Corelli's Mandolin

  Some enterprising Greeks took instantaneously to business, avidly and opportunistically selling government property such as stamps and licences. Others opened fruit-stalls, and a bank-manager in Argostoli set up a table before the ruins of his bank, conducting his usual transactions and enjoying his job for the first time. In Ithaca somebody hung up a sheet and opened up a cinema. Youth clubs from all over Greece poured in for working holidays, laughing and taunting each other if anyone showed fear at the pulse and breathing of the rock.

  The most unlikely people emerged as saviours. Although he had always been considered slow and placid, Velisarios took command in Pelagia’s village. He was now forty-two years old, and without vanity knew that he was stronger than he had ever been before, even though he lacked the immeasurable stamina of youth and all its happy dreams of remaining young forever. The earthquake somehow cleared his brain, just as it cured Drosoula’s rheumatism, and it was as if a light had switched itself on amid his mind’s flow of animal apperception and instinctive reflex.

  It was Velisarios who threw himself into the task of the village’s resurrection, and it was the grateful inhabitants who followed. With a strength that seemed greater than that of the earthquake he threw off the beams and boulders that imprisoned the crumpled body of the doctor, aware that putrefaction brought with it its diseases, and thereafter he gathered together the confused and hopeless, and ordered them into small working parties with widely varying jobs. He himself clambered down into the well and began to pass up the rubble that had filled it, working so furiously that he exhausted two fatigue parties without resting himself. It was solely because of Velisarios that no one suffered thirst.

  A rumour began, to the effect that the island was sinking into the sea, and that the government had ordered the entire population to take to its boats. As the gullible and credulous ran to the ruins of their houses for anything they could salvage for the exodus, Velisarios strode from one to the other, appealing to the cupidity and common sense of the people. ‘Are you stupid?’ he demanded. ‘This is a nonsense started by people who would be looters. Do you want to lose everything and be made a fool of? If anyone leaves, I’ll change their lights, and that’s a promise. Cephallonia doesn’t sink, it floats. Don’t be idiots, because that’s what people want.’ When folk scattered and screamed at every one of the thousands of small aftershocks, it was Velisarios who told them to pull themselves together and get back to work, and more than once he pulled idlers and the terrified from their hidey-holes and threatened them with broken bones and heads unless they resumed their tasks. With his shaggy grey hair, his perspiring temples, his bare chest hairier than a bear, and his legs thicker than columns of stone, there was no one whom he did not bully into sanity and work. Even Pelagia was persuaded to cover her father’s corpse, and went to attend to people’s wounds. She splinted and set two broken legs, even putting them into traction by means of ropes and boulders, and she smeared honey on cuts and extracted grit from babies’ eyes with a feather and spittle. Drosoula, who at first had done nothing but cry hysterically, ‘We have nothing left, nothing but our eyes to cry with,’ was put in charge of the children so that their parents could be put to work. They played hide-and-seek in the ruins, and tag, and built pyramids of stones; their small contribution to clearing up the houses and the street. When the aid workers finally bulldozed through the landslide in the road, they found a small community living in tents of corrugated iron lashed to salvaged beams, with discreet latrines dug at a safe distance from the well, their communal olive-press repaired and in working order so that money would continue to be earned and starvation kept at bay. They found a gigantic man in charge, who into old age would be more venerated and respected than the teacher or the priest.

  For three months the earth heaved, sounding as though it was breathing, holding its breath, and exhaling. Everyone lived in tents that were washed away and shredded by an untimely and freezing storm, only to be tacked together and re-erected. Through the early part of winter they shivered, sometimes fifteen to a tent for warmth, and then the wooden sheds went up, inconceivably spacious by comparison, but very near as cold. For three months Antonia went away on a holiday organised by the Queen in camps originally built for orphans of the civil war, and returned with lice and nits, and a shocking new vocabulary of oaths and names for private parts. In one year reconstruction began, and in three years it was complete. Ancient and beautiful Venetian towns re-emerged as undistinguished agglomerations of whitewashed concrete boxes. One village was rebuilt completely by a philanthropic exile who lavished his wealth on running water, sewerage, metalled streets, and wrought-iron lamp posts, and it became as charming as Fiskardo, the only town to survive intact. Pelagia’s village was rebuilt further down the hill, nearer to the new road that had been built by ingenious French engineers, and her old house was abandoned, the treasures and relics in the cachette buried, it seemed, beyond recall.

