Prospero's Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfu (10 page)

*
The
Van Norden
is called “the little lordcraft” by the peasants because of her upper-class lines.

History and Conjecture

9.12.37

C
ONFUSED BY OUR
clumsy gestures of interpretation, history is never kind to those who expect anything of her. Under the formal pageant of events which we have dignified by our interest, the land changes very little, and the structure of the basic self of man hardly at all. In this landscape observed objects still retain a kind of mythological form—so that though chronologically we are separated from Ulysses by hundreds of years in time, yet we dwell in his shadow. Like earnest mastodons petrified in the forests of their own apparatus the archaeologists come and go, each with his pocket Odyssey and his lack of modern Greek. Diligently working upon
the refuse heaps of some township for a number of years they erect on the basis of a few sherds or a piece of dramatic drainage, a sickly and enfeebled portrait of a way of life. How true it is we cannot say; but if an Eskimo were asked to describe our way of life, deducing all his evidence from a search in a contemporary refuse dump, his picture might lack certain formidable essentials. Thus Ulysses can only be ratified as an historical figure with the help of the fishermen who today sit in the smoky tavern of “The Dragon” playing cards and waiting for the wind to change. The Odyssey is a bore, badly constructed and shapeless, dignified by poetry everywhere degenerating into self-pity and rhetoric; the characters are stylized to the point of irritation, and their conventionalized drama serves simply as a decorative frame for the descriptive gift of the author which is a formidable piece of equipment.

Yet with what delightful and poignant accuracy does the poem describe the modern Greeks; it is a portrait of a nation which rings as clear today as when it was written. The loquacity, the shy cunning, the mendacity, the generosity, the cowardice and bravery, the almost comical inability of self-analysis. The unloving humor and the scolding. Nowhere is it possible to find a flaw.

9.17.37

T
hree towns contend for Ulysses and Nausicaa; Kassopi in the north, with its gigantic plane-tree and good harbor, its bluff ilex-grown fortress where
the goats graze all day, might have well been a site for such a fantasy. Fronting the ragged scarps of Albania, the north wind fetches in the blue sea with a crisp lazy power quite foreign to the gulf. South of Corfu town, the peninsula of Paleopolis is supposed to be the site of the ancient town; but there is nothing left of the arcades and the fountains and columns of the fabulous capital. The shadow of the marshy lake is hardly disturbed by the ripple of water from Cressida’s stream. Dried out Venetian salt-pans have eaten away the original form of the lake and here the sea settles in tide-less green stagnation, a haunt for pelicans, wild duck and snipe. In the dazzle of the bay stands Mouse Island whose romance of line and form (white monastery, monks, cypresses) defies paint and lens, as well as the feebler word. This petrified rock is the boat, they say, turned to stone as a punishment for taking Ulysses home. It might have been here.

Last and most likely is Paleocastrizza, drenched in the silver of olives on the northwestern coast. The little bay lies in a trance, drugged with its own extraordinary perfection—a conspiracy of light, air, blue sea, and cypresses. The rock faces splinter the light and reflect it both upward and downward: so that, staring through the broken dazzle of the Ionian sun, the quiet bather in his boat can at the same time look down into three fathoms of water with neither rock nor weed to interrupt the play of the imagination: so that, diving, he may imagine himself breaching the very floor
of space itself, until his fingers touch the heavy lush sand: so that, rising to the surface borne upward by air and muscle he feels that it is not only the blue sky that he breaks open with his arms, but the very ceiling of heaven. Here are the grottoes. Paleocastrizza has two of them, one reachable by boat and beautiful. The walls are twisted painfully out of volcanic muscle, blood-red, purple, green, and nacreous. A place for resolutions and the meetings of those whose love is timid and undeclared.

For the benefit of the more recondite, or for the mere specialist, one must record the existence of a great cave in the point immediately before the beach marked Hermones on the maps. It is approachable only when there is a calm, and the entrance is imposing, being formed in the style of a great gateway. Empty plaques of metamorphic stone stand above, as if the inscriptions have been melted from them. The entrance is knee-deep in water and slimy with rock; but this first cave leads to a second, higher and drier. The walls of this are palpitant with the bodies of bats, which hang like a heavy curtain, trembling and squeaking at any intruding noise. This second cave is perhaps ten yards across and as high—and in one corner, like the secret to one of those puzzles one has sought for a lifetime, opens a door. There is space enough to pass if one stoops. Nothing is revealed beyond this barrier. For those who have the courage and the curiosity to proceed, a torch is necessary.

At first nothing; a rubbish heap of broken stones at the beginning of a corridor. But a clearly defined corridor leading, it seems, into the very heart of the earth. Within twenty paces it branches into a multiplicity of corridors—like a dream, or a poem too charged with allusions—and the walls become heavy and damp, as if with mist. It seems a thousand miles away that the summer, with its quickened heartbeat of cicadas and wind, livens the meadows of Corcyra; we are here, deep in the ground, and our voices are low as if they sensed the dreadful unyielding rock which surrounds us. The many corridors menace us.

“We will never remember the way back,” says N.

The torchlight is barren and futile with its white beam moving along the walls. Holding N.’s hand I am aware of the small resisting pulse of the heartbeat like a message to say that we are not really part of it—the echoing and uncomfortable night of the rocks.

In 1912 a scientist tried to negotiate the corridor, using a light twine as a guide; but somewhere in the heart of the world the twine broke, and, it is presumed, his torch gave out, for he never reappeared in the light of day. This story, which I invent to frighten N., brings back to us both the seducing sweetness of life there outside the cave; the fishermen at their lobster pots, and the whole endearment of the Valley of Ropa, with its dapple of vines and figs. The soft throaty call of turtles in the arbors above Perama. The poison-green line of water perching and falling upon the shoals off the northern point.

