Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

by Lawrence Durrell

  Deftly the women were laying the table in the shadowy inner room, clucking like chickens with delight and only pausing to replenish our glasses. The talk had turned to village matters, the familiar and immemorial landmarks of lives lived in such heroic seclusion. Niko, it is true, had once been as far as Athens on a teaching course, but the others had never been farther than the town of Corfu, ten sea miles to the south. For them words like Belgrade, Cairo, London sank into the mind like dyes, colouring these far-off places with the richness of ancient myths. They sighed and squeezed their fingers together in their laps as I spoke of them, like children hearing a fairy tale. But for my part I sank into the little world of the village with equal relief and pleasure; this was my form of romance. They could have London and Paris.

  The little hamlet of Kalami with its ten families was a whole world—a total world—whose confines were all there to be enjoyed and measured. It was not limitless like the outside world. It had a formal completeness which allowed the villagers to live their lives in a kind of assured completeness—unfragmented, free from hesitation. Here the chronology too was different. Strangers had come from outside, there had been wars, deprivation and famine, but inside the spectrum they remembered the year when the children of Jani had been struck by lightning, or when Socrates severed his thumb with a knife while cleaning a fish, or when the mason lost an eye from a pinch of quicklime. This was truth; the rest belonged delightfully but uneasily to the world of fable.

  When the first glad rush of conversation had spent itself, when the presents had been examined and assessed—and repaid in kisses—we sat down at the long table to eat. The women followed the old-fashioned tradition, standing behind to serve us, but not sitting down with us. From time to time, however, Kerkira would sit for a moment on a chair and sip a glass of sweet liqueur as she listened to our talk. By now I had produced my little phial of green olive oil—the delicious Vierge from our Provençal olives. “How long since you have visited Saint Arsenius?” I asked Niko, and he flashed his white teeth in a smile. “Last week,” he said. “Why?” I held up the green French oil and said: “I have brought a little oil for his lamp from our trees in France.” They drew their breath with pleasure and emotion—indeed with a certain pride. Who but a Greek would have thought of such a gesture? Athenaios bowed his head for a moment and when he looked up I saw that there were tears in his dark eyes. “You have done well,” he said. “It is not for nothing you are an adopted Greek and the godfather of Spyro.” My godson was a merchant seaman now, doing the San Francisco to Hong Kong run. Niko banged the table with pleasure. “We will go to the saint together,” he said roundly, “in my new boat, eh, Athenaios? This afternoon.” Everyone clapped hands and agreed delightedly.

  The fare was simple and humble, a fitting reminder that here in the north prosperity was still a debatable concept. But we ate heartily, wasting not a crumb, and the blackish wine from Vigla was good.

  “I never cease to marvel,” said Athenaios, “at the way you have brought us trade, just by writing a book about us.”

  “A book we cannot read even,” said Niko, mopping up his gravy with a heel of crust.

  “What do you mean by trade exactly?” I asked, puzzled.

  Athenaios smiled at the question. “The foreigners that come. So many, you will see. Every Sunday many caiques come from town to see the house. Many British; very nice people. Each one has a small radio which is very loud. It is marvellous.”

  Kerkira took up the tale. “The whole bay is full of them,” she said with pride. “They swim and make a great noise. Then they come and look at the house and we show them your picture and make them buy Coca-Cola. Yes, we have a Frigidaire now in the boathouse. And for an extra ten drachmas we show them my daughter’s trousseau. They go away very satisfied, yes, completely satisfied. And it is all due to you, my dear.” She gazed into my eyes with a kind of lachrymose gratitude and kissed my hand repeatedly. I tried to look pleased by this sinister item of news.

  “Nor is it only the British,” said Niko proudly, “but the French also come, many French in caiques during the week. The girls are beautiful and half-naked and they dance the tveest on the rock below. Sometimes they drink too much. They also have lovely radios and make a great noise.” He sighed with rapturous pleasure at the thought. Kerkira said: “It is a marvellous way of passing the time, for as you know nothing ever happens in Kalami. It is better than the cinema. The music is free. And they bring us trade.”

