Captain Corelli's mandolin (46 page)

The same ghost appeared at the same place in 1947, and every year thereafter at roughly the same time, but never exactly, and every year at some moment in October there would be a rose. It was by this that Pelagia was led to conclude that Antonio had honoured his promise to return and that it was possible to keep a vow and to continue to love even from beyond the prison of a grave. She was able to live satisfied, knowing that she had not been deserted and cast off, filled with happy reveries of being desired and cherished even in her dry and fading spinsterhood, and anticipating that her own death would restore all that had been stolen away in life.

When Zeus wished to establish the exact location of the navel of the world he released two eagles from the furthest perimeters of it and made a note of where the flight of these birds crossed. They did so at Delphi, and Greece became the place where East divides from West, and North from South, the rendezvous of mutually exclusive cultures, and the crossroads of the rapacious and itinerant armies of the world.

Pelagia had taken pride in the idea that she lived at the very centre, but now, if such a thing is possible, she gave up being Greek. She had seen with her own eyes the contempt with which Drosoula was treated merely because to have become a widow is to have ceased to exist. For her own conscientious idealism in attempting to heal the sick she had acquired the reputation of being a witch, and, worse than any of this, the barbarity of the civil war had knocked out of her forever the Hellenic faith which her father had instilled into her. She could no longer believe that she was heir to the greatest and most exquisite culture in the history of the earth; Ancient Greece may have been in the same place as modern Grace, but it was not the same country and it did not contain the same people. Papandreou was not Pericles, and the King was hardly Constantine' Pelagia pretended to herself that she was Italian, and from afar she was able to feel more a part of it precisely because distance and the fact that she had never been there permitted her never to discover that it was no more full of liberal humanist mandolin players than Greece was. `After all,' she told herself, `I was to marry an Italian, I speak Italian, and I expect that in Italy I could have become a doctor.'

Accordingly she brought up Antonia to speak Italian, so that the latter learned Romaic Greek from Drosoula and never would speak Katharevousa, and she bought herself a wireless from someone who was happy to part with it for next to nothing, because something had gone wrong with its tuning mechanism and it would only pick up stations in Italy. She bought it in 1949, just after the battle of Vitsi had concluded the civil war, and was able to listen to it at the anniversary of the massacres in October. She loved it dearly, polishing is scratched veneer until it gleamed, and neglecting her obligations by sitting motionless before it for hours, not only listening to it, but watching it carefully as if expecting Antonio to seep suddenly like smoke through its bronzed mesh.

She could hardly bear to leave it, and she would sit through hours of tedious nonsense just in the hope of hearing `Non Ti Scorch Di Me', `Core'n Grato', `Parlami d'Amore', or `La Donna e Mobile'. But most of all she longed to be transported back to the days of La Scale by hearing Torna a Surriento', the favourite song of the club and the one they would sing the most, and she would close her eyes in the most blissful state of melancholy as she heard its melody and visualised the boys outside under the olive, scarcely aware of the melodrama of their gestures as they poured their hearts and the full lust of their voices into the grippingly beautiful mordants and gracenotes of the final phrase, after which they would sit in a moment of nostalgic silence before sighing, shaking their heads, and wiping the tears from their eyes with their sleeves. It was also because of the radio that she discovered that there were beautiful songs for women, and she sang `O Mio Babbino Carol at the top of her voice as she scrubbed the floor on her hands and knees, investing it with oriental microtones and adorning it with ululations, thus abnegating in the very attempt her project of becoming Italian.

She listened also and in particular for the sound of mandolins, and would remind herself that one day she must rescue that of the captain from the cachette. Once she had come in from gathering berries and could have sworn that she heard the last bars of 'Pelagia's March', but she realised that she could not have done, since the captain was dead. No, it was just that this profligate world possessed other players who could supply his place. She wondered often where he had met his fate; most probably in the sea, in that little boat, but perhaps in Italy, at Anzio, or somewhere on the Gothic Line. It filled her with a sense of the utmost bereavement to conceive of his skeleton whitening beneath the ground, the muscles and tendons that had worked such music stilled and useless, contracting into rotting thongs. The ground above him was perhaps as still and silent as that which held the dead in the maquis, or perhaps it was a thoroughfare like that above Carlo Guercio. She herself did not like to walk above Carlo's grave, and she teased herself at the ludicrous modesty of fearing that a dead man might peer through a depth of soil and see right up her skirts.

But the duplicitous soil of Cephallonia was far from still; it was like a dog who has slept in the rain and then gets up to shake away the drops.

