Captain Corelli's mandolin (31 page)

They passed each other at the door, she going out, and he returning from work. Unselfconsciously she put one hand up to his left cheek and, in passing, kissed him on the other.

He was astonished, and, by the time that she reached the entrance to the yard, so was she, because it was not until then that she suddenly realised what she had done. She stopped dead, as though having walked straight into a metaphysical but palpable stone wall. She felt her blood rising to the roots of her hair, and realised that she did not dare look back at him. Undoubtedly he too would be rooted to the spot. She could almost feel his eyes travelling from her feet to her head, finally settling upon the back of her head in the expectation that she would turn around. He called out, as she knew he would, 'Kyria Pelagia.'

`What?' she demanded curtly, as though an effort to be short with him could cancel out the hideously simple way in which she had betrayed her affection without even thinking about it.

`What's for dinner?'

`Don't tease me.'

'Would I tease you?'

`Don't make anything of it. I thought you were my father. I always kiss him like that when he comes in.'

`Very understandable. We are both old and small.'

`If you are going to tease me, I shall never speak to you again.'

He came up behind her and around her, and threw himself upon his knees before her. 'O no,' he cried, `anything but that.'

He bowed his head to the ground and moaned piteously, `Have mercy. Shoot me, flog me, but don't say you'll never speak to me.'

He grasped her about the knees and pretended to weep.

'The whole village is looking,' she protested, `stop it at once. You are so embarrassing, get off me.'

'My heart is broken,' he wailed, and he grasped her hand and began to smatter it with kisses.

`Stupid goat, you are deranged.'

'I am tormented, I am burning, I am broken into pieces, my eyes spout forth with tears.'

He leaned back and gestured poetically with his fingers to portray the extraordinary cascade of invisible tears that he intended her to envisage. `Don't laugh at me,' he continued, having struck upon a new tack. 'O, light of my eyes, do not mock poor Antonio in his affliction.'

`Are you drunk again?'

`Drank with sorrow, drunk with agony. Speak to me.'

`Did your battery win another football match?'

Corelli leapt to his feet and spread his arms with delight, `Yes. We beat Gunter's company by four goals to one, and we injured three of them, and then I came in and you kissed me. A glorious day for Italy.'

`It was a mistake.'

`A significant mistake.'

`An insignificant mistake. I am very sorry.'

`Come inside,' he said, `I've got something very interesting to show you.'

Relieved by this abrupt change of subject, she followed him through the door, only to find that he was passing her on his way out again. He clamped his hands upon either side of her head, kissed her lingeringly and flamboyantly on the forehead, exclaimed, 'Mi scusi, I thought it was the doctor, don't make anything of it,' and then sprinted away across the yard and down the street. She put her hands on her hips and stared after him in amazement, shaking her head and making every effort not to laugh or smile.

The doctor glanced out of the window and saw Captain Corelli creeping up on Lemoni in order to give her a surprise. At the same time Psipsina leapt foursquare onto the page he was writing about the French occupation, and this combination of circumstances inspired him with a wonderful idea. He set down his pipe and his pen, and ventured out into the incandescent sunlight of the early afternoon.

`Fischio!' exclaimed the captain, and Lemoni squealed.

`Excuse me, children,' said the doctor.

`Ah,' said Corelli, straightening up sheepishly, `Kalispera, Iatre. I was just...'

`Playing?'

He turned to the small girl, `Koritsimou, do you remember when you found Psipsina when she was very little and was hanging on the fence? And you made me come along to rescue her?'

Lemoni nodded importantly, and the doctor asked, `Are all the snails still there?'

`Yes,' she said. `Lots. Big ones.' She pointed at Corelli, `Bigger than him, even.'

`When is the best time to find them?'

`Early and late.'

`I see. Can you come round this evening and show me again where they were?'

`After dark's best.'

`We can't go out after dark, there's a curfew.'

`Before dark,' she agreed.

`What was all that about?' asked the captain, when Lemoni had departed.

Stiffly the doctor said, `Thanks to you there's almost no food. We're going out this evening to find snails.'

The captain bridled, `The blockade is British. They have the idea that they can best help you by starving you. As you know very well, I have done my best to help.'

`Your borrowings at the expense of the Army are very much appreciated, but it's a pity that the situation even arises. We need the protein. You can see what we've been reduced to.'

`At home snails are an expensive luxury.'

`And here they are a regrettable necessity.'

