Corelli's Mandolin Page 2

  The doctor refilled his pipe and read this through. He listened to Pelagia clattering outdoors in the yard, preparing to boil the crayfish. He read what he had written about beautiful women, and remembered his wife, as lovely as her daughter had become, and dead from tuberculosis despite everything he had been able to do. ‘This island betrays its own people in the mere act of existing,’ he wrote, and then he crumpled the sheet of paper and flung it into the corner of the room. This would never do; why could he not write like a writer of histories? Why could he not write without passion? Without anger? Without the sense of betrayal and oppression? He picked up the sheet, already bent at the corners, that he had written first. It was the title page: ‘The New History of Cephallonia’. He crossed out the first two words and substituted ‘A Personal’. Now he could forget about leaving out the loaded adjectives and the ancient historical grudges, now he could be vitriolic about the Romans, the Normans, the Venetians, the Turks, the British, and even the islanders themselves. He wrote:

  ‘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 lies stupefied not only by the sun, but by the impossible weight of memory. The ships of Odysseus were built of Cephallonian pine, his bodyguards were Cephallonian giants, and some maintain that his palace was not in Ithaca but in Cephallonia.

  ‘But even before that wily and itinerant king was favoured by Athene or set adrift through the implacable malice of Poseidon, Mesolithic and Neolithic peoples were chipping knives from obsidian and casting nets for fish. The Mycenean Hellenes arrived, leaving behind the shards of their amphorae and their breast-shaped tombs, bequeathing progeny who, long after the departure of Odysseus, would fight for Athens, be tyrannised by Sparta, and then defeat even the megalomaniac Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander, curiously known as “the Great” and a more preposterous megalomaniac still.

  ‘It was an island filled with gods. On the summit of Mt Aenos there was a shrine to Zeus, and another upon the tiny islet of Thios. Demeter was worshipped for making the island the breadbasket of Ionia, as was Poseidon, the god who had raped her whilst disguised as a stallion, leaving her to give birth to a black horse and a mystical daughter whose name was lost when the Eleusinian mysteries were suppressed by the Christians. Here was Apollo, slayer of the Python, guardian of the navel of the earth, beautiful, youthful, wise, just, strong, hyperbolically bisexual, and the only god to have had a temple made for him by bees out of wax and feathers. Here Dionysus was worshipped also, the god of wine, pleasure, civilisation, and vegetation, father by Aphrodite of a little boy attached to the most gargantuan penis that ever encumbered man or god. Artemis had her worshippers here, too, the many-breasted virgin huntress, a goddess of such radically feminist convictions that she had Actaeon torn to pieces by dogs for accidentally seeing her naked, and had her paramour Orion stung to death by scorpions for touching her fortuitously. She was such a fastidious stickler for etiquette and summary chastisement that entire dynasties could be disposed of for one word out of place or an oblation five minutes late. There were temples to Athene, too, the perpetual virgin who (with great forbearance, compared to Artemis) blinded Tiresias for seeing her naked, was formidably gifted in those crafts which are indispensable to economic and domestic life, and who was the patron of oxen, horses, and olives.

  ‘In their choice of gods the people of the island displayed the immense and intransigent common sense that has been the secret of their survival throughout the centuries; it is obvious that the king of the deities should be worshipped, obvious that a seafaring people should placate the god of the sea, obvious that vintners should honour Dionisios (it is still the most common name on the island), obvious that Demeter should be honoured for keeping the island self-sufficient, obvious that Athene should be worshipped for her gifts of wisdom and skill in the tasks of daily life, just as it also fell to her to oversee innumerable military emergencies. Nor should it be wondered at that Artemis should have had her cult, for this was the equivalent of an infallible insurance policy; she was a troublesome gadfly whose mischief should in preference have been made to occur elsewhere.

  ‘The choice of Apollo as a Cephallonian cult is both the most and the least mysterious. It is the most inexplicable to those who have never been to the island, and the most inevitable to those who know it, for Apollo is a god associated with the power of light. Strangers who land here are blinded for two days.

  ‘It is a light that seems unmediated either by the air or by the stratosphere. It is completely virgin, it produces overwhelming clarity of focus, it has heroic strength and brilliance. It exposes colours in their original prelapsarian state, as though straight from the imagination of God in His youngest days, when He still believed that all was good. The dark green of the pines is unfathomably and retreatingly deep, the ocean viewed from the top of a cliff is platonic in its presentation of azure and turquoise, emerald, viridian, and lapis lazuli. The eye of a goat is a living semi-precious stone half way between amber and arylide, and the crickets are the fluorescent green of the youngest shoots of grass in the original Eden. Once the eyes have adjusted to the extreme vestal chastity of this light, the light of any other place is miserable and dank by comparison; it is nothing more than something to see by, a disappointment, a blemish. Even the seawater of Cephallonia is easier to see through than the air of any other place; a man may float in the water watching the distant sea bed, and clearly see lugubrious rays that for some reason are always accompanied by diminutive flatfish.’

