Captain Corelli's mandolin (48 page)

The earthquake changed lives so profoundly that to this day it is still the single greatest topic of conversation. When other families elsewhere are arguing about whether or not socialism has a future or whether or not it was a good idea to abolish the monarchy, Cephallonians talk about whether there will be another earthquake and whether it will be as vicious as the last. They live in the shadow of apocalypse, and when they are ostensibly talking about socialism or the monarchy, they are really thinking about 1953. It will be marked by a pause during which someone forgets what they are saying, or a momentary interruption in the passage of fork to mouth. Like the Ancient Mariner, they cannot resist buttonholing strangers in order to inform them of the facts, and tourist guides will contrive to work them into sentences which were promising to be about the prospects of finer weather. Old people pin down a remembered year by reference to its being before or after the earthquake, just as the custom continues of naming this year's occasions as being before or after the feast of the saint. The catastrophe caused people to recall the war as piffling and inconsequential by comparison, and renewed their sense of life. It was now possible to wake up in the morning and be amazed and grateful to be yet alive and living in a solid house, and to go to bed at night full of relief at having lived a commonplace and uneventful day.

Lovers who had been procrastinating got married immediately, and longstanding couples in unsatisfactory marriages looked at one another in wonder at such a waste of years and immediately got divorced. Close families grew ever closer, and sibling squabblers emigrated to different lands in order to place the sea between them.

The three inhabitants of their new matriarchal house grew closer, turning their faces inwards upon each other, structuring their lives about the one pillar of Pelagia's atrocious guilt. Insomniac and occasionally hysterical, she reproached herself relentlessly for being instrumental in her father's death. `He was seventy,' said Drosoula sensibly, `and he owed God a death. It was better to die like that, trying to save us, and so quickly.'

But Pelagia would have none of it. She knew that in the moment of disaster her mind had been whirling with nothing but the need to save herself, and she knew that when her father had fallen she should have tried, even at the expense of her own existence, to drag him through the door before the roof fell in. Over and over she played through in her mind the manner in which she had been rendered as impotent as a blowfly in a hurricane, the way in which all rational thought had been cudgelled from her mind, the way in which the tie of blood and affection had been nullified by that awesome roaring and that leaping of the earth. But it was no good. Whatever the rationalisations and excuses, the one palpable fan remained that she had deserted her own father in his hour of greatest peril; he had saved her by galvanising her into action, and she had let him die. It was not the quid pro quo of a loving and dutiful daughter.

She fell into a morass of self-recrimination and remorse. She neglected her appearance and her household tasks, preferring instead to sit by his grave, watching the eternal flame that she tended in a red glass lamp, chewing her own lips until they bled, and wishing that she could speak to him. She could have spoken through the black marble slab with its old but smiling photograph, but felt herself unworthy to address him. With her guying hair disarrayed and her face pale, she simply sat and watched, as though expecting his shade to rise up through the earth and burden her with reproaches. When there was a vile east wind in January or a raging tempest she would pull her black shawl about her head, rise up from her chair beside the stove, and bow down her head to battle against the elements, snuggling up the hill on the interminably repeated Pilgrimage, obsessed with the single thought that his flame should not go out. She knelt in the soughing wind, bowing over her Iatre p to protect it from the rain, warming her shaking hands upon the glass, transforming her life into one long penitence and apology. She was in those days capable of believing that God had taken away Antonio because in His divine foreknowledge He had known that she would one day fail her father, contriving the former as her punishment, foreseeing the latter as her sin. Drosoula lost count of the times that she and Antonia had to go to the cemetery and drag Pelagia away, anguished and beseeching, her hands fluttering and her legs seemingly unhinged at the knees.

One day Antonia and Drosoula could take no more; their sympathy had transformed itself gradually and imperceptibly into anger and irritation, and the old woman and the young girl conspired together to bring her back to her senses. `The trouble is,' said Drosoula, `that she lost someone she loved during the war, and this extra death has made it all boil over.'

