Prospero's Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfu (5 page)

At all events the Saint holds the island in his power; the boats that set out nightly for fishing or daily for foreign ports of call, all travel in his benign shadow; and it is he who welcomes you to port on the days when the deep-trenched north wind blanches the sea, and
when the ironclads by the Venetian fort turn slowly on the leash to face it. It is he who guards your spirit when the wind screams down the ravines of Pantocrator. And when you are washed up in the dead calm of dawn, entangled like a sculpture in your broken boat and sprung nets—it is in his image and shadow that your soul finds rest. To him belongs the lovely greeting:

Ionian Profiles

7.25.37

T
HE SEA’S CURIOUS
workmanship: bottle-green glass sucked smooth and porous by the waves: vitreous shells: wood stripped and cleaned, and bark swollen with salt a bead: sea-charcoal, brittle and sticky: fronds of bladderwort with their greasy marine skin and reptilian feel: rocks, gnawed and rubbed: sponges, heavy with tears: amber: bone: the sea.

Our life on this promontory has become like some flawless Euclidean statement. Night and sleep resolve and complete the day with their
quod erat demonstrandum;
and if, uneasily stirring before dawn, one stands for a moment to watch the morning star, which hangs
like a drop of yellow dew in the east, it is not that sleep (which is like death in stories, beautiful) has been disrupted: it is the greater for this noiseless star, for the deep scented treeline and the sea pensively washing and rewashing one dreams. So that, confused, you wonder at the overlapping of the edges of dream and reality, and turn to the breathing person in whose body, as in a sea-shell—echoes the systole and diastole of the waters.

Nights blue and geometric; endearing and seducing moon; the sky’s curvature like an impress of an embrace while she rises—as if in one’s own throat, so pure and glittering. When you have stared at her until she chills you, the human proportions of your world are reasserted suddenly. Suddenly the man crosses the orchard to the seawall. Helen walks with a lighted candle across the grass to tend the goat. Abstract from the balcony Bach begins to play—absorbed in his science of unknown relations, and only hurting us all because he implies experience he cannot state. And because paint and words are useless to fill the gap you lean forward and blow out the lamp, and sit listening, smelling the dense pure odor of the wick, and watching the silver rings play on the ceiling. And so to bed, two enviable subjects of the Wheel.

7.27.37

Yesterday we awoke to find an Aegean brigantine anchored in the bay. She wore the name of Saint Barbara and two lovely big Aegean eyes painted on her
prow with the legend
(“God the Just”). The reflected eyes started up at her from the lucent waters of the lagoon. Her crew ate melons and spoke barbarically—sounding like Cretans. But the whole Aegean was written in her lines, the great rounded poop, and her stylish rigging. She had strayed out of the world of dazzling white windmills and grey, uncultured rock; out of the bareness and dazzle of the blinding Aegean into our seventeenth-century Venetian richness. She had strayed from the world of Platonic forms into the world of Decoration.

Even her crew had a baked, dazed, sardonic look, and sought no contact with my chattering, friendly islanders. The brig put out at midday and headed northward to the Forty Saints in a crumple of red canvas. Like a weary dancer to the Forty Saints and the Albanian peaks, to mirror herself in some deserted and glassy bay like a mad butterfly. We could not bear to see her go.

7.29.37

My material is rapidly getting out of control once more. Theodore has been to stay for a few days. Characteristic of his shy heart he sends us presents. For N. a box of Turkish delight with pistachio nuts in it; for me a flute made of brass, with the word
(“Loneliness”) engraved upon it. It is impossible to get a note out of it so I have asked the peasants to find me the shepherd boy to teach me.

Theodore has recorded the latest miracle of St. Spiridion with sardonic humor. An old man from a country village appeared at the x-ray laboratory with what was diagnosed as an incurable cancer of the stomach; medicine having washed its hands of him, the old man and his family made a Mass petition to the Saint. Within three weeks he reappeared before the doctors. The cancer had been reabsorbed. Theodore is professionally downcast, but secretly elated to find that the Saint has lost none of his art. It gives him the opportunity for a long disquisition upon natural resistance. It appears that the peasants can stand almost any physical injury which can be seen; but that a common cold may carry off a patient from sheer depression and terror. He gives an instance of a peasant who had a fight with his brother and whose head was literally cloven with an axe. Tying the two pieces of his skull together with a handkerchief the wounded man walked three miles into town to visit a doctor. He is still alive, though feebleminded.

Zarian has contributed a wonderful piece of natural observation for our notebooks. He observed last Tuesday that the four clock faces of the Saint’s church all registered different times of day. Intrigued, he asked permission to examine the phenomenon, scenting an ecclesiastical mystery. But it turns out that the clock hands are made of the flimsiest material and that the pressure of the wind upon the clock.… Therefore when the north wind blows the northern clock-face
is slowed up considerably, while when the south wind takes up its tale the southern clock face shows a loss of time.

Not that time itself is anything more than a word here. Peasant measurement of time and distance is done by cigarettes. Ask a peasant how far a village is and he will reply, nine times out of ten, that it is a matter of so many cigarettes.

7.30.37

It is important, when writing about the peasants, not to falsify them with sentimental humor. It is very much the fashion to represent them as comic and quaint abstractions attached to picturesque names like Paul and Socrates and Aristotle. The fact that they dress oddly seems to drive city-bred writers into a frenzy of romantic admiration. But really the average Balkan peasant is quite commonplace, as venal, cunning, or admirable, as a provincial townsman. And the sentiment which attaches to the pastoral life of these picturesque communities (which treasure amulets against the devil and believe in a patron saint), has been very much overdone. Anthropologists are only just beginning to visit the suburbs of our greater cities with their apparatus. Their findings should establish a greater sense of connection between the peasant and the townsman.

8.3.37

Theodore has one particular friend who is a so-called lunatic. He sits with the others most of the time under the trees outside the whitewashed asylum building, looking at his own fingers; but at times an abrupt desire to talk seizes him, and when it does he unerringly selects for audience the so-called sane who pass along the dusty white road outside the railings. His name is Basil and he has yellow dilated eyes and a deep voice. Theodore often pauses on his way out of town to greet him, rattling his stick against the railings to draw his attention, and shifting the great green bag of tree spore and seed which he carries about him on his walks. The lunatic sticks his head through the bars and smiles artfully. He says:

“They say I am mad.”

“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.