Prospero's Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfu (20 page)

The little amber ones and those which look ice-green and closely packed—they have done very well this year. Farther on we shall see the rhoditi. They run blood-red when the sun shines through them; coral rather, like the lobe of an ear. Dear me, we shall all have indigestion. Ah! Here comes the Doctor and Zarian—beyond the olive trees there. And his wife. Zarian looks extremely puffed as usual. And Nimiec.

By lunchtime the rest of the guests have arrived,
and are seated at tables laid under the arbor which bounds the last terrace. A tremendous meal has been prepared, and three of the prettiest village girls are there to serve it. Zarian openly bemoans having brought his pleasant American wife with him. “Where do you keep these beauties?” he asks. “They are never here when we come alone.”

“They would distract us perhaps,” says the Count seriously. The crimson
robola
is passed round. Each pours a drop upon the ground before drinking—the peasant libation. The grounds are swarming with workmen to prepare for tomorrow’s picking.

“This year we are going to begin on the hill there. It should be specially good, this year’s
robola.
I feel it in my bones. We shall call it, I think, Prospero’s Wine. What do you say?”

The valley curves away below the arbor with its delicately curved panels of landscape. From the orchard a guitar strikes up, and after a few moments’ hesitation the sound of voices—the men’s deep and rough, the women’s high and shrill as herring-gulls’. The gatherers have arrived in the hope of an extra day’s work. The faint crack of guns sounds in the valley. A puff of smoke here and there marks a sportsman with a muzzle-loader shooting doves. The conversation wells up in waves—overstepping the boundaries of language. The vintage holiday has begun.

Lunch prolonged unconscionably becomes tea. Some of us wander away to bathe or sleep out the long
hot afternoon. By nightfall the gang of workmen have done their job, and the vine vats are ready. They sit upon doorsteps or on the grass among the olive trees, eating their frugal meal of bread and fruit. But wine there is in plenty for them.

At the end of the terrace Zarian lies majestically sleeping in a hammock, while his wife pauses from her reading at intervals to brush a fly off his face. Theodore and Nimiec have disappeared on a journey of exploration with N.

The Count is pottering round the magazine in his pyjamas giving orders in a peremptory voice to his overseers. “Tomorrow we shall start on the
robola
vat,” he says, and gives orders for it to be moved out of the shadow into the angle of the wall where the sunlight strikes. “Niko is going to come and do the treading. I can always trust him.” Niko is a slim young man, dressed in a dark suit, who holds his hat modestly in his hand as he hears the Count speak. “If we put all the women on to the vineyard at once we should have the first vat gathered by sundown tomorrow. Niko can begin at dusk.” His face is radiant and empty of preoccupation. Meanwhile the cellars must be tidied, the magazines dusted and all vanishable goods removed beyond the reach of the pickers’ temptation. Ourania is filling the bowls with flowers—autumn crocus and cyclamen from the walls of the vineyards. Donkeys unload mounds of red tomatoes at the outhouse and everywhere the brisk sound of bargaining goes on.
Caroline is playing patience upon the balcony, stopping from time to time to pop a grape into her mouth. “We cannot complain,” says the Count. “It will be a lovely vintage. We can start Niko off tomorrow. We might bathe tonight. We can use the car. I see that Spiro has stayed on with us. It’s bad for trade but he can’t bear to miss a party.”

The sound of singing is beaten out thin upon the late afternoon air. I can hear Spiro’s bass notes sounding like the eructations of a giant. The Count sits for a while on the garden wall with one slipper off and lights a cigarette. “And perhaps we shall have an engagement or something to remind us that we are getting old men.” Caroline pretends she does not hear.

Bocklin has brought his flute. Its quaint twirls and flourishes sound unearthly on the empty lawns where the nymph stands. The Count walks slowly down the garden path.

