Island of Lightning (13 page)

Was it ever different? I say to myself. Did Mozart tear his hair or did the music run seamlessly through him like candlelight on the Danube? And no, I will not come to the performance. All week I have heard the production taking shape, the chorus carrying into the small hours, the baton cracking like a pistol shot. Everything that happens in the theatre happens here.

So I get on with my dog's breakfast. The bread and the wine. The loaf as sweet as a lemon leaf. But the wine? Sometimes I drink from the bottleneck. Or I pour the wine into a bowl and soak the bread if its crust is hard. Because I've found these loaves sometimes turned to rock, the rye especially a splinter of basalt. But the wine wins. It always will. Now the bread lies in its black petals. Dreamfood I call it. All that's left of last week's loaf.

The baker is a man-child who has lived in the bakery all his life. His mother is the crone at the hatch. When she offers my few cents change I always wave it away and she whistles in admiration, whistles like one of the thrushes that dive from the ramparts. And I smile at her but realise that sarcasm from the old is harder to swallow than ancient bread.

That's why I prefer the wine shop in Zachary Street. I take a bottle there and the girl does not dip the jug as I thought she might but fills it with a ladle. The wine is cheap. At first I thought the price a mistake, but no, she assured me, no, put that coin away, and that one too. Look. I need only this one and this one. And okay, this one with the thrush upon it, our blue rock thrush,
il merill
, a bird seldom seen now because of the snarers' nets.

And such wine it is. Black as the girl's eyes watching me as I watch her dipping and pouring and dipping. Yes, the same darkness in the barrel as in her gaze. Because this wine is inscrutable even in candlelight, this wine my tarry physic, warm in the room as the girl's hand might be. I touched it once. I touched her hand and she did not withdraw. But the jug was full and I was scrabbling for coins, for the coin with the thrush upon it. Yes, a rare bird now as everybody says.

13. Counting the Fireflies

If Omar is not telling tourists about the island's past, standing on the steps of a palazzo or in a cobbled yard where blue bees crawl through hibiscus, I ask for an hour, or an afternoon, of his time. Often, he agrees, and I feel honoured.

Yet so far he has said nothing about the gods. Yes, he tells me of the baroque churches. Of the Renaissance art. But that's not what interests me. I'm not that kind of scholar.

Today he takes me to a place I must have passed a score of times, yet never noticed. Under the western ramparts the walls are a maze of tunnels used by fishermen and lovers and the klandestini. Down a flight of steps we stop in shadow. There is a string of washing hung against an entrance, and above this door are two eyes painted blue and white, and the word
Caccarun
in flaking paint.

Omar leads the way, parts the shirts and vests on the line and beckons me inside. It is a small room, perhaps a kitchen. There are a table and two chairs and shelves of jars and bottles. The room is dark, so dark I cannot see that around the wall this space continues. Omar leads on. The room becomes a tunnel. Ahead a candle is burning. There are two diesel drums with a piece of driftwood between them. In the gloom, I think, someone might be sitting at this board.

Wine? asks Omar, and he himself lifts a bottle and two dusty glasses from a shelf.

Where are we? I ask.

Under the bastion, says my guide. It's time you met the Phoenician. Hey Nannu, your health.

Omar is toasting the shadow in the corner. I look closer. There is a man there with hair the colour of a spiderweb. An empty glass waits before him. Omar offers to pour him wine, Omar already the host, Omar the leader. But the figure places a palm over his cup. This man is very frail. In the candlelight his skin is yellow.

No hurry at all, smiles Omar. Nannu has waited a long time. He will wait longer. But you, sir, you should learn more.

Of course, I say. I'm here to learn. But…

Then listen, says Omar. We're in the warren here. These tunnels run a long way. Above us is a palace of many rooms and in its history it has been many things. Now, it's a kind of hotel. Sixteen women live there, not as many as before. But if you would know the island, you must know them.

It's less the present, I say. Than the past. The ancient days. And the…

But Omar holds up his hand.

First, the lovely Rusatia. Ask her, and she will dress as a priest for you. Or the Emperor himself. As a gladiator if such is your taste. No, she is never without callers.

Callidrome is a little older. She keeps a goat in her suite and feeds it radishes. It is tied to her bed with a toga chord and Callidrome rouges its white cheeks and puts lipstick on its nannygoat lips. Yes, Callidrome's goat is a beautiful creature, its eyes like dates. Once she gave it cocaine and she swore it spoke monk's Latin.

