Corelli's Mandolin

  ‘I’m getting old,’ Pelagia would say, ‘that’s all.’

  ‘You’ll live longer than I will, Mama.’

  But it was Drosoula who died first, perfectly upright in her rocking chair, so quietly that it seemed she was apologising for having lived at all. She was an indomitable woman who had lived a few short years of happiness with a husband that she had loved, a woman who had disowned her own son as a matter of principle, and lived out the rest of her days in ungrudging service to those who had adopted her by apparent accident, even earning them their bread. She had husbanded the little family like a patient shepherd, and gathered it to her capacious bosom like a mother. After she was buried in the same cemetery as the doctor, Pelagia realised with desperate clarity that she not only had another flame to tend, but that she was alone. She had no idea any more how to run a life, and it was with fear and hopelessness in her heart that she took over Drosoula’s taverna and fumbled for a living.

  Alexi, now completely bald and having travelled from the ideological arctic of the puritanical Communist party into the sub-tropical clime of the Socialist party, discovered with some initial anxiety and guilt that his success as a lawyer had indiscernibly precipitated him into the very class that he had professed to despise. He was a sleek bourgeois with a big Citroën, a purportedly earthquake-proof house complete with terracotta pots bursting with geraniums, four suits, and a loathing of the corruption and incompetence embodied by the party of his heart. He spoke volubly in favour of the socialists at meetings and parties, but in the ballot box he furtively marked his cross against Karamanlis, and then affected terrible despair when the latter won the vote. He hired an accountant and became as efficient in evading taxes as any other conscientious Greek with a long tradition to uphold.

  Antonia held out for four years after her womb began to clamour for an occupant, seeing no reason to cave in to a body that made such unreasonable and ideologically suspect demands, until eventually she conspired with it and allowed it to cause her to forget to take her pills. There was no one, therefore, more genuinely surprised than she when her belly swelled unseasonably and a child began to form. She and Alexi started to hold hands again in public, stared dewy-eyed at babies and baby clothes, and compiled long lists of names, only to cross them out on the grounds that, ‘I knew someone called that, and they were awful.’

  ‘It’s going to be a girl,’ said Pelagia upon those frequent occasions when she pressed her ear to Antonia’s ever-expanding belly. ‘It’s so quiet, it can’t be anything else. Really you must call her Drosoula.’

  ‘But Drosoula was so big, and …’

  ‘Ugly? It doesn’t matter. We loved her all the same. Her name should live. When this child is older, she should know how she got her name and who it belonged to.’

  ‘O, I don’t know, Mama …’

  ‘I am an old woman,’ declared Pelagia, who gained substantial gratification from reiterating this refrain. ‘It might be my last wish.’

  ‘You’re sixty. These days that isn’t old.’

  ‘Well, I feel old.’

  ‘Well, you don’t look it.’

  ‘I didn’t bring you up to be a liar,’ said Pelagia, terribly pleased nonetheless.

  ‘I’m thirty-four,’ said Antonia, ‘that’s old. Sixty is just a number.’

  The little girl transpired without a shadow of a doubt to be a little boy, complete with a fascinatingly wrinkled scrotum and a slim penis that would undoubtedly prove serviceable in later years. Pelagia cradled the infant in her arms, feeling all the sadness of a woman who has remained a virgin and technically childless all her life, and began to refer to it as Iannis. She referred to it so often by that name that it soon seemed obvious to its parents that it could not be Kyriakos or Vassos or Stratis or Dionisios. If you called it Iannis, it smiled and blew slimy bubbles that burst and trickled down its chin, and so Iannis it was. It had a determined and obstinate grandmother who would only ever talk to it in Italian, and parents who talked earnestly about sending it to a private school, even though there was nothing really wrong with the state ones.

  Alexi, driven by the suddenly self-evident notion that a man must pass something on to his son, unmediated by inheritance tax if possible, began to look around for good investments. He built a small block of holiday apartments on a barren hillside, and installed a modern kitchen and lavatories in the taverna. He persuaded Pelagia to accept the hiring of a proper cook, leaving her as the manager, and they split the profits fifty-fifty. On the distempered walls Pelagia stuck all the postcards that continued to arrive from the four corners of the globe, along with multicoloured samples of foreign currency donated by tourists grown generous and whimsical under the benign and mellowing influence of Robola and retsina.

