Prospero's Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfu (16 page)

Walking back to the house across the green grass of the meadow, Theodore and the Count exchange reminiscences of vampiredom. The vampire is still believed in. It is known as a Vrikolax
and is the reward for an exceptionally evil life. In some cases vampires have been reported to have terrorized villages to such an extent that the Church has had to be called in to use its powers of exorcism. “Uncle John,” says the Count, “whom I remember as an old grey-whiskered ruffian in jack-boots, appears to have been an exceptionally wicked man. His reappearance was fully borne out by over two hundred witnesses, some of whose children had actually died. It was unpleasant, but they dug him up and put a stake into his heart in the traditional fashion. I felt that it was more politic to move him off the estate into the precincts of a church in order to avoid gossip.”

This theme, sufficiently exciting to wake Zarian from the abstraction into which his weekly Armenian article always throws him, also wakens Theodore in whom there lives a vague Edwardian desire to square applied science with comparative religion. The Count listens
with exquisite politeness to a dissertation upon peasant lore. No one could guess that he has already heard it on several occasions. Throughout lunch, which we eat in the shade of the grape arbor, Theodore unloads his evidence of pagan survivals in Greece—informtion which Zarian notes down excitedly on his cuff, on the tablecloth, in the battered notebook. Zarian’s inveterate note-taking is a charming trait in his character—especially as he has never yet been known to succeed in reading his own notes afterwards, so cramped and illegible a hand has he. Theodore spends hours helping him to decode his own notes every Tuesday when the massive and erudite Armenian article must be begun.

During the afternoon, while the worthies of my Corcyrean pantheon are sleeping in shuttered rooms, I slip down to the house of the peasant family and borrow the Count’s placid little mare, which will take me through the vineyards and woods to what is perhaps the loveliest beach in the world. Its name is Myrtiotissa. Lion-gold sand, of the consistency of tapioca, lies smoothly against the white limestone cliff, thrown up in roundels by the force of the sea, which breaks upon a narrow sand bank some sixty yards clear of the shore. The rocks here are pitted and perforated into natural cisterns, sluggish with weed, and which the receding tide has left full of seawater and winking fishes; water which the sun has heated to greater than the temperature of human blood. Lowering myself into these natural baths, holding softly to the ladder of many-colored seaweed, I feel
the play of the Ionian, rising and falling about an inch upon the back of my neck. It is like the heartbeat of the world itself. It is no longer a region or an ambience where the conscious or subconscious mind can play its incessant games with itself; but penetrating to a lower level still, the sun numbs the source of ideas itself, and expands slowly into the physical body, spreading along the nerves and bones a gathering darkness, a weight, a power. So that each individual finger bone, each individual arm and leg, expand to the full measure of their own animal consciousness in this beneficent and dangerous sun-darkness. The scalp seems to put forth a drenched thatch of seaweed to mingle with the weeds rising and falling around one’s body. One is entangled and suffocated by this sense of physical merging into the elements around one. Blinded by this black sunlight, nothing remains of the known world, save the small sharp toothless kisses of fish on the hanging body—now no longer owned; a providential link with feeling, like the love of women, or the demands of the stomach, which tie one to the world of simple operations. One could die like this and wonder if it was death. The density, the weight and richness of a body without a mind or ghost to trouble it.

Here sometimes I come across Matthew, the lame dynamiter of fish, whose illegal operations in these bays have already cost him the sight of an eye and two fingers of his left hand. I help him to dive for those of his fish which for some mysterious reason sink instead of staying
on the surface. On a fire of twigs in the evening we have often watched him grilling his fish with the absorbed air of a specialist, while Zarian stood by with the salt, and the Count with his little bottle of lemon juice. Matthew chooses the afternoon for his fishing, as the noise of the detonations cannot then dissipate the heavy sleep of the policeman in the little guard house up the hill. He is an admirable companion because he never speaks. Clad in patched clothes and the conventional woollen vest, he moves slowly along the rocky galleries above the sea, his prehensile black toes (now swollen and bloated with damp) gripping the rocky ledges. In his right hand he holds the homemade depth-charge, which is made from a cigarette tin and short length of fuse wire. I follow him at a safe range, to allow for any mechanical faults in this piece of machinery.

At about three o’clock he will invariably climb the cliff above the bay, to where the monastery stands in its dazzling white sunlight, and fall asleep in the shadow of the main gate with his silver catch lying in his old felt hat upon the grass.

