Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

by Lawrence Durrell

  A letter from Gordon, Ruth’s brother, with a beautiful Greek stamp, and a pen-drawing of men drawing a boat up a sand-beach.

  It’s silly to wish you a merry Xmas, isn’t it? When the oranges are ripening slowly on the stalk, I mean, and the tangerines sport a green and yellow glaze like the finest porcelain. Occasionally the old man of the sea gets up, wraps the north wind round him and prowls down these coasts, havocking. Old man maestro. And then I think it’s winter. But the olives aren’t fully gathered yet, and the fishermen still skip barefoot into the water. Sun, life a long coma. No, I can’t think clearly or continuously about you two. Are you happy? Please be happy as long as you can. Why don’t you make a dash and come down to this Island? Coral and sea-gulls, sponges and octopus, and a patron saint who’s represented by a decayed tibia. Please darling Ruth bring Walsh down south. I haven’t seen you for such ages I don’t know what you look like. Yes, it was a Greek girl in Athens, but it didn’t last. We strained the litany of sensualities until our voices cracked. I don’t care. I recuperate in a long sun-convalescence from a disease more lovely than T.B. Chastity like a pure dream, for ever and forever, as long as one sun lasts. And then? The rest is silence.

  Episodes of decay. Dolly proud of a ring on her red finger. Her mouth broad with slow, amazing laughter. Old Vole had consented. A robin found dead on the path. Pompous even in death, fluffed out its red stomach. Lying in Dolly’s laughing hands. They put it on the fire and stoked the wood. The fiery bird. Robin into Phoenix. Would it be born again and vanish in a red ruft of flame up the wide chimney?

  Then one night a snow-storm came down out of forests, with a big insane wind to guide it. Past midnight. The slow clock from a steeple sounding foggily through the blanket. Wind at the shutters, at the oak front door.

  Something had happened in the field outside. Cattle trouble. Something dead in the long swirl of snowflakes. Lanterns shining out in a dim parade, and men’s voices.

  Inside it was so still he could hear himself thinking. Dust sleeping along the books. The oil lamps sleeping yellow. The yawn rising up in his throat. Feet sleeping along carpet slippers. The fire sunk to embers. The dead body of a book in his fingers.

  Then the silence became so profound that thunder, or artillery leaping into action from the hills, could not have been more utterly paralysing. For a minute he was afraid to look at her face, as she lay on the long sofa, a book folded between her breasts. His breathing, the dim noise of voices, water-music from a tap in the kitchen, insects moving in the musty wood of the rafters, all insisted on the silence.

  Looking, then, he saw Ruth staring away heavenwards, quite pleasantly remote, but terrifically motionless. Snap went a crazy spring inside the mechanical brain, quite cleanly and perfectly, without pain, but something like relief. His own fingers on a book, his cold thighs against the chair, his own breath flushing the lungs, infinite processes along the nerves coming into play. Light scorching his eyeballs. The mouth hung open from his face in concentration, dribbling. Casually, without urgency, formed the desire to urinate in his mind.

  Episode in numbness. Standing in the stern of the big liner as it loped southward across a heavy sea, smelling the wide smells of salt water, scourged by the March winds.

  People passing at his back. Talkers. The drive of the engines under his shoes. The clean sand-scrubbed deck. The long beautiful arches of spumy water, slipping away under them.

  Off the shores of Portugal a flight of brown, queer-billed sea-gulls pulled out to meet them, ravenous, curving with a splendid velocity to the wash of peel, sticks, cardboard, bread, peelings, offal, soup, fish, meat, ham-fat, and big-eyed potatoes.

  When they were off Cadiz a wind swept the white horses out from the land at them, deploying beautifully. At night on the gusty dark upper deck you could swear you smelt the warm South coming nearer, ever nearer.

  One night the wind, like an offering, brought them the smells of apples, guitars, neck-cloths, donkeys, dust, mimosa, jonquils, voices, garlic, desire.

  Nevertheless the great ship, undistracted, nosed down Gibraltar way, through the neck, into the blue Mediterranean.

