Prospero's Cell

by Lawrence Durrell

  Blue embroidered bolero jacket with black and gold braid and piping.

  A white soft shirt with puffed sleeves.

  Baggy blue breeches called Vrakes.

  White woollen gaiters.

  And pointed Turkish slippers with no pompom.

  Either a soft red fez with a blue tassel

  Or a white straw hat.

  6.11.37

  The straw from the packing cases will go to cover the floor of the magazine where the goat is tethered. The rooms look lovely and gracious with their whitewashed walls, and the few bright paintings and books. The windows give directly on to the sea, so that its perpetual sighing is the rhythm of our work and our sleeping. By day it runs golden on the ceilings, reflecting back the bright peasant rugs—a ship, a gorgon, a loom, a cypress tree; reflecting back the warm crude pottery of our table; reflecting back N. now brown-skinned and blonde, reading in a chair with her legs tucked under her. Calm eyes, calm hair, and clear white teeth like those of a young carnivore. As Father Nicholas says: “What more does a man want than an olive tree, a native island, and woman from his own place?”

  6.13.37

  The man and his wife are fine creatures. He is called Anastasius and she Helen. It is obvious from their children that the marriage was a marriage of love rather than convenience. She is most delicately formed in a deep silken olive color; their hair has that deep black which shines out in sudden hints of blue—the simile of the Klepthic poems says “hair like the wing of a raven.” Beautifully formed eyebrows above their dark eyes, clear and circumflex. Only their hands and feet—like those of all peasants—are blunt and hideous: mere spades grown upon the members through a long battle with soil, ropes, and wood. Their daughters are called Sky and Freedom.

  6.17.37

  “Formal geology,” writes Theodore in his treatise, “will still find features of interest in Corcyra; and if the form of the island in general is conditioned by its limestone features, there are many interesting configurations worth the mature attention of field workers.”

  Southward the land falls gently away to the white cape, luxuriant and steaming; every curve here is a caress, nakedness to the delighted eyes, an endearment. Every prospect is contained in a frame of cypress and olives and brilliant roofs. Inlets, lakes, islands lead one slowly down to the deserted saltpans beyond Lefkimi.

  Two great ribs of mountain enclose this Eden. One runs from north to south along the western ranges; while from east to west the dead lands rise sheer to Pantocrator. It is in the shadow of this mountain that we live. Here little vegetation clings to the rock; water, harsh with the taste of iron and ice cold, runs from the ravines; the olive trees are stunted and contorted in an effort to maintain a purchase on this crumbling gypsum territory. Their roots, like the muscles of wrestlers, hang from the culverts. Here the peasant girls lounge on the hillside—flash of color like a bird—with a flower between their teeth, while their goats munch the tough thistle and ilex.

  “All epochs from the Jurassic are represented here. In the north the configurations of certain caves suggest volcanic origins, but this has not yet been proved.” The grottoes at Paleocastrizza are ribbed with jewels which smolder purple and yellow and nacre in the reflected light of the intruding sea. Grapes from this mountain region yield a wine that bubbles ever so slightly; an undertone of sulphur and rock. Ask for red wine at Lakones and they will bring you a glass of volcano’s blood.

  6.20.37

  Zarian sends me a poem about the island in Armenian to which he adds an English translation. Writing of Corcyra he says:

  The gold and moving blue have stained our thoughts so that the darkness is opaque, and we see in our dreams the world as if in some great Aquarium. Exiles and sharers, we have found a new love. This is Corcyra, the chimney-corner of the world.

  Since I have nothing else I reciprocate with my poem on Manoli, the landscape painter of Greece:

  After a lifetime of writing acrostics he took up a brush and everything became twice as attentive. Trees had been simply trees before. Distinctions had been in ideas. Now the old man went mad, for everything undressed and ran laughing into his arms.

  Theodore promises “Maps, Tables, and Statistics.” I am making no attempt to control all this material. If I wrote a book about Corcyra it would not be a history but a poem.

  World of black cherries, sails, dust, arbutus, fishes and letters from home.

