Prospero's Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfu (13 page)

But the Count has, by an imaginative detour, avoided the impasse in which people too heavily endowed with sensibility or the need for expressing it, find themselves. The old house with its Venetian family portraits and tarnished silver radiates an absolute calm. Greek terra cottas lie piled in dusty cupboards—broken jars and oil-dips, all relics of the plough from this fertile valley.

We dine late by candlelight; light almost as yellow as the moon outside the great windows of the dining-room; portraits of Venetian ancestors stare pallidly at us from the walls in their moldering frames. The floors are full of dry-rot.

After the dinner the Count takes up a branch of candles and leads the way to the wine-covered terrace by the white southern wall on which the dapple of leaves silhouetted by moonlight stand out unmoving. Here we sit and talk away the greater part of the night. In the silences between our sentences we can hear the oranges dropping from the trees in the orchard—dull
single thuds upon the mossy ground. The marble table is wet with dew. An owl cries, and the watchdogs at the lodge grumble and shake their chains.

The Count smokes his homemade cigarettes in a short bone holder, stained with nicotine. Relaxing, and spreading out his hands against the moonlight as if to warm them at its white fire, he begins to talk. I have wasted all these words on describing the Count in the hope of isolating that quality in him which is so admirable and original, and when he begins to talk I grasp at once what it is. He is the possessor of a literary mind completely uncontaminated by the struggle to achieve a technique; he lacks the artifice of presentation, the corrupting demon of
form.
It is a mind with the pollen still fresh upon it.

While we sit here Ourania the heavily made but beautiful peasant girl comes out in her bare feet, the corner of her blue headdress gripped modestly between her white teeth, and arranges glasses of Visino before us; “Would’st give me water with berries in’t?” says the Count reflectively—“have I never told you that Corcyra is Prospero’s island? This,” he indicates the glass in which Ourania has placed a spoonful of dark viscous raisin jam, “is one of the links in my chain of reasoning. I cannot think that the scholars would support me, but you, my friend,” turning to Zarian, “you would take a little pleasure in the knowledge that Shakespeare was thinking of Corfu when he wrote
The Tempest.
Who knows? Perhaps he even visited it.”

It is the kind of opening which Zarian loves so much. His silver hair gleams in the moonlight. Taking his spectacles from his pocket, as if the better to follow the Count’s reasoning, he places them on his nose and says: “Now then, Count. Defend this contention.”

The Count has taken a small silver-hiked pencil from the pocket of his cardigan and is busy tracing meaningless little shapes on the marble table. He dusts some specks of cigarette ash from his clothes, and writes the word SYCORAX before Zarian. “Look,” he says, “Caliban’s mother, the mysterious blue-eyed hag who owned the island upon which Prospero was cast—her name is almost too obvious an anagram for CORCYRA.” He pauses for an instant and raises his eyes to Zarian’s eager face. He is unable to resist smiling at his friend. “Shall I go on?”

You will remember the Principle of
x
of which I was speaking? It struck me that perhaps in the work of the great artists I might find this outpost of the sensibility charted. In the course of my reading I stumbled upon
The Tempest.
I found what I was looking for in Prospero, but while I was reading the play I was struck by a few elements in it of a peculiarly Ionian nature. If you lose patience with the idea please tell me and I will stop. First of all, the shipwreck. Prospero s Island it is abundantly clear is somewhere off the main route between Tunis and Naples. I propose to
disregard the claims for Lampedusa and Malta; and I think that if you observe the coloring of the text you will see that it is peculiarly Greek. Think of Caliban’s imprecation. “A southwest blow on ye, And blister ye all o’er,” and reflect to yourself whether this south-wester is not the worst evil that could befall an Ionian—sirocco weather. Then, to go a little further with Caliban; he enumerates the qualities of the isle as “The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile.” I ask myself here whether the Venetian salt pans in the south of the island might not have been in his mind.

