Captain Corelli's mandolin (12 page)

She found no word to accompany 'Mussolini' until she came up with 'Metaxas'. 'Mussolini, Metaxas,' she said, and added, 'Mandras.'

As though answering her thoughts, a movement caught the corner of her eye. Below, to the left, a body was diving about in the waves like a human dolphin. She watched the brown fisherman with a pleasure that was entirely aesthetic, until she realised with a small shock that he was completely naked. He must have been a hundred metres away, and she knew that he was arranging a buoyed net with a mesh tiny enough to catch whitebait. He was diving for long moments, arranging his net in a crescent, and all about him the gulls wheeled and plunged for their share of the harvest. Guilefully, but without guilt, Pelagia crept closer in order to admire this man who was so sleek, so at one with the sea, so much like a fish, a man naked and wild, a man like Adam.

She watched as the net was curled about the shoal, and, as he stood glistening on the beach, hauling hand over hand, his muscles tightening and his shoulders rhythmically working, she realised that it was Mandras. She put her hand over her mouth to suppress her shock and a sudden access of shame, but she did not creep away. She was still transfixed by his beauty, by the harmony and strength of his work, and could not resist the idea that God had given her a chance to look over what was hers before she took possession of it; the slim hips, the sharp shoulders, the taut stomach, the dark shadow of the groin with its mysterious modellings that were the subject of so much lubricious female gossip at the well. Mandras was too young to be a Poseidon, too much without malice. Was he a male sea-nymph, then? Was there such a thing as a male Nereid or Potamid? Should there not be a sacrifice of honey, oil, milk, or a goat? Of herself? It was difficult to witness Mandras slipping through the water and not believe that such a creature would not, as Plutarch said, live for 9,720 years. But this vision of Mandras possessed a quality of eternity, and Plutarch's imputed span of life seemed too arbitrary and too short. It occurred to Pelagia that perhaps this same scene had been enacted generation after generation since Mycenean times; perhaps in the time of Odysseus there had been young girls like herself who had gone to the sea in order to spy on the nakedness of those they loved. She shivered at the thought of such a melting into history.

Mandras reeled in his net and bent over to busy himself with extracting the tiny fish from the mesh, throwing them into a line of buckets arranged in a neat row upon the sand. The silver fish flashed in the sun like new knives, transforming their asphyxiation into a display of beauty as they flicked and leapt against each other and died. Pelagia noticed that his shoulders had peeled raw, and had not hardened to the sun despite an entire summer's exposure. She was surprised, even disappointed, for it revealed that the lovely boy was made only of flesh, and not of imperishable gold.

He stood up, placed two fingers in his mouth, and whistled. She saw that he was looking out to sea, waving his arms in a slow semaphore above his head. Vainly she tried to descry the object of his attention. Puzzled, she raised her head a little higher above the rock behind which she had concealed herself, and glimpsed three dark shapes curving in unison through the waves towards him. She heard his cry of pleasure and watched him wade towards them with three larger fish in his hands. She saw him throw the fish high into the air, and the three dolphins leap and twist to catch them. She saw him grasp a dorsal fin and sweep out to sea.

She ran down to the edge of the sand and furrowed her brow in a desperate attempt to exclude the scintillating and shifting darts of light that the sun threw from the water, but could see nothing. Surely Mandras was drowned? She remembered suddenly that it was terribly bad luck to see a nymph naked; it caused delirium. What was happening? She wrung her hands and bit her lip. The sun burned her forearms with an intensity that amounted to vindictiveness, and she clasped them anxiously to her chest. She hovered for a few more moments on the shore, and then turned and ran home.

In her room she hugged Psipsina and wept. Mandras was drowned, he had gone away with the dolphins, he was never going to come again, it was the end of everything. She complained to the pine marten about the injustice and futility of life and submitted to the rasping tongue as it relished the saltiness of her tears. There was a discreet knock on the door.

Mandras stood, smiling diffidently, in his hand a bucket of whitebait. He shifted from one foot to another, and spoke all in a rush: `I'm sorry I didn't come sooner, it's just that I was ill the day after the feast, you know, it was the wine, and I wasn't very well, and yesterday I had to go into Argostoli to get my call-up papers, and I've got to go to the mainland the day after tomorrow, and I've spoken to your father in the kapheneion, and he's given his consent, and I've brought you some fish. Look, some whitebait.'