  “How we bless your name,” said Athenaios with his gravely smiling eyes as he pressed my hand warmly with those toil-worn fingers.

  “Thanks to you, Athenaios lives well,” said Niko. “Perhaps you will write something about my house now?”

  “Later we will start a hotel,” said Kerkira. “And then they can stay here all the time with their radios. Already we have many who rent your room—remember where you used to work?” She moved her fingers on an imaginary typewriter and went pock pock pock to illustrate just how I used to work.

  My heart sank slightly, but I put a good face on it as I drained my wine. “I am glad for you all.” Indeed I was, in a curious mixed-up sort of way. After all, why should I grudge them such a lucky windfall as a trade in itinerant celebrity hunters? Yet from another point of view, it was the twenty-year-old ghosts of the place which were threatened for me. Besides, how posthumous can one feel? I took a swift look at the silent nacreous sea outside the house with the trees growing in it upside down; the long swerving contours of the hill above Kouloura. There I had been once attacked by two eagles and had been forced to drive them off with a heavy club. I remembered with absolute clarity the shrill screaming and the soughing of their huge wings as they launched themselves at me from the steeper blue.

  Athenaios stood beside me with an arm about my shoulder. “You know,” he said, “I was thinking that now you are back in Corfu you will come and stay with us again, won’t you? It is not just or fair that we should enjoy all this glory and trade because of you, and that you should get nothing for it. It would shame us. No, you will live here. It will be very good for tourism, you will see. When the caiques come with the foreigners we will charge extra. They will pay to see the man himself. You will stand here upon the balcony and make a sign at them.”

  He made a vague sketch of a demagogic gesture—like Mussolini addressing the faithful, or the Pope blessing the world. Yes, I would stand on the balcony (clad in some suitable uniform?) and confer a blessing on my admirers with their transistors. Afterward we would take the rowboat out to collect all the floating beer bottles and Ambre Solaire suntan-lotion flagons and rubber ware.

  “You will sign their books,” Niko went on, “and we will pass the time very agreeably together, you will see.”

  “I shall reflect upon the matter,” I muttered vaguely. “I don’t know whether I can afford to leave my trees in France.”

  “Pouf! You can go back for the harvest every year, and then return to us for the tourist season,” he assured me comfortably.

  A lone green caique sputtered into view round the headland, carving the still, blue sea into curls as it crossed our line of vision. “That will be Dimitri going to town to sell his fish.”

  We finished our coffee and Niko led us down onto the white rock where his boat lay. It was a twenty-five-foot lateen-rig, sturdy but clumsy, and painted rust red. He had contrived a dashing but inappropriate housing for the front of it which gave the impression of half-decking. It was a tin form with a murky window. It would keep out the spray all right and provide some shelter in the sea, but being inappropriate to the type of boat would make her unmanoeuvrable when she was under sail.

  “I know what you are thinking,” grinned Niko. “It is very smart to look at but not very clever. We will take the cabin part off, I think.” The tin form was duly unbolted and dragged out upon the rock to make room for the three of us. We pushed off while the women of the family watched us with proud indulgence. “Don’t be too long,” cried Kerkira. Niko
gave a display of sudden physical violence as he cranked the ancient engine until it fired asthmatically and sent us throbbing across the bay. It was a weird contraption, this ancient machine. Niko caught me eyeing it and said proudly: “I know, my friend, it isn’t a marine engine at all. It is really a water pump I found on an old well. I fitted the shaft and adapted it. It works well but it is very heavy.” It was indeed. If ever the boat overturned it would plummet to the bottom of the sea.

  As we drew away I looked back at the familiar village and the diminishing figures of the women, who had returned to the high balcony over the water. Kerkira waved and we waved back. Here every twist of the headland, every rock and cove, was familiar. How often we had sat breathlessly for half the night gazing down into the dazzling pool of light cast by the carbide lamps, hunting for octopuses. Forgotten memories crowded in now, each one separate and vivid. One autumn night the bay was full of phosphorescence which turned our swimming bodies to fire; more than once after a winter storm we found the bay swarming with blue pipefish that could be gathered with a bucket. They behaved as though they were suffering from concussion. There on the big yellow rock by Agni, was Miller’s private bathing place. He used to trot off across the headland with his towel and notebook every morning, to return only when the distant cry of “Lunch” came to his ears across the olive groves.