  6.24.37

  Fragment from a novel about Corcyra which I began and destroyed:

  She comes down through the cloud of almond trees like a sentence of death, all dressed in white and leading her flock to the very gates of the underworld. Our hearts melt in us at the candor of her smile and the beauty of her walk. Soon she is to marry Niko, the fat moneylender, and become a stout shrew drudging out to olive-pickings on a lame donkey, smelling of garlic and animal droppings.

  6.25.37

  N. has been away for three days in the town, trying to buy a few odds and ends of furnishings for the house. The silence here is like a discernible pulse—the heart beat of time itself. I am all day alone on the great rock; the sea is cold—its chill hurts the back of the throat like an iced wine; but blue as the grave, while the sun is blazing. Tonight a letter by boat from her.

  I have bought us a twenty-foot cutter, carvel built, and Bermuda rigged. I am terribly excited—the whole world seems to be open before us. But O how wine-darkly she rides. Bringing her out tomorrow with Petros. Wait for me at the point.

  6.26.37

  The problem of water for the garden is serious. The only spring is on the highroad a quarter of a mile up the ravine. All our water is carried down on the backs of womenfolk in huge earthen jars. We had Nick the douser down with his hazel twig, but after walking backwards and forwards grumbling under his breath for a quarter of an hour, he pronounced the water “too deep”—over five meters. As the house stands at sea-level we could not afford to dig and have the well turn brackish on us. It must be a mountain spring or nothing. Meanwhile my two erudites send their suggestions by water—each a model of its kind. Zarian suggests a machine that a friend of his invented for turning salt water into fresh; he forgets how it works but he will write to America at once for particulars. It costs rather a lot but would save trouble; we would simply put one end of the pump in the sea and spray the garden with fresh water. Theodore, on the other hand, suggests something more practical. In the droughty summer the natives of Macedonia construct themselves ice-boxes by pulping quantities of prickly pear which they bury in a hole to the depth of about two meters. The hole is filled with fine pebbles or stones, and when the rains come the absorbing pulp of the prickly pear sups up the water and retains it in its pores. He suggests that we should adopt this scheme for our walled garden-boxes. “Be careful,” he adds, “to pulp the tree well. Count V. tried this in his country house garden on my advice but omitted to pulp the prickly pear so that by some unfortunate chance he found it growing up through his flower beds. This, as you can imagine, was a catastrophe and he has not spoken to me since.”

  7.3.37

  The conventions of our weekly meeting at “The Partridge” are charming; we share our food, our criticism, and even our mail. When Zarian gets a letter from Unamuno or Celine it is read out and passed round the table; and when I get one of Henry Miller’s rambling exuberant letters from Paris the company is delighted. This is the real island flavor; our existence here is in this delectable landscape, remote from the responsibilities of an active life in Europe, have given us this sense of detachment from the real world. Over the smoking copper pans the face of Paul, the Cretan manager of the tavern, looms strangely. He watches over the dishes, pausing to wipe the sweat out of his great brown moustaches; his manner is that of one who has dealt with epicures for a lifetime. Later Luke, the blind guitarist, arrives, led by his small son—a child of great beauty and pallor. Its face is the face of a Byzantine ikon. Stiffly the old red-faced man sits down on a chair, and strikes his instrument;
the small expressionless face of the boy is cocked over his cheap violin as he tunes it. Then they strike up one of the familiar Greek jazz songs—inevitably a tango; yet the words haunt, and the refrain is taken up to the accompaniment of knife and fork by the roystering Zarian, Peltours the lean Russian painter, Veronica and John, Nimiec, Theodore. The narrow white-washed room with its ugly tables and cheap advertisements rings.

  Loneliness, Loneliness,

  You are bitter company to us.

  Afterwards we walk down in the warm night to the dark slipway, and, as the moon is rising, shake out the jib of the Van Norden, start her engine, and put our noses northward into the night. Lights move on the darkness hardly grazing the surface of the consciousness. From the receding shore, clear on the water, we can hear Zarian still contending some majestic literary theme. N. curls in a rug and dips her grapes over the side in the shining sea. And hollow over the harbor, speeding us with the promise of a safe arrival, St. Spiridion strikes the hour of midnight.

