Corelli's Mandolin Page 6

  He was interrupted by a discreet cough from the main body of the church. Hastily he gathered his wits together, felt extreme embarrassment paint his ears and neck, and sat completely still. He had been caught in an unselfconscious act of declamatory daydreaming, and now the villagers would be saying that he was demented. He heard the shuffle of departing footsteps, and peeked round the corner of the screen to see that someone had left him a loaf of bread. He found himself smacking his lips and wishing for some cheese to accompany it. There were more footsteps, and he hid himself quickly, like a child at play. The feet departed, and he peered through a small hole to see that someone had left a large, soft, and succulent cheese. ‘A miracle,’ he said to himself. ‘Thanks be to God.’ He wished venially for some aubergines and a bottle of oil, only to be rewarded not with another miracle, but with a pair of slippers. ‘My God, my God,’ he said, looking up at the ceiling, ‘how perverse thou art.’

  Gradually the entrance to the building filled up with gifts as the villagers left their tokens of apology. Father Arsenios watched through the hole with naïve cupidity as fish were followed by vegetables and embroidered handkerchiefs. He began to notice that a large amount of Robola was accumulating, and he expostulated to himself, ‘What? Do they all think I’m a drunk?’ He began to work out how long the supply would last if he drank two bottles per diem. Then how long if he drank three. For mathematical amusement and intellectual challenge he started to compute the results of three and five-eighths each day, but became confused and was obliged to recommence.

  As the pile continued to grow he became urgently aware of a need to urinate. He shifted uncomfortably and began to perspire. It was a most terrible dilemma; either he went out of the church, in which case people might be deterred from leaving the gifts in his presence, or else he would have to sit there in augmenting desperation until such a time that he could be sure that the flow of penitent presents had ceased. He began to regret vehemently the bottle he had drunk before coming out; ‘This is the retribution of God against the bibulous,’ he thought, ‘I will never touch another drop.’ He prayed to St Gerasimos for relief.

  Upon conclusion of the prayer he was visited by inspiration. Out in the church was a large supply of bottles. He listened intently for the approach of footsteps, heard none, and nipped out as quickly as his girth would permit. He waddled rapidly to the entrance, leaned down painfully for a bottle, and then retreated to his concealment behind the screen. He pulled the cork with his teeth and considered the next problem; in order to be able to employ the bottle it would have to be empty. What could he do with the wine? It seemed a shame to waste it. He tipped back the bottle and poured it down his throat. Rivulets of the sweet liquid runnelled down his beard and onto his cassock. He inspected the bottle, found one or two drops left, and shook them with a flourish into his mouth.

  Father Arsenios peeped through the hole to ensure that he would not be heard, lifted his cassock, and released a formidable stream of urine into the bottle. It hammered against the glass of the bottom, and then splashed and hissed as the bottle filled. He noted with alarm that as the neck of the vessel narrowed, it filled at an exponential rate. ‘They should make bottles uniformly cylindrical,’ reflected the priest, and was promptly taken by surprise. He rubbed the splashback into the dust of the floor with his foot, and realised that he would have to wait in the church until the damp patches on his robes had dried. ‘A priest,’ he thought, ‘cannot be seen to have pissed himself.’ He put the bottle of urine down and reseated himself. Someone came in and left him a pair of socks.

  A quarter of an hour passed, and Velisarios came in, hoping to apologise in person. He looked in the campanile and in the main body of the church, and was about to leave when he heard a long and gurgling belch emanate from behind the screen. ‘Patir?’ called Velisarios. ‘I have come to apologise.’

  ‘Go away,’ came the petulant reply, and then, ‘I am trying to pray.’

  ‘But Patir, I want to apologise and kiss your hand.’

  ‘I can’t come out. For various reasons.’

  Velisarios scratched his head, ‘What reasons?’

  ‘Religious ones. Besides, I don’t feel well.’