`Is that the ghost she always talks about?'

`Yes. His name was Corelli, a musician.'

`Do you think she really sees him, or do you think she's gone mad?'

`She wasn't mad before. The thing about ghosts is that they can appear to anyone they choose, and no one else sees them. It's Grandpa's dying that's changed her bulbs.'

The little girl shuddered, `Poor Grandpa.'

`I'm thinking of going to the priest for advice,' said Drosoula.

`But he's mad too, ever since the earthquake. What if we dress up as Grandpa's ghost and come and tell her that it wasn't her fault?'

Drosoula frowned, `It's a good idea, but she's not stupid, even if she's mad. It's not easy to impersonate a ghost, you know. I'm too tall and you're too small, and we don't know how to talk like him at all. All those words that are three pages long if you write them down, and sentences that could cover an entire book from start to finish, and you've got to remember that it might even make it worse.'

`Why don't we just tie her to the bed and hit her?'

Drosoula sighed longingly at the satisfying image, and wondered whether or not it would work. In the old days, even when she was a child in Turkey, they had cured the crazy by beating them until they were too scared to be insane anymore. It had worked well enough back then, but there was no way of knowing how much human nature had changed in the intervening period. She suspected that in any case Pelagia's madness had about it an element of self-indulgence, a sort of masochistic egomania, and she might look upon a beating as amply deserved rather than deterrent. She held the young girl's hands in her own, kissed her on the top of the head, and her eyes brightened. `I've had an idea,' she said.

Accordingly, at breakfast the next morning, Antonia suddenly announced, `I had a dream about Grandpa last night.'

`That's funny,' said Drosoula, `so did I' .

They looked to Pelagia for some kind of reaction, but the latter continued merely to tear a piece of bread into tiny pieces.

`He told me he was glad he was dead,' said Antonia, `because now he can be with Mama's mother.'

`That's not what he told me,' replied Drosoula, whereupon Pelagia asked, `Why are you talking as though I'm not here?'

`Because you're not,' observed Drosoula, brutally. `You haven't been here for a long time.'

`What did he tell you, then?' enquired Antonia.

`He told me that he wants Mama to write the History of Cephallonia that got buried in the earthquake. To get it done for him. He said it spoils all the fun of being dead, knowing that it's got lost.'

Pelagia eyed them suspiciously, and the other two continued to ignore her. Antonia was discovering that this play-acting could be tremendously amusing. `I didn't know he was writing a history.'

`O yes, it was more important than being a doctor.'

Antonia turned to Pelagia and demand innocently, `Are you going to write it then?'

'No point in asking her,' said Drosoula, `she's too far gone.'

`I am here,' protested Pelagia.

'Welcome back,' said Drosoula sarcastically.

Pelagia went back to the cemetery and renewed the oil in the lamp. She stood looking at the inscription (Beloved Father and Grandfather, Faithful Husband, Friend Of The Poor, Healer Of All Living Things, Infinitely Learned And Courageous) and it occurred to her that there was indeed a way to keep his flame alive, even if all this stuff about dreams was silly nonsense. She went into Argostoli, hitching a lift on the back of a mulecart, and returned with pens and a thick sheaf of paper.

It was surprisingly easy. She had read through the manuscript so many times that all the old phrases rolled through the kitchen door and windows, made themselves heard inaudibly, and flowed down her arm and right hand, emerging from the nib of her pen and filling sheet afar sheet of paper: `The half-forgotten island of Cephallonia rises improvidently and inadvisedly from the Ionian Sea; it is an island so immense in antiquity that the very rocks themselves exhale nostalgia and the red earth is stupefied not only by the sun, but by the impossible weight of memory . . .'

Drosoula and Antonia spied on her, sitting at her table in a scholarly attitude, tapping her teeth with her pen, and occasionally staring out of the window at nothing in particular. The two conspirators crept away to a safe distance, hugged each other, and danced.

