Captain Corelli's mandolin (45 page)

'I didn't want to hurt you. I am sorry. But now at least you know the truth.'

'The truth,' he shouted, 'the truth? The truth is that you are a whore. And do you know what else? Do you know the first thing I hear when I arrive? I hear, "Hey Mandras, did you hear about your old fiancé? She's going to marry an Italian."

So you've found a Fascist for yourself have you? Is this what I've been fighting for? Traitor slut.'

Pelagia stood up, her lips quivering, and said, `Mandras, let me out.'

'Let me out,' he repeated satirically, 'let me out. Poor little thing's frightened is she?'

He strode up to her and struck her across the face so brutally that she wheeled about before she fell. He kicked her in the region of the kidneys, and bent down to pick her up by the wrists. He flung her on the bed, and, quite against his original intentions, began to tear at her clothes.

This violation of women was something that he could not help, it seemed. It was some irresistible reflex that welled up from deep inside his breast, a reflex acquired in three years of omnipotence and unaccountability that had begun with the armed appropriation of property and ended with the appropriation of everything. It was a natural right, a matter of course, and its violence and animality was infinitely more exhilarating than the feeble stings of lust with which it ended. Sometimes one had to kill at the end of it to draw back a tiny remnant, a vestige of the prior joy. And then there was a weariness, an emptiness that whipped one on to repetition after repetition.

Pelagia fought. Her nails broke in his flesh, she flailed at him with hands and knees and elbows, she shrieked and writhed. To Mandras her resistance was both unreasonable and unwarranted, he was getting nowhere despite his weight and strength, and he sat back and slapped her repeatedly about the face, attempting to subdue her. Her head was flung from side to side at every blow, and suddenly he tried to wrench up her skirts. At the same moment her apron was also flung back, and the solid weight of her derringer fell from its pocket and landed beside her head on the pillow. Mandras, his eyes glazed with ferocity and rage, his breath laboured, did not see it, and when the bullet cracked through his collar-bone the shock stunned him. He put a foot to the ground and staggered backwards, clutching at his wound, his gaze both astonished and accusing.

Drosoula heard the snap of the pistol-shot just as she came in through the kitchen door, and at first she did not recognise it. But then she knew it for what it was, and took the Italian pistol from beneath the pieces of stale bread for which she had fought with so many others of the hungry behind the windows of the Communist Party offices. Without thinking, knowing that thought would make of her a coward, she pushed open the door of Pelagia's room and beheld the unthinkable.

She had thought that Pelagia might have shot herself, that there might be thieves, but when she burst in she saw the doctor's daughter leaning up on her elbows, the tiny pistol smoking in her right hand, her face pulped and bloody, her lips split, her clothes ripped, her eyes already swollen and blackening. Drosoula followed Pelagia's gaze and the finger that was now pointing, and she saw, leaning against the wall behind the door, a man who might have been her son. She ran to Pelagia's side and took her into her arms, rocking her and shushing her, and heard words emerge from underneath the whimpering and the terror, `He . . . tried . . . to . . . rape me.' Drosoula stood up, and mother and son examined each other in disbelief. So much had changed.

AS the fury mounted in the woman's breast, so the fire in Mandras' soul quelled and died. A wave of self-pity overthrew him, and all he wanted to do was weep. Everything had come to nothing, everything was lost. The torment of the war in the ice of Albania, the years in the forest, the deluded self-confidence of his mastery of writing and his lexicographical knowledge of the technical terms of the revolution, his new power and importance, it was all a vapour and a dream. He was a little cowering boy again, trembling before the fury of his mother. And his shoulder hurt so much. He wanted to show it to her, to achieve her sympathy and attention, he wanted her to touch it and restore it.

But she pointed the pistol at him, its barrel wavering with her rage, and she spat the one word that seemed to mean the most `Fascist.'

His voice was pathetic and imploring, `Mother. . ' `How dare you call me "mother"? I am no mother, and you are not my son.'

