Captain Corelli's mandolin (23 page)

The doctor awoke at his usual hour, and departed for the kapheneion without awaking Pelagia; he had looked at her, curled up in her blankets upon the kitchen floor, and had not had the heart to disturb her. It did offend his sense of the natural decency of arising promptly upon the hour, but on the other hand she worked so hard for him, and had already become exhausted by the difficulties of coping with the war. Besides all that, she looked very fetching with her hair disarrayed upon the bolster, the blanket putted over her nose, and only one small ear completely exposed. He had stood over her, appreciating the paternal emotions that arose in his breast, and then had not been able to prevent himself from leaning down and peering into the ear in order to check that it was in good condition; there was one very small flake of skin suspended upon the tip of a gossamer hair at the junction of the auricle and the external auditory meatus, but the overall impression was one of perfect health. The doctor smiled down upon her, and then made himself miserable by reflecting that one day she would grow old, bent, and wrinkled, the sweet beauty would desiccate and disappear like dry leaves so that no one would know that it had ever been there. Seized by an impression of the preciousness of the ephemeral, he knelt down and kissed her on the cheek. He went to the kapheneion in a tragic mood that sat oddly with the serenity of a cloudless morning.

The captain, awakened by a sharp twinge from a haemorrhoid, came out into the kitchen, saw Pelagia fast asleep, and did not know what to do. He would have liked to have brewed himself a cup of coffee and eaten a piece of fruit, but he too was captivated by the appealing tranquillity of the sleeping girl, and felt that it would have been a desecration to awake her by clattering about. In addition he did not want to cause her any embarrassment that might arise from being in his presence in night-clothes, and, besides, it was terrible to be reminded of the shame of having displaced a rightful owner from her own bed. He looked down upon her and experienced the urge to crawl in beside her nothing could have seemed more natural - but instead he returned to his room and took Antonia out of her case. He began to practise fingerings with his left hand, sounding the notes minimally by hammering on and pulling off with his fingers rather than by using a plectrum; Tiring of this, he took a plectrum and laid the side of his right hand across the bridge so that he could mute the strings and play `sordo'. It made a sound very like a violin playing pizzicato, and with great concentration he set himself to playing a very difficult and rapid piece by Paganini that consisted entirely of that effort.

Half way between sleep and waking, Pelagia's lucid dream took on the distant rhythm of the piece. She was remembering the day before, when the captain had actually arrived at the house on a grey horse that he had borrowed from one of the soldiers who performed the curfew patrol each night. This capricious beast had been trained to caracole, and his owner had taken to impressing girls by making the beast execute this pretty trick whenever he saw one. The horse had soon cottoned onto the idea, and now readily did it unbidden whenever he came across a human in skirts who had long hair and bright eyes. All the soldiers were very envious of this animal, and its rider was always prepared to lend it to officers on the understanding that advantageous adjustments would be made to duty rosters. On the day that the captain borrowed it, its rider would be excused from latrine fatigues.

When Corelli had arrived at the entrance of the yard and Pelagia had looked up from brushing her goat, the horse had pricked up its ears and caracoled. The captain had raised his cap, smiling broadly, and Pelagia had felt a dart of pleasure such as she had seldom experienced before. It was the kind of pleasure that one feels when a dancer who has been kicking his legs impossibly high suddenly somersaults backwards, or when an apple rolls off a shelf, strikes a spoon, and the spoon spins up into the air and lands in a cup, scoop downwards, and comes tinkling to a rest as though it had been tossed there on purpose. Pelagia had beheld Corelli and the exhibitionist horse, and she had smiled and clapped spontaneously whilst Corelli's face had split from ear to ear in an enormous grin like that of a little boy who has at last been given a, football after years of whining and begging.

In her dream the horse caracoled to the tempo of Paganini, and its rider at one moment had the face of Mandras, and at another that of the captain. She found this annoying, and made a mental effort to reduce the faces to a single one. It became Mandras, but she found this unsatisfactory, and changed it to Corelli. Had there been anybody in the room, they would have seen her smiling in her sleep; she was reliving the jingle of brass, the creak of leather, the sharp sweet smell of horse's sweat, the intelligent pricking of its ears, the tiny sideways motion of the hooves as they struck the dust and stones of the road, the tensing and relaxing of the muscles in the haunches of the horse, the grand gesture of the smiling soldier as he swept off his cap.