The walls of the outer cave tremble in their membrane-like covering of bats; strange shudderings and copulations, strange disturbances and awakenings, strange departures and arrivals—like the unconscious in its outlawed slumber. One’s own flesh has become chill and puckered by the cold of the place. Very dimly now the sea can be heard outside, familiar as snoring, rapping and licking its way among the rocks. The pools are empty of fish.

The little white boat rides glib and pert in the shadow of the cliff, with Niko anxious at the tiller; wind has sprung up from the southwest, and the breakers are beginning their dock-like momentum sheer from the shores of Africa. It is time to make the half-hour run for the narrow harbor of Paleocastrizza. Shaken free, the sails immediately draw like a white fire, and crisp at the lips of the
Van Norden,
the sea draws her seething line of white. In the spaces of the wind the ear picks up the dry morse-like communication of the cicadas high above on the cliffs; while higher still in space sounds the sour brassy note of a woman’s voice singing. N. caught in one of those fine unconscious attitudes sits at the prow, head thrown back, lips parted, long fair hair blown back over the ears—the doe’s pointed ears. Drinking the wind like some imagined figurehead on a prehistoric prow one cannot tell from the sad expression of the clear face whether she hears the singing or not. Or whether indeed the singing is not in one’s own mind, riding clear and high above the white sails to where the eagles, broken like morsels of rock, fall and recover and fall again down the invisible stairways of
the blue. How little of this can ever be caught in words. The last clear point comes out to meet us with the little rock-chapel and lighthouse standing clear. The
Van Norden
turns, trembles for an instant between opposing intentions, and then dives clear through the towering walls of rock, into the bay where Nausicaa found the timorous Hero, washed up as naked as Adam but twice as intelligent.

9.20.37

It is one of the peculiar sentimentalities of the historian, this perpetual desire to trace places and origins by the shallow facts of romance. Fano, a few hours north of Paleocastrizza, is supposed to be Calypso’s island—“the sea-girt isle set with trees.” Corcyra, then, is the home of the oar-loving Phaecians, and the place of Ulysses’ meeting with Nausicaa. It is of course the final unkindness that the few scanty facts in Homer’s record of the adventure do not offer the historian any help. For Ulysses on his raft, helped by a fair wind, took eighteen days to cover the few sea-miles separating Fano and Corcyra. At least if one is to be browbeaten by such absurdities. Zarian has effectively disposed of this kind of thing in his essay on “Cowardice among Historians,” from which Theodore has translated the following passage:

We refuse to be confounded by facts like these. Firstly it is necessary to this enchanted
island that its landscape should be sweetened by such a fantasy, and secondly the Ancient Greeks had no sense either of time or distance. No reliance can be placed on their measurements, just as no reliance can be placed on the modern Greeks when they are dealing with space and time. Among the peasants today the duration of a cigarette is used to record distance in space. A peasant, asked how far a village is will reply: “Two cigarettes.” If you reply that you do not smoke he will, with difficulty, hunt about in his mind for the words “hours” or “minutes,” but it will be quite obvious from his use of them that he had only a very faint conception of what they mean. I maintain that the same holds true of the Ancient Greeks. Deft at the delineation of a psychology which has remained constant until today, Homer was all at sea when it came to accurate fact. Thus we are prepared to convict Homer of normal Greek mendacity rather than admit the suggestion that Ulysses did not land in this wave-washed cove, his skin bleached and worn like an old seashell from the exposure to the elements.

To the lovers of Paleocastrizza this passage will make a certain appeal; but perhaps this emphasis on Greek character will seem a little wearisome to those whose only interest in Greece begins and ends among
the broken columns of prehistory. After all, one might say, what contact could exist between the refined and isolated life of ancient Greece, and the haphazard life of the modern Greek living in the shadow of Europe, under the inferiority-complex of the top hat? One incident will provide an answer.

Anastasius knows that I am collecting peasant stories; the lunch hour of the workman is the time for smoking, lounging and storytelling, and from time to time when his work brings him into contact with the masons and plasterers of Vigla up the hill, he occasionally comes home with a story about St. Corcyra, or the tale of a haunted well.

Last week we were aware, during the evening, of an unusual disturbance in the family next door. Instead of retiring early to bed, the little oil lamp was burning until after midnight. We heard voices—the voice of Sky in particular—talking and laughing. There was a note of excitement; and the drone of Helen’s voice reading aloud. It was unusual for them to stay up late and waste lamp oil, and it was particularly unusual for the children to be awake late.

Next morning Anastasius, still unshaven, appeared at the breakfast table and said with some enthusiasm that he wished my Greek were good enough for him to relate me an “extraordinary” story, but it was rather complicated in its details. It was about a man called Odysseus who was washed up on an island. As he spoke I noticed that he was holding a small book crumpled
in his hand. He handed it to me. It was a first-form primer as used by the village school; it was an account of the Odyssey written in very simple demotic Greek for schools. Little Sky, he explained, had gone to school for the first time the day before, and had returned home at night with this book. In helping her read the first chapter he had suddenly found himself reading the story of Ulysses for the first time. To be sure, he had heard of Homer, but even now there seemed to be little connection in his mind between this delightful tale which had kept the whole family up until after midnight, and the revered name. “It is such a pity” he kept repeating, “that you will not understand it. It is one of the best things I have ever heard—this fable