  Because the earthquake had consisted entirely of compression waves, very few fissures had opened in the earth. But soon after the disaster an Italian fireman found one. He had travelled up from Argostoli in a jeep borrowed from an American, and he stood before Pelagia’s deserted and demolished house, looking up at it in dismay and trepidation. He walked across the yard with its sundered olive, and noticed that a crack had widened in the earth. He looked down into it and saw a skeleton, its sternum and ribs splintered, its massive skull with its shattered jaw opened as if caught in mid-speech, the tarnished silver coins in the sockets of its eyes endowing it with an expression of sadness, astonishment, and reproach.

  The fireman gazed at it for a few minutes, until a new tremor stirred him. He fetched a golden poppy from amongst the stones, threw it down upon the corpse, and then he went to the jeep for a spade. No sooner had he begun the task of reburial than another judder unbalanced him, and the red earth closed once again over the colossal bones of Carlo Guercio.

  67 Pelagia’s Lament

  This was my place of safety, my single refuge, the substance of my memory. Here in this house my mother held me, her brown eyes shining, and in this house she died. And my grieving father gathered in his love and gave it to me only, and he brought me up and made me unpalatable, manly meals, and sat me on his knees, and he made my feet grow into the earth by telling me its stories. He talked to me with so much love, he worked for me, he let me be a child. When I was tired he picked me up and carried me, he laid me in my bed and stroked my hair, and in the darkness I would hear him saying, ‘Koritsimou, if it wasn’t for you, if it wasn’t for you …’ and he would shake his head because for once he had no words, his heart was too big to hold them, and I would close my eyes and go to sleep with my nostrils full of the smells of ointment and tobacco, and in my dreams there were no Turks and no monsters to scare me, and sometimes at night I thought I saw my mother passing through the door and smiling.

  And in the morning he would wake me up and bring me chocolate, and say, ‘Koritsimou, I’m off to the kapheneia, and make sure you’re up by the time I come back,’ and he was still saying that when I was twenty, and I would lie there as happy as a nun for the new day, thinking of everything I could do, and I would listen for his footsteps on the flags, and fly out of bed, and he would come in and say, ‘Lazy little miss, this time I nearly caught you,’ until I would say it first, and he would laugh and say, ‘Right, today I am going to tell you all about Pythagoras, and then this evening you’ll choose a poem to read to me, and I’ll choose a poem to read to you, and then I’ll tell you why I don’t like yours, and you can tell me why you don’t like mine, and then we can lose our tempers and have a fight.’ And I would jump up and down and say, ‘Let’s fight now, let’s fight now,’ and he would tickle me until I nearly fell sick with laughing, and then he’d sit me in a chair and comb my hair, pulling it much too hard, and telling me frightful stories about Cretan abbots who burned themselves and their monks to death in their churches rather than surrender to the Turks. And he told me about islan
ds he had seen, where women had four husbands and no one wore any clothes, and places in Africa where the people’s backsides were wider than their height, and places so cold that the sea froze over and everything was white.