Sitting on the bed, Corelli became so absorbed in his practising that he forgot the sleeping girl, and he began to work on getting his tremolo up to speed; it was deeply annoying to him that every day he would have to play for at least a quarter of an hour before he could make it steady and continuous, and he commenced the exercise by mechanically clicking the plectrum backwards and forwards at half speed across the top pair of trebles.

Pelagia awoke ten minutes later. Her eyes flicked open, and she lay there for a second, wondering if she was still asleep. There was a most beautiful noise coming from somewhere in the house, as though a thrush had adapted its song to human tastes and was pouring out its heart on a branch by the sill. A shaft of sunlight was breaking through the window, she felt too hot, and she realised that she had overslept. She sat up, wrapped her arms about her knees, and listened. Then she picked up her clothes from where they lay beside her pallet, and went to dress in her father's room, still attending to the trilling of the mandolin.

Corelli heard the metallic clatter of a spoon in a pan, realised that she had risen at last, and, still clutching the mandolin, came out into the kitchen.

`Sewage?' she asked, offering him a cup of the bitter liquid that nowadays passed for coffee. He smiled and took it, realising that he was still very sore from riding that horse, and that he was still very relieved that he had not suddenly fallen off; it had been a near thing when it had started to dance like that. His thighs ached and it was painful to walk, so he sat down. `That was very beautiful,' commented Pelagia.

The captain looked at his mandolin as though he was blaming it for something, 'I was only practising tremolando scales.'

'I don't care,' she replied, 'I still liked it, it made waking up very easy.'

He looked unhappy, `I'm sorry I woke you up, I didn't mean to.'

That's very beautiful,' she said, pointing at the instrument with a spoon, `the decoration is wonderful. Does all that improve the sound?'

`I doubt it,' said the captain, turning it around in his hands. He himself had forgotten how exquisite it was. It was purfled about the rim of the soundbox with trapezia of shimmering mother-of-pearl, and it had a black strikeplate in the shape of a clematis flower, inlaid with multicoloured blossoms that were purely the result of an exuberant craftsman's imagination. The ebony diapason was marked at the fifth, seventh, and twelfth frets with a pattern of ivory dots, and the rounded belly of it was composed of tapering strips of close grained maple, separated skilfully by thin fillets of rosewood. The machine heads were finished in the shape of ancient lyres, and, Pelagia noted, the strings themselves were decorated at the silver tailpiece with small balls of brightly coloured fluff. `I suppose you don't want me to touch it,' she said, and he clutched it rightly to his chest.

`My mother dropped it once, and for a moment I thought I was going to kill her. And some people have greasy fingers.'

Pelagia was offended, `I don't have greasy fingers.'

The captain noted her aggrieved expression, and explained, `Everyone has greasy fingers. You have to wash and then dry your hands before you touch the strings.'

`I like the little balls of fluff,' said Pelagia.

Corelli laughed, `They're stupid, I don't even know why they're there. It's traditional.'

She sat down opposite him on the bench and asked, `Why do you play it?'

`What an odd question. Why does one do anything? Do you mean, what led me to start?'

She shrugged her shoulders, and he said, 'I used to play the violin. A lot of violinists play one of these because they're tuned the same, you see.'

Contemplatively he ran a fingernail across the strings to illustrate his point, a point which Pelagia, for the sake of simplicity, pretended to see. `You can play violin music on one of these, except that you have to put in tremolos where a violin would have one sustained note.'

He executed a quick tremolo to illustrate this second point. `But I gave up the violin because, however much I tried, it just came out sounding like cats. I'd look up and the yard would be full of them, all yowling. No, seriously, it was like a tribe of cats or even worse, and the neighbours kept complaining. One day my uncle gave me Antonia, which used to belong to his own uncle, and I discovered that with frets on the fingerboard I could be a good musician. So there you are.'