Three hundred feet below, I cross the margin of scalding white sand, to the shadow of the great rock, and lie panting for a moment, too exhausted by running to move. Above me, leaking from the heart of the cliff, runs sweet water, down a shallow lip of maidenhair, into a sand-bowl; further to the left a mysterious spring rises in the very sand itself with little regular gushes, as if from some severed artery in the earth.
At each soundless pulse a small cone of sand rises in the hollow and slowly spins back to the bottom. Clear and cold, the water plays with the regularity of a clock. It is the sweetest of the island waters, because it tastes of nothing but the warm afternoon, the breath of the cicadas, the idle winds crisping at little corners of the inert sea, which stretches away towards Africa, death-blue and timeless.

In this little bowl I wash the grapes I have brought with me. They are the little early grapes, delicately freckled green, and of a pouting teat-shape. The sun has penetrated their shallow skins and has confused the sweetness with its own warmth; it is like eating something alive.

Then after a rest another burst of running across the sand to where the cliff path winds upwards, vertiginous and rocky, among the myrtle groves. At the top of the cliffs, if you look back, you see the sea has become a deep throbbing emerald; the sand is freckled by long roaming silver lines across which an occasional lazy fish will move, indulgent of still water. In the shadows under the cliff a piercing nitric green. Far out across the water a brig moves southward into the sun; the noise of its engine is carried in the empty spaces of the air—a sound rubbed out as soon as registered, though nothing has breathed or stirred around one. A white butterfly wavers in across the blue spaces.

The mare snorts in the shadow of the peasant’s house, glad to return. Half an hour later I am under the
terrace upon which Zarian and Theodore sit, drinking tea from heavy Venetian-looking crockery, while the Count, an unfamiliar pipe alight in his mouth, sits and methodically cleans the coat of his favorite gun dog. It is inevitable that the discussion of this morning should be continuing. “But, my dear Doctor” the Count is saying placidly, “I do not know how you can reconcile current religious beliefs without dragging in the ancient Pantheon. Our saints are not canonized and forgotten. They walk. The hagiography of St. Spiridion is still being written in those little two drachma books you buy outside the church. And then, the confusions. You have made a study of the folk songs; have you found a very clear distinction made between the just and the unjust, or the idea of reward and punishment? No. The dead simply drink the waters of Lethe
and enter into a sort of mirage life, troubled by vague longings for fleshly joys—everything which we sum up in that most beautiful of Greek words
. And then, of course, you have the Underworld, the Abode of the Dead. It is also known as Hades and as Tartarus, just to complete our confusion. And Charon, as you know, still exists, though he has altered his habits. Sometimes black snake, sometimes black swallow or eagle, he is also the Black Cavalier of our modern imaginations, dragging the souls of the dead behind him into the netherworld. And even he is credited in modern mythology with a wife. No. The only return for the dead seems to be for the unlucky or the
evil; they become vampires and roam for a short while, until the Church catches up with them.”

Zarian is wearing his spectacles which means that he is paying extra close attention. Meanwhile Theodore nods his golden beard and, pouring out his tea into a saucer, blows upon it to cool it. The methodical fingers of the Count move through the shaggy coat of the animal, pulling off the fat white ticks, pursed with blood, one by one. “And then the naiads” says the Count again, with his peculiar sweetness of voice, “and the nereids that haunt our fountains and wells—what would we do without them? The shadow of the cypress which at noonday can drive a sleeper mad? The sea maiden that winds her arms about those poor fishermen whom the full moon has overtaken on the strands?” Theodore is giving his famous grunt of disapproval which we have all learned to imitate. It is a kind of humming behind closed lips. “You cannot, my dear Doctor,” continues the Count ruthlessly, “make them compare with your scientific findings, yet we are glad to own them, even if they are lapses from the material attitude. They are part of the fantasy of this remarkable country and island, are they not?”

The dog whimpers softly as the strong antiseptic is applied to the little raw wounds left by the ticks; the Count’s shapely hands cherish and soothe it. He looks up smiling, and watches Zarian disposing of a cake in short order. “And think of the piercing lamentations of the professional mourners. I have made a collection
of them—all spontaneous poetry, and some of the best known to the language. But there is no trace of the good-and-evil preoccupation. No, we Greeks are not religious, we are superstitious and anarchic. Even death is less important than politics. There is a kind of old Mother Hubbard who lives on the hill there; she is much in demand at funerals because of her poetic gift. Last year when Taki the fisherman died you should have heard her singing. It would have moved a stone.”