Prospero's Cell

by Lawrence Durrell

  “Yes,” says Theodore gravely.

  “And here I am.”

  “Yes,” says Theodore.

  “I am fed and clothed and do not have to work.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well—am I mad, or are the people outside mad?”

  This is in the purest vein of Ionian logic and is to be commended to students of sociology. Basil’s dossier lists him as a melancholic. A novice in a nearby monastery he early showed a gift for casuistry—that melancholy science. But he dips his fingers into Theodore’s little paper bag of sweets with a transfiguring smile of happiness before he goes back to his place on the garden bench among the others.

  8.6.37

  “If you had an opportunity to put a question to Socrates what would it be?” writes Zarian. “I would ask him if he was a happy man. I am sure that greater wisdom imposes a greater strain upon a man.” At the “Partridge” this view is contested bitterly by Peltours and N. Wisdom, they say, teaches the ratiocinative faculty how to rest, to attain a deeper surrender of the whole self to the flux of time and space. Theodore recalls Socrates’ epileptic fits while I find myself thinking of a line from Donne prefixed to “Coryat’s Crudities”: “When wilt thou be at full, Great Lunatique?”

  8.7.37

  Fishing demands the philosophic attitude. We have been waiting a week for propitious nights to use the carbide lamp and the tridents and at last the wish has been granted: deep still water and a waning moon which will not rise until late.

  After dinner I hear the low whistle of the man by the sea and I go out on to the balcony. He is shipping his basket and tridents and screwing his carbide-lamp to the prow. Tonight I am to try my hand at this peculiar mode of fishing. The tridents are four in number and varying in size; besides them we ship the octopus hook—attached to a staff about the size of a billiard cue—for octopus is not stabbed direct but coaxed: whereas squid and fish are victims of a direct attack.

  Small adjustments are made. He removes his coat which smells of glue and wood shavings and bales some of the water out from under the floorboards. Then we cast off and move slowly out into the darkness. The night is deep and clean smelling and utterly silent. Far out under the Albanian hills glow the little flares of other carbide fishers. Anastasius circles in the margin of rocks below the house and begins to talk quietly, explaining his practice. Midges begin to fly into our faces and we draw down our sleeves to cover our arms. He rows standing up and turning his oars without breaking the surface—since it is into this spotless mirror that we must gaze, and the least motion of wind smears all vision.

  Presently the carbide lamp is lit and the whole miraculous underworld of the lagoon bursts into a hollow bloom—it is like the soft beautiful incandescence of a gas mantle lighting. Transformed, like figures in a miracle, we gaze down upon a seafloor drifting with its canyons and forests and families in the faint undertow of the sea—like a just-breathing heart.

  Now hoarse in the darkness beyond the point the Brindisi packet boat brays once; and nearer a grampus gives a Blimp-like snort. Then we are alone again.

  Anastasius talks quietly. When I am tired I must not hesitate to tell him, he says. He himself is indefatigable and in good weather fishes half the night. But he is not really talking to me; he is talking himself into the receptive watchfulness of the hunter—the unreasoning abstraction which will allow him to anticipate the movement of fish; he is like a chess player combining possibilities in his own mind and testing them, so to speak, upon futurity.

  We move in a concave ripple. Deep rock surfaces, yellow and green and moving like a human scalp with marine fucus. Fishes, a school, the silver-white of dawdle to the entrance of a cave and goggle at us. Each wears a black dapple on the back, and they look, in their surprise, like a row of semiquavers. Then, as if frightened by some purely marine event they disappear with the suddenness of a thrown switch. An eddy of wind purls the surface and Anastasius dips his twig of almond into the bottle of olive oil hanging at the prow. He scatters a few drops before us and the water clears again and steadies. I catch my breath, for there, crouching on a patch of reddish sand is the famous and eatable (I take him to be the sea scorpion) with his bulldog head flattened upon a stone. Anastasius gets him squarely through the body at the first lunge and soon he is fluttering and ebbing in the darkness at my feet—a small dying pulse, uncomfortably tapping against the dry wood. Twice I put him in the basket and twice he leaps out and beats against the wood like the pulse of a dying bird.