Pelagia sat on the edge of her bed and went numb inside; it was too much happiness, too much desolation. Officially engaged to a man who was going to wrestle with fate, to a man who should have drowned in the sea, a man who jumbled a marriage together with whitebait and war, a man who was a boy who played with dolphins and was too beautiful to go away to die in the snows of Tsamoria.

He seemed suddenly to have become a dream-creature of frightening and infinite fragility, something too exquisite and ephemeral to be human. Her hands began to shake; `Don't go, don't go,' she pleaded, and remembered that it was bad luck to see a nymph naked, that it brought about delirium, and occasionally death.

I have had many regrets in my life, and I suppose that everyone else can say the same. But it is not as if I regret little things, childish things, things like arguing with my father or flirting with a woman who was not my wife. What I regret is having had to learn a most bitter lesson about the way in which personal ambitions can lead a man, against his will and against his nature, into playing a part in events that will cause history to heap him with opprobrium and contempt.

I had a very nice job, and it was pleasant to be the Italian Minister in Athens, for the very simple reason that Colonel Mondini and I had no idea until the war started that there was going to be a war at all. You would think that Ciano or Badoglio or Soddu would have told us, you would think that they would have given us a month or two to prepare, but no, they let us carry on with the normal pleasantries of diplomacy. It infuriates me that I was attending receptions, going to plays, organising joint projects with the Minister of Education, reassuring my Greek friends that the Duce had no hostile intentions, telling the Italian community that there was no need to pack, and then find that no one had ever bothered to tell me what was going on, so that I had no time to pack myself.

All I had was rumours and jokes to go on. At least, I thought they were jokes. Cunio Malaparte, that idiotic snob with the ironic and twisted sense of humour and the lust for wars to fuel his journalism, came to see me, and he said, `My dear friend, Count Ciano, told me to tell you that you can do what you like, because he's going to make war on Greece all the same, and that one day soon he's going to lead Jacomoni's Albanians into Greek territory.'

It was the way he said it, wryly and mocking, that made me think it was a joke, as well as the fact that this cockatoo will say anything whatsoever, however ridiculous, untruthful, or inconsequential, as tong as it contains something to indicate that he is a personal friend of Ciano.

The only other thing that I had to go on was when Mondini was called to the airport to meet an intelligence officer, who told him that war was going to break out within three days, and that Bulgaria would invade at the same time. He told Mondini that all the Greek officials had been bribed. Naturally I telegraphed Rome, and I also spoke to the Bulgarian ambassador. Rome did not reply, and the Bulgarian ambassador (rightly as it turned out) told me that Bulgaria had no intention whatsoever of declaring war. I was reassured, but I think now that Ciano and the Duce were just trying to confuse me or keep their own options open. Perhaps they were trying to confuse each other. Colonel Mondini and I sat in my office, oppressed by the deepest gloom imaginable, and we discussed the idea of returning to private life.

Things became increasingly incomprehensible. For example, Rome asked me to send a member of my legation for `Urgent confidential instructions', but Ala Littoria wasn't providing any flights, so nobody could go. Then the Palazzo Chigi telegraphed to say that a courier was coming by special flight, and whoever it was never arrived. Everyone in the diplomatic community in Athens was making representations to me to do something about preventing a war, and all I could do was blush and stammer, because I was in the untenable position of being an ambassador who didn't have a single notion of what was happening. Mussolini and Ciano humiliated me, and I will never forgive them for forcing me to rely on the propaganda of the Stefani Agency as my sole source of information. Information? It was all lies, and even the Greeks knew more about the impending invasion than I did.

What happened was this; the Greek National Theatre put on a special show of Madama Butterfly, and they invited Puccini's son and his wife as guests of the government. It was a wonderful gesture, a typically noble and Greek thing to do, and we issued invitations to a reception on the night of October 26th, after midnight. Receptions after midnight are a Greek habit I never quite adjusted to, I must confess.

Metaxas and the King did not come, but it was a very fine party all the same. We had an enormous gateau with `Long Live Greece' iced onto it, and we had the tables laid with the Greek and Italian flags, intertwined to symbolise our friendship. We had poets, playwrights, professors, intellectuals, as well as representatives of society and the diplomatic community. Mondini looked splendid in his full dress uniform covered with medals, but I noticed that as the telegrams began to flood in from Rome he was growing pale and seemed visibly to shrink inside his tunic until it looked as though he had disavowed it or borrowed it from someone else.