  But it’s all gone now. I come and sit in the ruins of my home and all I see is ghosts. There is nothing now but withered grass and broken stones and a severed tree. There is no table where the boys of La Scala sing, there is no Psipsina catching mice, no goat to bleat in the dawn and wake me, there is no Antonio seducing my heart with his flowers and mandolin, there is no Papas returning from the kapheneia and saying, ‘Kokolios said the most ridiculous thing …’

  All my home is nothing but sadness and silence and ruin and memory. I have been reduced, I am my own ghost, all my beauty and youth have shrivelled away, there are no illusions of happiness to impel me. Life is a prison of poverty and aborted dreams, it is nothing but a slow progress to my place beneath the soil, it is a plot by God to disenchant us with the flesh, it is nothing but a brief flame in a bowl of oil between one darkness and another one that ends it.

  I sit here and remember former times. I remember music in the night, and I know that all my joys have been pulled out of my mouth like teeth. I shall be hungry and thirsty and longing forever. If only I had a child, a child to suckle at the breast, if I had Antonio. I have been eaten up like bread. I lie down in thorns and my well is filled with stones. All my happiness was smoke.

  O my poor father, silent and still, wasted and lost forever. My own father, who brought me up alone and taught me, who explained everything, and took my hand and walked with me. Never again will I see your face, and in the morning you will not wake me. Never again in our ruined house will I see you sit, writing, always writing, your pipe clenched between your teeth and your sharp eyes shining. O my poor father, who never tired of healing, who could not heal himself and died without his daughter; my throat aches from the hour you died alone.

  I remain upon these piles of shattered rocks and imagine it how it was. I remember Velisarios heaving away the tiles and beams as though it were his own father dead beneath them. And I remember when he brought my father out, covered in white dust, his head hanging back in Velisarios’ arms, his mouth hanging open, his limbs all limp and dangling. I remember when Velisarios set him down and I knelt beside him, blind and drunk with tears, and I cradled his bloodied head in my hands and saw that his eyes were empty. His old eyes, looking not on me but on the hidden world beyond. And I thought then for the first time how small and frail he was, how beaten and betrayed, and I realised that without his soul he was so light and thin that even I could lift him. And I raised up his body and clasped his head in my breast, and a great cry came out that must have been mine, and I saw as clearly as one sees a mountain that he was the only man I’ve loved who loved me to the end, and never bruised my heart, and never for a single moment failed me.

  68 The Resurrection of the History

  The earthquake changed lives so profoundly that to this day it is still the single greatest topic of conversation. When other families elsewhere are arguing about whether or not socialism has a future or whether or not it was a good idea to abolish the monarchy, Cephallonians talk about whether there will be another earthquake and whether it will be as vicious as the last. They live in the shadow of apocalypse, and when they are ostensibly talking about socialism or the monarchy, they are really thinking about 1953. It will be marked by a pause during which someone forgets what they are saying, or a momentary interruption in the passage of fork to mouth. Like the Ancient Mariner, they cannot resist buttonholing strangers in order to inform them of the facts, and tourist guides will contrive to work them into sentences which were promising to be about the prospects of finer weather. Old people pin down a remembered year by reference to its being before or after the earthquake, just as the custom continues of naming this year’s occasions as being before or after the feast of the saint. The catastrophe caused people to recall the war as piffling and inconsequential by comparison, and renewed their sense of life. It was now possible to wake up in the morning and be amazed and grateful to be yet alive and living in a solid house, and to go to bed at night full of relief at having lived a commonplace and uneventful day.

  Lovers who had been procrastinating got married immediately, and longstanding couples in unsatisfactory marriages looked at one another in wonder at such a waste of years and immediately got divorced. Close families grew ever closer, and sibling squabblers emigrated to different lands in order to place the sea between them.

  The three inhabitants of their new matriarchal house grew closer, turning their faces inwards upon each other, structuring their lives about the one pillar of Pelagia’s atrocious guilt. Insomniac and occasionally hysterical, she reproached herself relentlessly for being instrumental in her father’s death. ‘He was seventy,’ said Drosoula sensibly, ‘and he owed God a death. It was better to die like that, trying to save us, and so quickly.’