The captain wiped the perspiration from his forehead and said, `Permit me to come and help.'

So it was that in the evening, an hour before the setting of the sun and shortly after the cooling of the day, Pelagia and her father, Lemoni and the captain, found themselves crawling through the impossible tangle of animal runs and briars, having climbed the crumbling wall and negotiated their way beneath the branches of ancient and neglected olives.

The doctor was crawling behind Lemoni, and suddenly she stopped and looked round at him. `You said,' she reproached him, `you said that if you went round looking for snails, you'd be taken somewhere and locked up:

`Piraeus,' said the doctor. `I said I'd be taken to Piraeus. Anyway, we're all locked up nowadays.'

It became apparent in that dingy light that upon the undersides of the lower leaves there were legions of fat snails, competing with each other for variegation of design. There were tawny snails with almost invisible markings, there were light snails with whorls of stripes, there were snails of ochre yellow and bright lemon, and snails of red speckles and black dots. In the upper branches the Sicilian warblers cocked their heads and flitted about, listening to the dull clacks and pings as the harvest was gathered and dropped into the buckets.

The child and the three adults became so absorbed in their task that they did not notice themselves becoming separated. The doctor and Lemoni vanished down one tunnel, and the captain and Pelagia down another. At some point the captain found himself on his own, and paused for a second to reflect upon the curious fact that he could not remember ever having felt so contented. He carelessly deplored the state of the knees of his breeches, and squinted up at the reddening sun as its crimson light softened amongst the twigs and leaves. He breathed deeply and sighed, relaxing back upon his heels. He poked with a forefinger at a snail that was attempting to crawl out of the bucket. 'Bad snail,' he said, and was relieved that there was no one near to hear him utter such inanities. In the distance an anti-aircraft gun cracked, and he shrugged his shoulders. It probably was nothing.

'Ow, O no,' came a voice nearby that was undoubtedly Pelagia's. 'O, for God's sake.'

Horrified by the terrible thought that perhaps she had been struck by falling shrapnel, the captain fell to his hands and knees, and crawled quickly back along his tunnel towards the place from which the exclamations had come.

He found Pelagia, apparently paralysed into a contorted posture that had left her neck ticked backwards. She was on her hands and knees, a long thin streak of blood was beading diagonally across her cheek, and she was clearly in a state of extreme irritation.

'Che succede?' he asked, crawling towards her. 'Che succede?'

'I've got my hair caught,' she replied indignantly. 'A thorn scraped my cheek, and I jerked my head away, and I caught my hair on these briars, and I can't untangle it. And don't laugh.'

'I'm not laughing,' he said, laughing. 'I was afraid you'd been wounded.'

'I am wounded. My cheek stings.'

Corelli reached into his pocket for a handkerchief, and dabbed at the graze. He showed her the blood and said lightly, 'I'll treasure this forever.'

'If you don't untangle me, I'll murder you. just stop laughing.'

'If I don't untangle you, you'll never catch me to murder me, will you? Just hold still.'

He was obliged to reach his hands over her shoulders and peer past her ear in order to see what he was doing. She found her face pressing into his chest, and she took in the rough texture and dusty aroma of his uniform. `You're squashing my nose,' she protested.

Corelli sniffed appreciatively; Pelagia always smelled of rosemary. It was a young, fresh scent, and it reminded him of festive meals at home. 'I might have to cut this,' he said, pulling futilely at the black strands that had wound themselves about the thorns.

'Ow, ow, stop pulling it about, just be careful. And you're not cutting it.'

`You're in a very vulnerable position,' he remarked, 'so just try to appear grateful.'

He tugged it out, piece by piece, ensuring that he let no hairs slide between his fingers to cause her any pain. His arms began to ache from being held so much in a stretched and horizontal position, and he rested his elbows on her shoulders. 'I've done it,' he said, pleased with himself, and began to draw back. She shook her head with relief, and as the captain's lips passed by her cheek, he kissed it gently, before the ear, where there was an almost invisible, soft down.

She touched her fingertips to the site of the kiss, and reproached him, 'You shouldn't have done that.'

He knelt back and held her gaze with his own. 'I couldn't help it.'

'It was taking advantage.'

'I'm sorry.'

They looked at one another for a long moment, and then, for reasons that even she could not fathom, Pelagia began to cry.

'What's the matter? What's the matter?' asked Corelli, his face furrowing in consternation. Pelagia's tears rolled down her cheeks and fell into the bucket amongst the snails. 'You're drowning them,' he said, pointing. 'What's the matter?'