  The learned doctor leaned back and read through what he had just written. It seemed really very poetic to him. He read it through again and relished some of the phrases. In the margin he wrote, ‘Remember; all Cephallonians are poets. Where can I mention this?’

  He went out into the yard and relieved himself into the patch of mint. He nitrogenated the herbs in strict rotation, and tomorrow it would be the turn of the oregano. He returned indoors just in time to catch Pelagia’s little goat eating his writings with evident satisfaction. He tore the paper from the animal’s mouth and chased it back outside. It skittered out of the door to bleat indignantly behind the massive trunk of the olive tree.

  ‘Pelagia,’ remonstrated the doctor, ‘your accursed ruminant has eaten everything I’ve written tonight. How many times do I have to tell you not to let it indoors? Any more incidents like this, and it’ll end up on a spit. That’s my final word. It’s hard enough to stick to the point without that animal sabotaging everything I’ve done.’

  Pelagia looked up at her father and smiled: ‘We’ll be eating at about ten o’clock.’

  ‘Did you hear what I said? I said no more goats inside the house, is that understood?’

  She left off slicing a pepper, brushed a stray hair from her face, and replied, ‘You’re as fond of him as I am.’

  ‘In the first place, I am not fond of the ruminant, and in the second place you will not argue with me. In my day no daughter argued with her father. I will not permit it.’

  Pelagia put one hand on her hip and pulled a wry face. ‘Papas,’ she said, ‘it still is your day. You aren’t dead yet, are you? Anyway, the goat is fond of you.’

  Dr Iannis turned away, disarmed and defeated. It was a most damnable thing when a daughter pulled feminine wiles upon her own father and reminded him of her mother at the same time. He returned to his table and took a new sheet of paper. He recalled that in his last effort he had somehow managed to stray from the subject of gods to the subject of fish. From a literary point of view it was probably just as well that it had been eaten. He wrote: ‘Only an island as impudent as Cephallonia would have the insouciance to situate itself upon a faultline that exposes it to the recurrent danger of cataclysmic earthquakes. Only an island as lackadaisical as this would allow itself to be infested by such troupes of casual and impertinent goats.’

  2 The Duce

  Come he
re. Yes, you. Come here. Now tell me something; which is my best profile, right or left? Really, do you think so? I am not so sure. I think that perhaps the lower lip has a better set on the other side. O, you agree do you? I suppose you agree with everything I say? O, you do. Then how am I supposed to rely on your judgement? What if I say that France is made of bakelite, is that true? Are you going to agree with me? What do you mean, yes sir, no sir, I don’t know sir; what kind of answer is that? Are you a cretin or something? Go and fetch me some mirrors so that I can arrange to see for myself.

  Yes, it is very important and also very natural that the people should perceive in me an apotheosis of the Italian ideal. You won’t catch me being filmed in my underwear. You won’t see me in a suit and tie anymore, for that matter. I am not going to be thought of as a businessman, a mere bureaucrat, and in any case this uniform becomes me. I am the embodiment of Italy, possibly even more than the King himself. This is Italy, smart and martial, where everything runs like clockwork. Italy as inflexible as steel. One of the Great Powers, now that I have made it so.

  Ah, here are the mirrors. Put it down there. No, there, idiota. Yes, there. Now put the other one there. In the name of God, do I have to do everything myself? What’s the matter with you, man? Hm, I think I like the left profile. Tilt that mirror down a bit. More, more. Stop there. That’s it. Wonderful. We must arrange it so that the people always see me from a lower position. I must always be higher than them. Send somebody round the city to find the best balconies. Make a note of it. Make a note of this, too, whilst I remember it. By order of the Duce, there is to be maximum afforestation of all the mountains in Italy. What do you mean, what for? It’s obvious isn’t it? The more trees, the more snow, everyone knows that. Italy should be colder so that the men it breeds are tougher, more resourceful, more resilient. It’s a sad truth, but it’s true nonetheless, our youngsters don’t make the soldiers that their fathers did. They need to be colder, like the Germans. Ice in the soul, that’s what we need. I swear the country’s got warmer since the Great War. It makes men lazy, it makes them incompetent. It unsuits them to empire. It turns life into a siesta. They don’t call me the Unsleeping Dictator for nothing, you don’t catch me asleep all afternoon. Make a note. This will be a new slogan for us: ‘Libro e Moschetto – Fascisto Perfetto’. I want people to understand that Fascism is not merely a social and political revolution, it’s cultural as well. Every Fascist must have a book in their knapsack, do you understand? We are not going to be philistines. I want Fascist book-clubs even in the smallest towns, and I don’t want the damned squadristi turning up and setting them on fire, is that clear?