  We do not speak now, but proceed slowly along the edge of the lagoon in silence, surveying the haunted underworld which seems so like a panorama of the moon’s surface. We stop where the fig trees overhang and he tells me to look down. I can see nothing. Gingerly he lowers the trident and strikes; it is buried in a small white shape which begins to flutter madly. The small frightened eyes of the squid. As it breaks surface it spits a mouthful of ink over his face and arms and begins to wheeze like a sick kitten. Cursing softly and laughing he scrapes it off the trident against the gunwale and lets it drop into the basket where the contact of its fluttering hardly dead body suddenly rouses the stiffened body of the Scorpion to a small fluttering gasp of life. The air is cold tonight, and the sudden chill is fruitful, for within an hour we have several squid and two unnameable white fish besides the scorpion.

  Anchored in a tiny bay we smoke a cigarette and Anastasius breaks off a piece of dry bread in his teeth. The air makes one hungry. The lamp is guttering and he charges it again with rock carbide. Once more the underworld flares into bloom. It is time, says Anastasius, for us to land an octopus, and to this end he ships the tridents and lets down his hooked staff, with its floating decoy of parsley training dispiritedly from it. He begins probing gently under rocks, turning this way and that. From the darkness of the cliff edge above us a fir cone falls with a little plop into the water. “Look,” says Anastasius suddenly between his teeth, and I lean down. From under a rock, lazily moving, is something which looks like a snake. He is touching it very gently with the sprig of parsley, flirting with it. The tentacle plays softly with the leaves and is joined coyly by a second tentacle: then a third. They make playful passes at the sprig of green which conceals the waiting hook. Presently the ugly gas mask head of the octopus comes into view, peering with moronic concentration at the decoy. And the moment has come. Anastasius slips the hook under the hood and tugs. There is a sudden strain and convulsion. The tentacles of the beast become rigid, but it is too late. Up it comes, writhing and grovelling, carrying two small boulders in its paws which it drops into the boat with a tremendous clatter, alarming us both. He now grips it firmly, and the hideous thing wraps itself round his arm, fighting back strongly. His object is to find the critical central bone, and he gives a sudden movement of the wrists, turning the hood inside out and plunging his teeth into a certain place in order to break it. A convulsion, and the whole mechanism seems to falter and fall to pieces. The tentacles still frantically suck and writhe, but they are now attached to a paralysed and shattered brain which gives them no directions for escape. Thrown dully to the bottom of the boat, they suck along the wood with the dull tearing noise that medical tape makes when it is being torn from human flesh.

  Anastasius laughs softly and washes his hands in seawater to dry them on the edge of his coat. A fish is a fish, but squid and octopus are a delicacy for him.

  We take up the hunt in a desultory way and I manage, under his tuition, to spear yet another squid, and to miss a red mullet.

  It is past midnight, and a small wind has sprung up, forcing us to use more and more olive oil to still the surface. We retrace our path slowly indulging in afterthoughts: looking under rocks which we have missed, and probing the larger caves in the hope of rousing an eel. Soon we are back at the davits, slinging the boat. Helen is there to meet us with bread and wine. I lend her my torch and she exclaims proudly over the catch in the happy vein of a person whose lunch and dinner for the morrow has been provided for.
<
br />   By now a thin slice of moon is up, and early morning winds are beginning to curl up and lie on the surface of the water for a minute at a time before disappearing. The cypresses stretch for a moment from their romance stillness, like tired and cramped human models. I pause irresolute at the still edge of the bay, wondering whether the water is too cold for a bathe. The taste of the Greek cigarette is light and heady.

  Tomorrow I am to be instructed in the art of fishing with the shoulder net—called This has a span of about six feet, and is loaded at the edge with lead. It is carried folded in a certain way on the left shoulder and is used to trap fish in shallow water. The throwing of it demands a special skill.

  And so, confused by these shallow veins of thought, to the balcony and the bedroom. The Van Norden lies at anchor twenty feet from the house, her tall spars rigid and consciously beautiful on the lacquer of the sea.

  Sleep, in this cool, still room, is like entering a cave.

  8.10.37

  The Albanian smuggler has been over again from the Forty Saints. He is a fierce old ruffian, evil of manner and with no sense of humor. In his great sack he brought tobacco leaf, which we are buying for next to nothing. Anastasius teaches me how to strip each leaf of veins and lay them one on top of the other. Then we put them out to dry for a while, and finally to rest in the great magazine with its dry musty air and its rows of tomatoes drying on strings. Here after awhile we roll and press the leaf and cut it finely with a razor blade. It is probably the coolest and richest pipe tobacco in the world, pure leaf and heavy. Anastasius loads his own cigarettes with it.