  But Pelagia would have none of it. She knew that in the moment of disaster her mind had been whirling with nothing but the need to save herself, and she knew that when her father had fallen she should have tried, even at the expense of her own existence, to drag him through the door before the roof fell in. Over and over she played through in her mind the manner in which she had been rendered as impotent as a blowfly in a hurricane, the way in which all rational thought had been cudgelled from her mind, the way in which the tie of blood and affection had been nullified by that awesome roaring and that leaping of the earth. But it was no good. Whatever the rationalisations and excuses, the one palpable fact remained that she had deserted her own father in his hour of greatest peril; he had saved her by galvanising her into action, and she had let him die. It was not the quid pro quo of a loving and dutiful daughter.

  She fell into a morass of self-recrimination and remorse. She neglected her appearance and her household tasks, preferring instead to sit by his grave, watching the eternal flame that she tended in a red glass lamp, chewing her own lips until they bled, and wishing that she could speak to him. She could have spoken through the black marble slab with its old but smiling photograph, but felt herself unworthy to address him. With her greying hair disarrayed and her face pale, she simply sat and watched, as though expecting his shade to rise up through the earth and burden her with reproaches. When there was a vile east wind in January or a raging tempest she would pull her black shawl about her head, rise up from her chair beside the stove, and bow down her head to battle against the elements, struggling up the hill on the interminably repeated pilgrimage, obsessed with the single thought that his flame should not go out. She knelt in the soughing wind, bowing over her lamp to protect it from the rain, warming her shaking hands upon the glass, transforming her life into one long penitence and apology. She was in those days capable of believing that God had taken away Antonio because in His divine foreknowledge He had known that she would one day fail her father, contriving the former as her punishment, foreseeing the latter as her sin. Drosoula lost count of the times that she and Antonia had to go to the cemetery and drag Pelagia away, anguished and beseeching, her hands fluttering and her legs seemingly unhinged at the knees.

  One day Antonia and Drosoula could take no more; their sympathy had transformed itself gradually and imperceptibly into anger and irritation, and the old woman and the young girl conspired together to bring her back to her senses. ‘The trouble is,’ said Drosoula, ‘that she lost someone she loved during the war, and this extra death has made it all boil over.’

  ‘Is that the ghost she always talks about?’

  ‘Yes. His name was Corelli, a musician.’

  ‘Do you think she really sees him, or do you think she’s gone mad?’

  ‘She wasn’t mad before. The thing about ghosts is that they can appear to anyone they choose, and no one else sees them. It’s Grandpa’s dying that’s changed her bulbs.’

  The little girl shuddered, ‘Poor Grandpa.’

  ‘I??
?m thinking of going to the priest for advice,’ said Drosoula.

  ‘But he’s mad too, ever since the earthquake. What if we dress up as Grandpa’s ghost and come and tell her that it wasn’t her fault?’

  Drosoula frowned, ‘It’s a good idea, but she’s not stupid, even if she’s mad. It’s not easy to impersonate a ghost, you know. I’m too tall and you’re too small, and we don’t know how to talk like him at all. All those words that are three pages long if you write them down, and sentences that could cover an entire book from start to finish, and you’ve got to remember that it might even make it worse.’

  ‘Why don’t we just tie her to the bed and hit her?’

  Drosoula sighed longingly at the satisfying image, and wondered whether or not it would work. In the old days, even when she was a child in Turkey, they had cured the crazy by beating them until they were too scared to be insane anymore. It had worked well enough back then, but there was no way of knowing how much human nature had changed in the intervening period. She suspected that in any case Pelagia’s madness had about it an element of self-indulgence, a sort of masochistic egomania, and she might look upon a beating as amply deserved rather than deterrent. She held the young girl’s hands in her own, kissed her on the top of the head, and her eyes brightened. ‘I’ve had an idea,’ she said.

  Accordingly, at breakfast the next morning, Antonia suddenly announced, ‘I had a dream about Grandpa last night.’