Reflections on a Marine Venus: A Companion to the Landscape of Rhodes Read online

  My patrimony has finally been decided upon. I am to inherit three linotypes, a mass of assorted hand type, and all the greasy junk that goes with a printing house; apart, I mean, from the thirty or so devils who keep the machinery running. Later a Government printer is to be appointed who will take over the staff work and leave me free to be simply and solely an editor. But for the time I am playing the part of peacemaker, lawgiver and minor oracle to this large mixed staff. Italians, Greeks and Turks must be made to work amicably together. Did I say amicably? The rows we have sweep the whole building like thunderstorms. It is, however, the ideal laboratory for a study of national character. The Turk one very soon begins to know; slow, shy, mole-like and very suspicious he goes about his work with circumspection, doing it grain by grain. In our Italians one sees at once the large florid feminine sense of decoration, the innate taste, the desire to please. But the Greek is a terrible fellow. Mercuric, noisy, voluble and proud—was there ever such a conjunction of qualities locked in a human breast? Only the Irishman could match him for intractability, for rowdy feckless generosity.

  My terms of reference do not make it any easier. We are to produce three daily papers: Greek, Italian, and Turkish.* The Greek editorial staff is locked away in a room of its own where its ardors and disagreements cannot be heard. Muffled by the heavy doors I hear them blasting and bombinating all morning through. One can almost hear their fingers flying as they argue. And all morning long there comes a stream of visitors trying to get free advertising or to bribe the editor to print material full of political bias. It is going to be tiresome work.

  By one everyday my newspapers are made up, however, and I walk across the old town to collect Gideon from his office on the waterfront before walking home.

  Now at long last E has arrived from Egypt with the rest of the office staff and enough domestic luggage to enable me to start thinking in terms of a house. It hardly seems fair when she will have to stay on in the great hotel herself; but the air and the scenery of the island are enough to compensate her for the prospect of six months in a bed sitting room. For years now I have been trying to describe Aegean scenery to her, but I have always been aware of a suspicious look in her eye as she listened. It was obvious that she suspected me of poetic license. Now she is speechless with it all, and like a woman she says: “But why didn’t you tell me it was so marvelous?” “I tried to. You wouldn’t believe me.” Sitting under the great plane tree on the walls of the fort we dawdle away our afternoons watching the windmills turning against the blue sky and listening to thin bored cries of the fruit vendors in the market stretched out at our feet.

  The little Swedish tanker on which she traveled ran into bad weather and was forced to lie up in Carpathos for a week. She could not have had a happier introduction to Aegean Greece, for Carpathos is as pure in contour as a primitive sculpture. The little pointilliste harbor with its vivid houses is later work—Seurat plus abandon. After Egypt with its swarming vermin, its population of Apes in nightgowns, its dirt, disease, and truncated beggars on trolleys, Carpathos must have seemed preciously close to Paradise in this spring weather. She spent her days bathing, and lying in an almond grove near the sea where the village children gathered round her and sang her their songs. Being an Alexandrian she speaks fairly good Greek, and so found herself at home. She has brought with her a couple of Carpathos songs which Mills will soon be singing. One has a delightful chorus:

  O sweet lemon tree, with lemons up

  When will you lean and lemon me?

  Lemons are identified with breasts in the popular literature, and this is supposed to be sung by a young girl. By the same token “olive” in poetry stands as a symbol for the mole upon the dark face or arm of a girl.

  This morning the blazing sunlight gives a promise of the coming summer; but a promise which could only take in those to whom the calendar means nothing. E swears that in the plane tree she heard the first tentative strokes of the cicada; but by lunchtime the sirocco had started up and the clouds were pouring down over the islands and piling up upon the Anatolian hills. Night came tearfully on through a rainbow of watered silk touching Smyrna at the further end. The peasants say of rainbows, that when one crosses over a carob-tree it dries it: and that the wood of the tree becomes deep-scented and pleasant. They put, adds the tale, this wood into their clothes chests to make them smell nice and to keep the moths away.

  I am told by Hoyle that in parts of the island a rainbow is known as “Helen’s Cord” because, say the peasants, a great queen hanged herself with a rainbow from a tree. Is this perhaps one of those curious survivals which delight him so much to unearth? According to one ancient source when Troy fell Helen was driven out by her stepsons and took refuge in Rhodes where Polyxo hanged her from a tree to avenge the death of Tlepolemos in the Trojan War. Torr has already noted the tree cult of Helen Dendritis in Rhodes during ancient times. The reader must draw his own conclusions. Yet the line of descent seems clear enough. As for Tlepolemos, he enjoyed the posthumous honors of a hero, but there is no record which tells us where his temple stood.