  Kalami disappeared now and we were in the throat of the open sea which stretched away across the calm carpet of water to where the Venetian town drowsed among its opalescent mists. Niko was talking to Atheniaos with animation. In the starvation period they had learned to eat the leaves of certain trees, which brought them out in boils. The gravedigger was too enfeebled by lack of food to pierce the rocky soil of the churchyard; the dead had begun to “form queues” like the living, said Niko with grim humour. Nitsa dying had given a great cry and seen a vision of Greece free, once more. The smoke from the guns across the water had drifted about in the still winter air, unsubstantial as thistledown. “Well,” said Athenaios, “we have seen many things come to pass and yet, praise God, we are still among the living.” Niko grinned ironically and grunted. “Not for long,” said he. “At sixty-one it isn’t for long. But so long as I can still eat and sail I don’t care. Give me a few more years and I’ll enjoy them.”

  The sheep bells still tonked among the grassy glades above Agni; on the second headland there were fishermen at work. They were smashing up hermit crabs for bait, but they paused to wave. They were inevitably relatives of either Niko or Athenaios and by consequence were addressed in familiar fashion.

  “Caught anything, you cuckolds?”

  “Nothing. Where are you going, cuckolds?”

  “To Saint Arsenius, cuckolds.”

  “Is that the foreigner?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell him welcome and wish him Godspeed.”

  I thanked them and tipped a benign hat. We were heading down now for what we always regarded in the past as our own private beach. Elsewhere I have described the little shrine, the sentinel cypresses, the carved-out beach where we spent whole summers bathing naked. Once an ikon had been found floating in the sea and the faithful had taken this as a sign that Saint Arsenius was looking for a familiar place to settle. The shrine itself is hardly bigger than a large telephone booth, but the lamps are always in repair and the floor always dusted. How this is done is rather a puzzle, for the place cannot be approached by land, only by sea. Yet it has always been so. Once a year a priest comes by water with his acolytes and reads a service there.

  It hadn’t changed. We throttled down as we turned back the last headland like the page of a book and entered the little bay. But I am wrong; the profile of the rock has been altered somewhat by the explosion of an Italian land mine during the war. The shrine, however, had escaped unscathed. A few huge boulders had been scattered about the bathing beach, that was all. So still was the water that we did not bother to anchor. We snubbed the unfractious rock and climbed ashore, taking a line. Despite their age the two men climbed the rock as effortlessly as goats.

  The door was lightly pinioned with wire, easy to undo. I entered the little chapel, after so long, with emotion. Battered by wind and sea the rotting ikon stared back at us in the musty gloom. The lamps were full but unlit. We crossed ourselves backwards, in the Orthodox way.

  “Well, you old brute,” said Niko, addressing the squinting saint in terms of rough familiarity—tones one is permitted to adopt with close friends or relatives by marriage and which imply no irreverence. “We have brought you back the foreigner at last.” I stood breathing lightly in the still, stale air of the shrine, and remembering. Athenaios grubbed about in the gloom behind the makeshift altar. He was hunting for a twist of wick. There is always a half-burned wick lying about in such places. I had found a small empty lamp among the branch of oil lamps hanging above the ikon. I unstoppered my phial of green oil and reverently tipped it into the glass bowl. “Pour it all,” cried Niko with a sort of delighted voluptuousness, “every drop.” The blunt fingers of Athenaios had found a small twist of wick. We set it afloat in the oil and waited for a moment to let it drink and settle. “If it lights the first time,” Niko joked, “it means that you are welcome and that he has no outstanding complaints against you.” I admit I felt somewhat anxious, for the saint has a beady and penetrating glare—indeed the stare of an elder Freud. And he might well have a complaint against me, for in the longyears of my absence I had never sent him the smallest offering. But no. The wick flamed up and Athenaios clapped his hands softly. All of a sudden I saw the faces of my friends spring out of the gloom, touched by the yellow light; they had a chastened, ageless quality. I thought of the Byzantine faces which stare at one out of the ikons in Salonika, Athens, Ravenna—the dark eyes, the crisp curling hair, the long speculative noses. And behind this front rank, so to speak, the calm profiles of ancient Greek statues.