She smiled pitifully, and set once more to crying. He took her in his arms and patted her back. She felt her nose begin to run, and became anxious that she might leave mucus on the epaulette of his uniform. She sniffed hard in order to preclude this eventuality. Suddenly she blurted out, 'I can't stand it any more, not any of it. I'm sorry.'

'Everything is lousy,' agreed the captain, wondering if he too might yield to the temptation to cry. He took her head gently in his hands and touched at the tears with his lips. She gazed at him wonderingly, and suddenly they found themselves, underneath the briars, in the sunset, flanked by two buckets of escaping snails, their knees sore and filthy, infinitely enclosed in their first unpatriotic and secret kiss. Hungry and desperate, filled with light, they could not draw away from each other, and when finally they returned home at dusk, their combined booty shamefully and accusingly failed to reach the quota reached by Lemoni on her own.

How like a woman is a mandolin, how gracious and how lovely. In the evening when the dogs howl and the crickets chirp, and the huge moon hoists above the hills, and in Argostoli the searchlights search for false alarms, I take my sweet Antonia. I brush her strings, softly, and I say to her, 'How can you be made of wood?' just as I see Pelagia and ask without speaking, 'Are you truly made of flesh? Is there not here a fire? A vanishing trace of angels? A something far estranged from bone and blood?'

I catch her eye in passing, her gaze so frank and quizzical, holding mine. Her head turns, a smile, an arch and knowing smile, and she has gone. I see her go for water, and then she comes, the urn upon her shoulder, a living caryatid, and as she passes she permits a splash upon my epaulettes. She apologises, laughing, and I say 'Accidents will happen', and she knows I know that it was no chance. She did it because I am a soldier and an Italian, because I am the enemy, because she is funny, because she likes to tease, because it is an act of resistance, because she likes me, because it is contact, because we are brother and sister before she is Greek or I am invader. I notice that her wrists remind me of the slender necks of mandolins, and her hand broadens from the wrist like the head that holds the pegs, and the place where the heel swells to meet the soundbox gives the same contour as her line of neck and chin, and glows the same with the soft polish of youth and pine.

At night I dream of Pelagia. Pelagia comes, undressing, and I see her breasts are the backs of mandolins moulded in Napoli. I cup them in my hands and they are cold like wood and warm like yielding mother's flesh, and she turns about and I see that each buttock is the rounded pear-shaped singing mandolin, swelling in tapered segments, purfled in pearl and slivers of ebony. I am confused because I am caught between looking for strings and the pain of the loins' longing, and I wake up moistened by my own lust, clutching Antonia, pricked by the scratching ends of strings, sweating. I put Antonia down and say, 'O Pelagia,' and I lie awake awhile, thinking of her before I force myself asleep because then it will be morning sooner, and I will see Pelagia.

I think of Pelagia in terms of chords. Antonia has three chords that live together in the first three frets, doh, re, and sol, and they all need two fingers apiece to stop them. I play sol, and I move it one space across and I make the doh, and they ring in each others' aftermath like soprano and alto in the same key in a Tuscan song. I play the re, twisting my hand, making a double space, and it belongs with the other two, but it is sad and incomplete, it is like a virgin unfulfilled. It begs me 'Take me back where I can find my peace', and I return to sol, and all's complete, and I feel like God Himself who made a woman and found His world perfected by a final and a consummating touch.

Pelagia shares these simple, merry chords. She plays with a cat and laughs, and it is sol. She raises an eyebrow when she catches me observing, and pretends to reproach me and reprove me for the guilt of admiration, and it is doh. She asks me a question, 'Haven't you anything useful to do?' and it is like re, requiring resolution. I say, 'Il Duce and I are conquering Serbia today,' and she laughs and all is brought back and clarified. She throws back her head and laughs, her white teeth sparkling, and she knows she is beautiful and that I find her so. I am reminded of sparkling whitewashed houses on a distant hill in Candia. She is glad and proud and withholding, everything has circled back upon itself. She has returned to sol. I find myself laughing also; we are octaves apart, laughing in octaves together, mandola and mandolin, and far away a gun roars at imaginary British planes, there is a spurious rattle of machine-guns, and behold, there is our timpani.

