Prospero's Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfu (7 page)

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 beaten 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.

Karaghiosis:
The Laic Hero

W
E TIE UP
at the old port on Tuesday and find little Ivan Zarian dancing down the great staircase under the lion of St. Mark to meet us. He has been waiting to tell us the great news. Karaghiosis has come to town and there is to be a performance this evening. All the children of the town and of course numbers of peasants will be there. We send Spiro to book seats for us all, and spend the afternoon sitting on the esplanade drinking lemonade in the white pure sunshine, and listening to clinking of ice in glasses around us. It is one of the innumerable Saints’ days, and as such a whole holiday. The cafes are crowded, and the green grass of the esplanade
studded with the gay clothes of the Corfiot girls. Zarian, aroused from the abstraction into which his weekly Armenian literary article always throws him, discourses amiably about the art of the shadow play. He has come across Karaghiosis under different guises in Turkey and in the Middle East, where the little black-eyed man wore, instead of his enormous prehensile baboon’s arm, a phallus of equal dimensions. Translated into Greek he is no longer a symbol of pornographic buffoonery but something much more subtle—the embodiment of Greek character. It is a fertile theme. National character, says Zarian, is based upon the creations of the theatre. Huxley has remarked somewhere that Englishmen did not know how the Englishman should behave like until Falstaff was created; now the national character is so well established that everyone knows what to expect in the average Englishman. But what about the Greeks? Their national character is based on the idea of the impoverished and downtrodden little man getting the better of the world around him by sheer cunning. Add to this the salt of a self-deprecating humor and you have the immortal Greek. A man of impulse, full of boasts, impatient of slowness, quick of sympathy, and inventive as well as assimilative. A coward and a hero at the same time; a man torn between his natural and heroic genius and his hopeless power of ratiocination.

In the middle of this discourse we are joined by Nimiec and Peltours who take an innocent delight in
teasing Zarian; meanwhile the little Ivan is dancing about like a wasp waiting for it to get dark. As we have some shopping to do N. and I move off about our business with a promise to meet at “The Partridge” for a glass of wine before we all go on to the shadow play.

The shadows hang deep in the arcades by the little shop of Nomikos the bookbinder. He is binding some sketchbooks for us. Farther down in what we call the Street of Smells, the ghosts of various dishes are being conjured up in great copper cauldrons: fish, sweetmeats, bread, onions.

The northerners are down for a dance; I catch a glimpse of Father Nicholas bending over a stall and haggling fearfully about the price of a cantaloupe. Farther on Sandos is walking in his Sunday clothes listening raptly to the cries and shouts of the hawkers, while his little black-eyed daughter walks beside him, sucking sweets. We have just time to do our shopping so that I dare not stop to talk. “Will you come back with the caique tonight?” bawls Sandos, “or did you come in the little ‘lordiko’
*
today?”

It is towards the hour of seven that, mellowed by the excellent wine of “The Partridge,” we cross the little cobbled square by the Church of the Saint, and seek our way through the alleys and fents of the Venetian town (the women touching hands as they talk on the
balconies over our heads) to where the shadow play is to be shown. In a little sunken garden by the Italian school the lights and the grumble of a crowd had already marked the place. A prodigious trade in ginger beer and sweets is being carried on with the schoolchildren and the peasants who sit crammed into the small arena before the dazzling white screen upon which our hero is to appear. Two violins and a drum keep up a squalling sort of overture, punctuated by the giggles of the children and the pop of ginger beer bottles. (Important note: Ginger beer, first imported by the British during their occupation of the Ionian Islands, has never lost its hold over the Corcyrean public. In places such as the Canoni tavern it may even be bought in those small stone bottles which we remember from our childhood, and which are quite as aesthetically beautiful as the ancient Greek lamp-bowls with which the museum is crammed.)

Our seats are right in front, where the orchestra can scrape away under our noses, and the sales of ginger beer increase noticeably owing to Ivan Zarian who persuades his father to buy us a bottle each. N. prefers nougat while Nimiec has found a paper bag full of peanuts. Thus equipped we are prepared for the spectacle of Karaghiosis, whose Greek is sure to baffle us however much his antics amuse.