The Count says this with a singular and deprecating sweetness; I can see that he anticipates Zarian’s protest.

Zante has also a claim under that head. There was a prodigious trade with Zante during Elizabethan times; Lithgow mentions the currants which the English used in their puddings; and even if you read mere teachers of languages like Hollyband you find an unself-conscious reference to the island—proving that to the average Elizabethan merchant Zante was already well known. And of course the salt pans of Zante would be better known.

The Count nods patiently.

Perhaps too well known, not quite mysterious enough to furnish the imaginative background for the desert island of
The Tempest.
We are on delicate ground. Yet you must agree that the coloring is Mediterranean—“And thy broom groves, whose shadow the dismissed bachelor loves, being lass-lorn; thy pole-clipped vineyard and thy sea-marge, sterile and rocky-hard.” What do you say to that, my friend?

Zarian is too patently seduced by the idea to say anything at all; in his mind I can see he is planning a whole article on this remarkable idea. He sits impatiently in his chair and waits for the Count to speak. The latter takes a turn up and down the terrace trying to remember further quotations to support this delightful fantasy. At each Zarian’s enthusiasm grows.

“I must,” he says at last, “I must drink to this noble discovery. Count, this is a memorable addition to our knowledge about Corcyra.”

“Then,” says the Count, in a voice mellow with pleasure and a certain triumph, “let us drink a glass of Visino—which I have christened Caliban’s Wine. ‘Water with berries in’t,’ is, to my mind, not coffee, as most of the commentators would have it, but
—this unusual Ionian drink. Your health, my dear Zarian.”

The health is unduly prolonged in a bottle of red Kastellani wine, while Zarian plunges deeper into the maze of surmise and conjecture. “We cannot be certain
whether Shakespeare ever came here,” says the Count, “but we can ask ourselves two things. First, who is the ‘well-wishing adventurer’ who is described as ‘setting forth’ in the dedication to the sonnets? The second is this: Shakespeare was too well known to be the victim of an open piracy by 1609. But if he were
out of the country
it is possible that Mr. Thorpe might have had the courage to print the sonnets.
The Tempest
was written in 1611 they say.”

At this point, Theodore, who always retires formidably to bed at nine-thirty, puts down his massive volume of medical lore, blows out his candle and comes to the window above our heads. He receives Zarian’s information about Shakespeare’s visit with sceptical good humor, remarks on the clearness of the night. Looking towards the west you can see a strip of glittering sea drawing a line between two black olive groves. Small breathless eddies of air come to us across the valley. Theodore sniffs appreciatively and says: “Jasmine,” before bidding us good night and withdrawing his bearded head from the window. The three of us walk down across the lawn and through the orchard towards the little circular Rotonde which houses the battered statue of a Roman nymph. “I trust,” says the Count, “that your wives are not offended with me for refusing to invite them to these meetings. If you permit me to say so, women tire me. Their presence introduces an atmosphere of politeness and favoritism; they will discuss poetry like angels until they notice a mirror in the
corner of the room. They lack the magnanimity of the male mind.”

From this small hillock the prospect stretches away—vineyard, orchard and wood, with its insinuating lines: to the last bluffline of limestone crags beyond which the sea coils and uncoils its silver meshes. From Paleocastrizza the fishermen are setting out with their coracles of straw and wood.

“One sleeps lightly these moonlight nights” says the Count. We pass an arbor in which, sitting like statues at a deal table, we see a peasant and his wife. Their low voices sound clear and rich upon the breathless night. “Tomorrow we shall ride down to the sea together. I have a horse for you each.”

And so quietly back to the house, and through the great doorway. The candles have burnt down to their guttering ends. The Count distributes them like blessings. We make our way to our several rooms in silence.