  8.11.37

  Took the Van Norden up in the direction of the Forty Saints in a strong western wind, but became totally becalmed in the lea of the headland, and lay off the Stephano lighthouse, watching a party refuel the lamp. It was strange to lie in this well of still water while not more than two hundred yards off the wind crisped the sea, and the air was wild with herring gulls. One of the lighthouse men tried to engage us in amiable conversation but at that range we could not understand a word he said, so we had to be content to wave to each other.

  Zarian and his wife had arrived when we got back for tea, to stay a couple of days. Zarian says he has read somewhere that Nelson once drafted a plan to take the Old Fort (considered impregnable in his time) by running a frigate aground by the seawall, and boarding her from the masts. From every point of view a bad plan for there is a sea ramp which would have grounded the ship before her boarding crews were within reach of the lower battlements.

  A letter from Zarian’s wife in the south of the island.

  You say I am your cruelest critic. I have been afraid when you seemed about to submit the island to the contamination of “fine writing”—but I need not have been. You will never touch it, my dear boy. Has the chapter upon Corcyra’s perpetual spring been finished? I had it so much in mind that this walk southward with Theodore and the child has been like wandering through your book ahead of you. But how can you do it—how can anybody? There is as you say, no sense of season for the small ones. I have thrown away my paint box. Soon you will be throwing away your typewriter. All the summer children like iris and anemone, are out again—glades of them falling away to the White Cape, revived by the first autumn rains. Here it is your own underworld. My sketchbooks are fuller of notes than any Theodore could make it: speedwell, iris stylosa (?), marigolds, cranesbill, buttercup and pimpernel. Even the beady blue drops of grape hyacinth—how?

  You should do a sort of ballet of fruits and flowers; chorus the rough blue of sea, the staple olive-tone washed in rotation by the wild pearfoam, and the lands under Spartila by peachmist and asphodelcloud. It is too much. Mist of plum, pear, almond.

  Now we camped for the night in an orchard where nespoles in golden knots—but why go on? You must come and see for yourself. Utterly silent and out of prehistory lay a little olive grove shelving into the sea on a beach carpeted with brown dry seaweed. We have been cooking from a friendly cottage with an earth floor, the garden of it crammed with wistaria, carnation and stock—drunk-making and rich.

  High up above me when I look up from this pad I see two villages with cypresses on crags above us; where the ancient temple was is now a small whitewashed church—nothing has really changed as you said. And the crags are alive with golden broom. Kestrels hover and shriek over the blue gulf. A girl minds her sheep and is friendly. Here it is the habit to keep a flower dangling in the teeth—to set off the wonderful flashing smile.

  This morning when we went down for a bathe we found the abbot of a local monastery sitting on a rock fishing for dear life. He accepted a sandwich with great politeness and exchanged it for a cigarette which he took from his stovepipe hat, which meant that he untidied his hair; he had to comb it out again and restore the bun at the back.

  So you see how terribly unearthly we are becoming, just three days in this haunted grove. And of course we have given your love to everyone here.

  8.13.37

  Father Nicholas is a great mythological character. He is a big-boned rosy-faced old man of close on sixty-five. He likes to sit and boast by the edge of the sea on calm days, like an Ionian Canute. He is the author of three fine sons, one of whom is young Nicholas the village schoolmaster. Under his pendulous trumpeter’s cheeks, under the sculptured fall of the great moustache, his mouth is always smiling. He still wears the blue pantaloons, and curving Turkish slippers of the older generation, and he is pedantic about the whiteness of his three heavy silk shirts, two of which are always out on the line being watched over by his timid, retiring wife. Father Nicholas sits manfully in the shadow of his own vine, prodding the grapes from time to time with his oak stick—in a faintly sardonic manner, as if to dare them to ripen. He has the good-humored scolding manner—the scornful affection—which is the mark of the finest Greek temperament. He boasts and boasts. The story of his sailing voyages have become a sort of saga in his own mind; and when he begins a tale it is always to show how worthless the Ionians have become as sailors since the Diesel engine was imported. As he talks he consumes cup after cup of red wine, which is brought for him from a rapidly emptying keg in the magazine. His long nose ravens over the heavy Kastellani wine—his favorite brew. He illustrates his stories by drawing in the earth with his stick. The lack of variation in them is astonishing. In every one of them he is returning from Goumenitsa with a load of wood when he is overtaken by an immense “fortuna”; everything goes overboard to lighten the craft; amidst thunder and lightning the ikon of Spiridion is consulted, but on this occasion the Saint is about other business because while they are praying a waterspout stoves in the boat. Father Nicholas at this point leaves the tiller and goes overboard clutching an armful of kindling (it is astonishing how few of these islanders can swim), which bears him up until he is washed ashore next day at Govino. All the crew perish, and the wife of Socrates, the mate, who is a woman of remarkable saintliness, is washed up two days later in Kouloura harbor. Her hands are folded on her breast and her eyes shut—Father Nicholas at this point folds his own hands, closes his eyes, and assumes an expression of saintly resignation. He is extremely affected by his own narrative, and wipes his eye in his sleeve, calling for more wine as he does so.