Presently the acetylene lamps on the hedge are extinguished, and the rows of eager faces are lit only by the light of the brilliant screen with its scarlet dado.
The actors are taking up their dispositions, for now and then a shadow crosses the light, and the little peasant children cry out excitedly, hoping that it heralds the appearance of their hero. But the orchestra is still driving on with the awkward monotony of a squeaking shoe. I catch a glimpse of Father Nicholas at the end of a row, and seeing us smiling at him he feels called upon to make some little gesture which will put him, as it were, on the same plane as ourselves. He pushes aside the ginger-beer hawker, blows his nose loudly in a red handkerchief, and bawls to the tavern keeper across the road in superior accents: “Hey there, Niko—a submarine for my grandson if you please.” “A submarine” is a charming fantasy, Nicholas’s little grandson would much rather have a ginger beer but he is too experienced and tactful a child to interrupt the old boy. He sits vaguely smiling while the waiter darts across to them from the tavern with the “submarine”—which consists of a spoonful of white mastic in a glass of water. Nothing more or less. The procedure is simple. You eat the mastic and drink the water to take the sweetness out of your mouth. While the child is doing this, and while Father Nicholas is looking around him, pleased at having caused a little extra trouble, and at having been original, the orchestra gives a final squeal and dies out. Now expectancy reaches its maximum intensity, for the familiar noise of sticks being rattled together sounds from behind the screen. This is a sign for the play to begin.

The crowd draws a sharp breath of familiarity and pleasure as the crapulous figure of Hadjiavatis lurches on to the screen, cocking an enormous eyebrow and muttering a few introductory remarks. “It is Hadjiavatis” cry the small children in the front row with piercing excitement, while Father Nicholas remarks audibly to the row behind him: “It is the rogue Hadjiavatis.” But even his gruffness cannot disguise the affection in his tones, for Hadjiavatis is beloved for his utter imbecility. He is to Karaghiosis what Watson is to Sherlock Holmes—his butt and “feed” at the same time. At the appearance of Hadjiavatis the orchestra strikes up a little jig—his signature tune—completely drowning his monologue, whereupon he gives an indignant shake of his whole body, commands it to be silent, and recommences his groans and exclamations. Apparently everything is rather gloomy. Nothing is right with him. He is poor, he cannot pay his rent, he has been recently set upon and badly beaten in mistake for someone else—in fact the whole universe is out of key. That is why he wanders erratically down this cardboard street with its fretwork houses searching for a friend—and of course there is only one friend that Hadjiavatis would go to seek in such a case. Karaghiosis. He bangs at the door of a hovel insistently and calls, “Karaghiosis, are you there?” For a while there is no answer; the tension of the children is agony to watch. “Are you there?” calls Hadjiavatis more insistently. A rather unsteady-looking coach passes across the stage almost running him
over. He curses it, and recovering himself bangs ever more insistently at the door of the hovel. Finally a flap flies open and the head of the hero sticks out. At this a roar goes up from the children and a burst of joyous clapping which is hastily stilled in order not to miss what is being said. Karaghiosis has a great curved nose, a hump on his back, and the phallic arm already mentioned. He also has a wicked lidless eye, as ripe with mischief as a mulberry. “You wish to speak to Karaghiosis?” he says with becoming caution. “If it is about the rent then I am afraid Karaghiosis is not at home. As for the money you lent me last week I paid you back, as you no doubt remember.” With that he disappears and Hadjiavatis returns to his hammering once more. This time the head of one of Karaghiosis’s innumerable children appears. Father is in bed and not to be disturbed. Hadjiavatis implores in nasal accents for an interview, but apparently Karaghiosis’s wife refuses. Finally, in the course of the dialogue the word “bread” is mentioned, and at this the front door flies open and the hero bounds out of it, asking in accents of hope and hunger: “Did you say bread, O Hadjiavatis? Did I hear the word bread?”

Hadjiavatis manages to find a crust of bread on his person which he hands over to the famished Karaghiosis who agrees to talk to him at some length. Indeed their conversation lasts a considerable time, and is punctuated by the most endearing asides of the hero: “A beautiful woman, did you say? Then keep her away
from me. You know what it is. My beauty and charm—and, above all my social position—would make her fall in love with me immediately.”