  70 Excavation

  By the time that he was five years old and Christos Sartzetakis was elected in place of Karamanlis, Iannis already knew how to say ‘Hello’ and ‘Isn’t he adorable?’ in six different languages. This was because he spent nearly all his time at the taverna in his grandmother’s care, being cooed over by pink and sentimental foreigners who loved olive-skinned little boys with black fringes over their ebony eyes, just as long as they did not grow older and come to their own countries looking for employment. Iannis delivered the baskets of bread to the tables, peering very charmingly over the tablecloth, and earned enough money in tips to be able to afford a teddy bear, a radio-controlled toy car, and a simulation in durable plastic of a World Cup football. Pelagia proudly introduced him to her guests, and he would hold out his hand confidently and politely, the very image of the perfect child that in more prosperous but less sensible countries was no longer to be found. His antique manners were a prodigious novelty, and he only grimaced when embraced and slobbered over by fat women with halitosis and adhesive red lipstick.

  The reason for his continual presence at the Taverna Drosoula was that his father was building new holiday apartments with swimming pools and tennis courts, and his mother was reverting to an old-fashioned, pre-socialist feminism, that declared that a woman has equal rights to a man when it comes to capitalist enterprise. She borrowed money from her husband in order to open a shop, and conscientiously paid it back at five per cent interest over four years. On Bergoti Street in Argostoli she opened a souvenir emporium that sold reproduction amphorae, worry beads, dolls dressed in the fustanella of the evzones, cassettes of syrtaki music, snorkelling equipment, statuettes of Pan playing his pipes with every evidence of concentration yet endowed with a resplendent and hyperbolical erection, owls of Minerva shaped in limestone, postcards, handmade rugs that were really made by machines in North Africa, porcelain dolphins, gods, goddesses, and caryatids, terracotta tragedians’ masks, silver trinkets, bedspreads embellished with meanders, keyrings that humorously mimicked in miniature the motions of copulation, diminutive clockwork bozoukis with loose red nylon strings made of fishing line that played ‘Never on a Sunday’ or ‘Zorba the Greek’, copies of Kazantzakis’ novels in English, sombre icons with authentic patina depicting various saints whose names in Cyrillic were indecipherable and improbable, emollients for sunburned Britons, leather belts and handbags, T-shirts which proclaimed variations on the message of ‘My Dad Went To Greece, And All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt’, tourist guides and phrase-books, harpoon guns, paracetamol, beach-bags whose handles became unstitched, raffia mats, intimate wipes, and condoms. Antonia presided over this eclectic emporium, dressed as always in clothes of sparkling white, sitting at the open till (in order to leave no clues for the taxman), with her thumb in her mouth and her long legs arranged about her in attitudes of sophisticated grace.

  Shortly she opened other shops with identical stock in Lixouri, Skala, Sami, Fiskardo, and Assos, and, to salve her finer artistic conscience, she sponsored a potter who was to make genuinely beautiful garden equipment and ornament out of frostproof terracotta, in the classical style. She and Alexi visited Paris and Milan with the vague idea of opening a very expensive boutique in Athen
s, and these days Alexi contemptuously dismissed the arguments of those who wished to redistribute his wealth: ‘Between us Antonia and I keep dozens of people in employment. By enriching ourselves we enrich our staff, so don’t give me any of that outdated crap, OK? What do you want? Do you want them all to live on the dole? And have you any idea how many people there are making the stuff that we sell? Hundreds, that’s how many.’

