Prospero's Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfu (17 page)

My silver boy, My golden one,

Softer the down on his face

Than breast of the woodcock;

Keener his mind than a snake striking.

The silver person has left us.

The golden man has gone.

“We carried him in his open box to the cemetery on the hill, and all the time this poetry was flowing out of Mother Hubbard in a continuous stream, keeping pace with her tears, for she really loved Taki.”

“Was the coffin open?” says Zarian

“Yes. There again a point is proved.”

“Is that a religious custom of the island?”

“No. But under the Turks it was a law to prevent the smuggling of arms in coffins under the pretence of carrying corpses to the grave. In some places it has lingered on among the superstitious. So Taki’s pale aquiline features were visible all the way as the ragged little procession wound up the hill. He looked as if he were
about to smile. Of course no sooner was he dead and buried than Mother Hubbard, who was some vague relation, took out an injunction against his mother, to prevent her disposing of Taki’s twenty olive trees, which, she said, had been given to her as a gift. You see, there seemed to her no incongruity in making poetry for a dead man whom you love, and whose heirs you are trying to swindle. The case dragged on for months and I believe she lost it.”

As we talk we are watching out of the corner of our eyes the little party of sprayers which moves slowly down the rows of olive trees. The foremost man holds the long canister with the tapering spout, through which he sprays a jet of arsenic and molasses, in a light cloud over each tree, to preserve the bloom against the ravages of its special pest.…

“It is fortunate” says the Count, “to have a rich language. Look at my olive trees. How immeasurably they are enriched by the poetic symbolism which surrounds them—the platonic idea of the olives. The symbol for everything enriched by the domestic earth and private virtue. Then again, we use the word for those small dark moles which our women sometimes have on their faces or throats. And of course, being Greek, I find myself thinking at one and the same moment of all these facts, as well as the fact that the olive brings me in some eight hundred pounds a year on which to philosophize. Poetry and profit are not separated at all. For the Greek there is only the faintest dividing line.”

The evening light mellows very softly into its range of warm lemon tones, pressing among the close bunches of ripening grapes, and washing the tiles of the peasant houses in the valley. The turtledoves croon softly in the arbors behind the orchard. The cicadas are dying out—station after station closing down. The two great plane-trees are already silent, and only in the meadow where the sun still plays do they keep up their singing. In the altering values of sound one becomes aware of the chink of teacups as the servant girl clears away.

“The great god Pan,” says the Count, reverting suddenly to his original theme, which has been running as an undercurrent in his thoughts all this time, “was first announced as dead off Paxo, some miles south of us. This island must have been among the first to get the news. We have no record to tell us how the islanders received it. Yet in our modern pantheon we have a creature whose resemblance to Pan is not, I think, fortuitous. He is, as you know, called the
kallikanzaros.
He is the house-sprite, a little cloven-hooved satyr with pointed ears, who is responsible for turning milk sour, for leaving doors unlocked, and for causing mischief of every kind. He is sometimes placated by a saucer of milk left upon a window-sill, or a kolouri—one of those quoit-shaped peasant cakes. He also is dying out. But there is one story about him which you, my dear Zarian, will enjoy recording. It is said that on the ten days preceding Good Friday, all the kallikan-zaroi in the Underworld are engaged simultaneously
upon the task of sawing through the giant plane-tree whose trunk is supposed to hold up the world. Every year they almost succeed, except that the cry ‘Christ has arisen’ saves us all, by restoring the tree and driving them up in a chattering throng into the real world—if I may call our world that. Perhaps you will be able to find classical origins for the story. I give it to you for what it is worth.”

Bats are now beginning their short strutting flights against the sky. In the east the color is washing out of the world, leaving room for the great copper-colored moon which will rise soon over Epirus. It is the magic hour between two unrealized states of being—the day-world expiring in its last hot tones of amber and lemon, and the night-world gathering with its ink-blue shadows and silver moonlight.

“Watch for her,” says the Count, “behind that mountain there.” The air tastes faintly of damp. “She will be rising in a few moments.”

“I am thinking,” says Zarian, “how nothing is ever solved finally. In every age, from every angle, we are facing the same set of natural phenomena, moonlight, death, religion, laughter, fear. We make idolatrous attempts to enclose them in a conceptual frame. And all the time they change under our very noses.”