There is going to be a war, of course. But on days like this one feels that it will go on for ever—I mean this lovely lambent weather: no sense of time, except that the fruit upon our tables changes. By the way, figs are in. Let us hope they will outlive your foreign policy, my dear boy. I see you have been reading Mackenzie. It will be just the same. The Royalists will let us down all the way along. Don’t you see that Nimiec and Caroline are falling in love with each other? There is that subtle
unspoken polarity of feeling you can see when they are together. They both know it will happen. They both know that the other knows. They both avoid each other’s company. And yet the invisible cobweb is drawing tighter. That is happiness—the certainty and inevitability of an attraction like that. It remains for the lock to turn on the event and already it is spoiled. They have had a hundred opportunities to confess themselves—and there he is walking round with the Doctor, holding his test tubes, while she sits and plays patience and imagines that she does not want him to come and find her there. You know, there is no philosophic compensation for growing beyond the reach of love—that is the one wall one never breaks through. To think that
that
will never happen again. That
that
moment, the germinating half-second during which you recognize your complement in someone else, will never happen again.… Any of the peasant girls would supply the physical simulacrum of the event. Ah, but the thing itself is gone. Let us have a glass of wine, shall we? It’s thirsty work talking like a Norman Douglas character. Caroline, have a glass of wine with us and let me tell your fortune.

Just after dawn the cries of the pickers wake us. The grass is still heavy with dew and the sun not yet above
the trees. A long line of colored women are setting forth for the vineyard with their baskets. Mark and Peter are the overseers, and they follow with lordly strides behind them smoking and talking, proud in their blue smocks and straw hats. Spiro follows with the brindled puppy. As we watch the procession the window below us opens and the Count puts his head out to cheer them with some parting pleasantry. The early breakfast daunts everyone but Zarian, who has eaten himself into a state of feverish indigestion and cannot sleep. Spiro sits on the terrace, cap in hand, and prophesies a sunny day in the voice of such heartiness that Zarian becomes all at once quite peevish. The Count, having reassured himself that the pickers have set out to gather the favorite
robola
vineyard, sleeps on for a couple of hours.

By mid-morning we are all up on the hillock overlooking the vineyard, surrounding our pyjama’d host like staff officers watching a battle. On the brilliant dappled sunlight of the slopes below the women have put on their wimples and are moving with swift grace from shrub to shrub, cutting the long branches with their sickle knives—branches of crimson
robola
which droop in their baskets with the weight of human limbs.

In the shade of an olive cloths have been spread, and here the women converge, each with her blooming basket load. Two donkeys with panniers stand by apathetically, flicking flies with their tails. Everything goes with a terrific pace for this the first day of picking and the Count himself is looking on.

Presently, when the Count has been reassured as to the picking, we retire to the arbors by the house to drink coffee and pass the long morning in idle talk. Bocklin plays his flute. And gradually, by journeys, the donkeys bring in the fruit which is emptied into the great wooden vat under the careful eyes of Niko himself. The Count cannot sit still until he has supervised everything himself, and seen everything with his own eyes. “Niko is a wonderful boy” he says. “Don’t think that any oaf can tread wine. No, he is pure as island water. Don’t imagine that the wine-treader doesn’t transform the wine with his feet—that there isn’t a communication I mean between his style and technique and state of soul and the response of the fruit. It’s an aesthetic performance. No, Doctor. It is no use you smiling in that ironical scientific manner. We could easily use a machine-treader and you would soon see what sort of wine my
robola
had become. Niko treads a part of himself into the vat. He is an angel on earth. Ah! dear me. How over-exotic one sounds when one translates from Greek to English.”

By four o’clock the vat is heaped full and from the sheer black weight of the fruit the must has begun to force the crude spigot. The Count is extremely excited, for it is the moment to begin the treading. Niko has been standing in the trough by the well, washing himself in the icy water. Now he advances to the vat, clad only in a white shirt which is knotted at the thighs. His pale face looks remote and far-away as he hoists himself
up. His white feet dangle for a second in the sunlight and vanish. The Count is hoarse with emotion. “You remember everything now,” he says nervously. “The old way—as you have done it always.” Niko does not answer. He smiles, as if at some remembered joke, and nods. Gently moving his feet he begins by treading a small hole to stand in and begins to work into it the grapes piled above the rim.