It was a horrible situation. The people with the telegrams had to pretend to be guests, and as I read them, one after another, my heart sank to my boots. I had to make smalltalk with people as I became steadily overwhelmed by a wave of horror and disgust. I felt ashamed for my government, I felt anger at having been kept in ignorance, I felt embarrassment before my Greek friends, and over and over again I heard the same sentence repeating itself in my head - `Don't they know what war is?'

A novelist asked me if I was quite well, because I had turned very pale and my hands were shaking. I looked from face to face and saw that everyone in our legation had experienced the same reaction; we were dogs who had been commanded to bite the hand that fed us.

The first part of the Duce's ultimatum arrived last, and I did not know exactly what was transpiring until five o'clock in the morning. I was tired and sick, and I don't know if I was relieved or pained by the instruction not to deliver it until 3 A.M. on the 28th, and wait for a reply until 6 A.M. It seemed that the `Unsleeping Dictator' (who, I happen to know, used to sleep rather a lot) was determined not only to unleash havoc, but to keep us from our beds.

On the 27th the Greek Chief-of-Staff summoned Mondini in order to deny that the border incidents and the explosion at Santi Quaranta were anything to do with Greece. Mondini came back very depressed and told me that Papagos had humiliated him by asking a single pertinent question: `By what miracle do you know that we did these things when no one knows who it was and no one has ever been caught?'

Mondini tried to placate him by saying that it was probably the British, whereupon Papagos laughed and said, `I suppose you are aware that every yard of the border is guarded by Greek patriots who will fight to the last drop of blood?'

Mondini shared my sense of shame and impotence; Badoglio had not kept him informed. Badoglio later told me that he himself was not informed, despite being our Chief-of-Staff at home - was there ever another war when the Commander-in-Chief did not know that there was going to be one? Mondini and I discussed resignation again, whilst outside the Athenians went about their usual clamorous business. It was a beautiful, warm, splendidly autumnal day, and Mondini and I both knew that soon this beauty and this peace were going to be torn apart by sirens and bombs; it was too revolting, even sacrilegious, to contemplate. We began to receive ashen-faced delegates from the Italian community in Athens, who feared internment and persecution in the event of war. I was obliged to lie to them, and I sent them away with my heart bleeding. As it turned out, the Greeks very honourably tried to evacuate them, and at Salonika they were bombed by mistake by our own air force.

My interview with Metaxas was the most painful occasion of my life, and afterwards I was repatriated, but I didn't see Ciano until November 8th. You see, the campaign was already a fiasco, and Ciano didn't want me to say `I told you so'. He didn't really want to see me at all, and he kept interrupting and changing the subject. In my presence he telephoned the Duce and told him that I had said things that I had not, and then he told me that the Albanian campaign would be over in two weeks. Later on, when I had started to make a fuss about the truth of the matter, he sent Anfuso to advise me to go on a holiday, and I suppose that that was the end of my career.

You want to know about my interview with Metaxas? Isn't that famous enough already? I don't like to talk about it much. You see, I admired Metaxas, and the truth is that we were friends. No, it's not true that Metaxas just said `No.' O, all right, I'll tell you. We had a Greek chauffeur, I can't remember his name, and we sent him home so that it was Mondini who drove us to the villa at Kifisia. De Santo came along to interpret, though he wasn't needed in the event. We left at 2.30 A.M., with stars shining like diamonds above us, and it was so mild that I didn't even have to button my coat. We arrived at the villa, a modest little place in the suburbs, at about 2.45, and the commander of the guard got muddled - he must have mistaken our Italian tricolor for the French one - and he telephoned Metaxas to say that the French ambassador wanted to see him. It would have been comical on any other occasion. As I waited I listened to the rustling of the pines and tried to spot the owl that was hooting in one of the trees. I felt sick.

Metaxas came to the service door himself. He was very ill, you know, and he looked quite small and pathetic, he looked like a little bourgeois who has come out to collect the newspaper or call the cat. He was wearing a nightgown that was covered in a pattern of white flowers. Somehow one expects the night attire of the eminent to be more dignified. He squinted up into my face, saw that it was me, and exclaimed with pleasure, `Ah, monsieur le ministre, comment allez-vous?'