  Chapter Twelve: Atque Vale

  During the same week the weather, which had hitherto been so perfect, produced a few quirks and freaks from its repertoire. Waking one morning, Marlowe found that his bed was soaked in the rain which was beating down across the open window. An ugly wind dragged at the panes of glass and drove them chattering against their frames. Securing the window, he stood, his body glistening with water, and noticed that a great width of cloud hung above Leucothea, menacing the channel. Lightning slanted down out of the sky from time to time creating apocalyptic gulfs of blue light on the hillside, and the thunder followed it.

  Below the villas the sea was piled up in furls of water, dashing now this way, now that, unable to decide upon which side of the channel to explode: while the seaweed in the bay was carried out in layers, like floating mats, and dumped on the end of the rocky headland. Such manifestations were inexplicable at this time of year.

  The rain had ploughed gutters in the earth banks of the hillside. In the road itself were hundreds of puddles, spinning round and round in the wind, winking and bubbling. The air was crisply cold.

  Breakfast that morning was a dull affair. Maria crept about her tasks like a whipped dog, muttering and crossing herself from time to time, when the lightning flashed. Her clothes were sodden on her and splashed with mud.

  She served him that morning with an averted face, and a far-away look in her eyes that seemed half fear and half concentration on some distant event—perhaps the next flash of light, or beat of thunder. He did not speak but ate moodily, staring out across the tossing waters whose end was chipped off soft by the curtain of damp mist which hung down, obliterating the mainland. When he had finished he remembered that Francis had promised to show him some of her canvases before she roped them up, ready to send back to England. Wrapping several thicknesses of newspaper round his head and shoulders outside a thin mackintosh, he tugged open the door and ran down the steps to the road, leaving the muttering woman to close it after him. The first drag of the wind nearly pushed him off his feet, and the rain rapped holes all over his swathed head until the newspaper was pocked like a sieve. He could hear the olives moaning and dragging at their roots as he scuttled down the hill.

  Huddled in the doorway of her villa, he rapped long and loud before Francis heard and came to open the door. He flung off his pulp of newspapers and pushed into the hall, shutting the wind-swung door with his shoulder.

  “Heavens, what a day!”

  “Appropriate for the business,” she said evenly, and led the way into a room where Gordon lay on the floor smoking.

  “Hail to thee, blithe spirit,” he said sombrely, pleased with the pun. “Is it still hailing outside?”

  In the corner of the room stood half a dozen or so large canvases, loosely roped together, leaning against the wall. On request, the girl undid the ropes and presented her productions one by one for his approval. They were pleasantly designed scenes from the life of the Island, for the most part carefully and cleanly painted. It was distracting, however, to attempt an appreciation of them when the light was so dull.

  “Francis tells me she’s going,” said Gordon slowly.

  “Yes,” said Marlowe, still staring at the canvases, “so she says.”

  The girl stood by the window, expressionless, with a curious tension in her pose, turning now this canvas to him for approval, now that.

  “Yes,” he repeated softly, concentrating.

  The flashes of lightning silhouetted her long body across the running window-pane, livid.

  “When are you leaving?” she asked at last, deliberately forcing herself to the question.

  “I?” he said, surprised; and for the moment he had forgotten the haunting decision which demanded fixed dates and times for his movements. “Not yet, I hope. Not for a bit at any rate.”

  “What abo
ut the critical intelligence?” said Gordon. He got to his feet and stamped out his cigarette in the fender. As Marlowe opened his mouth to say something, he turned and cut him short. “Wait. Tell me something first. Don’t you think there’s a lovely sense of colour and design?”

  “Yes,” said Marlowe carefully.

  “Thank you. I must be going.”

  From the corner, where he had flung them, Gordon produced a gigantic mackintosh cape and sou’-wester in which he proceeded to imprison himself. Then he said, with camaraderie: “Well, you sods. So long. See you at the party.”

  “Party?”

  “She’ll tell you all about it,” and he commenced his wrestling with the door. Putting a booted foot in the aperture, he inserted his face into the hall again and said, “Marlowe.”

  “Yes?”

  “Try and convince her that she’s got no feeling at all for the form of those bloody things. Not a trace. So long.”

