Prospero's Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfu (2 page)

From My Notebook 5.12.37

For Theodore’s portrait: fine head and golden beard: very Edwardian face—and perfect manners of Edwardian professor. Probably reincarnation of comic professor invented by Edward Lear during his stay in Corcyra. Tremendous shyness and diffidence. Incredibly erudite in everything concerning the island. Firm Venezelist, and possessor of the dryest and most fastidious style of exposition ever seen. Thumbnail portrait of bearded man in boots and cape, with massive bug-hunting apparatus on his back stalking across country to a delectable pond where his microscopic world of algae and diatoms (the only real world for him) lies waiting to be explored. Theodore is always being arrested as a foreign agent because of the golden beard, strong English accent in Greek, and mysterious array of vessels and swabs and tubes dangling about his person. On his first visit to Kalamai house he had hardly shaken hands when sudden light came into his eye. Taking a conical box from his pocket he said “excuse
me” with considerable suppressed excitement and advanced to the drawing room wall to capture a sand fly exclaiming as he did so in a small triumphant voice “Got it. Four hundred and second.”

5.17.37

Gulls turning down wind; today a breath of sirocco and the sea grinding and crushing up its colors under the house; the town gardens steaming in their rotten richness. The Duchess of B. abroad in a large hat, riding in a horse carriage. Shuttered mansions with the umbrella pines rapping at the windows. On the great southern shelf you can see the road running white as a scar against the emerald lake; the olives are tacking madly from grey to silver, and behind the house the young cypresses are like drawn bows. Nicholas who was standing firm and square before us on the jetty a minute ago is now that speck of red sail against the mountains. Then at night it dies down suddenly and the color washes back into the sky. At the “Sign of the Partridge” Zarian gives a discourse on landscape as a form of metaphysics. “The divine Plato said once that in Greece you see God with his compasses and dividers.” N. maintains Lawrence’s grasp of place against an English boy who declares all the Lawrentian landscapes to be invented not described; while Theodore surprises by asking in a small voice for a glass of wine (he does not drink) and adding in an even smaller voice: “What is causality?”

5.18.37

Causality is this dividing floor which falls away each morning when I am back on the warm rocks, lying with my face less than a foot above the dark Ionian. All morning we lie under the red brick shrine to Saint Arsenius, dropping cherries into the pool—clear down two fathoms to the sandy floor where they loom like drops of blood. N. has been going in for them like an otter and bringing them up in her lips. The Shrine is our private bathing-pool; four puffs of cypress, deep clean-cut diving ledges above two fathoms of blue water, and a floor of clean pebbles. Once after a storm an ikon of the good Saint Arsenius was found here by a fisherman called Manoli, and he built the shrine out of red plaster as a house for it. The little lamp is always full of sweet oil now, for St. Arsenius guards our bathing.

5.22.37

At evening the blue waters of the lagoon invent moonlight and play it back in fountains of crystal on the white rocks and the deep balcony; into the high-ceilinged room where N.’s lazy pleasant paintings stare down from the walls. And invisibly the air (cool as the breath from the heart of a melon) pours over the window sills and mingles with the scent of the exhausted lamps. It is so still that the voice of a man up there in the dusk under the olives disturbs and quickens one like the voice of conscience itself. Under the glacid
surface of the sea fishes are moving like the suggestion of fishes—influences of curiosity and terror. And now the stars are shining down frostblown and taut upon this pure Euclidian surface. It is so still that we have dinner under the cypress tree to the light of a candle. And after it, while we are drinking coffee and eating grapes on the edge of the mirror a wind comes: and the whole of heaven stirs and trembles—a great branch of blossoms melting and swaying. Then as the candle draws breath and steadies everything hardens slowly back into the image of a world in water, so that Theodore can point into the water at our feet and show us the Pleiades burning.

5.28.37

At such moments we never speak; but I am aware of the brown arms and throat in the candlelight and the brown toes in the sandals. I am aware of a hundred images at once and a hundred ways of dealing with them. The bowl of wild roses. The English knives and forks. Greek cigarettes. The battered and sea-stained notebook in which I rough out my poems. The rope and oar lying under the tree. The spilth of the olive-press which will be gathered for fuel. The pile of rough stone for the building of a garden wall. A bucket and an axe. The peasant crossing the orchard in her white headdress. The restless cough of the goat in the barn. All these take shape and substance round this little yellow cone of flame in which N. is cutting the cheese
and washing the grapes. A single candle burning upon a table between our happy selves.

6.4.37

I have preserved the text of Theodore’s first communication. It arrived on Sunday by the evening boat and was delivered at the door by Spiro the village idiot. Since it was superscribed urgent I made the messenger the gift of a drachma.

I learn with considerable joy from our mutual friend Z that you are intending a written history of the isle. It is a project which I myself have long contemplated but owing to the diffuseness of my interests and lack of literary talent I have always felt myself unequal to the task. I hasten however to place all my material at your service, and on Tuesday will send you (a) my synoptic history of the island, (b) my facts about St. Spiridion, (c) my freshwater biology of Corcyra, (d) a short account of the geology of the island of Corcyra. This should interest you. It is only the beginning. Yours sincerely, Theodore Stephanides.

It is on the strength of this that I have entered into a correspondence characterized on my part by flights of deliberately false scholarship, and on his by the unsmiling and fastidious rectitude of a research worker. Our letters are carried to and fro by the island boats. It is, as he says, only a beginning.

6.7.37

At night the piper sometimes plays, while his grazing sheep walk upon the opposite cape and browse among the arbutus and scrub. We lie in bed with our skins rough and satiny from the salt and listen. The industrious and rather boring nightingales are abashed by the soft liquid quartertones, the unearthly quibbles of the flute. There is form without melody, and the notes are emptied as if drop by drop on to the silence. It is the wheedling voice of the sirens that Ulysses heard.

6.9.37

We have been betraying our origins. N. has decided to build a garden on the rock outside the house. We will have to bring the soil down in sacks, and employ the Aegean technique of walled boxes and columns. The design is N.’s and its execution is in the hands of John and Nicholas, father and son, who are the best masons in the village. The father builds slightly lopsided because, he says, he is blind in one eye; and his son comes silently behind him to rectify his errors and admire his facility in pruning the mountain stone into rough blocks. John is most comfortable squatting on his haunches in the shadow cast by his wide straw hat and talking scandal; he moves along the wall in a series of hops like a clipped magpie. His son is a fresh-faced dumb youth with a vivid smile and excellent manners. He dresses in the hideous cloth cap and torn breeches of the European workman, while his father still wears
pointed slippers. It is worth perhaps recording the traditional island costume, now seldom seen except at festivals and dances.

	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.