  ‘Do you want me to fetch Doctor Iannis?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I apologise, Patir, for what I did, and to make amends I have left you a bottle of wine. I will pray to God to forgive me.’ He left the church and returned to the doctor’s house to see how Mandras was getting on, finding him gazing at Pelagia with positively canine adoration. He went to tell the doctor that the priest was unwell.

  Father Arsenios was finding that his solution to the problem of a distended bladder was itself the cause of further distension. After Velisarios’ departure he had emptied another bottle, and refilled it with the transmogrified produce of the previous one. This time his aim, his balance, and his judgement of the right moment at which to stop all lacked even the suspect precision of the earlier enterprise. There was further mess to be rubbed into the dust with his foot, and more dampening of the robe. Arsenios reseated himself blearily, and began to feel nauseous. He slipped heavily off the stool, bruising his coccyx, and was woken twenty minutes later by the urgent need to empty and refill another bottle. He vowed to stop before the narrowing neck could create another venturi effect, but was so oppressed by now with high pressure that once more his judgement failed. Dismally.

  Dr Iannis walked to the church in the transparent light of the afternoon. On weekdays he wore the kind of clothes that peasants wore on holidays and church days; a bedraggled black suit with shiny patches, and a collarless shirt, black shoes embellished with dust and scuffs, and a wide-brimmed hat. He was twirling his moustache, sucking pensively upon his pipe, and had divided his attention in two so that he was thinking simultaneously about the sacking of the island by crusaders and of what he was going to say to the priest. He envisaged the following scene:

  He would say, ‘Patir, I regret deeply the indignity inflicted upon you this morning,’ and the priest would say, ‘I find this surprising in an irreligious man,’ and he would reply, ‘But I do believe that a priest should be treated with respect. A village needs a priest as an island needs the sea. Please come and eat with us tomorrow. Pelagia is going to do lamb with potatoes in the fourno. I will also invite the teacher. I am sorry to hear, by the way, that you are unwell. Is there anything I can do?’

  But when he entered the church he was immediately apprised of the probability that this conversation was unlikely to occur. He heard groaning and retching from behind the screen. ‘Patir,’ he called, ‘Are you all right? Patir?’

  There was another pitiful and wracking groan, and the doglike noise of painful vomiting. From his experience of the vomit of innumerable patients, he visualised that this would be of a predominantly yellow colour. He knocked a knuckle on the screen and called, ‘Patir, are you in there?’

  ‘O God, o God,’ moaned the priest.

  The doctor was presented with an intractable problem. The fact was that only the ordained might pass behind the screen. He had long ago abandoned his religion in favour of a Machian variety of materialism, but he felt nonetheless that he could not break the prohibition. Such a taboo cannot be lightly cast aside even by one who places no credence in its premise. He could not enter there any more than he could have made sexual overtures to a nun. He knocked more urgently, ‘Patir, it’s me, Doctor Iannis.’

  ‘Iatre,’ wailed the priest, ‘I am grievously stricken. O God, wherefore hast thou made all men in vain? Help me for the love of God.’

  The doctor sent a prayer of penitence up to the God in whom he did not believe, and stepped behind the screen. He beheld the supine priest, helplessly recumbent in a pool of urine and vomit. One of the man’s eyes was closed and the other was streaming with tears. The doctor noted with dispassionate surprise that the vomit was more white than yellow, and that it contrasted brightly with the dull blackness of the robes. ‘You’ve got to stand up,’ he s
aid. ‘You can lean on my shoulder, but I am afraid that I cannot carry you.’

  There ensued an unequal and impossible struggle in which the slight doctor contrived to raise the rotund cleric. He very quickly realised the futility of the effort, and stood upright. He noted the presence of three bottles of urine in that holy place. Out of professional curiosity he held one of the bottles up to the light and inspected it for the tell-tale mucal streaks that indicate urethral infections. It was clear. He realised that he had some vomit on his hands. He looked at them for a moment; he was damned if he was going to wipe them on his trousers, and even more damned if he was going to do so on the back of the screen. He stooped down and cleaned them on the priest’s robe. He went to fetch Velisarios.

