Prospero's Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfu (21 page)

Presently Theodore will wake and ask Caroline to sing “Greensleeves” and “Early One Morning”—airs sounding in all that emptiness so Lydian and remote coming from those American lips with their limping southern drawl.

Tomorrow we are separating.

1.1.41

A postcard from the Count:

Christmas Day. I spent it alone in happy memory of the year before when we walked across the northern marshes and you were attacked by a wounded hare—remember? To remind myself (and hence you also) of our perpetual spring I gathered a bunch of flowers from the valley—flowers from every season. Cyclamen and snowdrop. February’s irises and a jonquil, cinquefoil, bugloss, corn marigold, orange blossom, clover, and wild roses. Spiro has asked one of his pilots to fly them to you so you will have them by now. They are my invitation for next year. Don’t forget us.

Epilogue in Alexandria

T
HE SIGHTLESS PHAROS
turns its blind eye upon a coast, featureless, level and sandy. One thinks of Nelson on his column turning a blinded eye across the miles of English mist to where by the deserted gun batteries of Aboukir the sea runs thin and green. In these summer twilights the city lies in its jumble of pastel tones, faintly veined like an exhausted petal. Flocks of pigeons wheel in the last sunlight, turning and falling, like a shower of confetti when the light strikes against their wings. The last landmark on the edge of Africa. The battleships in their arrowed blackness turn slowly in the harbor. The loss of Greece has been an amputation. All Epictetus could not console one against it.

Here we miss Greece as a living body, a landscape lying up close against the sky, suspended on the blue lion-pads of mountains. And above all, we miss the Eye: for the summers of indolence and deduction on the northern beaches of our island—beaches incessantly washed and sponged by the green Ionian—taught us that Greece was not a country but a living eye. “The Enormous Eye” Zarian used to call it. Walking in those valleys you knew with complete certainty that the traveler in this land could not record. It was rather as if he himself were recorded. The sensation of this immense hairless recording eye was everywhere; in the ringing blue sky, the temples, the supple brushes of cypress, the sun beating in a withering hypnotic dazzle on the statues with curly stone hair and blunt sagacious noses. Everything was the subject of the Eye. It was like a lens fitting into the groove of the horizon. Nowhere else has there ever been a landscape so aware of itself, conforming so marvellously to the dimensions of a human existence. At Epidaurus, for example, it is not the theatre that obsesses one or the temples, but the enfolding circle of small hills, as if the very land had conformed to the architect’s plan: all contours, no edges, and only the faintest engraving of ilex and olive along the sky.

Something of all this lives on in the keen Athenian faces of our friends—faces so long turned towards the preoccupation of Greece that you can read everything in them: the dark uncombed blue of the Cydades
slowly uncurling about the flanks of Mykonos and Delos: the dazzling windmills and the grey springs. But they are here now like ghosts of the old lucid past in the aura of that enormous Eye—Stephan sailing his boat like a demon, half seas over in blue and gold; girls like Elie with dark slanting arms and long olive legs; the shaggy islanders in their colored belts; caves echoing to the suck and swish of the water; the long rows of colored caiques snubbing at anchor in the oilgrey waters of the port; the church bells ringing. Meeting them in these crooked streets one is struck by the potentiality of the drama which the Greeks this time have offered to the world. Maro, the human and beautiful, in her struggle against apathy, the drawn face of Eleftheria with its haunting eyes reading the last few lines of her great poem; the solemn face of Seferiades with its candor and purity (“we are the dying limb, withering on the body of the tree cut down”); Alecco, Spiro, Paul. In them the thousand and one images of that Greece of ours crystallize into pinpoints of light: the book-lined room where the woman of Zante was read: the terrace with the figs and the sound of running water: Tinos where the red sails walk down the main street: Corinth with its vermin: Argos and Thebes with their retzina: Kalamata choked in vines: the warm scent of bruised sage on the Arcadian hills.

I think of them all in Africa, in this unfamiliar element, as subtropical men, defeated by a world where the black compromise is king. I see them daily
recovering by their acts, their songs and poems, the whole defeated world of acts and thoughts, into a small private universe: a Greek universe. Inside that world, where the islands lie buried in smoke, where the cypresses spring from the tombs, they know that there is nothing to be said. There is simply patience to be exercised. Patience and endurance and love. Some of us have vanished from the picture; some have had their love converted into black bile by the misery they have witnessed. Nimiec died in an Athens nightclub. Spiro died in his own vine-wreathed house. Theodore with British forces in Italy punctuates the silence by characteristic letters beginning “Do you remember?” Zarian is in Geneva. His silence is complete. Caroline, Mitsu, Rosemary, are in Cairo. The Count is somewhere in the mountains of Epirus—a philosopher with his pockets full of dynamite. Bocklin is on the Russian front. The white house has been bombed and the boats too. History with her painful and unexpected changes cannot be made to pity or remember; that is our function.

The day war was declared we stood on the balcony of the white house in a green rain falling straight down out of heaven on to the glassy floor of the lagoon; we were destroying papers and books, packing clothes, emptying cupboards, both absorbed in the inner heart of the dark crystal, and as yet not conscious of separation.