  Our circle of acquaintance has widened to include Sand, the newly arrived director of antiquities, and Egon Huber, an Austrian potter who has lived here for some fifteen years and has been responsible for much of the lovely Icarus pottery turned out during the Italian dispensation. Sand is dour and Scotch, with a gibbous face, and the pleasantest turn of humor imaginable. Huber, by contrast, is a born solitary, tall, fair-haired, and living in a state of perpetual and melancholy detachment from this world of wars and conquests. Fourteen years ago he was washed up in Rhodes during a storm. He had been trying to travel from Venice to Alexandria in a canoe. The island pleased him and he stayed, while the Italian governor, who had been appealing to Rome for an expert in pottery for years past, suddenly heard that God had answered his prayers, and had provided him with a penniless and talented Austrian needing some form of subsistence beyond the icons he was doing for the churches. Huber lives now in a little Martello tower much ruined by damp and neglect. How he avoided having to join the German Army is a miracle—yet he did it, on a series of ridiculous technicalities which only a long Levantine experience could have helped him to think up. He works in desultory fashion at the ruined workshop outside the town where in the past his world famous pottery brought him tourists in their thousands and where shortage of clay has reduced him to poverty. No word of complaint ever passes his lips, however, for he is one of the aristocrats of the spirit—the poor artist who wishes for nothing but a chance to create.

  Gradually the town characters have begun to assert themselves, to fill out with detail the idiosyncrasies of their various personalities. Emerging to the notice first as people encountered daily in the street, the outlines of character and habit follow. From thence it is only a step to the essential details—for everyone knows them: the subject is married or unmarried, has collaborated or has not, is rich or poor. So, gradually Rhodes becomes peopled by living people: Mehmet Bey, Manoli the net maker, Baron Baedeker, and Christ. Characters in the order of their appearance, as they say.

  Mehmet is my neighbor. He lives across the oleander grove, beyond the tombs, in a little house of his own. Every morning he salutes the dawn by flinging wide his wooden shutters and expectorating with marvelous precision upon one or other of the white Leghorns which run about the wired enclosure outside the house. Then he creaks down the stairs, growling at his wife for being a slowcoach, and emerges languidly into the sunshine to stretch and light a cigarette. He is a tall, heavily built man with a pale skin and the lazy dark eyes which betray his Turkish ancestry. He wears the blue skirt and high boots of the Cretan mountaineers, but it is as if his courage (or his resources) had failed him at this point, for he tops off the costume with a white shirt and a soiled handkerchief knotted at his throat. His general manner accords with this appearance of lackadaisical piracy. He wanders round the town on a series of small errands, shambling like an unhorsed gaucho, to emerge in the ga
rden towards noon carrying a pair of trussed chickens, a wire box of quail, a handful of parsley, a honeycomb—or some other such item of domestic concern. It is always a bargain, and he gives the impression of having made no effort to achieve his triumph. It is as if, on awakening in the morning, a sixth sense told him immediately into which quarter of the town he must plunge to secure the day’s meal. Twice a week he slaughters a chicken with hideous expertness on a block, standing with the bloodstained chopper in his hand, and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, to watch the headless corpse run bubbling and coughing round the yard until it falls in a heap.

  Once a month Mehmet disappears on what is a technically forbidden journey—to Turkey. Nobody knows how he goes or how he returns; but after an absence of some ten days he returns with a cargo of contraband which he distributes to agents in the town at something like the speed of light.

  The theory is that he runs his cargo ashore somewhere near Trianda and loads it on to mules. He then joins the dawn caravan of mules which bring the country produce into the markets of the town. I hear him softly crunching along the gravel paths to his house in the early morning; he taps at the door and calls hoarsely. Sometimes he is dragging something heavy along the ground. I shall be sorry if he is caught, as the fines are enormous for smuggling.

  But Mehmet is remarkable for other things; in the town he is regarded with reverence as a man who, born very rich, dissipated three fortunes by sheer joyful improvidence. He was also the last Turk on Rhodes to have a harem, says rumor. “Complétement épuisé, ce type-la,” said the Baron Baedeker the other day, setting down his “espresso” to jerk a thumb in the direction of Mehmet, who was shambling gravely across the square, led by that unerring sixth sense, towards a sucking pig or a goose.

  Sirocco again—a huge white-capped sea racing away for Anatolia, to dash itself in pieces on the headlands, buried in smoke. “All poetry,” says V, “partakes of the epitaph. Even the Epithalamium participates in the death of joy.” It is perhaps a gloomy view. I think of an epitaph scrawled in charcoal above a niche in the catacombs of Rome, a niche containing the bones of a Christian martyr, Clementia tortured, dead sleeps: will arise. Ah! Give us the same power of compression, to resume life and death in poems of not more than six words!

  The question of origins … Gideon and I have been doing some reading in the little archaeological library which Sand has put at our disposal. I have been ploughing through the lush verbiage of Bileotti and Cottret (to whom Gideon has given the collective name of “the Abbé Cutlet”) while he has been chuckling over the primness of Torr, whose two volume account of Rhodes is perhaps the best history of them all.