“To admit that,” says the Count oracularly, “is to admit happiness—or peace of mind, if you like. Never to imagine that any of these generalizations we make about gods or men is valid, but to cherish
them because they carry in them the fallibility of our own minds. You, Doctor, are scandalized when I suggest that
The Tempest
might be as good a guide to Corcyra as the official one. It is because the state of being which is recorded in the character of Prospero is something which the spiritually rich or the sufficiently unhappy can draw for themselves out of this clement landscape.”

“All this is metaphysics,” says Zarian a trifle unhappily.

“All speculation that goes at all deep becomes metaphysics by its very nature; we knock up against the invisible wall which bounds the prison of our knowledge. It is only when a man has been round that wall on his hands and knees, when he is certain that there is no way out, that he is driven upon himself for a solution.”

“Then for you, Count,” says Theodore, “the hard and fast structure of the sciences yields nothing more than a set of comparative myths, some with and some without charm?”

“I would like to pose the problem from another angle. There is a morphology of forms in which our conceptual apparatus works, and there is a censor—which is our conditioned attitude. He is the person whom I would reject, because he prevents me choosing and arranging knowledge according to my sensibility. I will give you an example. I was once asked to write a short history of sixth-century Greek
sculpture. My publisher refused the work because in it I had pointed out that sixth-century sculpture reaches it peak in Maillol, an artist of whom the man had not then heard. He informed me that I could not treat history in this manner. He informed me of the fact in the exact tone of voice used by my own censor when I first happened upon a Maillol statue, standing weighed down by its connections with the Mediterranean earth. Yet an instant’s observation will show one that Maillol does not belong to us in space and time, but to them; I mean to the Greeks of the sixth century.”

At this point, according to time-honored custom, we chant in unison: “And if you don’t believe me there is a Maillol in the garden
to prove
it to you,” at which the Count smiles his indulgent smile and nods twice. “There is indeed” he says.

The first bronze cutting-edge of the moon shows behind the mountain, traveling fast. “Ah, there she is” says Zarian.

“And here we are” says the Count, unwilling to relinquish his subject, “each of us collecting and arranging our common knowledge according to the form dictated to him by his temperament. In all cases it will not be the whole picture, though it will be the whole picture for you. You, Doctor, will proceed under some title like
The Natural History, Geology, Botany and Comparative Ethnology of the Island of Corfu.
You will be published by a learned society in Vienna. Your work will contain no mention of the first edition of Petrarch
in the Library, or of the beautiful mother of Gorgons in the Museum. As for you, Zarian, your articles when they are collected in a book will present a ferocious and lopsided account of an enchanted island which has seduced every historical figure of note from Nero to Napoleon. You will omit the fact that communications are bad and that all Greeks are liars, and that the fleas during the summer are intolerable. It will not be a true picture—but what a picture it will be. Hordes of earnest Armenians from New York will settle here to quote your poetry and prose to each other, and I will be able to charge two drachmae for sitting in the chair which you now occupy and which will certainly outlive you.”

“And I?” I say. “What sort of picture will I present of Prospero’s Island?”

“It is difficult to say,” says the Count. “A portrait inexact in detail, containing bright splinters of landscape, written out roughly, as if to get rid of something which was troubling the optic nerves. You are the kind of person who would go away and be frightened to return in case you were disappointed; but you would send others and question them eagerly about it. You are to be forgiven really, because you have had the best of your youth in the island. And it is only very much later that one grows the courage to return. I noticed that you did not drink of Kardaki’s well the other day. I particularly noticed.”

“I do not like being bound by charms,” I say.

At this point Theodore, who has been listening with some impatience to this dissertation upon character, suggests a stroll, and soon we are walking down the avenue of cypresses together, smelling the strong tobacco from the Count’s pipe.

“Ah no, Doctor,” says the old man, as if continuing aloud an argument which has been going on quietly in his mind, “thought must be free. Let us dispense with the formalist whose only idea is to eliminate the dissonant, the discrepant. Let us marry our ideas and not have them married for us by smaller people. Only in this way will our ideas produce children—for the children of ideas are actions. Dear me,” he adds, “I am hardly in a position to moralize. I live here quietly without children, on money which my grandfather earned. It would be useless my justifying myself to an economist by explaining that I am exercising my sensibility through loving greatly and suffering greatly in all this quietness. Don’t you think?”

Insensibly his footsteps have led us across the green unkept lawns to where the nymph stands in her rotunda. Her loins fall away in their heavy inevitable lines to her shapely feet. The torso is heavy with its weight of lungs and bone. The breasts ride superbly, held by the invisible thongs of the pectorals.