  And what’s this I hear about a regiment of Alpini marching through Verona singing ‘Vogliamo la pace e non vogliamo la guerra’? I want it investigated. I won’t have élite troops marching around singing pacifist-defeatist songs when we aren’t even properly at war yet. And talking of Alpini, what’s this about them getting in fistfights with the Fascist legionnaires? What else have I got to do to make the military accept the militia? How about this for another slogan; ‘War is to Man what Motherhood is to Woman’? Very good, I think you’ll agree. A fine slogan with a lot of virility to it, much better than ‘Church, Kitchen and Children’ any day of the week. Call Clara and tell her I’ll be coming tonight if I can get away from my wife. How’s this for another slogan: ‘With Daring Prudence’? Are you sure? I don’t remember Benni using it in a speech. Must have been years ago. Perhaps it’s not so good.

  Make a note of this. I want it made absolutely clear to our people in Africa that the practice of so-called ‘madamismo’ has to end. I really cannot countenance the idea of men of Italy setting up house with native women and diluting the purity of the blood. No, I don’t care about native prostitutes. The sciarmute are indispensable to the morale of our men over there. I just won’t have love affairs, that’s all. What do you mean, Rome was assimilationist? I know that, and I know we’re reconstructing the empire, but these are different times. These are Fascist times.

  And talking of wogs, have you seen my copy of that pamphlet ‘Partito e Impero’? I like that bit where it says ‘In short, we must try to give the Italian people an imperialist and racist mentality’. Ah yes, the Jews. Well I think it’s been made perfectly clear that Jewish Italians have to decide whether they are Italians first or Jews. It’s as simple as that. It hasn’t escaped my notice that international Jewry is anti-Fascist. I’m not stupid. I know perfectly well that the Zionists are the tools of British foreign policy. As far as I am concerned we must enforce these employment quotas on Jews in public office; I will not tolerate any disproportion and I don’t care if it means that some towns end up with no mayor. We must keep in step with our German comrades. Yes, I know the Pope doesn’t like it, but he has too much to lose to stick his neck out. He knows I can repeal the Lateran pacts. I’ve got a trident up his backside and he knows I can twist it. I gave up atheist materialism for the sake of peace with the Church, and I’m not going any further.

  Make a note; I want a salary freeze to keep inflation under control. Increase family subsidies by fifty percent. No I don’t think the latter will cancel out the effects of the former. Do you think I don’t understand economics? How many times do I have to explain, you dolt, that Fascist economics are immune from the cyclic disturbances of capitalism? How dare you contradict me and say it appears that the opposite is true? Why do you think we’ve been going for autarky all these years? We’ve had some teething problems, that’s all, you zuccone, you sciocco, you balordo. Send Farinacci a telegram saying that I’m sorry he’s lost a hand, but what else do you expect when you go fishing with hand-grenades? Tell the press it was because of something heroic. We’ll have an article about it in Il Regime Fascista on Monday. Something like ‘Party Boss Injured in Valiant Action Against Ethiopians’. Which reminds me, how are the experiments with poison gas going? The ones against the wog guerrillas? I hope the rifiuto die slowly that’s all. Maximum agony. Pour encourager les autres. Shall we invade France? How about ‘Fascism Transcends Class Antagonisms’? Is Ciano here yet? I’ve been getting reports from all over the country that the mood is overwhelmingly anti-war. I can’t understand it. Industrialists, bourgeoisie, working classes, even the Army, for God’s sake. Yes, I know there’s a deputation of artists and intellectuals waiting. What? They’re going to present me with an award? Send them straight in.

