Prospero's Cell Page 6
Meanwhile Theodore has compiled his list of characters with the help of the saturnine young man, while Zarian is well and truly launched upon an anecdote about his early life in Armenia, his mane of silver hair flying and his expressive voice rolling. The copper cauldrons are smoking, while the scavenging cats are feasting piteously all round our feet, and the wooden sign of the “Partridge” is swinging in a light breeze—a good augury for the night journey home. Calm, upon the dark calmness of the night outside, the tangoid music of the guitar and the fiddle grazes and moves; banal but wonderfully moving, the words are taken up by the diners, until even the cook beats with a ladle on a cooking-pot to mark the time.
The three players take their leave with warmth, promising us to play us any piece of our choice the following day, and Zarian shakes hands warmly with each while continuing his fauldess recitation of adventures in French to Nimiec, whose energies are divided between laughing and feeding a tabby cat under the table.
It is after midnight when we separate, N. guarding the precious menu upon which the fruits of Theodore’s scholarship are written in his flawless minuscule handwriting. The port is dark, and alive with the lick and slap of dark water; there is a spark of light off Stiletto; wind southwesterly upon a clean tranquil darkness. The little boat rides clear in her white awnings; turns to Albania her sharp cheeks, and slides clear of the fort. And so home to the white house, tired and happy, and with a sense of many blessings.
“Karaghiosis,” writes Theodore, “and the shadow play which created him, are both ancient. The tradition of the hero in drama is medieval. His adventures rival those of Tyll Owlglasse in the German—and his place in the popular imagination is one which one could compare with the Elizabethan Tarleton. The disturber of social justice, he never does anything to alienate the audience, and his political license is almost absolute (for example, despite the Metaxas dictatorship Karaghiosis enjoyed uninterrupted powers of critical comment, at a time when even Plato was banned in the University of Athens—or at least expurgated). He is the spirit of the little man—but the Greek little man; he is splendid at loafing, borrowing, and playing practical jokes on his friends which have a strong profit-motive. He is a current symbol for the whole Middle East under varying forms. The comic phallus, we have already noticed, has been translated into an arm so long and so expressive as almost to satisfy the psychological theory of symbolic substitution. The fun is not by any means clean fun by puritan standards and nothing like it would be allowed on the stage in London; but is essentially pure in that it is broad and unmalicious. The list of characters which appear from time to time in the Karaghiosis mythology is quite considerable; of his own family there is first of all his wife (Karaghiozaina: ). She is quite conventional, while his numberless children (Kollitiri: ) supply unvarying comic relief without becoming distinguishable from the average street urchin. Karaghiosis’s uncle (Barba Giorgos: ) is made of sterner stuff. A shepherd from the mountains, he wears the fabulous foustanella and speaks with the crackling dialect of Aitolia and Akarnania. His huge moustaches bristle with avarice and friendliness. Gullible at times he is usually honest and bold. His particular opposite number is Dervenagas who is Albanian and resembles Barba Giorgos in many ways. Their meetings are usually accompanied by tremendous tussles in which Dervenagas is almost always beaten. Karaghiosis dislikes him hotly and takes every opportunity of humiliating him. The Vizier, the Aga, and the Cadi are conventionalized Turkish figures of extraordinary size; the former is the most important and is on the whole sympathetically represented.
Hadjiavatis is the Turkish town crier and is associated with all Karaghiosis’s rascalities—in which he usually suffers instead of their author. Next in importance come Sir Gnio-Gnio and Captain Nikolis. Gnio-Gnio is an idiotic, lisping imbecile in a top hat and tailcoat with a long pointed beard. He represents Zante, and speaks with the curdling sing-song accents of the island. This of course is from our point of view. It is presumed that when in Zante he represents Corcyra with a changed but still sing-song voice. Captain Nikolis is a makeweight whose atmospheric value lies in his baggy breeches and his Aegean fez.