  7.4.37

  We breakfast at sunrise after a bathe. Grapes and Hymettos honey, black coffee, eggs, and the light dear-tasting Papastratos cigarette. Unconscious transition from the balcony to the rock outside. Lazily we unhook the rowboat and make for the point where the still blue sea is twisted in a single fold—like a curtain caught by a passing hand. A shale beach, eaten out of the cliff-point, falling to a row of sunken rocks. A huge squat fig tree poised like a crocodile on the edge of the water. Five fathoms directly off the point so that sitting here on this spit we can see the dolphins and the steamers passing within hail almost. We bathe naked, and the sun and water make our skins feel old and rough, like precious lace. Yesterday we found the fetus of an octopus, colorless ball of gelatin, which throbbed invisibly in the palm of the hand; today the fisherboys have found our beach. They have written Angli in charcoal on one of the rocks, we have responded with “Hellenes” which is fair enough. We have never seen them. N. draws a little head in a straw hat with a great nose and moustache.

  7.5.37

  Yesterday was a fisherman’s holiday; first a great glistening turtle was washed up on the beach at the cliff edge. It was quite dead and its heavy yellow eyelids were drawn down over its eyes giving it a sinister and reptilian air of being half asleep. It must have weighed about as much as the dinghy. I expected the fishermen to make some use of the meat but nobody has touched it—except the village dogs which have been worrying its flippers.

  More exciting was the killing of the eel. We were unhooking the boat when a small boy who was helping us cast off pointed to something in the water and exclaimed “Zmϒrna.” I was about to probe about with an oar—for I could see nothing in the shadow of the great rock—when Anastasius came running like a flash from the carpenter’s shop. He held two heavy four-pronged tridents. For a moment or two he stared keenly down into the water; we could see nothing beyond the movements of marine life, the swaying of the seaweed fronds and the strange flickering passage of small fish. Then Anastasius lowered a piece of wood—simply the unshod shaft of a trident—into the darkest patch of the shadow. There was a small audible snap—as of a rat-trap closing—and his shoulders became rigid; maintaining his pressure on the wood he picked up a trident and lowering the point slowly into the water suddenly struck home at an angle. There was a sudden convulsion among the seaweed and the head of the eel emerged; it seemed to our terrified eyes about the size of a dog’s head and infinitely more senseless and wicked. The trident had pierced the skull and while it was still dazed from the blow Anastasius strove to dislodge it from its perch. Help, too, was at hand. Old Father Nicholas came racing down with a couple of sharpened boat hooks and these were driven into the meaty shoulders of the eel.

  It took three of them to lug it on to the rock, and for a quarter of an hour on dry land it fought savagely, with two tridents piercing its brain and two more in its sides. I can hear the dry snapping of its jaws on the stick as I write. It had muscle on it like a wrestler, and its tail tapered into a great finned bolster of brown gristle—a turbine; altogether the whole fish looked more like an American invention than anything from the water-world; and it had the ferocity and determination of Satan. It was interesting to see how afraid its evil aspect made one; long after it was dead the peasants were driving their tridents into it with imprecations; and everyone gave it a wide berth until it stiffened with an unmistakable rigor.

  Another reflection of this anxiety: Helen was given a terrific scolding because she was in the habit of poking about in the rocks at low tide barefooted. “And if such an animal got you?” Anastasius kept repeating. “And if such an animal got you?”

  The children stood like carvings by the sea in their red flannel frocks, never taking their eyes off the dead eel. They all had their thumbs in their mouths. Then Sky removed her thumb with a little sigh and said: “Let’s go,” and they trotted off up among the olive trees.

  Tonight we shall have eel meat with red sauce for supper.