In April of 1941, as I lay on the pitch-dark deck
of a caique nosing past Matapan towards Crete, I found myself thinking back to that green rain upon a white balcony, in the shadow of Albania; thinking of it with a regret so luxurious and so deep that it did not stir the emotions at all. Seen through the transforming lens of memory the past seemed so enchanted that even thought would be unworthy of it. We never speak of it, having escaped: the house in ruins, the little black cutter smashed. I think only that the shrine with the three black cypresses and the tiny rock pool where we bathed must still be left. Visited by the lowland summer mists the trembling landscape must still lie throughout the long afternoons, glowing and altering like a Chinese water-color where the light of the sky leaks in. But can all these hastily written pages ever recreate more than a fraction of it?

Appendix for Travelers

Karaghiosis

(see Chapter IV)

C
’
EST À KARAKOUCHE
, ministre de Salah Edine, que revient I’honneur d’avoir fait édifier la ‘ Citadelle. Il proposa en 1176 la construction d’un chateau où le sultan pourrait loger.… Karakouche, plus communément connu sous le nom de Kara-guez, avait fait détruire les petites pyramides de Gizeh et de Sakkara et employ ait leurs pierres à bâtir les rem-parts des édifices. II s’était rendu très impopulaire par les nombreuses vexations qu’il avait fait subir au peuple pour lui permettre de rèaliser les travaux d’utilitè pub-lique qu’il avait en vue. C’est pourquoi certains, pour se venger, commencèrent à brandir des fantoches à son
image, auxquels ils donnèrent son nom. Ainsi, Kara-guez entrait dans le tourbillon d’une brillante carrière de pitre qui jusqu’aujourd’hui amuse les foules sur les place publiques.

G. Z
ANANIRI

L’Egypte et I’Equilibre du Levant au Moyen Age

Some Peasant Remedies in Common Use against Disease

 1.
For all Fevers.
Infusion of the plant called Pharmakouli (a type of Erythrea, perhaps E. Centaurea).

 2. 
Kidney Troubles.
Infusion of plantain leaves (Plantago coronopus).

 3. 
Earache.
The brown silk with which the pinna shell fixes itself to the ocean bed, is said by sailors to be excellent in cases of earache. The ear is plugged with the silk.

 4. 
Stings, Bites.
Garlic or onion applied to the wound.

 5. 
Scorpion Bite.
A living scorpion dissolved in a bottle of olive oil, provides a remedy against the bites of other scorpions. Lotion applied externally.

 6. 
Dysentery or Diarrhea.
A small bottle of beet root juice (about 50 cc.) is corked and placed in the heart of an uncooked loaf of bread. The bread is baked and the bottle removed. The medicine is
drunk in small quantities on successive days until symptoms cease.

 7. 
Open Wounds.
Infusion of cypress cones used to dress wounds.

 8. 
Malaria.
The efficacy of quinine is supposed to be increased if taken with a little urine from an unweaned baby.

 9. 
Open Wounds.
Cobwebs or cigarette tobacco used to stanch flow of blood.

10. 
Coughs, Colds.
Infusion of mallow flower.

11. 
Indigestion.
Infusion of mint leaves and flowersused for flatulence, indigestion and all minor stomach disorders; often mixed with infusion of orange blossom.

12. 
Piles.
Water from boiled onions applied in the form of hot fomentations.

13.  
Seasickness.
Suck a lemon.

14.  
The Evil Eye.
Blue stone amulet, price 3 drachmae. Worn by all horses and most motorcars.

15.  
Werwolves.
Garlic fixes both werwolves and witches.

16.  
Rats.
An excellent rat poison is made by pounding the center of asphodel bulbs and mixing with a lit tle ordinary cheese.

17.  
Warts.
Rub on juice of milk-wort

18.  
Skin Eruptions and Sores.
Strong infusion of Sambucco nigra used for skin trouble. Applied as poultices.

19.  
Hollow teeth.
Juice of cloves on cotton wool.

Many of these peasant remedies show medical knowledge. No. 18 is particularly effective in the case of autumn sores, which are prevalent in Corfu towards the end of the year.

Synoptic History of the Island of Corfu

BCE

734  Island colonized by Corinth. (Town probably at Analypsis, Canoni.)

434  First sea victory in Greek history over Corinth. Took place off Lefkimi.

432  Corinthians repelled once more.

413  Corfu helps Athens in second Sicilian invasion.

373  Corfu helped by Athens beats off the Spartans under Mnesippus, who is killed.

361  Civil wars.

303  Corfu sacked by Spartan Cleonymnus.

301  Corfu sacked by Agathocles, Tyrant of Sicily.

229  Corfu conquered by Demetrius the Pharian with his Illyrian freebooters.

229  Taken by the Romans without resistance. Remains a Roman colony until
CE
337.

CE

445  Raided by Vandals.

562  Raided by Goths.

733  Corfu comes under Byzantine Empire of Leo the Isaurian.

933  Raiding Slav pirates repulsed. Forts built on the hill near the town from which the island is supposed to get its name.

1032  Corfu raided by Barbary pirates who are destroyed by the Byzantines.

1080  Corfu conquered by Robert Guiscard, King of Sicily.

1149  Retaken by Byzantines after long siege.

1185  Retaken by Sicilians.

1191  Retaken by Byzantines.

1199  Corfu raided and taken by Genoese under Vetrano.

1203  Retaken by Byzantines.

1205  Conquered by the Venetians, who are however driven out by Vetrano.

1206  Vetrano defeated by Venetians and hanged.

1214  Corfu seized by Michael Douca, Despot of Epirus, who builds Castle of St. Angelo at Paleocastrizza.

1259  Helen, daughter of Michael II, receives the island as a dowry on her marriage with Manfred of Sicily.

1266  Manfred killed in battle. Island seized by Philip Cinardo for himself.