And now we move from character to myth; for Alexander the Great survives still in the Karaghiosis cycle of plays as a huge warrior dressed in full armor. He even kills the dragon in certain plays, and obviously owes something to St. George. Next comes Morphonios though exactly what he is one cannot decide. A hideous mommet with a vast lolling cranium, he speaks with a frantic affectation of voice, and dresses in conventional European clothes. He is sometimes played off against Stavrakas an extremely nasty specimen of Piraeus bravo clad in exaggerated modern dress and felt hat—which, in the course of his lengthy conversations, he is in the habit of cocking over one eye. His self-assurance is the comic vein in him, and this Karaghiosis exploits to the full.
To bring up the tail-end of this procession one could list The Lord or The Frank tailcoated representatives of European culture, as well as Abraham, Moses, Isaac, etc., an endless series of Salonika Jews, uniform in size, dress and accent. Female figures seem very unimportant in the plays, and besides Karaghiosis’s wife they include an occasional Vizier’s daughter, a princess, and a wife of Barba Giorgos.
The puppets themselves are the result of curious workmanship; since their dimensions of operation are so limited, and since the light which illuminates them comes from behind the screen, it is necessary to do as much filigree-work as possible to enliven the bare outlines of the figures. Great ingenuity is shown in their manufacture, and the use of a kind of many-colored gelatin material enables their clothes to be as brightly colored as those of the island peasants themselves.
10.18.37
Three days of squall and rain. The wind moans on the promontory, and all day long the threshing of sea sounds on the white rock outside the house. In the interval as the undertow draws back you hear the dull patient throb of the hand-loom in the magazine, and the cough of the old billygoat. Trees lean and whirl where the wind pours through the vents and boulder-strewn crevices of Pantocrator. The roof has been sprung in several places, but this is the first taste of winter, and it is good that we should be proven wind-and-water-tight before the real thunderstorms of December. Theodore has unearthed another charm against accident; it is for fair-weather sailors on moonlit nights. “It is widely believed that the figure of a woman rising from the sea beside the boat calls out in wild accents, ‘How is it with Alexander?’ . The correct answer for those who do not want their craft overturned by her rage and grief is ‘He lives and reigns still’ . I do not know whether this charm will be of any practical assistance to you, but since you say you always run out to the Bay of Fauns at the full moon, it would be better on the whole to memorize it. One can never tell.”
I ask Anastasius about the belief. He denies it with rather an uncomfortable look. He likes to consider himself superior in intelligence to the ordinary peasants, but I can tell from his manner that he has heard of it. “Does old Nicholas believe it?” I ask, and he turns his black eyes out of the window for a full minute before shrugging his shoulders and replying “How can I tell what these old men believe? He cannot read and write, Father Nicholas is not an heir to our common European culture!
* The Van Norden is called “the little lordcraft” by the peasants because of her upper-class lines.
History and Conjecture
9.12.37
CONFUSED BY OUR clumsy gestures of interpretation, history is never kind to those who expect anything of her. Under the formal pageant of events which we have dignified by our interest, the land changes very little, and the structure of the basic self of man hardly at all. In this landscape observed objects still retain a kind of mythological form—so that though chronologically we are separated from Ulysses by hundreds of years in time, yet we dwell in his shadow. Like earnest mastodons petrified in the forests of their own apparatus the archaeologists come and go, each with his pocket Odyssey and his lack of modern Greek. Diligently working upon the refus
e heaps of some township for a number of years they erect on the basis of a few sherds or a piece of dramatic drainage, a sickly and enfeebled portrait of a way of life. How true it is we cannot say; but if an Eskimo were asked to describe our way of life, deducing all his evidence from a search in a contemporary refuse dump, his picture might lack certain formidable essentials. Thus Ulysses can only be ratified as an historical figure with the help of the fishermen who today sit in the smoky tavern of “The Dragon” playing cards and waiting for the wind to change. The Odyssey is a bore, badly constructed and shapeless, dignified by poetry everywhere degenerating into self-pity and rhetoric; the characters are stylized to the point of irritation, and their conventionalized drama serves simply as a decorative frame for the descriptive gift of the author which is a formidable piece of equipment.