Closing the shutters against the staring moon, I pick up a book from the pile lying on top of a cupboard in the corner of a room; it is a commonplace book, full of entries in the fine small hand of the Count. More than half of it is given up to accounts, which are entered in Italian. There is a list of Greek peasant proverbs, a rough drawing of a strip of coast over the legend “Dodona’s Shrine?”, two designs for sailing boats, and the following quotation:

Lingering perdition, worse than any death

Can be at once, shall step by step attend

You, and your ways, whose wraths to guard you

from,

Which here in this most desolate isle, else falls

Upon your heads, is nothing but heart’s sorrow,

And a clear life ensuing.

10.28.37

Goodisson records the existence of a “fine quarry of marble under the western peak of St. Salvador, of a very fine grain, and well adapted to the use of statuary.” Niko has made us a garden table and seat from this lovely stuff, which is of a deep salmon pink and shot with lines of rust-red.

10.29.37

William Goodisson, A.B., whose “Historical and Topographical” essay on the island was published in 1822 is sometimes interesting, but often dull and moribund. He charms us most when he is most scientific—and surely no more charming feat than his measurement of the “Chemical Properties of Sappho’s Leap” (in Leukada) could be imagined. “Chemical Analysis of Sappho’s Leap” would make a charming subtitle for the following piece of information: “External properties: of a clear sugar whiteness, with a few glimmering points in the internal fracture resembling that of fine loaf-sugar. Sp. Gravity.2.263.”

11.2.37

Cressida has left her name and her legend to grace the reed-fringed edges of the Hyallic Lake; but the force of the stream seems much diminished since 1822, when the speed of the current is said to have turned a mill at 300 meters from the source.

11.7.37

The discovery that Judas Iscariot has a direct connection with Corcyra has provided a great deal more grist to Zarian’s mill. Theodore happened to be discussing a first edition of Petrarch which has just been discovered in the uncatalogued jumble of rarer MSS. belonging to the Library with the curator, when the name of Pietro Delia Valle was mentioned. The quotation, as it appears in Zarian’s essay, is as follows: “Here also lives a man reputedly of the race of Judas.… I remember a servant of ours who resided at Corfu affirming that some of the Apostate’s descendants still existed there, and that a house he inhabited was pointed out.” The date was 1614.

Walking through the verminous and crooked streets of the Hebraica with Theodore we discuss the problem from all its angles. The cobbled alleys are slippery with excrement. The little shops, made for the most part of the flimsiest materials, are worm-eaten and decayed. Yet counters groan with cheap dress materials, mounds of sweets, and everywhere the tap
of shoemakers’ hammers emphasizes the gnome-like quality of the place. It is natural, of course, that until today we have never noticed the name of Theodore’s shoemaker: ISCARIOTES. It is painted in lopside capitals on a sagging board. The man himself is a deaf mute with some of the lowering gloomy aspect of Dr. Faustus. He works from a skilful and pedantic set of brown-paper patterns which Theodore has cut out for him. The skin of his face and hands is ingrained with dirt and cobbler’s wax. He never smiles. The hair on his face grows high up on the cheekbones so that, unshaven, he seems to be suffering from powder-markings—as if from the discharge of the gun. “His eyebrows,” says Zarian with disappointment, “do not meet in the middle.” (Popular superstition suggests that this is one of the signs of the Evil Eye.)

Nevertheless the occasion is too good a one to miss, and Zarian draws his notebook from his pocket. Just how to interview a deaf mute, however, is a problem which none of us can solve. Iscariotes can only move his pinkish tongue in his mouth with a faint snake-like composure; he can groan through his nose. And to complete the record of our misfortunes he is illiterate. He appears to have no family, and nobody in the surrounding shops knows anything about him except that he has been working at his little skin-covered bench for many years. Voluble and excited, Zarian falls into the Venetian dialect which the Jews in this quarter use among themselves,
but without result. Iscariotes shakes his head and attempts a laugh; he does this noiselessly by inflating his throat as a snake its hood—until you can see his pink tongue moving among the yellow stumps of teeth. It is rather a failure.