She paused and wiped the saliva from her mouth with her sleeve. `I have a daughter . . . ' she indicated Pelagia, who was now curled up with her eyes dosed, panting as though she had given birth, ` . . . and this is what you do. I disown you, I do not know you, you will not come back, never in my life do I want to see you, I have forgotten you, my curse goes with you. May you never know peace, may your heart burst in your chest, may you die alone.'

She spat on the ground and shook her head with contempt, `Nazi rapist, get out before I kill you.'

Mandras left his rifle leaning against the wall of the kitchen, and left his knapsack. With bright scarlet blood trickling through the fingers of his right hand where still he comforted his wound, he stumbled out into the bleak December sun, and drew breath. He looked through swimming eyes at the olive tree where once he had swung and laughed, and where, he seemed to renumber, there had been a goat. It was a tree that was incomplete without Pelagia as she was, fresh and beautiful, chopping onions beneath it and smiling through the tears. It was a solitary tree that signified an absence and a loss. A wave of grief and nostalgia overwhelmed him and his throat constricted with sorrow as he lurched his way along the stones.

It did not occur to him that he was a statistic, one more life warped and ruined by a war, a tarnished hero destined for the void. He was aware of nothing but a vanishment of paradise, an optimism that had turned to dust and ash, a joy that had once scone brighter than the summer sun, but now had disappeared and melted in the black light and frigid heat of massacre and cumulative remorse. He had struggled for a better world, and wrecked it.

There was a place, once, where all had sparkled with delight and innocence. He stood still a moment, recalling when it was. He swayed on his feet, nearly fell backwards, and the peasants in their houses looked out and wondered. They did not know him, although be seemed familiar, and they thought it better not to interfere. There had been enough soldiers, enough blood. They stared at him through their shutters, and watched him lumber past. Mandras went down to the sea. He stood on the waterline, watching the bubbles of foam glitter and burst on his boots. Italian boots, he remembered, a man who had not died well. He kicked them off and watched them arc into the waves. With his one hand that worked he unbuttoned his beeches, let them fall, and stepped out of them. Carefully he removed his jacket and let it slip from his wounded shoulder. In wonder he watched the circle of blood soaking an ever wider circumference in his shirt around that tiny ragged hole. He unfastened his shirt's buttons and let that fall too.

He stood naked before the sea, even in that bitter cold, and looked up at the sky for gulls. They would guide him to the fish. He realised that he wanted nothing so much as to feel the sea upon his flesh, the draw of sand across his skin, the tightening and contraction of his groin upon the cold caress of salt and silky water. He felt the wind whipping, and his wound hurt less. He needed to be washed.

He remembered days in his boat with nothing to do but fish and squint against the light, he remembered his triumph when something fine was landed for Pelagia, his pleasure at her pleasure when she was given it, the kisses stolen in the evenings when the crickets sawed and the sun fell suddenly in the western skies of Lixouri. He remembered that in those days he was slim and beautiful, his muscles standing proud and keen, and he recalled that there had been three wild and exuberant creatures who had loved and trusted him. Creatures who in their grace and simplicity were unruffled about dowries and inconstancy, unconcerned about changing the world, creatures with love but without complications. `Kosmas! Nionios! Krystal!' he cried, and waded out into the sea.

The fisherman who recovered the bloated body reported that when he had found it, there had been three dolphins taking it in turns to nudge it towards the shore. But there had been stories like that from ancient times, and in truth no one knew any more whether it was merely a romantic figure or a fact of life.

There had been so many rapes and so many orphans made, that Pelagia and Drosoula were not surprised to find an abandoned bundle on their doorstep. It had been born at such a time that its father could have been a Nazi or a Communist, and its mother might have been any unfortunate girl at all. Whoever this sorrowing and dishonoured girl had been, she had cared enough about her child to leave it upon the doorstep of a doctor's house, knowing that those inside would have an inkling what to do. Such was the intractable chaos of the times that the two women could think of nothing else to do other than to try to care for it themselves, thinking that in time it could be adopted by someone childless or handed to the Red Cross.