It is said that in ancient times all lands were one, and it seems that the continents themselves profess nostalgia for that state of affairs, just as there are people who say that they belong not to their nation but to the world, demanding an international passport and a universal right of residence. Thus India pushes northwards, ploughing up the Himalayas, determined not to be an island but to press its tropical and humid lust on Asia. The Arabian peninsula wreaks a sly revenge on the Ottomans by leaning against Turkey casually in the hope of causing it to fall into the Black Sea. Africa, tired of white folk who think of it as musky, perilous, unknowable and romantic, squeezes northward in the determination that Europe shall look it in the face for once, and admit after all that its civilisation was conceived in Egypt. Only the Americas hurry away westwards, so determined to be isolated and superior that they have forgotten that the world is round and that one day perforce they will find themselves glued prodigiously to China.

It seemed obvious afterwards that it was going to happen, but there had last been such an occasion not in Cephallonia but in Levkas to the north, in 1948, when Greece had been so embroiled in savagery that no one else had noticed, and the signs and omens of the morning were considered strange rather than portentous.

The Korean War had just concluded, but French troops had just parachuted into Indochina, and it was a fine August 13th of 1953, near the Feast of the Assumption, after the harvesting of the grapes. There was a thin haze, and streaky clouds like vapour trails were draped across the skies at insouciant angles, as though placed there by an expressionist artist with an . allergy to order and serious aesthetic objections to symmetry and form. Drosoula had noticed chat there was an inexplicably strange smell and glow upon the land, and Pelagia had found that the water was right up to the top level of the well, even though there had been no rain. Yet minutes later she had returned with her pail and found no liquid there at all. Dr Iannis, who had been tightening the miniature screws of his spectacles, found to his amazement that they stuck to his screwdriver with implausible magnetic force. Antonia, now eight years old but as tall as a child of twelve, went to pick up a sheet of paper from the floor, and the sheet fluttered upwards and stuck to her hand. `I'm a witch, I'm a witch,' she cried, skipping out of the door, only to find that a hedgehog with two babies was scuttling across the yard, and that a similarly nocturnal owl was inspecting her from a lower branch of the olive, flanked by rows of Pelagia's new chickens that sat roosting obliviously with their heads beneath their wings. If Antonia had looked, she would have seen not one bird flying in the sky, and if she had gone down to the sea, she would have seen flatfish swimming near the surface, and the other fish leaping as if they now wished to be birds and to swim in air, whilst many others pre-emptively turned turtle, and died.

Snakes and rats left their holes, and the martens in the Cephallonian pines gathered together in groups upon the ground and sat waiting like opera-lovers before the overture begins. Outside the doctor's house a mule tethered to the wall strained against its rope and kicked out at the stones, the thudding of its hooves reverberating in the house. The dogs of the village set up the same ungainly and enervating chorus that normally occurs at dusk, and rivers of crickets streamed purposefully across roads and yards to vanish amongst the thorns.

Curious events followed one upon another. Crockery rattled and cutlery clattered just as it had in the war when British bombers overflew. Outside in the yard Pelagia's bucket fell over, spilling its water, and Antonia denied upsetting it. Drosoula came inside, perspiring and shaking, and told Pelagia, `I am ill, I feel terrible, something has happened to my heart.'

She sat down heavily, clutching her hand to her chest, gasping with anxiety. She had never felt so weak in the limb, so tormented by pins and needles in the feet. Not since the last feast of the saint had she so much wanted to be sick. She took deep breaths, and Pelagia made her a restorative tisane.

Outside in the yard Antonia realised that she was suffering from headache, was a little giddy, and was also oppressed by that vertiginous terror that one experiences when looking over a precipice and fears that one is being drawn over it. Pelagia came out and said, 'Psipsina, come in and watch; the other Psipsina's going bonkers.'

It was true. The cat was indulging in behaviour more mysterious than any seen in any feline since the time of Cleopatra and the Ptolemies. She scratched at the floor as though burying something or unearthing it, and then rolled upon the spot as though expressing pleasure or wriggling against the pricking of her fleas. She skipped suddenly sideways, and then straight up in the air to an extraordinary height. She turned her gaze on the humans for one split second, somersaulted with a wide-eyed expression that could only have meant astonishment, and then shot out of the door and up the tree, where she ignored the chickens. A moment later she was back in the house looking for things to get into. She tried a wicker basket for size, put her head and forepaws into a brown paper bag, sat for a minute in a pan that was too small to contain her, and ran straight up the wall to perch, blinking owlishly, upon the top of a shutter that was swaying precariously from side to side and creaking with her weight. `Mad cat,' remonstrated Pelagia, whereupon the animal leapt and skittered from one shelf to another, hurling itself dementedly round and round the room without once touching the floor, in a manner that reminded Pelagia of the cat's eponymous predecessor. She stopped abruptly, her tail fluffed out to splendid dimensions, the hair of her arching back standing straight on end, and she hissed fiercely at an invisible enemy that appeared to be somewhere in the region of the door. Then quietly she returned to the ground, slunk out into the yard as though stalking, and sat on the wall yowling tragically as though perplexed at the loss of kittens or lamenting an atrocity. Antonia, who had been clapping her hands and laughing with delight, suddenly burst into nears, exclaimed, `Mama, I've got in get out,' and ran outdoors.