The spigot is now uncorked and the must begins to come out in an opaque crimson spurt. This beautiful color stains the trough, lacquers the tin measure, and stabs the shadows of the magazine with splashes of red. Keeping the same tireless pace Niko labors deeper and ever deeper into the great vat until by the latest dusk his white face has quite vanished into the depths and only his two crimson grape-splashed hands can be seen holding the edges of the vat. He perches himself up every now and again and rests, hanging his head like a bird. He has become almost intoxicated himself by the fumes of the must, and by the long six-hour routine of his treading—which ends at ten o’clock. His face looks pale and sleepy in the red light of the lanterns. Mark encourages him with gruff pleasantries as he measures the must back into the vat. Since the wine is red the skins and stalks are left in. Now the huge wooden lid, weighted with stones, is floated upon the top, and by tomorrow morning all the leavings will have risen up under it into a scarlet froth of crust, from under which the liquid will be crackling with fermentation. For ten
days now the fermentation will go on, sending its acid smell on the gusts of wind from the meadow, into the bedrooms of the great house.

Now that the
robola
is safely on the way, the Count can turn his attention to the kitchens with their gleaming copper ware and dungeon-like ovens. Here he busies himself with Caroline and Mrs. Zarian in the manufacture of
mustalevria
—that delicious Ionian sweet or jelly which is made by boiling fresh must to half its bulk with semolina and a little spice. The paste is left to cool on plates and stuck with almonds; and the whole either eaten fresh or cut up in slices and put away in the great store cupboard.

Sykopita,
Zarian’s favorite fig cake, will come later when the autumn figs are literally bursting open with their own ripeness. But for the time being there are conserves of all kinds to be made—orange-flower preserve and morella syrup. While the Count produces for the table a very highly spiced quince cheese, black and sticky, but very good.

The ravished vineyards are a sad sight on the brown earth of the property. The Count pauses from time to time in his passage between the kitchen and the dining-room terrace to contemplate them. He is happy with the full weight of his resignation: because October is coming with its first sweep of rain and mist. The remaining vine-leaves and fig-leaves—strange butterfly-like shapes against the massive platinum-grey trunks—will be gathered for fodder. The earth will die shabbily
and dully in russet patches, tessellating the landscape with its red squares and octagons. In November the cleaning of guns, the first wood fires, and the putting away of summer clothes. Then the earth will spin inexorably into winter with its gales and storms—the wild duck screaming from Albania, the seas shrieking and whistling off the barren northern point beyond Turtledove Island.

These few days pass in a calm so absolute, that to regret their passing would be unworthy of them. Zarian is bound for Geneva next week. Nimiec for Poland until next spring.

We picnic for supper on these warm nights by the Myrtiotissa monastery. Spiro lights a fire of pine branches and twigs, and the three wicker hampers of the Count are brimmed with food and drink. In the immense volume of the sea’s breathing our voices are restored to their true proportion—insignificant, small and shrill with a happiness this landscape allows us but does not notice. The firelight etches the faces so clearly. The Count with his bright eyes looking over N.’s shoulder as she draws. Theodore’s golden beard lowered over a pool in complete abstraction. Nimiec and Caroline walking with linked fingers into the sea. Zarian’s lips shiny with wine, his silver scruff of hair flying like a halo round his head. Spiro’s great charred features. Everyone. The night around us edges slowly on towards the morning, silent except for the noise of the sea, and the sleepy chirp of cicadas in the
planetree who have mistaken our fire for sunlight. “You have noticed how we talk less and less together as the days go on,” says the Count. “It is not because we have less to say to each other, it is because language becomes inadequate to our parting. I do not know when we shall meet again. Will you all be back by next spring I wonder?”

It is already very late, and the donkeys have stumbled off home with the hampers. Theodore lies asleep in the firelight. His lips move slowly. Zarian has taken the guitar from Bocklin and has started to play it inexpertly. He is trying to find the key for the little island song which Theodore has taught us.

Sea, you youth-swallower,

O poison-bearing element, Sea,

Who make our island folk

Always be wearing their black clothes.

Have you not had enough of it,

Sea, in all this long time,

With the bodies you have swallowed

Down in your insatiable waves?