  Niko’s dark eyes twinkled with merriment. We crossed ourselves once more and embraced while Niko went on rallying the saint. “Now you are drinking French,” he told the ikon. “Drink then, drink deeply. Then tell us if the French oil is as good as ours.”

  We stayed a while bemused, by the yellow flame of the wick as it burned on, unwavering in the still air. Outside the dark shrine with its little cone of vivid yellow light the sunlight beat down mercilessly on the rock and water. It was time to go blinking into daylight once more. Niko wound up the prayer session by calling for a blessing from Arsenius and, by his leave, for another covering blessing from his great senior, Saint Spyridon. Once more he used his ironic rallying tone, addressing them as wicked old brutes. But his eyes were grave and tender.

  Suddenly I was reminded of the ancient shrines of Herakles which one could only approach backwards, uttering terrible curses. There had been one such in Lindos on Rhodes. A bit of bad language, a bit of familiarity, makes a saint feel at home with you when uttered in the right frame of mind. Standing once more upon that ragged rock face we grinned at each other and winked.

  “Well, he’s still there, as you see. Still on the job.”

  So long as Arsenius is there the Greek world will remain right side up.

  There was one more visit to be made—to the little underwater cave in which we used to hide whenever a passing boat hove in sight. In here, on the shallow slip of gravel beach, we used to leave our bathing suits so that we could put them on swiftly in any case where our nakedness might give offence to the peasants. I slipped overboard into the cool water and swam into the bay. Once we had made a clay statue of Pan and set it up in the cave and I was curious to see if anything remained. No. The winter sea had long since licked out the cave. There was no trace.

  We dawdled for an hour in the little bay, reminiscing. Then I spread my wet body out in the boat and Niko started up his engine with many a cajoling oath. Slowly we drew away from the Saint once more, giving him a friendly wave as we passed round the headland out of his life once more, perhaps this time for ever.

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p; It was later than we had imagined; indeed the sun was westering steeply when at last we tied up again at the white house. “It is a great thing,” said Niko sagely, “to be a creator.” He used the ancient word “demiurge” which is still current modern Greek. He seemed to have only the vaguest idea of what the concept stood for; and yet, perhaps not. After all, in the ancient world the gods walked about freely on earth and undertook many of men’s duties. Why should not a “demiurge” lend a hand with a little mild tourism and help a deserving cause? Zeus would not have blenched at the idea.

  That evening the “demiurge” held court, greeting all comers and meeting glass with lifted glass. Some were old friends, fishermen of the Forty Saints and Kassiopi; some were the grandchildren of old friends who came to press my hand and mutter warm greetings. Hands as horny as oaks, faces lined like druids, but with the fine manners of kings.

  By the time we settled for supper, the moon was rising—a huge copper ball swinging up from behind the Albanian mountains, struggling free of the shimmering ground mists. It seemed to rise in one’s very throat. Once more upon that silent balcony we sipped our last coffees and watched its wide shimmering path stretch across the straits. A liner slipped by with its thousand lights ablaze. But the moon outshone everything. There were stifled yawns now, for peasant folk sleep early, and I too was tired. My things had been laid out for me by Kerkira in the upper room, the old room. I dawdled a while to smoke a cigarette and watch the changing sea. A few old articles of furniture still remained—my old desk, for example, crudely painted and clumsy. The floor I had stained with my own hands once upon a time. The old fireplace which had cost us such diplomacy and anxiety had been bricked up, but I could still trace the lintel in the plaster of the wall.