  Helios was the great God of Rhodes; of all the ancient names for the island, Heliousa, the Sun-friend, is perhaps the one most worth recording, for it is the Sun God’s portrait, more than any other, which emerges from the welter of myth and classical conjecture. The first inhabitants of Rhodes were his children, the Heliades. To his favorite, the nymph Rhodon, was the island bequeathed as a place to live in. The festival of Helios was yearly in September. His priest gave the name to the year. The Colossos was built in his likeness, and the coinage of the realm bore his image, while in the great yearly festival which honored his name white or tawny lambs, white rams, white horses and red honey were offered as a sacrifice; and the wrestlers, boxers and charioteers contended for a wreath of white poplar. So famous were the festivals of Helios that neighboring States sent both their best athletes as competitors and their diplomatic envoys. A team of four horses was sacrificed to him by casting them into the sea. This celebrated in symbolic form his daily journey across the sky, from the great submarine palace where he lived to the western darkness of Oceanus. His temple stood where now De Vecci’s* cardboard fortress stands, and within its precincts was the famous statue of the Sun God standing up in a chariot drawn by four steeds. Before the town of Rhodes was founded in 408 BCE the Rhodians, who claimed Argos for their parent state, lived for the most part in the three glittering cities, named after the heroes Lindos, Ialysos, and Camiros, grandsons of Helios. There were other great towns on the island—and every year fresh evidence of forgotten sites comes to light—but these three cities alone governed the island and its colonies. With Cos and Cnidos they formed a religious league and shared a common temple on the Triopian Cape. What induced them to band together and found a fourth town more beautiful than any of the others, to which they surrendered the government of the island? Some suggest an earthquake which shattered the three cities. Was there some feeling perhaps that the site of the new town, on the spatulate northeastern tip of the island, would offer them both the strategic use of three admirably situated harbors and an immunity against the volcanic disturbances which from ancient time have been the curse of the Sporades? We shall never know. The modern peasant version of the foundation of Rhodes is worth translating from one of the pamphlets of Vronty. “After the great plague of horseflies which bit everyone and died, there came a great earthquake on the feast day of St. Demetrius. In the earthquake the three cities fell down, so they built the new city in a better place where it would not be affected by such things.”

  White bread is the great novelty of the day. The Rhodians have become positively snobbish about it, and the meanest beggar would refuse a piece of brown if it were offered to him. “English bread” they call it. Today I saw a small gesture which pleased me and reminded me once more how deeply significant, almost biblical, is the Greek attitude to bread. A family party under a tree in some forlorn, bombed backyard in the city. Grandfather, grandmother and three small noisy children were eating bread and garlic. As I passed them a piece of bread, it fell to the ground. The old man picked it up, saying in the kind of voice one would use to a child: “Come up with you, little English breadlet, then,” and kissed it before he put it back into the grubby hand of his grandson. The staff of life!

  It is inevitable that we should, in the course of our reading and arguing, rub up against the question of the rose of Rhodes. Is it a rose? Egon Huber has taken some clay squeezes of the device with which the Rhodian manufacturer, in ancient times, sealed and, guaranteed his little flasks of oil, wine or scent. In many cases the flower is a pomegranate blossom. Huber himself is of the opinion that the true “rose” of Rhodes is a hibiscus. A German archaeologist who visited him during the war told him so. Certainly the hibiscus is everywhere: the three prevailing notes are the reds of the oleander and hibiscus, and the raw massive purple of the bougainvillea with which the Italians have drenched the modern part of the town. Nearly all the cottage gardens of the peasants, however, are picked out with the scarlet stabs of the hibiscus. Yet Cottret and Bileotti have decided upon the wild rose—somehow too modest a flower I think to symbolize an island as powerful as Rhodes was in ancient times.

  In summer, says the naval handbook which Gideon has stolen from, somewhere, the Etesian wind springs up to cool the edge of the heat. It hardly marks the sea, yet one will feel it, cool on the forehead and breast, dispersing the afternoon accidie which sets in with the noise of the cicadas. This will be called the meltemi, unless I am mistaken—Graeco-Turkish hybrid which chimes with “mellow” “melon” “melting” and the Greek for honey, which is meli. That should give you a taste of its quality, for it is one of the treasures of the Aegean. In Rhodes, adds Tozer, its younger sister is a shore wind, eagerly waited for by those who wish to cross the straits. This blows inshore till noon and then offshore until dusk. This is called the imbat. “The whole region from Rhodes and Eastern Crete to Samos and Ikaria,” adds the book, “continues the geological structure and configurations of Southwest Anatolia.” The poetry of precise observation! We are, then, only part of the rim of a volcano, the Aegean. “Much of the foothills have been submerged, leaving only the mountains above water. Great heights and depths are thus produced. The sea is 10,600 feet deep east of Rhodes, with Mount Atabyron rising 4,069 feet in height above sea level.” The naval geographer who produced the handbook was no doubt u
nconscious of any lyrical impulse. “The old crystalline rocks, schists and marbles, are converted by exposure into a light sandy soil.… The massive limestones are very pure in quality.… Volcanic soils are represented by the craters of Nisyros and Patmos and the pumice gravels of Kalymnos. These usually break up easily into rich red and black soils.”