Yet with what delightful and poignant accuracy does the poem describe the modern Greeks; it is a portrait of a nation which rings as clear today as when it was written. The loquacity, the shy cunning, the mendacity, the generosity, the cowardice and bravery, the almost comical inability of self-analysis. The unloving humor and the scolding. Nowhere is it possible to find a flaw.
9.17.37
Three towns contend for Ulysses and Nausicaa; Kassopi in the north, with its gigantic plane-tree and good harbor, its bluff ilex-grown fortress where the goats graze all day, might have well been a site for such a fantasy. Fronting the ragged scarps of Albania, the north wind fetches in the blue sea with a crisp lazy power quite foreign to the gulf. South of Corfu town, the peninsula of Paleopolis is supposed to be the site of the ancient town; but there is nothing left of the arcades and the fountains and columns of the fabulous capital. The shadow of the marshy lake is hardly disturbed by the ripple of water from Cressida’s stream. Dried out Venetian salt-pans have eaten away the original form of the lake and here the sea settles in tide-less green stagnation, a haunt for pelicans, wild duck and snipe. In the dazzle of the bay stands Mouse Island whose romance of line and form (white monastery, monks, cypresses) defies paint and lens, as well as the feebler word. This petrified rock is the boat, they say, turned to stone as a punishment for taking Ulysses home. It might have been here.
Last and most likely is Paleocastrizza, drenched in the silver of olives on the northwestern coast. The little bay lies in a trance, drugged with its own extraordinary perfection—a conspiracy of light, air, blue sea, and cypresses. The rock faces splinter the light and reflect it both upward and downward: so that, staring through the broken dazzle of the Ionian sun, the quiet bather in his boat can at the same time look down into three fathoms of water with neither rock nor weed to interrupt the play of the imagination: so that, diving, he may imagine himself breaching the very floor of space itself, until his fingers touch the heavy lush sand: so that, rising to the surface borne upward by air and muscle he feels that it is not only the blue sky that he breaks open with his arms, but the very ceiling of heaven. Here are the grottoes. Paleocastrizza has two of them, one reachable by boat and beautiful. The walls are twisted painfully out of volcanic muscle, blood-red, purple, green, and nacreous. A place for resolutions and the meetings of those whose love is timid and undeclared.
For the benefit of the more recondite, or for the mere specialist, one must record the existence of a great cave in the point immediately before the beach marked Hermones on the maps. It is approachable only when there is a calm, and the entrance is imposing, being formed in the style of a great gateway. Empty plaques of metamorphic stone stand above, as if the inscriptions have been melted from them. The entrance is knee-deep in water and slimy with rock; but this first cave leads to a second, higher and drier. The walls of this are palpitant with the bodies of bats, which hang like a heavy curtain, trembling and squeaking at any intruding noise. This second cave is perhaps ten yards across and as high—and in one corner, like the secret to one of those puzzles one has sought for a lifetime, opens a door. There is space enough to pass if one stoops. Nothing is revealed beyond this barrier. For those who have the courage and the curiosity to proceed, a torch is necessary.
At first nothing; a rubbish heap of broken stones at the beginning of a corridor. But a clearly defined corridor leading, it seems, into the very heart of the earth. Within twenty paces it branches into a multiplicity of corridors—like a dream, or a poem too charged with allusions—and the walls become heavy and damp, as if with mist. It seems a thousand miles away that the summer, with its quickened heartbeat of cicadas and wind, livens the meadows of Corcyra; we are here, deep in the ground, and our voices are low as if they sensed the dreadful unyielding rock which surrounds us. The many corridors menace us.
“We will never remember the way back,” says N.
The torchlight is barren and futile with its white beam moving along the walls. Holding N.’s hand I am aware of the small resisting pulse of the heartbeat like a message to say that we are not really part of it—the echoing and uncomfortable night of the rocks.