  Marlowe turned slowly as the door crashed to, and the noise of Gordon’s running feet diminished from outside it. He went into the room where Francis sat uncomfortably on the couch, staring out at the lines of rain on the window-sill. Very expressionless and stiff was her pose. He sat down beside her silently, disinclined to talk.

  She said slowly, with a half smile on her mouth, turning her head to him: “Do you believe in omens?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Look at the rain.”

  Looking out of the window, on the panes of which the water squeezed and trembled, he had the sensation of looking into the glass plating of an aquarium. Dim and liquescent, the fringe of trees and the background of churning sea slipped across their vision. Their ability to stand there, on one side of the glass, dry and untouched by the weathers, seemed almost as much of a fiction as the dark landscape outside.

  “Omens?” he said nervously. “What do you mean?”

  “Gordon was at the wine-shop today and a peasant told him that bad weather at this time of year meant the death of somebody. Everyone is awfully upset in the village.”

  “Oh,” said Marlowe, compressing his lips in a prim line.

  “Yes. And Fonvisin had to go up to Leucothea again today because the old monk had a relapse. I expect he’s properly caught in it.”

  Somehow the darkness of that morning, the force of the storm, suggested something plausible and frightening about these beliefs. In the gulf of a thunder-clap his answer was swallowed up. He repeated his words as the noise rolled away:

  “Do these things worry you?”

  She turned to him with a smile. “Lord no. But this weather depresses me. Doesn’t it you?” He admitted that it did; and, realizing for the first time how weak and pointless it made his motives, his fears, his decisions seem, he was again cast down. On his desk, he had left Fred’s letter. The lightning would be flashing on it from time to time. He wanted to sit nearer to the girl for comfort; no longer to kiss her, for action so definite would commit himself; simply to sit near her so that their shoulders might touch, or their knees.

  “What are you thinking about?” he said at last.

  She was thinking of the vicarage at home, with daddy writing his sermons; the smell of damp; the cold rooms in which the fires had not been lighted. Mother sucking her teeth over her knitting. Andrew had died long since.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Nothing!” he echoed and got up, walking over to the window to stare out of it.

  By leaning his head forward he could see at an angle down the hillside to the right. It was very melancholy. The rain jumped a foot from the road, furiously, and little water spouts were snatched up off the sea and whirled hundreds of yards before they dropped. The village looked deserted. The trees heaved and shook above the cluster of coloured huts.

  “What about this party?” he said, wondering how appropriate revels would seem in such weather.

  “Oh, that,” she said, almost contemptuously. “That’s one of the old mans ideas. Seems a good day for the Ave atque Vale business, doesn’t it?”

  ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

  He [Rumanades] stood at the front door and shook hands with each of them as they passed, with his head down upon his chest, as if fearing to look at them. One by one, they ran through the doorway into the rain, muffled in coats and papers, like curious grotesques: and each turned in the rain swept light of the doorway, cried out and raised a hand, and then was spirited away by his shadow. The old man stood, backed by the line of jumping candle-flames, gripping the shaking door and watching them, as they were lost in the blankness, one by one. Their voices sounded from very far off, crying “Good-bye,” and thanking him. The wind wrenched their garments out on their stooping bodies like wings. “Good-bye,” they cried: the voices of Walsh, Marlowe, and Francis.

  He shut the door securely upon the weather, and, assuring himself that the servants were long since gone, walked from pillar to shadowy pillar, blowing out the candles, until the hall was dark except for the lightning, and silent but for his own slow footsteps on the stone.

  He mounted the stairs slowly, one by one, breathing hard, as if the effort needed were a great one. Somewhere in his mind, he was searching for the idea which would govern his actions. He did not know what it was. Something was needed. Something was there at the back of his mind, which he must wait for: an agency which would direct him. This body of his walked in a dark trance of weariness and confusion, without direction, up the flight of stairs to the music-room. The candles dripped and dripped until he puffed them out, with a gesture like a kiss: and left the acrid smoke from burnt wicks hanging in the darkness. They were burnt right down to the black wood sockets of the sconces. He felt, of a sudden, very ancient and whimsical, and a little weary. With a quaint little smile, he stopped and put his hand to the left breast of his coat, reassuring himself that his heart was still beating. A minute bumping communicated itself to his fingers. He gave a sniff of approval and pushed open the door of the music-room. The room was just as they had left it, with the lights still burning. His footsteps made very little noise upon the smooth wood floor.