Fortunata is inseparable from her mother. They are, I suppose, a team. Once mummy put a love potion in the communion wine, then they waited in their room. The first to knock was the Bishop of the Blue Lagoon, and soon a school-teacher with his class dinner money. Yes, powerful medicine.

Now Fabia, she has style. She drinks ouzo from Milos and listens to Cole Porter songs. Ah, she whispers, I was his muse. In love with the night mysterious? Of course. He came here you know. To this island. Ah Mr Porter, sang Fabia. What shall I do? Night and day, you are the one. That's Fabia's best line, I think. Of course, it didn't last. Poor Porter with his limp and his money? The hotel was no place for him and Fabia such a demanding child. But for a while they got along. They were artists, you see. He could no more stop writing his music than Fabia turn down one million Turkish lire for a tick of her eyebrow pencil. People like that can never switch off. Because you should never retire. Ask old Nannu here. Still keeping a bar. So Fabia stays working. What should she be doing? Watching the island's TV? As she will say, I am a witness, as are all artists.

Nica is always in demand because she owns the strongest mosquito spray.
Pif Pif,
I think it is called. Yes, a powerful poison that gives those swampflies no chance. But as to losing blood, doesn't little Nica have that all her own way? How sweet, Nica will say, after her pearly whites have done their job. Advocates taste of palm oil, she tells the other girls. And MPs of mothballs. Her favourites of course are the orchestra from the theatre. Apparently, violinists are salty as the Ligurian deeps. Oh, what blood, little Nica will say. I can taste the music in it.

Felicia drinks like no other. Her tipple is anis, which has deranged many a fine mind. Men often challenge her to a bulb of wine. Always Felicia wins. How? Because she doesn't swallow. The wine simply disappears into her gullet, though sometimes of course, I can hear it sloshing about when I place my ear to her belly, a belly dark as a communion plate. Yes, little Felicia, outdrinking the lascars, the Ark Royal stokers tattooed like Scythians, the trireme oarsmen still in their chains. How often have I seen her hands in their pockets or lifting a greasy tarboosh while they slept it off? Often, brother. Oh yes.

Cressa and Drauca work together for safety's sake. They come from Siricusa and know all the wiles of the dockside trash who want to try their luck. But one day, they were duped. Some old fool offered an IOU. He swore the next day, or the next, he'd have the brass. Together they tipped him upside down and found only grapeseeds in his suit. So they christened him with the chamber pot. No credit notes, no plastic, no Albanian squindarkas are their rules of business. Couldn't he read?

Mula is from the island. Her father makes brandy from prickly pears, and delivers a cask of it to the hotel every month. So the girls look after Mula, who cannot read, but is kind and plump and sunburned. A friendly girl. And the brandy? Rotgut. But cut it with luminata and they can stay sober at least an hour.

Now Helpis's specialty is hashchich. On her door and her website is the sign of the snake that swallows its own tail. Her shift is the blue of michaelmas daisies, and Helpsis is suitably melancholy.

As to Ianuaria, she speaks some dialect that no-one understands. Maybe she comes from Durrazo or Izmir, tough cities. Yes, the girls are a United Nations all by themselves. But those opaque vowels are no matter when she begins her love talk. Then she is the oriole the snarers crave. Yes, with her words, Ianuaria can make anyone disgorge their soul. Her tongue is a goldsmith's anvil all right. Where did that woman learn to speak such a language? Such whispering behind her boudoir door.

Faustilla? Dear Fausty's tongue is pierced with a ball bearing. It serves as a clapper for the bells that God cannot ring. So who better to serenade the priest, who has brought wine with honey and whose birretta is crushed under his fat arse?

And I know Palindrome as well as any. She is white as gesso and looks like a ghost. In her cupboard once I found the following: a charioteer's whip; sea holly; a barbed wire torque; a packet of angel dust; Vallium; blindfolds; scarabs; a map of the port of Alexandria; a stone jug of raki, pale green as I recall, and a letter from the Caliph. Oh yes, she is known in high places is our Palindrome.