They had taken the child inside and unwrapped it, discovering that it was a girl in the process, and also had seen straight away that she was a child whose nature was made for a better world to come. She was calm and serene, sought no pretexts for that demented howling with which some babies torment their parents, she sucked the thumb of her right hand, a habit she was never to lose even in old age, and she smiled liberally, her legs and arms pumping with delight in a motion that Pelagia called `twittering'. She could be induced to emit a long gurgle of pleasure merely by pressing one's finger upon the tip of her nose, producing a sound so much like a slow tremolo on a bass string that Pelagia decided to name her after Captain Corelli's mandolin.

The two women, whose souls had been so continuously tempered in the crucibles of bereavement and unhappiness, found in Antonia a new and poignant focus for their lives. There was no penury too grievous to endure that she did not make sufferable, no tragic memory that she could not efface, and she took her place in that providential matriarchy as though designed for it by fate. In all her life she never asked a question about her father, as though it had fallen to her naturally to arrive by parthenogenesis, and it was not until she was applying for a passport to take her abroad on her honeymoon that she discovered the extreme weightlessness of finding that officially she did not exist.

She did have a grandfather, however. When Dr Iannis returned after two years, shuffling into the kitchen supported upon the arms of two workers of the Red Cross, utterly broken by the continual dread of daily brutality, forever speechless and emotionally paralysed, he bent down and kissed the child upon her head before retiring to his room. Just as Antonia did not speculate about a father, so Dr Iannis did not speculate about the child. It was enough for him to understand that the world had forked along a path that was inapprehensible, alien, and opaque. It had become a mirror chat reflected dimly the grotesque, the demonic, and the hegemony of death. He accepted that his daughter and Drosoula would sleep in his bed and that he would take Pelagia's, because, whichever bed it was, he would dream the same dreams of a forced march of hundreds of kilometres without his stolen boots, without sustenance or water. He would hear the cries of villagers as their houses burned, the screams of live castration and extracted eyes, and the crackle of shots as stragglers were executed; and he would witness over and over again Stamatis and Kokolios, the monarchist and the Communist, the very image of Greece itself, dying in each others' arms and imploring him to leave them in the road test he himself be shot. His mind echoed perpetually with the ELAS hymn, a panegyric to unity and heroism and love, and the sour irony of being addressed as comrade when his back was beaten and a barrel pressed upon the nape of his neck in the false executions that struck his guards as humorous.

In his wordlessness, thinking in images instead of words, because words were too feeble and too far off the mark, Dr Iannis drew the same comfort from Antonia as he had drawn from his daughter after his own young wife had died. He would dandle the child upon his knee, arranging her black hair, tickling her ears, gazing intently into her brown eyes as if this alone was any way to speak, her every smile filling his heart with sorrow because when she was old she would lose her innocence and know that tragedy wastes the muscles of the face until a smile becomes impossible.

Dr Iannis took up medicine again, helping his daughter in a reversal of their prior roles. It alarmed her to see the shaking of his hands as silently he dealt with wounds and sores, and she knew also that he worked only in the face of his own overwhelming sense of futility. Why preserve life when alt of us must die, when there is no such thing as immortality and health is an ephemeral accident of youth? She wondered sometimes at the invincible power of his humanitarian impulse, an impulse as inconceivably courageous, hopeless and quixotic as the task of Sisyphus, an impulse as noble and incomprehensible as that which inspires a martyr to cry out blessings as he burns. In the evenings she wrapped her arms about him and held him as his mind revolved upon his past, his eyes wet with sadness, and she buried her head in his chest, understanding that it was his despair that lightened hers.

