Captain Corelli's mandolin (26 page)

Pelagia treated the captain as badly as she could. If she served him food she would set the plate before him with a great clatter that sent the contents of the bowl splashing and overflowing, and if by any chance it did spill onto his uniform, she would fetch a damp clout, omit to wring it out, and smear the soup or the stew in a wide circle about his tunic, all the time apologising cynically for the terrible mess. 'O, no, please Kyria Pelagia, this is unnecessary,' he would protest futilely, and eventually she noticed that he had acquired the habit of not drawing in his chair until she had already slopped the food onto the table.

His failure to remonstrate with her, and his complete reluctance to come up with the kind of threats that one might expect from an officer of an occupying force, only succeeded in irritating her. She would have liked him to shout, to command her to cease from her insolence, because her anger was so deep and bitter that only a confrontation seemed sufficient to purge it. She wanted to give it an airing, to throw her arms about like a Protestant preacher; but he was bent, it seemed, upon frustrating her. He remained submissive and polite, and she would find herself practising in private all the narrowings of the eyes and hard pursings of the lips that would eventually accompany the hypothetical tempest of recrimination and contempt that every day she looked forward to heaping upon his head. After two months of passing her nights sleepless with rage, curled up in her blankets upon the kitchen floor, she had perfected several versions of the impromptu and vitriolic speech with which she intended to confound him. But when would the opportunity to deliver it arise? How does one explode with righteous rancour when the target of it remains circumspect and diffident? The captain did not seem to her to be a typical Italian. It was true that he sometimes came home a little inebriated, and that occasionally he suffered bursts of incorrigibly high spirits; sometimes he burst in and fell to his knees, presenting her with a flower which she would accept and then feed pointedly and conspicuously to the goat; sometimes he would suddenly grasp her about the waist with his right hand, and her right hand with his left, and whirl her vertiginously a couple of times as though executing a waltz, but this only occurred when his battery won a football match. So he was impulsive like a typical Italian, and he seemed to have not a care in the world, but on the other hand he appeared to be a very thoughtful character who was a master at disguising it. Quite often she would see him standing by the wall of the yard with his hands behind his back like a German, his feet apart, deep in contemplation either of the mountains or of some matter for which they were nothing more than a peaceful occupation for his eyes. She thought that he had a sadness that was very like nostalgia, without actually being it. 'If only,' she thought, `he was like the other Italians who hiss when I walk by, or try to pinch my backside. Then I could swear at him and hit him, and say "Testa d'asino" and "Possate muri massa," and I would feel very much better.'

One day he left his pistol on the table. She thought how easy it would be for her to purloin it, and perhaps blame it on an opportunistic thief. It came to her that she could actually shoot him when he came through the door, and then run away to join the andartes with it. The trouble was that he was no longer just an Italian, he was Captain Antonio Corelli, who played the mandolin and was very charming and respectful. In any case, she could have shot him with the derringer by now, she could have cracked his pate with a frying pan, and the temptation had not arisen. In fact the very idea was sickening, and it would in any case have been pointless and counter-productive; it would lead to horrendous reprisals, and it would hardly win the war. She decided to immerse the pistol in water for a few minutes so that its barrel went rusty up its inside and the mechanism would seize up.

The captain came in and caught her red-handed just as she was lifting it out. She was standing with her forefinger through the trigger guard, moving the surprisingly heavy dead-weight of it up and down so as to shake off the drips. She heard a voice behind her and was so startled that she dropped it back into the bowl.

`What are you doing?'

'O God,' she exclaimed, `you frightened me!' The captain looked down at his immersed pistol with an expression of scientific objectivity, raised his eyebrows, and said, `I see you're engaged in a bit of mischief.'

This was not what she had expected, but nonetheless her heart galloped painfully with fear and anxiety, and a sensation of extreme dread rendered her momentarily speechless; `I was washing it,' she said feebly at last. 'It was terribly oily and greasy.'