“An old man’s love” says the Count. “Look at her. There you have desire which is quite still, retained inside the mind as form and volume—like the grapes for lunch which were still warm and a little drowsy
from the sun. It is the speechless potence of the old man, the most terrible kind of desire in stillness which this Mediterranean sculptor has impressed in the rock. Was he happy or unhappy, moral or amoral? He was outside the trap of the opposites. It was a mindless act of coition with the stone that made him describe her. Critics would be interested to know if it was his wife or his eldest daughter. Their speculations would lie right outside the realm in which this sixth-century Pomona stands. It is not desire as we know it—but an act of sex completed by looking at her. The weight of her. Feel how cold the stone arms are.”

The moon is up now among the trees, and the first screech of the owl rings out across the meadow.

“Ah! but I see they have lighted the candles and laid the table” says the Count, suddenly conscious of the dew as he moves his toes in his battered felt slippers. “And is it our function simply to stand about here making bad literature? Doctor, we are having brain cutlets in your honor this evening; and my dear Zarian, a bottle of Mantinea red wine for you.”

Seated at the great table by the sedate light of his own candles, the Count turns to me and says:

It is the pleasantest form of affection to be able to tease one’s friends. You perhaps do not know the history of the Society of Ionian Studies and the brain cutlets?” At this Theodore shows the faintest signs of impatience,
and remarking it, the Count pats him laughingly on the arm. “The Doctor’s well-known passion for brain cutlets is something of which you will have undoubtedly heard. Well, some years ago, he was asked to become President of a small informal society of local savants, who were bent on the pursuit of Ionian studies. They were a sombre and bearded collection—for the most part doctors and lawyers of the island: these being the two classes which have the least work to do. At this time our friend was pursuing some studies upon forms of idiocy at the local asylum; and he was particularly interested in the mental condition of an inmate called Giovannides, whose brain he had been coveting off and on for a number of years. In those days he used to speak about Giovannides’s brain with ill-concealed cupidity, and explain what a splendid time he would have when the patient died. You see, he had been promised the brain for dissection. Now it so happened that this long-awaited event took place upon the very day when the inaugural lunch of the society was due to take place at the Doctor’s house; Theodore was in a state of great excitement. He found himself unable to be patient, and spent the whole morning extracting the brain from its braincase, remembering all the time that he must get home and prepare his speech for the
Society. By midday he had succeeded in removing the brain, and, having wrapped it carefully in greaseproof paper, he had managed to reach home with it held in his arms like a precious treasure. On entering the house he realized that the day was exceptionally warm, so he entered the kitchen, where he popped the lunatic’s brain in the ice-box, and retired to his study to prepare his speech. All went well. The guests arrived and were seated at table. The speech was delivered and met with restrained applause. And a steaming dish of the Doctor’s favorite brain-cutlets appeared, which was greeted with delighted exclamations. As the guests were helping themselves the telephone in the corner of the room rang. It was Theodore’s wife, who had rung up to apologize for having been unable to provide him with his favorite dish for lunch. There was, she said, no brain to be bought anywhere in town. An involuntary cry burst from Theodore’s lips. To do him justice, it was not really of his guests that he was thinking so much as of his brain. With a muffled cry of “Giovannides’s brain” he sprang to the kitchen and opened the icebox. The brain had gone. Speechless with anxiety the good doctor returned to the banqueting room and found that his guests were all looking either uneasy or downright ill.
Where a lesser man would have carried it off without telling them anything definite, and where a greater would have wrung his hands for science, Theodore simply stood, trembling from head to foot and pointing at the dish of excellent brain cutlets and repeating: “I get a brain and
this
is what you do. I get a brain and
this
is what you do.” By this time the truth had dawned upon the Ionian Society; their dissolution was so sudden as to be amazing. The maid threw her apron over her head and burst into sobs. The inaugural lunch was a failure. But that was not the unkindest thing of all. The brain of the lunatic was at this moment safely upon Theodore s desk, in the study; the cook, who was devoted to Theodore, had spent the whole morning searching for brain, and had found some in the nick of time. The cutlets served to the Society were perfectly genuine brain cutlets. But do you think he has ever managed to persuade anyone of the truth of this? No. The Society is now referred to as the Brainfever Society, and its members are all supposed to be suffering from aberrations brought on by this meal.