  Their son grew up contentedly in his grandmother’s company, dabbling his toes in the astoundingly clear water of the port and mesmerised by its flitting and impulsive shoals of fish. In the evenings the reunited family would sit together in the taverna, sometimes before the rush but more usually after it, arguing both in Italian and in Greek, whilst Pelagia, already nostalgic for Iannis’ infancy, would say, ‘Do you remember the time when I was changing his nappy on the wall, and suddenly he peed, whoosh, and a great golden spout came out and landed on the cat? And how the cat ran away, and it licked itself clean, ugh, and we laughed so much we thought we would burst? Those were the days. It’s such a shame they’ve got to grow up.’ And the little boy would laugh politely and wish that his granny would not embarrass him so much, and then he would go behind the wall and see how high he could spread the damp patch, leaning backwards from the knees and experimenting with the range and elevation of his interesting appendage and its wonderful golden spout. He had a friend called Dmitri who could pee higher than him, and he had some catching up to do before he took on any bets. He had a piece of chalk back there too, and he kept a score of all the beautiful foreign women who had kissed him on the cheek when they said goodbye at the end of their holiday. It was one hundred and forty-two, almost too many to imagine, and he could not remember any of their faces, only a general and blissful impression of shiny hair and big eyes, redolent scent, and spongey breasts that flattened against him fortuitously and then resumed their shape. In the evening, after he had been carried home at midnight, fast asleep in his father’s arms, he would dream in a babel of languages about exquisite girls and the smell of moisturising face-cream.

  When he was ten years old, in the year of the antithetical coalition between Communists and conservatives, Pelagia hired a bozouki player to entertain her guests in the taverna. His name was Spiridon, he was a charismatic Corfiote, and his exuberance was inexhaustible. He played his bozouki with such vibrant virtuosity that he seemed to be playing three, and he could induce even the Germans to put their arms about each others’ shoulders and dance in a circle with motions of the feet like the impatient pawings of a horse. He knew exactly how to play a piece accelerando, starting very slowly and pompously, and gradually speeding up until all the dancers were tangled hysterically in each others’ flailing limbs. He knew cradle songs and fishing songs, classical tunes and new compositions by Theodorakis, Xarhakos, Markopoulos, and Hadjidakis, and he executed all of them with perfect tremolos and extraordinary syncopated improvisations that were inclined to prevent his audience from dancing because it was even better to listen.

  Iannis worshipped him, with his broad shoulders, huge black beard, his wide mouth that seemed to contain a hundred flashing teeth (including a gold one), and his repertoire of prestidigitatory tricks whereby he produced eggs out of one’s own ears and made coins disappear and return in a flash of the fingers. Pelagia also loved him because he reminded her so much of her vanished captain, and occasionally her heart yearned for a time-machine to take her back to the days of the only real love of her life. She thought that perhaps the captain’s soul inhabited the fingers of someone like Spiridon, for it seemed that even when players died, their vagrant music moved to other hands, and lived.

  Iannis’ secret desire was to become a harpoon, as soon as he was old enough. These ‘kamakia’ were the young Greek boys who lived on a diet of perpetual sex, entertaining the unchaperoned and romantic foreign girls who arrived on the island in search of true love and multiple orgasms in the arms of any latter-day Adonis who agreed to sweep them off their feet. They considered themselves so indispensable to the tourist industry that there was even talk of forming a union to represent their interests. Charmingly and chivalrously they doled out beautiful memories and broken hearts, waiting at the airport after one girl had flown out in order to acquire another as she flew in. They hung about on their mopeds in fallow times, discussing the sexual hierarchy of merit amongst the different nationalities. Italian girls were best, and English girls were useless unless inebriated. German girls were technicians, Spanish girls uncontrollable and melodramatic, and French girls were so vain that you had to pretend to be in love with them from the very first. Iannis used to inspect his diminutive rod with its unpredictable and painful erections, and wonder if he would ever have an orgasm, whatever that was, and whether and when his particular harpoon would waken from its humid dreams and grow.

  Iannis did not fail to notice that Spiridon was popular with the girls. At the end of every performance they would seize the red roses from the slender vases in the middle of their tables, and throw them at him. He noticed that Spiro would go round early in the evening, to remove the prickles from the stems, so confident was he of this floral bombardment. He also observed that Spiro was always having his picture taken with his arms across the shoulders of girls with shining noses, sometimes two or four of them at a time, and that on these occasions his grin spread from ear to ear as his face radiated pride and happiness. Accordingly Iannis demanded one day that Spiro should teach him how to play bozouki.