`I had no idea you were so touchingly ignorant,' said the captain laconically. Pelagia flushed with a very curious emotion indeed, an emotion arising from his sarcasm, and his ironic imputation that she was a sweet and silly girl who did stupid things because she was too sweet and silly to know any better. He was pretending to be patronising, and that was easily as galling as actually being patronised. She was also still frightened, still apprehensive about what he would do, and still, far back in her mind, angry that she could not succeed in provoking him.

`You are not disingenuous enough to be a good liar,' he said.

`What do you expect?' she demanded, only to find herself immediately wondering what she had meant.

The captain seemed to know, however: `It must be very difficult for you all to have to put up with us.'

`You have no right . . . ' she began, employing the first words of her well-rehearsed speech, and immediately forgetting the rest of it.

He fished the pistol out of the bowl, sighed, and said, `I suppose you have done me a favour. I should have dismantled it for cleaning and oiling a long time ago. Somehow one forgets, or puts it off.'

'Aren't you angry, then? Why aren't you angry?'

He looked down at her quizzically, `What's anger got to do with cadenzas? Do you really believe I've got nothing important to think about? Let's just think about important things, and leave one another in peace. I'll leave you alone, and you can leave me alone.'

This idea struck Pelagia as novel and unacceptable. She did not want to leave him alone, she wanted to shout at him and strike him.

Suddenly overwhelmed, and cynically aware that she would herself come to no harm by it, she slapped him stingingly with all her force, right across his left cheek.

He had tried to step back in time, but was too late. A little dazed and perplexed, he steadied himself and touched a hand to his face, as though comforting himself. He held out the pistol. `Put it back in the water,' he said, 'I might find it less painful.'

Pelagia was now enraged by this new trick, perfectly designed for the instantaneous annulment of her rage. Frustrated beyond human ability to suffer, she raised her eyes to heaven, clenched her fists, gritted her teeth, and strode out. In the yard she kicked a cast-iron pot with all her might, grievously injuring her big toe in the process. She hopped about until the pain subsided, and then threw the offending pot over the wall. She limped back and forth a little, with great vehemence and bitterness, and plucked an unripe green olive from the tree. It was satisfying and consoling, so she wrenched off a few more. When she had sufficient for a good handful she returned to the kitchen and threw them hard at the captain, who had turned to face her. He ducked futilely as the hard fruits bounced harmlessly off him, and shook his head in bemusement as Pelagia once more disappeared. These Greek girls, such spirit and fire. He wondered why no one had ever set an opera in modern Greece. Perhaps they had, come to think of it. Perhaps he should write one himself. A tune entered his mind and he began to hum it, but it kept turning into the `Marseillaise'. He struck the side of his head in order to expel the intruder, and the tune perversely transformed itself into the 'Radetzky March'. 'Carogna,' he shouted, in extreme annoyance. Outside, Pelagia heard him; feared a delayed reaction, and hurried away down the hill to escape to Drosoula's house until he cooled down.

As the months went by Pelagia noticed that she was losing her anger, and this puzzled and upset her. The fact was that the captain had become as much a fixture in the house as the goat or her own father. She was quite used to seeing him seated at the table, scribbling furiously, or rapt in concentration with a pencil stuck between his teeth. Early in the morning she anticipated with a small and familiar domestic pleasure the moment when he would emerge from his room and say, 'Kalimera, Kyria Pelagia. Is Carlo here yet?' and in the evening she would actually begin to become concerned if he were a little late, sighing with relief as he came through the door, and smiling very much against her will.

The captain had some engaging traits. He tied a cork to a piece of string, and sprinted about the house with Psipsina in hot pursuit, and in the evening at bedtime he would go out and call her, because normally the pine marten judiciously and fair-mindedly began the night with him and concluded it with Pelagia. He was often to be found on his knees with one hand clamped about Psipsina's stomach as he rolled her back and forth on the flags whilst she pretended to bite him and rake him with her claws, and if the animal happened to be sitting on a piece of his music, he would go away and fetch another sheet rather than disturb her.