  So it was that Velisarios’ penance for submitting the priest to the indignity of the morning was that he should be obliged to carry the colossal weight of him to the doctor’s house. It was possibly the most titanic feat of strength and determination that he had ever had to perform. He staggered twice and nearly fell once. Afterwards his arms and his back felt as though he had borne up the entire universe, and he understood how St Christopher must have felt after carrying Our Lord across the river. He sat sweating in the shade, panting, and experiencing a most alarming galloping of the heart whilst Pelagia plied him with lemon juice sweetened with honey, and she in turn was plied with smiles by Mandras, who had turned on his side in order to watch her. Pelagia felt his gaze as though it were a hot caress, finding that it had the disconcerting effect of making her trip over her own feet, and that it seemed to cause her hips to sway more than usual. In truth it was the attempt to control her hips that had caused the difficulty with her feet.

  Inside the house the doctor forced the priest to drink jar upon jar of water, this being the only sensible cure for alcoholic poisoning of which he was aware. He found himself waxing unbecomingly censorial with respect to his patient, for he was unravelling in his mind an internal monologue along the lines of: ‘Surely a priest should set a better example than this? Surely it is shameful to become inebriated so long before evening? How can this man hope to retain any stature in these parts when he is greedy and drunken? I do not remember any priest as bad as this, and we’ve had some bad ones, God knows …’ He frowned and tutted as he swabbed the vomit from the man’s robes, and transferred his irritation to Pelagia’s goat, which had entered the room and leapt up onto the table. ‘Stupid brute,’ he shouted at it, and it looked at him impudently with its slotted eyes, as if to say, ‘I, at least, am not drunk. I am merely mischievous.’

  The doctor left the patient to his stupor and sat at his desk. He tapped his pen on the table and wrote, ‘In 1082 an infamous Norman baron named Robert Guiscard attempted to conquer the island and was resisted with extreme determination by bands of guerrillas. The world was relieved of his obnoxious presence by a fever that killed him in 1085, and the sole trace of him on earth is the fact that Fiskardo is named after him, although history does not relate how the G transformed itself into an F. Another Norman, Bohemund, whilst flaunting the piety freshly culled from a recent crusade, sacked the island with the most extreme and inexcusable cruelty. The reader should be reminded that it was crusaders and not the Muslims who originally sacked Constantinople, which should have caused perpetual scepticism about the value of noble causes. Apparently it has not, as the human race is incapable of learning anything from history.’

  He leaned back in his chair and twirled his moustache, and then he lit his pipe. He saw Lemoni pass the window and called her in. The tiny girl listened with wide-eyed seriousness as the doctor asked her to go and fetch the priest’s wife. He patted her on the head, called her his ‘little koritsimou’ and smiled as he watched her skipping erratically away along the street. Pelagia had been just as sweet when she was small, and it made him feel nostalgic. He felt a tear rise to his eye, and he banished it forthwith by writing another sentence excoriating the Normans. He leaned back again and was interrupted by the entrance of Stamatis, who was holding his hat in his hands and kneading the brim. ‘Kalispera, Kyrie Stamatis,’ he said, ‘what can I do for you?’

  Stamatis shuffled his feet, looked with concern at the round mound of priest upon the floor, and said, ‘You know that … that thing in my ear?’

  ‘The papilionaceous and exorbitant auditory impediment?’

  ‘That’s the one, Iatre. Well, what I want to know, is … I mean, can you put it back?’

  ‘Put it back, Kyrie Stamatis?’

  ‘It’s my wife, you see.’

  ‘I see,’ said the doctor, releasing a rank cloud from his pipe. ‘Actually I don’t see. Perhaps you would explain.’

  ‘Well, when I was deaf in that ear I couldn’t hear her. Where I sit, you see, I had my good ear on the other side, and I could sort of take it.’

  ‘Take it?’