Pelagia almost became the doctor. As in the time of her distress, and just as he had done throughout his life, she did virtually nothing about the house, leaving it all to the women. Of the few souvenirs of her father, dug from the ruins, there remained his pipe, and this she stuck between her teeth as he had done, inhaling the faded traces of tarry dottle, and impressing the stem with the indentations of her own teeth over the marks of his. She did not light it, but regarded it as an instrument of her mediumship, so that the old words now seemed to flow in through the empty bowl, gather in the stem, and sound directly in her brain. Tentatively she began to add a woman's touch to the male prepossessions of the text, supplying details of manners of dress and the techniques of baking in the communal fourno, the economic significance of child labour, and the cruel but traditional contempt for widows. As she wrote, she discovered her own passions surmounting those of her father, passions whose existence she had never previously suspected, and out onto the page there soared thundering condemnations and acid verdicts to rival and outvenom his.

The joy of it transformed her. Her act of filial devotion metamorphosed into a grand design involving trips to the library and earnest letters of enquiry to learned institutions, to maritime museums, the British Library, experts on Napoleon, and American Professors of The History of Imperial Power. To her amazement and gratification she discovered that all over the world there were enthusiastic people so enamoured of knowledge and its coherent explanation that they would actually spend months making enquiries on her behalf, and eventually send her much more than she had asked for, with personal notes of encouragement and lists of other experts and institutions to consult. As the piles of correspondence mounted, she began to feel in danger of finishing up by writing a `Universal History of the Entire World', because everything connected to everything else in the most elaborate, devious, and elegant ways. Finally Pelagia compressed her sheaves of paper into a large boxfile, and wondered what to do next. It ought to be published, under the joint names of herself and her father, but it seemed an unbearable wrench to part with it, to send her intellectual baby out into the world without its mother there to defend it. She would want to be beside each reader in order to answer their objections and tell them not to skip any sections, to adduce additional proofs. Nonetheless she made tentative enquiries of four publishers, who expressed sympathy and support, advised her that such a book would have no market, and told her that the best thing to do would be to donate it to a university. `I will when fm dead,' thought Pelagia, and she left it on her shelf as visible evidence of the now undeniable fact that she was a substantial intellectual in the great Hellenic tradition.

The project had kept her busy right up to 1961, the year in which Karamanlis won the election from Papandreou, and at the end of it she looked through her massive document and realised that throughout its composition and compilation, a transmogrification had been unfolding within herself.

The calligraphy near the beginning was as spidery and unhinged as that of her father during the long years of his silence, but as time progressed it had become firmer and more rounded, more confident and affirmative. But more importantly than this, the process of writing had crystallised opinions and philosophical positions that she had not even known that she had held. She discovered that her basic understanding of economic processes was Marxist, but that, paradoxically, she thought that capitalism had the best ways of dealing with the problems. She considered that cultural traditions were a stronger force in history than economic transformations, and that human nature was fundamentally irrational to the point of insanity, which accounted for its willingness to embrace demagoguery and unbelievable beliefs, and she concluded that freedom and order were not mutually exclusive, but essential preconditions of each other.

Drosoula had too much common sense to listen to grand theories, and so Pelagia bludgeoned the budding Antonia with these ideas, the two of them sitting up late into the night, too intoxicated with philosophising to drag themselves away to empty bladders that were bursting with taint tea, or to go to bed and close eyes that were burning with fatigue.

Antonia, now in the most fresh and perfect stage of an adolescent's beauty and natural perversity, opposed all of her adopted mother's ideas not only for the sake of argument, but as a matter of principle, and Pelagia soon discovered the extreme delight of forcing an opponent into contradicting a position she had held the day before. It left Antonia speechless and enraged, hedging her comments carefully with qualifications and provisos that involved her either in further contradictions or in arriving at a conclusion so tempered that it amounted to no opinion at all. Pelagia exacerbated the girl's frustration and annoyance by informing her repeatedly, `When you're my age, you'll look back and see I was right.'