  7.6.37

  At night the fishing boats put out; they carry great carbide flares to attract the fish to the nets, and the dark bulk of the Albanian shadow opposite is studded with their jeweled fires. Dark red and smoky, occasional fires glow on the hills themselves; yellow and small along the sealine shine the lights of the solitaries who hunt alone in boats with tridents. I must record the method and the instruments employed in carbide fishing—but tonight my mind is full of a story which Nicholas has been telling me. It concerns two lovers in Corcyra during the occupation of the Turks. He was an Albanian Moslem and she a Greek. During a political crisis he was banished from the island and she was kept guarded in a country house on the coast; before he left they agreed to signal to each other by lighting fires—he on the tip of Cape Stiletto and she at Govino on the second Sunday of every month. For three years these fire messages passed telling each of them that the other was well. Then one night the girl died and her attendants forgot to light the accustomed fire. The fire on the Cape, however, burned at the accustomed time. But when her Albanian lover saw no response to his message he knew that something serious was afoot and crossed over to the island to try and visit her. He was caught and murdered. Yet ever since then on the second Sunday of every month there is a fire alight on the end of Cape Stiletto; it burns brackishly for a few hours and then goes out. Sometimes it shows a greenish flame. It is not a carbide fisher as there is no shallow beach off the cape; it is not a scrub fire because on this bare promontory there is nothing but rock. It is, says Nicholas, the Albanian sending his message—a message to which there is never any answer, for Govino headland lies dark and unresponsive to the west, under the hump of shadow from the mountains.

  7.7.37

  The boat rides beautifully. N. has christened her the Van Norden. Now in the still weather we keep her anchored close under the balcony; she is smart in her black paint with brass fittings and a white awning. Yesterday we took her out in a fresh north-easterly wind up as far as the Forty Saints. I wanted to conquer my timidity about a following wind. But she ran before it like a knife. The wood around the lead keel however is puffed and cankered; she must come out and be painted against worms. I notice that we speak about her in the compassionate and familiar way that people speak about their pets. The young schoolmaster Niko is full of envy, and in order to show off we invited him for a sail in the evening. He handles her much more sensitively than either of us; with roughness and determination, with an unerring sense of what to ask her. She turns upwind like a dancer and falters into the still water under the house like a vessel of silk.

  The Island Saint

  THE ISLAND ISreally the Saint: and the Saint is the island. Nearly all the male children are named after him. All the island craft carry his tintype—mournful of beard and brow—nailed to their masts of unseasoned cypress wood. To use his name in an oath is to bind yourself by the most solemn of vows, for St. Spiridion is still awake in Corcyra after nearly two thousand years on earth. He is the Influence of the islan
d.

  In the chapel of the church of his name he lies, looking a trifle misanthropic but determined, as befits one who has seen most sides of life on earth, and who is on equal terms with heaven. The sarcophagus is deeply lined and comfortable; he lies in hibernating stillness in his richly wrought casket, whose outer shell of silver is permanently clouded by the breath of the faithful who stoop to kiss it. The darkness swims with chalices and banners—all the garishness of Byzantine church decoration. A style of art which is literal rather than figurative: the saint has a real nimbus of silver let into the canvas round his haunted oval face. Eyes of black olive stare unrepenting down from every wall.

  Here in the church of St. Spiridion, Venice and Turkey compete in silver and brass, in bronze and iron; and under this tortured inlay work and color the dark pagan eyes still stare with their fleshly hunger—reminding you how close the old pantheon is, locked in this narrow ritualism.

  Light, dammed up by the obtuse walls, bursts fiercely through the great porches and explodes like butter over the scarves and headdresses, the beards and lips and clothes of the peasants.

  The saint lies quite composed in his casket. He is a mummy, a small dried-up anatomy, whose tiny feet (clad in embroidered slippers) protrude from a vent at the bottom of his sarcophagus. If you are one of the faithful you may stoop and kiss his slippers. He will answer your prayers.

  Who is Spiridion? His life is an amusing study in myth. He was born and lived as a shepherd in the mountains of Cyprus. When his wife died he buried his unhappiness between the four walls of a monastery, becoming immediately remarkable for his fineness of spirit and fidelity to God. As a bishop he took part in the great council of Nicea, where he gave miraculous testimony of the then disputed doctrine of the Trinity by casting a brick (which he must have secreted about his person) to the ground, where it immediately gushed fire and water in one.