Drosoula and Pelagia exchanged glances, as if to say, `She must have reached puberty early,' when there erupted from the earth below a stupefying roar so far below an audible pitch that it was sensed rather than heard. The two women felt their chests heave and vibrate against the restraint of sinews and cartilage, their ribs seemed to be tearing, a god seeming to be dealing mighty blows to a bass drum within their lungs. `A heart attack,' thought Pelagia desperately, `O God, I've never lived,' and she saw Drosoula with her hands to her stomach and her eyes bulging, stumbling towards her as though felled by an axe.

It seemed as though time stopped and the unspeakable rolling of the earth would never end. Dr Iannis plunged out of the doorway of the room that used to be Pelagia's and spoke for the first time in eight years: `Get out! Get out!' he cried, `It's an earthquake! Save yourselves!' His voice sounded tinny and infinitely remote behind that guttural explosion of ever-augmenting sound, and he was thrown violently sideways,, Panicked and blinded by the frantic leaping and quivering of the world, the two women latched for the door, were hurled down, and attempted to crawl. To the infernal and brain-splitting booming of the earth was added the cacophony of cascading pans and dishes, the menacing, wild, but mincing tarantella of chairs and table, the gunshot reports of snapping beams and walls, the random clanging of the church-bell, and a choking cloud of dust with the stench of sulphur that tore at the throat and eyes. They could not crawl on hands and knees for being thrown upwards and sideways, again and again, and they spread their hands and legs and writhed like serpents for the door, reaching it only as the roof began to cave.

Out into the heaving yard they went, the light obliterated from the sky, the direful clamour bursting inside their heads and breasts, dust rising slowly from the earth as though attracted by the moon. The ancient olive, before their very eyes, made obeisance to the ground and split cleanly down the centre of the trunk before springing upright and shaking its branches like a palsied Nazarene. A bubbling and filthy waterspout erupted from the centre of the street to a height of twelve metres, and then disappeared as though it had never been, leaving a pool of water that filled rapidly with dust and also disappeared. Higher up the hill, invisible because of the ascending curtains of pale and choking dust, a plate of rock and red clay split from the slope and tobogganed down, entering the road to the south side, dragging the olives in its route, and removing the field from which the crickets had migrated. Once more the unsettled giant in the bowels of the earth slammed a mighty fist vertically upwards, so that houses leapt from their foundations and solid stone walls rippled like paper in the wind, and suddenly there was a stillness like that of death. An uncanny and sepulchral silence settled upon the land, as though belatedly regretting such catastrophe, and Pelagia, hawking and filthy, filled beyond measure by a sense of impotence and tiny-ness, began to struggle to her knees, still winded beyond measure by the last titanic blow that had struck her in the diaphragm and paralysed her lungs. She stood up, tottered on her feet, and the preternatural stillness was suddenly broken by the wild and savage cries of the priest, who had rushed from his church and was now wheeling and spinning, his arms raised to the heavens, his eyes flashing through the grime of his face, not imploring the deity to desist, as Pelagia at first supposed, but berating him. `You bastard!' he roared, `You filthy dog! You son of a flea-bitten bitch! You whore's disease!' The forbidden words spewed out of him, all the serenity of his pious soul transformed instantaneously to contempt, and he fell to his knees, battered the earth with his fists, and, his body incapable of enfolding his rage, he sprang once more to his feet and punched a fist towards the sky. Tears rose to his eyes and he demanded, `Have we not loved you? Ungrateful shit! Excrement of the devil!' At this point, as though in response, the deep growling recommenced and mounted. Once more that plutonic fist shot upwards from the profoundest depths, and once more the crust and rocks of Cephallonia jolted and danced, the peaks of the mountains rocking like the masts of boats. Thrown to the ground again, Pelagia clawed at the oscillating, thudding earth, her helplessness and terror confounding and abolishing even her desperation to survive. The whole world had shrunk to the dimensions of a dark ball of fire that seemed to be erupting in her stomach and disgorging its consuming flames into the fibres of her brain, and in this solitary inferno she writhed and choked, incredulous, astonished, beyond amazement or dismay, a plaything of the impudence and callousness of earth., To the south, in the island of Zante, the capital town blazed beneath a rain of incandescent cinders that fell upon the flesh so tormentingly that both men and dogs went mad. A rescue worker, one who had been a witness to Nagasaki, said afterwards that this was worse. All over the Ionian islands people found themselves with nothing but whatever idiotic items they had tried to save as they disgorged from their houses; a chamber pot, a letter, a cushion, a pot of basil, or a ring. On Cephallonia the rock at Kounopetra, in Paliki, which had vibrated for centuries and which even British warships had failed to disturb, fell still and found repose amid the demolition of the land. It became just another seaside rock as the island transmogrified itself, dissolving into desolation and rehearsing Armageddon.