Pelagia hears the guns and frowns. We were happy together, sitting on this balcony shaded by bougainvillaea visited by bees, but now it is the war; the war has returned, and Pelagia knits her brow and frowns. I want to say, 'I am sorry Pelagia, it was not my idea, it was not me who stole Ionia. I was not inspired to take your goats technique for rendering them palatable, and she detested the feeling of insecurity engendered by her own confusion; she dreaded the idea of serving up something that would turn out to be slimy and repulsive, and was fearful that if she cooked a bad meal she might be lowered in the captain's estimation. The warm and jubilant glow which she felt after the discovery of their mutual love was now being threatened not only by the furtive guilt of it, but also by the appalling thought that if she did the wrong thing with the snails she would at best revolt him, and at worst perpetrate a poisoning.

Drosoula told her emphatically that what you had to do was leave the snails overnight in a pot full of water, with the lid on to prevent escape, and in the morning you had to wash them thoroughly. Then you heated them alive in water, and waited for froth and scum to appear on the surface. At this precise moment you had to throw in some salt and begin to stir them clockwise ('If you stir them anti-clockwise they'll taste horrible'). After fifteen minutes you had to pierce a hole in the back of each shell, 'to let the devil out and the sauce in', and then you had to rinse them clean in the water in which they had boiled. She did not explain to Pelagia how it was supposed to be possible, when performing this operation, to dip one's fingers into water that was still boiling hot. Drosoula also maintained that you could only eat snails that had been feeding on thyme, and Pelagia, whilst not believing this for a minute, became yet more anxious nonetheless.

Kokolios' wife told her at the well that this was all nonsense, because she remembered how her grandmother had done it: `You don't want to listen to that Drosoula. The woman's almost a Turk.'

No, what you had to do was pinch each snail, and if it moved it was alive. `But how do I pinch it when it's gone inside?' asked Pelagia.

`Wait for it to come out,' replied Kokolios' wife.

'But if it comes out, then obviously it's alive, and so I don't have to pinch it.'

`You still pinch it. It's best to be sure. Then you take a pointed knife and clean around the mouth of the shell, and then you take clean water and wash each snail twenty-one times. No more because that will wash away the flavour, and no less because then they will still be dirty, and then you leave them to drain for half an hour, and then you put salt in the mouth of the shell and all this disgusting yellow bubbly slime starts to come out, and that's how you know they're ready. Then you fry them one at a time in oil, with the mouth downwards, and then you add wine and boil them for two minutes, no more no less. And then you eat them.'

`But Drosoula says you ought to . . .'

'Don't listen to that old witch. Ask anyone who knows and they'll tell you the same as I did, and if they tell you anything otherwise, then they don't know what they're talking about.'

Pelagia asked Arsenios' wife, and she asked Stamatis' wife. She even looked up `snails' in the medical encyclopaedia, and found no entry for it. She felt like throwing them down onto the floor of the yard and stamping on them. In fact she felt so frustrated that she wanted to cry or shout. She had been told five different ways of preparing the gastropods themselves, and had heard four different recipes: boiled snails, fried snails, Cretan snail stew, and snails pilaf. There was no rice, so the pilaf was out. At the memory of rice her mouth began to water, and she wished all over again that the war would end.

But how do you know how many snails to use? Drosoula said a kilo for four people. But was that with the shells or without them? And how on earth were you supposed to get them out of their shells anyway? And how did you weigh them without getting slime on the scales? The kind of slime that would not even wash off with hot water and soap, and just transferred itself to everything you touched it with, as though it had some mystical ability to multiply itself to infinity.

Pelagia looked down at her shiny cargo of mucilaginous animals, and poked them with her finger when they tried to crawl nut of the pot. She began to feel terribly sorry for them. They were not only very grotesque, with their erectile horns and their helplessly slow weaving of the body when you held them upside down, but they were also deeply pathetic in their sad and pitiful faith in the safety of their carapace. She was reminded of herself as a child, when she had honestly believed that if she closed her eyes, then her father would not be able to see her doing something naughty. Proding at the snails, she was saddened by the cruelty of a world in which the living can only live by predation on creatures weaker than themselves; it seemed a poor way to order a universe.

Her practical and ethical quandaries were broken by an excited cry of, 'Barba C'relli, Barba C'relli,' and she smiled as she recognised the voice of Lemoni in a state of high excitement and pleasure. The little girl had taken to calling the captain `Old Man' and coming every evening to relate to him in breathless and childish Greek every event of the day. 'Barba' Corelli would listen patiently, failing to understand any of it, and then he would pat her on the head, call her 'koritsimou', and begin to throw her up and down in the air. Pelagia could not see what possible pleasure there was in this for either of them, but some things are inexplicable, and Lemoni's piercing shrieks of joy were a conclusive testament to the improbable. Pelagia, glad of a distraction, went out into the yard.