Moreover, the captain was possessed of a deep curiosity, so that he could sit with unnerving patience watching Pelagia's hands doing the formal dance of the crochet, until it seemed to her that his eyes were radiating some strange and potent force that would give her fingers the cramps and cause her to lose a stitch. `I'm wondering,' he said one day, `what a piece of music would be like if it sounded the way your forgers look.'

She was deeply puzzled by this apparently nonsensical remark, and when he said that he did not like a certain tune because it was a particularly vile shade of puce, she surmised either that he had an extra sense or that the wires of his brain were connected amiss. The idea that he was slightly mad left her feeling protective towards him, and it was this that probably eroded her scruples of principle. The unfortunate truth was that, Italian invader or not, he made life more various, rich and strange.

She found a new irritation to replace the old, except that this time it was an irritation against herself. It seemed that she just could not help looking at him, and he was always catching her.

There was something about him, sitting at the table as he waded through the mountains of paperwork demanded by the Byzantine military bureaucracy of Italy, that made her look up at him regularly, as though by conditioned reflex. No doubt his mind was on sorting out the family problems of his soldiers; no doubt he was tactfully suggesting to a bombardier's wife that she go to a clinic for a check-up; no doubt he was signing requisition forms in quadruplicate; no doubt he was trying to work out why a consignment of anti-aircraft shells had mysteriously turned up in Parma, and why he had received in their place a crate of government-issue combinations. No doubt; but all the same every tithe she looked up his eyes would flick to hers and she would be caught in his steady and ironic gaze as surely as if he had grasped her by the wrists.

For a few seconds they would look at one another, and then she would grow abashed, her cheeks would flush a little, and she would return her attention to her crochet, knowing that perhaps she had slighted him by so breaking away, but cognisant also of the brazenness of holding his regard for one moment longer: A few seconds later she would look up furtively, and at that exact instant he would return her glance. It was impossible. It was infuriating. It was so embarrassing as to be an humiliation.

`I've got to stop doing this,' she would resolve, and, convinced that he was deep in his tasks, would look up and get caught again. She tried to control herself rigidly, saying to herself, `I won't look at him for another half hour.'

But all to no avail. She would sneak a glimpse, his eyes would flicker, and there she would be again, imprisoned by an amused smile and a raised eyebrow.

She knew that he was playing a game with her, that she was being teased and taunted so gently that it was impossible to protest or to bring it out into the open in order to make an issue of it. After all, she never caught him looking at her, so it was all her fault, obviously. Nonetheless, it was a game of which he was in absolute command, and in that sense she was its victim. She decided to change her tactics in this war of eyes. She decided that she would not be the one to break the impasse; she would wait for his spirit to fail, she would wait until it was he who broke away. She composed herself, summoned up every last spark of resolution, and looked up.

They looked at one another for what seemed like hours, and Pelagia wondered absurdly if it was considered technically legitimate to blink. His face fell out of focus, and she concentrated on the bridge of his nose. It too began to blur, and she switched back to his eyes. But which eye? It was like the paradox of Buridan's ass: an equal choice yields no decision. She concentrated upon his left eye, which seemed to grow into an immense and wavering void, and so she changed to the right eye. Its pupil seemed to transfix her like an awl. How strange, that one eye should be a bottomless chasm and the other a weapon as honed as a lance. She began to feel a terrible vertigo.

He did not look away. Just as her giddiness was about to confound her, he set himself to pulling faces, all the while holding her in his gaze. He flared his nostrils rhythmically, and then waggled his ears. He bared his teeth like a horse, and started to move the tip of his nose from side to side. He leered horribly, like a satyr, and then grimaced.

A smile began to tug at the comers of Pelagia's mouth, and then tugged harder. Finally it pulled irresistibly, and suddenly she laughed aloud and blinked. Corelli sprang dancing to his feet, capering ridiculously and crying, 'I won, I won,' and the doctor looked up from his book, exclaiming, `What? What? What?'

'You cheated,' protested Pelagia, laughing. She turned to her father, `Papas, he cheated. It's not fair.'