  Good evening, gentlemen. I must say that it is a great pleasure to receive this from some of our, ah, greatest minds. I shall wear it with pride. How is your new novel going? Ah, I’m sorry, I quite forgot. Of course you are a sculptor. A slip of the tongue, A new statue of me? Splendid. Milan needs some monuments, does it not? Let me remind you, although I am sure you have no need of it, that Fascism is fundamentally and at bottom an aesthetic conception, and that it is your function as creators of beautiful things to portray with the greatest efficacy the sublime beauty and inevitable reality of the Fascist ideal. Never forget; if the Armed Forces are the balls of Fascism, and I am its brains, you are its imagination. You have a heavy responsibility. Now if you’ll excuse me, gentlemen, affairs of state, you know how it is. I have an audience with His Majesty the King. Yes, indeed, I shall convey your profoundest sentiments of loyalty. He would expect no less. Good evening.

  That’s got rid of them. Isn’t this pretty? I might give it to Clara. She is bound to find it amusing. Ah, Ciano is coming is he? About time too. Been hacking his way round a golf-course, no doubt. Damn stupid game, in my opinion. I could understand it if one was trying to hit rabbits or intercept the odd partridge. You can’t eat a hole-in-one, can you? You can’t draw the entrails of a good putt.

  Ah, Galeazzo, how good to see you. Do come in. Bene, bene. And how is my dear daughter? How wonderful it is to keep government in the family, so to speak. So good to have someone one can trust. Been playing golf? I thought so. Wonderful game, so fascinating, such a challenge, as much intellectual as physical, I understand. I wish I had
time for it myself. One feels so much at sea when talk turns to mashie-niblicks, cleeks, and mid-irons. Quite an Eleusinian mystery. I said ‘Eleusinian’. O never mind. What a splendid suit. Such a good cut. And such distinguished shoes too. They’re called ‘George boots’? I wonder why. Not English are they? Give me an honest military jackboot, Galeazzo; I can’t compete with you in elegance, I’ll be the first to admit. I’m just a man of the soil, and that’s the best thing to be when the soil happens to be Italian, don’t you agree?

  Now look, we’ve got to sort out this Greek business once and for all. I think we’re agreed that after all our accomplishments we need a new direction. Think of it, Galeazzo; when I was a journalist Italy had no empire to speak of. Now that I am the Duce we do have one. It’s a great and lasting legacy, of that there can be no doubt. There is more acclaim for a symphony than for a quartet. But can we stop at Africa and a few islands that no one’s ever heard of? Can we rest on our laurels when all about us we see divisions within the party and find that we seem to have no central thrust to our policy? We need dynamite up the arsehole of the nation, do we not? We need a great and unifying enterprise. We need an enemy, and we need to maintain the imperial momentum. This is why I return to the subject of the Greeks.

  I’ve been looking through the records. In the first place we have an historic blot to expunge, an outstanding account. I’m referring to the Tellini incident of 1923, as you no doubt realise. Incidentally, my dear Count, I have been becoming increasingly aware that you have been making foreign policy independently of me, and that consequently we have often found ourselves pulling in different directions at once. No, do not protest, I merely mention this as an unfortunate fact. Our ambassador in Athens is very confused, and perhaps it has been in our interest that he should remain so. I don’t want Grazzi dropping hints to Metaxas, and it suits us that they should remain friends. No damage has been done; we’ve taken Albania and I have written to Metaxas to reassure him and to commend his treatment of King Zog, and everything is going very well. Yes, I am aware that the British have contacted Metaxas to say that they will help defend Greece in the event of an invasion. Yes I know Hitler wants Greece in the Axis, but let’s face it, what kind of debt do we owe to Hitler? He stirs up all of Europe, there seems no limit to his greed and irresponsibility, and to cap it all he takes the Romanian oilfields without allowing us any slice of the cake at all. The cheek of it. Who does he think he is? I fear, Galeazzo, that we must base our actions upon a calculation as to which way the dice are falling, and I have to say that it is obvious that Hitler is getting all the sixes. Either we join with him and divide the spoils or else we risk an invasion from Austria as soon as the little man sees fit. It is a question of grasping opportunities and evading perils. It is also a question of expanding the empire. We must continue to stir up liberation movements in Kosovo and irredentism in Tsamouria. We get Yugoslavia and Greece. Imagine it, Galeazzo, the whole Mediterranean littoral rebuilt into a new Roman Empire. We’ve got Libya, and it’s just a question of joining the dots. We’ve got to do this without telling Hitler; I happen to know that the Greeks have been seeking his assurances. Imagine the impression on the Führer when he sees us sweep through Greece in a matter of days. It’ll make him think twice, that’s for sure. Imagine yourself at the head of a Fascist legion as you enter Athens on the turret of a tank. Imagine our colours fluttering on the Parthenon.