  It goes without saying that Father Nicholas is an extremely cautious sailor; picking his wind, he occasionally makes an autumn trip over the water to Albania to gather a bit of fuel. But the slightest inequality of weather makes him run for harbor with a frantic and undignified haste. At home he is the complete autocrat, and spends all morning on the sunny terrace with a little plate of figs, bread, and olives before him.

  He is occasionally guilty of an aphorism which sounds as if it were a proverb adapted by himself to suit his own experience. He enjoys uttering blood-curdling threats against his wife in the hearing of strangers, and she repays these with her quick sad smile and a remark which could only be translated as: “Get along with you now.”

  “Women,” he grumbles, “should be be
aten like an olive tree; but in Corfu neither the women nor the olive trees are beaten—because of the terrible laziness of everyone.”

  We have given Nicholas a set of chessmen, and Theodore has managed to teach the game to the old man, who is delighted. Unlettered as he is, he plays chess with tremendous imagination and certainty. When Theodore comes to stay he always strolls across to the little vine-wreathed balcony and challenges Father Nicholas to a game. More often than not he loses—and when this happens the old man becomes flushed with triumph, and begins to boast more than ever. “What good are letters,” he rumbles affectionately, “and learning? Everything you have in your head, doctor, is little use against the wide-awakeness of the Romeos—the Greek.”

  Theodore takes it meekly and in very good part. “My learning tells, O Nicholas,” he replies, “that if you continue to drink wine like this you will have an affection of the foot—which we have no name for in Greek. But it will be painful.”

  “Bah,” says Father Nicholas equably. “Since you cannot get the better of me in this game of bishops and kings, how can I believe you in other matters?”

  In this flow of banter they disguise their affection for each other; for when Theodore is hunting for malaria specimens Father Nicholas will walk miles beside him to show him the location of a particular pond or well. While, whenever illness visits the family, either the sufferer or a letter is despatched at once by caique to Theodore in his laboratory. And we, as Theodore’s friends, have become partly involved in these questions of the community’s health. The encyclopedia, a medicine chest, and a thermometer enable N. to perform miracles of diagnosis. So far we have successfully diagnosed two cases of whooping cough, one malaria, one case of rheumatic fever, and a case of incipient rickets due to malnutrition.

  11.15.37

  You wake one morning in the late autumn and notice that the tone of everything has changed; the sky shines more deeply pearl, and the sun rises like a ball of blood—for the peaks of the Albanian hills are touched with snow. The sea has become leaden and sluggish and the olives a deep platinum grey. Fires smoke in the villages, and the breath of Maria as she passes with her sheep to the headland, is faintly white upon the air. All morning she will sit crouched among the bracken and myrtle, singing in her small tired witch’s voice, while the sheep bells clonk dully around her. She is clad in a patchwork of rags, and leather slippers. In her hands she holds the spinning bobbin upon which she is weaving her coarse woollen thread. Later on the treadle loom in the magazine Helen will weave the coarse colored blankets which the shepherd boys take into the hills with them where they mind their sheep in the deeper winter approaching. Maria watches the younger women picking olives through her wrinkled violet eyes and spits contemptuously before taking up her little song—which is about two ravens sitting in an olive tree. Golden eagles hover in the grey. The cypresses hang above their own reflections like puffs of frozen grey smoke. Far out in the straits the black shape of a boat sits motionless—or dragging slowly and uncouthly with the flash of oars—like an insect upon a leaf. Now is the time to break logs for the great fireplace we have built ourselves, and smell the warm enriching odor of cypress wood, tar, varnish and linseed oil. It is time to prepare for the first gale of tears and sunsets from Albania and the East.