  He seated himself in the armchair, facing the dying fire, and with his face in his hands, concentrating. What was it he was waiting for? From where would it come? The occasional thunder seemed a hint of the nature of the things with which he was trying to establish contact in his mind. He waited in painful respect. Would it be a voice? As he waited, he heard the sharp strokes of a bell wafted up to the house through the noise of the wind and rain. Uncertain, he went to a window, and drew the curtain across in the face of the lightning. The olives had gone mad, jumping and twisting, and flinging their bodies up, raving at the sky. Against the light from the window, the rain fell in lemon showers. The dim straits were humped and twisted in dark torsion, and the waves in the blow-hole below Phaon beat like tomtoms. It was funny that all this energy should be let loose around him, and he, of all humanity it seemed, safe and dry from it, in his little ark of masonry and plaster. Noah must have felt like this, looking out from the ark as from a watch-tower across the immense waters of the world, snug and dry, but ineffably alone, with the soul weary in his old body, crying out for the symbol of a dove. The cypress trees, with an air of dignified lunacy, bent now this way, now, like pendulums, that, touching their toes. He gave a chuckle, and his eyes turned from side to side in his head, as he watched the landscape, start up at him and disappear again, swallowed by the night.

  Again the sound of the bell. Running his dry tongue round his teeth, he stared out, trying to establish its identity in that world of chaotic sound. Illusion? Perhaps there was a fishing boat caught in the storm, and the priest was invoking the aid of the saint. Perhaps it was the bell in the church-tower.

  There was a sharp sound of footsteps on the path of the house, retreating, soon lost; and then the bell sounded again, beating across the valley and up the slopes. He knew then that in the monastery on the top of Leucothea the old monk was dying, or already dead. He could imagine the dead man
’s familiar, distracted by the weather-symbols of judgement, dragging the long bell-rope which hung in the yard, his eyes closed against the stinging rain, his beard turned to the sky, crying out the warning of God to the valley, and to mankind. So the monk, after all, was dead. For some reason he felt cheered by the thought.

  He drew the curtains together again, shutting out the view, and returned to the armchair, rubbing his hands together as he might have done after a successful business deal. The fire shone boldly on the glass bottles, though itself dying, and on the black piano. The fire was dying, the priest dead. Seating himself, he poured out a glass of the red wine, his especial favourite, which was brewed for him in one of the southern villages from grapes specially grown. Raising it, he drank, letting the tepid sweetness of the liquid cling on his tongue, curdle along his palate, and send its fumes to his brain.

  Sitting there, in all simplicity of mind, he contemplated his own death as something new and delightful; a divorce from the present which was perplexing, always perplexing, with its trivialities. Death, once beyond that partition of physical pain and fear, seemed to him made in the shape of his own desire. It would be a place of infinite understanding, in which there would be no bars for the roving intuition; everything would be open, and explored. Death must be a very spacious place, he heard himself think, in which so many heroes can be accommodated, so many mysteries solved. And thinking like this, in the warm first flush of exultation, he recalled to his mind all those things which before had done him hurt, trying to prove that the new strength was proof against them. As a man will press a bad tooth to see that it still hurts, he filled his mind with the unhappy things, but was at peace. Somehow the death of the monk had assoiled him and annulled his fear.

  Still smiling, he got to his feet and blew out the candles. In the silent corridor he paused for a second, looking at the floor, and then went to Manuela’s room.

  The shutters were drawn, and the musty air lay warm in it, and dark. He groped his way across to the French window, with a sense of impish excitement, and unlatched the window, letting the rain beat in upon the expensive tiles, and the lightning flash down, lighting up the furniture—the great bed and its counterpane decorated with the phoenix, the polished wardrobe, the line of bottles on the dressing-table.