I can't remember what I said in reply, but I knew that Metaxas suspected that I had come to give him the kiss of Judas. He was dying by then, as I expect you know, and the burden on his soul must already have been unimaginably great.

We went to a little sitting-room that was full of cheap furniture and those little gewgaws that every middle-class Greek seems to love. Metaxas was an honest politician, you see. He was never accused of corruption even by his enemies, not even by the Communists, and it was obvious from his house that state funds had never contributed towards its embellishment. There could not have been a man more different from the Duce.

He put me in a leather armchair. I heard later that Metaxas' widow never let anyone sit in it again. He sat on a couch that was covered in cretonne. We spoke entirely in French. I told him that I had been commanded by my government to hand over an urgent note. He took it, and read it very slowly, over and over again, as though it were intrinsically unbelievable. He made that click of the tongue that Greeks employ to signify refusal, and he began to shake his head.

The note said that Greece had openly sided with the British, that she had violated the duties of neutrality, that she had provoked Albania . . . and it concluded with these words that I shall never forget: `All this cannot be tolerated by Italy any further. The Italian government has therefore decided to ask the Greek government, as a guarantee of Greek neutrality and of Italian security, for permission to occupy some strategic areas on Greek territory for the duration of the present conflict with Great Britain. The Italian government asks the Greek government not to oppose such occupation and not to place obstacles in the way of the free passage of troops that are to carry out this task. These troops do not come as enemies of the Greek people, and by the occupation of some strategic points, dictated by contingent and purely defensive necessities, the Italian government in no way intends to prejudice the sovereignty and independence of Greece. The Italian government asks the Greek government immediately to give the orders necessary to enable this occupation to take place in a peaceful manner. Should Italian troops meet with resistance, such resistance would be broken by force of arms, and the Greek government would assume responsibility for the consequences that would ensue.'

Metaxas' spectacles misted over, and behind them I could see tears. It is a hard thing to see a powerful man, a dictator, reduced to this state. His hands shook a little; he was a hard man, but passionate. I sat there opposite him, my elbows on my knees, and I was bitterly ashamed of the folly and injustice of this escapade in which I had become embroiled. I too wanted to weep. He looked up at me and said, `Alors, c'est la guerre.'

So you see, he didn't say `okhi' as the Greeks believe; it was not as simple as `No,' but it meant the same. It had the same resolve and the same dignity, an identical finality.

`Mais non,' I said, knowing that I was lying, `you can accept the ultimatum. You have three hours.'

Metaxas raised an eyebrow, almost with sympathy, because he knew that I was not cut out for dishonour, and replied, 'Il est impossible. In three hours it is impossible to awaken the King, summon Papagos, and get orders to every outpost on the border. Many of them have no telephone.'

'Il est possible, neanmoins,' I insisted, and he shook his head; `Which strategic parts do you wish to occupy?'

He placed a sarcastic emphasis upon the word `strategic'. I shrugged my shoulders in embarrassment, and said, `Je ne sais pas. Je suis desole.'

He looked at me again, this time with a trace of amusement in his eyes: `Alors, vous voyez, c'est la guerre.'

`Mais non,' I repeated, and told him that I would wait until 6 A.M. for his final answer. He accompanied me to the door. He knew that we intended to occupy all of Greece whatever his reply, and he knew that if he fought us he would finish by having to fight the Germans. `Vous etes les plus forts,' he said, `mais c'est une question d'honneur.'

It was the last time that I ever saw Metaxas. He died on January 29th of a phlegmon of the pharynx that had turned into an abscess and led to toxaemia. He died wishing that the British had been able to send him five divisions of armour, without which he had nonetheless succeeded in transforming our Blitzkrieg into an ignominious retreat.

I had left him standing there in his flowery gown, a tittle man who was ridiculous in the eyes of most of the world, a little man, accursed with a notorious and intransigent daughter, unelected, who had just spoken to me with the voice of the entire people of Greece. It was Greece's finest hour and my country's most disgraceful. Metaxas had earned his place in history amongst liberators, caesars and kings, and I was left diminished and ashamed.