Restituta wears a veil. A gorgeous hoodwinker she. Who do you favour, sir? she will ask her regulars. Am I your Dominican today? Or your grateful poor Clare? Such admirable humility. You see, Restituta has truly been a nun. But it was a roofless convent with cactus in the garden. The well had collapsed. She came here, to the island of lightning, from Kriti, where she had already learned much of her science.

And Felicia? A Nubian princess they say. Experiencing interesting times. She keeps a panther, and this beast has a shrivelled leg. As a deterrent to intruders it lives on the roof, shitting in an old roasting tin filled with torn up
Gazzetta della Sport.

Yes, smiles Omar. They live above us. It's one of my jobs to help them out with the money. And to learn their stories of course, because all the girls are great raconteurs. What can I do with these? Nica might ask. That Moroccan in the Hugo Boss suit paid in dirhams. So I take them, as I take the dinars and the kroons and the lecs and the forints and the tolars and the dollars Canadian and turn them into money the girls can understand. A lovely family, I hope you agree. My fireflies I call them. How they glow.

14. The Wedding Dress

Today I come to a district I have not visited before. The streets are narrow here, the balconies almost touching. And there's no-one about, no-one in all this crowded city, nothing but the usual famished cats, and a linnet in a cage on a balcony, rouge-headed little harlot singing in the abandoned afternoon.

I stop on a flight of steps. The wall above is covered in bleached paintwork, devotional works that picture local saints, pale men and women exhausted by time or their passion, the blues and yellows almost drained from their robes. At a balcony above the saints hangs a bushel of dead grasses and the leaves of a salt tree that has dried to a negative of itself.

Above this balcony is strung a line of washing like a tattered gonfalon. I look at the garments pegged there, all the colour of the city's stone, stonedust in the creases of the shirts and stonedust in the shift hems, stonedust in the folds of the jerseys and the jalibayahs, stonedust covering the veils.

I look more closely. A wedding dress is hanging there, a grey gown exploding like one of last summer's cornsheaves, stonedust in its folds and flounces and its bodice embroidered with stony sequins. Behind these clothes the windows of the apartment are shut but something has been written on the glass.

I peer through the leprous underwear at the letters and spell them out and spell again, useless as they are to me as the linnet's heartbroken song.

15. The King

I see the old man has wandered from his house again. Or from whatever hole in the ramparts he inhabits. In hospital pyjamas he stands on the cobbles, scratching his chest, his cock, that inflamed member red as a radish. Under his breath the old man murmurs a love song, a lullaby. Or is it some warning?

I step closer. Yes, he is muttering about dogs, how the brave and the beautiful will be eaten by dogs, unspeakable battlefield curs that lick heroes' blood and gnaw the bellies and balls of dead warriors whose golden greaves have been stolen by the thieves and whores, thick as horseflies, that follow all armies, smelling death and the must of riven exchequers, the air heavy with such perfume.

There is badger-bristle on his cheeks, his chest collapsed and hairless. This man reminds me of someone I might see where I used to live. This other man would hurry through my town, his shirt unbuttoned and cap crooked, his eyes rolling, this other man racing every morning on an impossible errand, the news he brought too terrible to communicate.

But this man does not race. Here he stands, mumbling about dogs. Perhaps someone will come and take him away but maybe he has run out of someones, as must we all. Yes, here he stands with the sea before him and the Maria Dolores coming into harbour and the Anchor Bay and the Martzaiola departing our shore and the pigeons clinging to the fortress brick. For this is honey-coloured Troy. And here stands Priam, shaking his pizzle at the Greeks.

16. Sigmundo

There is a saint carved from the mast of a scuppered scutch. Peter in effigy is whiskered with grime, the gilt on him dusty as mothwings. But Peter is celebrated here.

There's no plaque to give his proper name so I will call him Sigmundo. Yet who is or was Sigmundo? All I find, and all I see, are the skull and a casket of relics, bones above a tomb in the shipwreck church.

Ah, Sigmundo, I whisper. How goes it, brother?

Or, Good morning, Sigmundo. Do you hear the rain outside, a torrent down the steps of this city and bouncing off the lead on the cupolas above us? Please, tell me what you know, Sigmundo, and what you see with those hollow eyes, bony cupolas themselves those sockets.

But was it not the monks' trick to roast a pig and gnaw the bones white and then proclaim them the holy scaffolding of a saint? Surely I'm not talking to a boar, Sigmundo? Or a red titted sow famished for her farrow?