She attempted to interest him in working on his History, and when she took the papers from the cachette and arranged them in front of him at his table, he seemed willing enough to work. He read through them, but at the end of a week Pelagia found that he had added only one short paragraph in a calligraphy that had transformed itself from the old firm hand into a spidery chaos of wavering spikes and attenuated loops. She read it and remembered something that her father had once said to Antonio. Diagonally across the bottom of the last page, her father had written, `In the past we had the barbarians. Now we have only ourselves to blame.'

While she had been in the cachette, Pelagia had rediscovered Mandras' rifle, Antonio's mandolin, and Carlo's papers. The latter she read through in a single evening, beginning with the heartrending and prophetic letter of farewell, and continuing through the story of Albania and the death of Francesco. She had never once imagined that that virile and genial Titan had suffered so immensely from a secret woe that had transformed him permanently into a stranger to himself, drying up the source and springs of happiness. But at last she understood the true source of all his fortitude and sacrifice, and she understood that nothing is less obvious in a man than that which seems unquestionable. She saw that he had been as much intent on losing his life as he had been to save Corelli's, and she realised that her own adopted child at risk would have prompted the same ineffable courage in herself.

Antonia grew tall and slender, approximating daily to the classical image of the amazon athlete depicted on the vases in museums. When she walked she strode, springing lightly from the balls of her feet, and very early on she adopted white as the colour of her clothes. She was incapable of decorum, and when she sat in her grandfather's armchair she not only sucked her thumb, but dangled on leg languorously over the arm of the chair, lolling in the most unladylike fashion, and reproving her mother's and Drosoula's reproofs with laughing cries of, `Don't be so old-fashioned.'

Pelagia recognised that in a house run by eccentric women for themselves, she had only herself to blame if Antonia continued the process of becoming anomalous amongst the female sex that her father had inaugurated with herself.

Eccentric they were seen to be. The empty-headed gossips of the village transformed Drosoula, with her extreme ugliness, and Pelagia with her fearless lack of deference to men, into a pair of harridans and witches. The fact that the doctor was silent and impotent in the house was explained away by means of chemically emasculating potions and Ottoman spells, and the fact that Pelagia was driven by impecuniousness to resort to valerian and thyme rather than to sophisticated modern drugs merely served to exacerbate the certainty that their methods were suspicious and occult. Children stoned them as they passed, taunting them, and adults warned their children to keep away and encouraged their dogs to bite them. Nonetheless, Pelagia earned a living, because after darkness people would arrive furtively in the belief that her cures and lotions were infallible.

The first great crisis of this life occurred in 1950, when the women of the house failed to accumulate enough money to bribe a public health official into ignoring the fact that the doctor and Pelagia were unqualified. Forbidden to practise, it seemed that they were destined to sink into the most abject destitution, and to return to a wartime subsistence of hedgehogs, lizards, and snails.

But as though the fates were smiling upon them for the first time, a lugubrious Canadian poet who specialised in verses concerning suicide attempts and metaphysical laments, arrived on the island looking for lodgings. He was the first in the new vanguard of Western romantic intellectuals with Byronic aspirations, and he was looking for a simple house amongst simple people of the earth where he could get to grips with the truly gritty realities of life.

What he got was a simple house amongst simple people of the sea. Ashamed and apologetic, Drosoula showed him around all two rooms of her unsanitised, damp, peeling, and faintly smelly little house on the quay which had been closed for five years and become a haven for cockroaches, lizards, and rats. She was bracing himself for a contemptuous refusal when he promptly professed himself delighted, offering a rent that was nine and a half times as big as she had tentatively proposed to herself. She concluded that the man was undoubtedly rich and mad, and the man himself could not believe his good fortune in having found a house at a sum so peppercorn that even a poet could live. He even felt guilty about it and would put too much money in the envelope that he would insert through the shutters, whereupon Drosoula would honestly return it.