  ‘The nagging. I mean before it was sort of like the murmuring of the sea. I liked it. It helped me to doze off. But now it’s so loud, and it won’t stop. It just goes on and on.’ The man waggled his shoulders in imitation of an irritated woman, and mimicked his wife: ‘You’re no good for anything, why don’t you bring in the wood, why haven’t we ever got any money, why do I have to do everything round here, why didn’t I marry a man, how come you only ever gave me daughters, what happened to the man I married? All that stuff, it’s driving me crazy.’

  ‘Have you tried beating her?’

  ‘No, Iatre. Last time I struck her she broke a plate across my head. I still have the scar. Look.’ The old man leaned forward and indicated something invisible upon his forehead.

  ‘Well, you shouldn’t beat her anyway,’ said the doctor. ‘They just find more subversive ways of getting at you. Like oversalting the food. My advice is to be nice to her.’

  Stamatis was shocked. It was a course of action so inconceivable that he had never even conceived of conceiving it. ‘Iatre …’ he protested, but could find no other words.

  ‘Just bring in the wood before she asks for it, and bring her a flower every time you come back from the field. If it’s cold put a shawl around her shoulders, and if it’s hot, bring her a glass of water. It’s simple. Women only nag when they feel unappreciated. Think of her as your mother who has fallen ill, and treat her accordingly.’

  ‘Then you won’t put back the … the, er … disputatious and pugnacious extraordinary embodiment?’

  ‘Certainly not. It would be against the Hippocratic oath. I can’t allow that. It was Hippocrates, incidentally, who said that “extreme remedies are most appropriate for extreme diseases.” ’

  Stamatis appeared downcast: ‘Hippocrates says so? So I’ve got to be nice to her?’

  The doctor nodded paternally, and Stamatis replaced his hat. ‘O God,’ he said.

  The doctor watched the old man from his window. Stamatis went out into the road and began to walk away. He paused and looked down at a small purple flower in the embankment. He leaned down to pick it, but immediately straightened up. He peered about himself to ensure that no one was watching. He pulled at his belt in the manner of girding up his loins, glared at the flower, and turned on his heel. He began to stroll away, but then stopped. Like a little boy involved in a petty theft he darted back, snapped the stem of the flower, concealed it within his coat, and sauntered away with an exaggeratedly insouciant and casual air. The doctor leaned out of the window and called after him, ‘Bravo Stamatis,’ just for the simple but malicious pleasure of witnessing his embarrassment and shame.

  8 A Funny Kind of Cat

  Lemoni ran into the courtyard of Dr Iannis’ house just as he was departing for the kapheneia for breakfast; he had been planning to meet all the mangas there and argue about the problems of the world. Yesterday he had been disputing vehemently with Kokolios about Communism, and during the night he had come up with a splendid argument which he had been rehearsing in his head so much that it had prevented sleep, obliging him to get up and write a little more of his history, a little diatribe about t
he Orsini family. This was his speech to Kokolios:

  ‘Listen, if everybody is employed by the state, it’s obvious that everyone gets paid by the state, yes? So all the tax that comes back to the state is money that came from the state in the first place, yes? So the state only ever gets back maybe one third of what it paid out last week. So this week the only way to pay everyone is to print more money, no? So it follows that in a Communist state the money very soon becomes imaginary, because the state has nothing for that money to represent.’

  He envisaged Kokolios riposting thus: ‘Ah, Iatre, the missing money comes from profits,’ and then, quick as a flash, he would come back with, ‘But look, Kokolio’, the only way the state can get a profit is by selling the goods abroad, and the only way that this can happen is if the foreign states are capitalist and have a surplus from their taxes to buy things with. Or else you’ve got to sell to capitalist companies. So it’s obvious that Communism cannot survive without capitalism, and this makes it self-contradictory, because Communism is supposed to be the end of capitalism, and moreover it is supposed to be internationalist. It follows from my argument that if the whole world went Communist, the entire economy of the globe would grind to a halt within the space of a week. What do you say to that?’ The doctor was practising the dramatic gesture with which he would conclude this peroration (the return of his pipe to the clenched position between the teeth) when Lemoni caught at his sleeve and said, ‘Please, Iatre, I’ve found a funny kind of cat.’