  ‘Your arms aren’t long enough yet,’ said Spiro, ‘it would make more sense to start with a mandolin. It’s the same thing really, but small enough for you. You’re ten now, and maybe when you’re fourteen you should start to play bozouki. Look …’ he placed the instrument in the boy’s lap and stretched out the left arm ‘… your arm’s too short and your hand isn’t big enough to get round the neck. You need a mandolin.’

  Iannis was a little disappointed. He wanted to be exactly like his hero. ‘Can you play mandolin?’ he asked.

  ‘Can I play mandolin? Can I walk and talk? That’s how I learned. I am the best mandolinist I ever heard, except for one or two Italians. In fact the mandolin is the instrument of my heart.’

  ‘Will you teach me?’

  ‘You might need a mandolin. Otherwise we might have to stick to theory.’

  Petulantly Iannis pestered his mother and father and his grandmother for a mandolin. Antonia removed her thumb from her mouth and said, ‘I’ll get you one in Athens, next time I’m there,’ and needless to say, she forgot. ‘I’ll get you one when I go to Naples,’ said Alexi, who had no idea when he would be going, or indeed why. Eventually Pelagia told him, ‘In fact we have one already, but it’s buried under the old house. I am sure Antonio wouldn’t mind you digging it up.’

  ‘Who’s Antonio?’

  ‘My Italian fiancé who was killed in the war. It belonged to him. You must have heard about him a lot.’

  ‘Oh, him. If it’s buried it’s going to be all rotten and broken, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t think so. There was a big trapdoor in the middle of the floor, and it was in a hole underneath. But you’ll never be able to sift all that rubbish on your own, and I wouldn’t let you. It’s much too dangerous.’

  Iannis pleaded with his father to divert some of his construction workers from one of his sites, was promised, and was then let down because of pressing schedules which were something to do with having a plane-load of tourists arriving shortly at a newly built complex whose plumbing was not even complete yet. Alexi was apoplectic with anxiety about it, and he snapped at his son for the first time in his life, only to hug him and apologise immediately afterwards.

  So Spiridon was dragged up the hill by the hand, and shown a ghostly and forlorn ruin overgrown with long clumps of desiccated grass and thorn, its broken stones just visible above the growth. All around it rested the silent and deserted remains of little houses that had all the appearance of regret and loneliness. Tilted steps led nowhere. A com
munal oven sat at a drunken angle, its cast-iron door seized up and rusted at the hinges, with laminating plates of scale ready to split away either in heat or frost. Inside was a colony of woodlice and the charred scarring of countless forgotten meals eaten by people long dispersed or dead. ‘Jesus,’ said Spiro, gazing about him at the scene of tranquil desolation, ‘it wasn’t nearly this bad in Corfu. Doesn’t it make you feel sad?’

  ‘It’s the saddest place,’ said Iannis. ‘I come here to explore, and when I’m angry, and when I’m unhappy.’ He pointed, ‘My great-grandfather died in there. I’m named after him. Grandma says he was the best doctor in Greece, and he could have been a great writer. He could cure people just by touching them.’

  Spiro crossed himself, saying, ‘Mary preserve us.’

  ‘I’ve found lots of things,’ said Iannis, ‘but most of them are broken.’ A young brindled cat trotted away, its belly distended with unborn kittens. ‘She comes here to hunt for lizards,’ said Iannis, pointing. ‘She’s very good at it. She always leaves the tail, and it sort of writhes around on its own for ages. It’s brilliant.’

  ‘Look at this,’ said Spiro, pointing to a huge old olive tree that had split down the middle, begun to rot at the bole, but was still exuberant with contorted black branches and small green fruit. ‘I climb in this one,’ said Iannis, ‘there’s a branch that’s really good for swinging on. That one there.’

  ‘Let’s have a swing then,’ said Spiro, and Iannis climbed the tree to get there whilst the former sprang upwards and hung. Side by side the two of them swung backwards and forwards for a few moments, aided by the elasticity of the branch, and then dropped to the ground, full of businesslike and manly satisfaction. Spiro rubbed his hands together and said, ‘Right, let’s get working before it becomes too hot. Do you realise that this will be very bad for my hands? I probably won’t be able to play tonight. Did you know that guitarists won’t do the washing-up because it softens their fingernails? What a perfect excuse, eh?’