He stayed there for three years until the disaster of 1953, filling the rooms with neurotic bohemian blondes and fashionably Marxist novelists who expounded their conspiracy theories all night and with increasingly slurred vehemence, over bottles of coarse red wine whose alcoholic content and deleterious effect upon the intellect were significantly greater than they thought. The poet would have stayed after the disaster too, but he had come to realise with increasing clarity that relaxation, sunshine, and contentment were doing irreparable damage to his muse. It had at last become impossible to write depressing verse, and it had become a priority to return to Montreal, via Paris, where freedom was in the process of being recognised as the major source of Angst.

But Pelagia, Drosoula and Antonia revelled in the freedom of their unprecedented wealth. They ate lamb at least twice a week, and were able to buy beans that had been dried this year rather than the year before. Additionally, the daily bottle of wine had the salutary effect upon the doctor of healing his psychic wounds one by one, releasing his memories and making light of them, until at length he smiled and laughed even if he never spoke. He had taken to going for long slow walks with Antonia, watching the little girl taking delight in butterflies and skittering from one treasure to another in a fashion that reminded him of Lemoni when she had been a child. Nowadays the only complication in their lives was that they had adopted a cat.

It was not a serious complication, but a confounding one nonetheless. It seemed that cats, for a very obvious reason, had been exterminated from the island during the war, but within a few years they had bred to their former number. Once more there were fat and contented creatures waiting on the quays for offcuts of fish, and once again there were pathetic, worm-infested, skinny and stunted cats begging from house to house in expectation of nothing but blows and kicks.

It so happened that Drosoula had taken to calling Antonia `puss', which was by no means uncommon nor unwarranted, and the name, in Greek 'Psipsina, had stuck and spread to Pelagia, until the girl had almost forgotten her real name. She had become completely accustomed to it, it suited her feline nature and her languid grace, and she was used to being called to dinner by the name. It took some time for the family to work out why, one evening and upon seven subsequent evenings, a small brindled cat leapt through the kitchen window and onto the table just after they had called Antonia in.

At first they shooed it away with snapping dishcloths and waves of the hand, but of course it persisted, and of course eventually it stayed. It meant that Antonia would hear, 'Psipsina, get off the table,' when she was innocently playing in the yard, or, 'Psipsina, dinnertime,' only to come in and find that a small and uninviting dish of raw and bloody offal had been placed upon the tiles. If there was a sudden cry of, 'Psipsina, don't do that,' she would freeze in the process of her mischief and wonder desperately whether or not it was she who had been caught. Drosoula sensibly proposed that Antonia and the cat should swap names, so that the cat became Antonia and the little girl became Psipsina, but it was tried and found unworkable.

During all this time Pelagia became convinced that Antonio Corelli was dead, and like her father she became assured beyond doubt of the reality of ghosts.

It had happened first in 1946 when, one day in October, at about the anniversary of the massacres, she was standing outside the house with the infant Antonia cradled in her arms. She was at the time making cooing noises and giving the baby her forefinger to suckle. Something made her look up, and she saw a figure dressed in black standing looking at her. He was in exactly the place where Mandras had been when he was shot by Velisarios' cannon. The figure was looking at her, poised between a hesitation and a forward pace, and her heart leapt. He had about him the melancholy atmosphere of nine thousand grieving ghosts, and sorrow emanated from his face with the same distinctness with which a light breaks through the mantle of a lamp. She was sure it was him. Thin and bearded though he was, she saw clearly the scar on his cheek and the same brown eyes, the same fall of hair, the same symmetry of his carriage. Excited beyond all joy she put the baby down in order to run to him, but when she looked up he had gone.

Her heart jumping and pounding, she ran. Around the bend of the road she stopped and looked wildly about. `Antonio!' she cried out, `Antonio!' But no voice responded and no man moved towards her. He had vanished. Her hands rose to the heavens in incomprehension, and fell down again to her sides in despair. She stood, watching and calling, until her shouts hurt her throat and tears blinded her eyes. The following morning she found a single red rose on the ground above where Carlo Guercio lay.