterranean.
We hugged the northern shore. Acarnania ended at the mouth of the Acheloös, and the steeps of Aetolia rose from the tufted shoals and sandbanks. Late afternoon unfolded shade in the dips of these mountains and we sailed past a long lagoon in the mouth of which, on an islet tethered to either shore by fine stone bridges, the little town of Aitolikon clustered round the dome of its church. It hovered in the haze with some of the enchantment of S Giorgio Maggiore seen from the piazzetta in Venice. Missolonghi too, which soon floated towards us as though raft-borne on its rank lagoons, has a faint air of the Venetian approaches. The same amphibious feeling reigns. A spit of land appeared, and a lighthouse and we shouted back greetings to a russet Zakynthian caïque with her bowsprit springing from a figurehead of Poseidon. To port lay salt-pans and wicker labyrinths for fish breeding. A channel meandered between two miniature lighthouses, a fisherman mended his nets on a stinking dune. There were rush huts on the mud banks and flimsy pens of reed and bamboo; the breeze had a miasmal whiff. Half-naked men in enormous hats, up to their thighs in the hot and stagnant water, toiled at fishy tasks. The momentary air of Venice evaporated as the faded town grew bigger. A dome, a line of trees, a warehouse and a factory cohered in a medium-sized town of no particular character. On the left was the shabby site of the house where Byron died. Beyond it stretched the city wall through which the Greek population made their heroic sortie through the ranks of the beleaguering Turks. The thought of those four strange winter months of Byron’s sojourn here, his illness and death, only underlined the presiding atmosphere of melancholy. It is a sad place to die.
I had a special reason for halting in Missolonghi; a reason which must carry us back a few months; back to a rainy day in Sussex where I was staying with an old friend, Antony Holland; to a morning when we were driving to luncheon with a neighbour through a downpour of rain.
The prospect was captivating. Lady Wentworth, whose house we were heading for, was Byron’s great-granddaughter and, I knew, the owner of a hoard of Byroniana.[2] Her father was Wilfred Scawen Blunt, the poet. I knew his legend well: how he lived as an Arab Sheikh and a rebel against British rule in the desert near Cairo and founded the Arabian stud there which was now his daughter’s; his association with “Skittles” was a literary link with Meredith’s Ordeal of Richard Feveral, and perhaps with Lucy Glitters in Mr. Sponge’s Sporting Tour. In my youthful ears, rumours of his literary and sporting regime at Crabbet and Newbuildings had always held, probably wrongly, something of the legendary and lurid glamour of Medmenham and the Hellfire Club. His daughter’s marriage was a fragile join with the Last Days of Pompeii.
Above all, there was Lady Wentworth’s own myth. The portrait of her—a beautiful, smouldering-eyed, pre-Raphaelite girl in elaborate Arab costume—had long been familiar. Her early virtuosity and recklessness on horseback were as famous as her monumental book on the Arab horse was later to become. I knew she lived by a system of private conventions: a melancholy daemon of discord had set her at odds with her family and most of the outside world; rifts which even now, when she was over eighty, had lost none of their acerbity. Isolation surrounded her with a dark halo of fable. By a miracle of exemption, Antony Holland’s father and his family were almost the only old friends or neighbours with whom Lady Wentworth was not in some degree at feud.
Rain was pouring down as we approached the park gates. The number and the fierceness of the warnings to trespassers suggested mantraps and spring-guns and filled the undergrowth with imaginary bloodhounds. Arab horses grazed under the chestnut clumps. We had to stop while a score of beautiful animals galloped across the drive with flying tails and manes and sailed in a long loop towards a tree-reflecting lake. The house appeared and a few moments later we plunged indoors through the deluge.
Nothing had changed since Regency and Victorian times. The sad charm pervading large houses in which only the owner and the servants live was paramount here. Lady Wentworth displayed the same disregard for fashion and change as the house: an indifference discernible in a skirt to the ground like the ones women wore for badminton at the turn of the century; many chains and lockets and a ribboned lace cap, obsolete for many decades, showed the same independence. Her abundant russe
t coiffure looked as strong in texture as though it were plaited from the strands of her stallions’ manes gathered from the briars and the teazles in the park. Going in to luncheon, she said: “I’m sorry appearin’ in these,” and pointed to her blancoed gym-shoes. “Just been playin’ squash.” By far the most remarkable thing in her appearance was the beauty and distinction of her features: an exquisite high-bridged delicacy of bone-structure and texture that time had spared intact: Byron and Wilfred Blunt leapt to the mind. Her eyes were as clear and smouldering as those in the famous Arabian picture on the wall above the table; they were capable still, it was easy to see, of turning into emblems of her bent for strife. An old-fashioned elimination of final g’s and sometimes of initial h’s distinguished the chiselled clarity of her speech and her vowels were so patricianly thin that they almost came full cycle. The tone was sad, sometimes almost sepulchral, as though weighed down by distress. The words “Have some more spotted dog?” rang like a knell.
Antony Holland was a great favourite; she seemed really pleased that we had come to see her. Her talk ranged with dark humour over life in the desert and the breaking and training of Arab horses; famous figures long dead were stood up and bowled over like ninepins. Answering a question about a tremendous Edwardian statesman and grandee, she said, “Oh, charmin’, charmin’, but such a milksop....” She liked the idea of her great-grandfather: “But Lady Byron had rotten bad luck with him,” she said. “You just read my uncle Lovelace’s book about it!” The row might have taken place only a few years ago. Afterwards we hunted through a huge, disused and heavily cumbered room for a full-face portrait of Byron as a young man, but we could not find it.[3] “It’s all a bit topsy-turvey,” she murmured, hopping nimbly over corded trunks and japanned tin cases. I saw, with excitement, that these were labelled on the side, in chalk or in white paint, “Ld. Byron’s letters” and “Ly. Byron’s letters.”[4] “Yes, they’re all in there,” Lady Wentworth said sombrely, “and it’s the best place for them.” We looked at a case with Byron’s Greek-Albanian velvet jacket with its gold lace and hanging sleeves. There were his velvet-scabbarded scimitar and his heavily embroidered velvet greaves—the same accoutrements, I think, that he wears in the famous Phillips portrait. We explored the amassed relics for an hour. Struck by a sudden idea, she led us to her study. It was crammed with portraits, miniatures, framed eighteenth-century silhouettes; books, keepsakes and trophies were gathered in a jungle: rummaging in her desk, she turned over a chaos of farm accounts, horse-breeding literature, lawyers’ letters, a battered missal, seedsmen’s catalogues, a rosary, farriers’ bills and circulars for cattle cake, until at last she found what she was after.
Roumeli Page 17