In 1912 a scientist tried to negotiate the corridor, using a light twine as a guide; but somewhere in the heart of the world the twine broke, and, it is presumed, his torch gave out, for he never reappeared in the light of day. This story, which I invent to frighten N., brings back to us both the seducing sweetness of life there outside the cave; the fishermen at their lobster pots, and the whole endearment of the Valley of Ropa, with its dapple of vines and figs. The soft throaty call of turtles in the arbors above Perama. The poison-green line of water perching and falling upon the shoals off the northern point.
The walls of the outer cave tremble in their membrane-like covering of bats; strange shudderings and copulations, strange disturbances and awakenings, strange departures and arrivals—like the unconscious in its outlawed slumber. One’s own flesh has become chill and puckered by the cold of the place. Very dimly now the sea can be heard outside, familiar as snoring, rapping and licking its way among the rocks. The pools are empty of fish.
The little white boat rides glib and pert in the shadow of the cliff, with Niko anxious at the tiller; wind has sprung up from the southwest, and the breakers are beginning their dock-like momentum sheer from the shores of Africa. It is time to make the half-hour run for the narrow harbor of Paleocastrizza. Shaken free, the sails immediately draw like a white fire, and crisp at the lips of the Van Norden, the sea draws her seething line of white. In the spaces of the wind the ear picks up the dry morse-like communication of the cicadas high above on the cliffs; while higher still in space sounds the sour brassy note of a woman’s voice singing. N. caught in one of those fine unconscious attitudes sits at the prow, head thrown back, lips parted, long fair hair blown back over the ears—the doe’s pointed ears. Drinking the wind like some imagined figurehead on a prehistoric prow one cannot tell from the sad expression of the clear face whether she hears the singing or not. Or whether indeed the singing is not in one’s own mind, riding clear and high above the white sails to where the eagles, broken like morsels of rock, fall and recover and fall again down the invisible stairways of the blue. How little of this can ever be caught in words. The last clear point comes out to meet us with the little rock-chapel and lighthouse standing clear. The Van Norden turns, trembles for an instant between opposing intentions, and then dives clear through the towering walls of rock, into the bay where Nausicaa found the timorous Hero, washed up as naked as Adam but twice as intelligent.
9.20.37
It is one of the peculiar sentimentalities of the historian, this perpetual desire to trace places and origins by the shallow facts of romance. Fano, a few hours north of Paleocastrizza, is supposed to be Calypso’s island—“the sea-girt isle set with trees.” Corcyra, then, is the home of the oar-loving Phaecians, and the place of Ulysses’ meeting with Nausicaa. It is of course the final unkindness that the few scanty facts in Homer’s record of the adventure do not offer the historian any help. For Ulysses on his raft, helped by a fair wind, took eighteen days to cover the few sea-miles separating Fano and Corcyra. At least
if one is to be browbeaten by such absurdities. Zarian has effectively disposed of this kind of thing in his essay on “Cowardice among Historians,” from which Theodore has translated the following passage:
We refuse to be confounded by facts like these. Firstly it is necessary to this enchanted island that its landscape should be sweetened by such a fantasy, and secondly the Ancient Greeks had no sense either of time or distance. No reliance can be placed on their measurements, just as no reliance can be placed on the modern Greeks when they are dealing with space and time. Among the peasants today the duration of a cigarette is used to record distance in space. A peasant, asked how far a village is will reply: “Two cigarettes.” If you reply that you do not smoke he will, with difficulty, hunt about in his mind for the words “hours” or “minutes,” but it will be quite obvious from his use of them that he had only a very faint conception of what they mean. I maintain that the same holds true of the Ancient Greeks. Deft at the delineation of a psychology which has remained constant until today, Homer was all at sea when it came to accurate fact. Thus we are prepared to convict Homer of normal Greek mendacity rather than admit the suggestion that Ulysses did not land in this wave-washed cove, his skin bleached and worn like an old seashell from the exposure to the elements.