Pelagia smiled, 'So do cats like the mandolin?'

'This is a little known fact,' he said in a confidential manner, `but cats like anything in the soprano range. They don't like things that are alto, so you can't play a guitar or a viola to a cat. They just walk out with their tails in the air. But they do like a mandolin.'

`So the cats and the neighbours were both happy with the change?'

He nodded happily, and continued, `And another thing. People don't realise how many of the great masters wrote for the mandolin. Not just Vivaldi and Hummel, but even Beethoven.'

`Even Beethoven,' repeated Pelagia. It was one of those mysterious, awesome, mythical names that implied the ultimate possibilities of human achievement, a name that in fact meant nothing at all specific to her, since she had never knowingly heard a single piece of his music. She knew simply that it was the name of an almighty genius.

`When the war's over,' said Corelli, `I am going to become a professional concert player, and one day I am going to write a proper concerto in three movements, for mandolin and small orchestra.'

`You're going to be rich and famous then?' she said teasingly.

`Poor but happy. I'd have to take another job as well. What do you dream about? Being a doctor, you said.'

Pelagia shrugged, distorting her lips into an expression of resignation and scepticism. `I don't know,' she said at last: `I know I want to do something, but I don't know what it is. They don't let women become doctors, do they?'

`You can have bambinos. Everyone should have bambinos. I'm going to have thirty or forty.'

`Your poor wife,' said Pelagia disapprovingly.

`I don't have one, so I might have to adopt.'

`You could be a teacher. That way you could be with children in the daytime and have time for music in the evening. Why don't you play me something?'

`O God, whenever people ask me to play something I forget what pieces I know. And I always depend on having the music in front of me. It's very bad. I know, I'll play you a polka. It's by Persichini.'

He positioned the mandolin, and played two notes. He stopped, explaining, `It slipped. That's the trouble with these round backs from Naples. I often think I should get a Portuguese one with a flat back, but where does one get one of those in times of war?'

He followed this rhetorical question with the same two notes, ritardando, played four quaver chords, then a bar which disrupted one's expectations by the introduction of a rest and a pair of semi-quavers, and very shortly broke into cascades of chorded and unchorded semi-quavers that left Pelagia open-mouthed. She had never before heard such elaborate virtuosity, and never before had she found a piece of music to be so full of surprises. There were sudden, flashing tremolos at the beginning of bars, and places where the music hesitated without losing its tempo, or sustained the same speed despite appearing to halve or double it. Best of all, there were places where a note so high in pitch that it could barely be sounded descended at exhilarating pace down through the scale, and fell upon a reverberant bass note that barely had had time to ring before there came a sweet alternation of bass and treble. It made her want to dance or do something foolish.

She watched wonderingly as the fingers of his left hand crawled like a powerful and menacing spider up and down the diapason. She saw the tendons moving and rippling beneath the skin, and then she saw that a symphony of expressions was passing over his face; at times serene, at times suddenly furious, occasionally smiling, from time to time stern and dictatorial, and then coaxing and gentle. Transfixed by this, she realised suddenly that there was something about music that had never been revealed to her before: it was not merely the production of sweet sound; it was, to those who understood it, an emotional and intellectual odyssey. She watched his face, and forgot to attend any more to the music; she wanted to share the journey. She leaned forward and clasped her hands together as though she were at prayer.

The captain repeated the first part, and concluded it suddenly on a spread chord that he muted immediately so that Pelagia felt deprived. `There you are,' he said, wiping his forehead with his sleeve.

She felt excited, she wanted to jump up and perform a pirouette. Instead she said, `I just don't understand why an artist like you would descend to being a soldier.'

He frowned, `Don't have any silly ideas about soldiers. Soldiers have mothers, you know, and most of us end up as farmers and fishermen like everyone else.'

'I mean that for you it must be a waste of time, that's all.'

'Of course it's a waste of time.'

He stood up and looked at his watch, 'Carlo should have been here by now. I'll just go and put Antonia away.'