'I saw a great big spiky rustball,' Lemoni informed the captain, `and I climbed all over it.'

`She says that she saw a great big spiky rustball and she climbed all over it,' translated Pelagia.

Carlo and Corelli exchanged glances, and blanched. `She's found a mine,' said Carlo.

`Ask her if it was on the beach,' said Corelli, appealing to Pelagia.

`Was it on the beach?' she asked.

`Yes, yes, yes,' said Lemoni gleefully, adding, `and I climbed on it.'

Corelli knew enough Greek to recognise the word for `yes', and he stood up suddenly, and then just as suddenly sat down. 'Puttana,' he exclaimed, taking the little girl into his arms and hugging her tightly, `she could have been killed.'

Carlo put it more realistically; `She should have been killed. It's a miracle.'

He rolled his eyes and added, 'Porco dio.'

'Puttana, puttana, puttana,' chanted Lemoni inconsequentially, her voice muffled by the captain's chest. Pelagia winced, and said, `Antonio, how many times have I told you not to use bad words in front of the child? What do you think her father will say when she comes home talking like that?'

Corelli looked at her shamefacedly, and then grinned; 'He will probably say, "What figlio di puttana taught my little girl to say puttana?"

'There was no one in the village who could resist joining the long straggle of the inquisitive that wound its way down the cliffs to the sand. When they saw it they pointed and cried, `There it is, there's the mine,' and there indeed it was, perched with a deceptive air of aptness and innocence at the very edge of the peacock sea. It was a sphere the height of a man, a sphere that was a little squatter than it was tall, studded with blunt spikes that made it look like an unnaturally gigantic horse chestnut, or like a vast sea urchin whose spines had freshly emerged from an encounter with a military barber.

They gathered about it at a respectable distance, and the captain and Carlo went in close in order to inspect it.

`How much explosive, do you think?' asked Carlo.

`God knows,' answered the captain. `Enough to blow a battleship out of the water. We'll have to cordon it off and explode it. I wouldn't know how to make it safe.'

`Magnificent,' exclaimed Carlo, who, despite the horrors of Albania, loved explosions from the bottom of his heart and had never lost his boyish delight in harmless destruction.

'Go back to base and get some dynamite, a command wire and one of those electrical plunger things. I'll stay here and get the villagers organised.'

`It's Turkish,' said Carlo, pointing to the swirling characters that were still barely visible amongst the great flakes and pits of rust. 'It must have been floating about for twenty years or more, ever since the Great War.'

'Merda, that's incredible,' said Corelli, `truly a freak. I expect that all the explosive has decayed by now.'

`Won't it be a big bang then?' asked Carlo ruefully.

`It will be if you get enough dynamite, testa d'asino.'

'I get the hint,' said Carlo, and he began to walk back up the beach towards the village.

Corelli turned to Pelagia, who was still gazing wonderingly at the immense and ancient weapon, `Tell Lemoni that if she ever finds anything, anywhere, that's made of metal and she doesn't know what it is, then she mustn't ever, ever, touch it, and she's got to run and tell me about it straight away. Tell her to tell all the other children the same thing.'

Corelli asked Pelagia to translate for him, and gestured to the villagers to gather round. `First of all,' he told them, 'we are going to have to explode this device. It might be a very big explosion indeed, and so when the time comes I want you all to go back to the top of the cliff and watch from there, because otherwise there could be a serious accidental massacre. Whilst we're waiting for the dynamite, I need some strongmen with spades to dig me a trench about fifty metres from this thing, over there, where I can get down in safety whilst I detonate the device. It has to be about the same size as a grave. Any volunteers?'

He looked from face to face, and the eyes in those faces were averted. It was not a good thing to help an Italian, and, whilst everybody wanted to see the big bang, it would have been a matter of shame to be the first to volunteer. Corelli saw those truculent faces, and flushed. `There'll be a chicken to share between you,' he announced.

Kokolios held up two fingers and said, `Two chickens.'

Corelli nodded in agreement, and Kokolios said, `I will do it with Stamatis, and we want two chickens each.'

Pelagia translated, and the captain grimaced, `Each?'

He rolled his eyes in exasperation and muttered, `Rompiscatole,' under his breath.