13 Delirium

13 Delirium

Mandras put in no appearance for two days after the feast of the saint, leaving Pelagia to ferment in an agony of agitation. She could not think what could have happened to him, and she invented one reason upon another for his absence, which she felt as a growing lack that was threatening to become more real than

the obligations and objects of everyday life.

She had walked back from the feast with her father, and had deduced that the levity of his conversation was due to a combination of drink and the fact that Mandras had not found him. At every step she had wanted to interrupt his flow of remarks about the psychological nature of the miraculous and his surprisingly coarse observations about what had been going on at the periphery of the feast; she was bursting with an insupportable admixture of anxiety and happiness, and wanted nothing so much as to mention Mandras' proposal. It was information that weighed more than the entire world, and she needed her father to share it, so that it might be lightened. The doctor had not noticed her flushed cheeks, her erratic attention, her tendency to trip over stones, the overemphatic gestures of her hands, and the slight strangulation of her voice; he had achieved precisely that stage of inebriation where high spirits teetered on the edge of nausea and unsteadiness, and decided to withdraw. His was a happiness that precluded any sensitivity to the state of his daughter's mind, and she had still not imparted her news by the time that they had reached home, where the doctor had gathered the philosophical Psipsina in his arms and waltzed about the yard before urinating on the mint and retiring to bed, malodorous and fully clothed.

Pelagia went to her own bed and could not sleep. A gibbous moon slid filaments of eerie silver light through the slats of the shutters, and this conspired with the energetic carpentry of the crickets to keep her lying on her back with her eyes wide open. She had never felt more awake. Her mind looped interminably as it replayed the events of the day; the miracle, the songs and dances, the fights, the race, the proposal. It always came back to that; every train of memory twisted on its track and returned to that handsome boy on his knees by the bench where she sat, Mandras on his knees in a pool of wine, Mandras, so beautiful, luminous, and young; Mandras, as exquisite as Apollo. Perspiration broke out on her limbs as she imagined herself entwined in his embrace, transformed him into an incubus, moved her arms and legs, caressed his back and experienced in absentia the soft curl of his tongue on her breasts and the lithe pressure of his weight.

disguised. What would Mandras be like? How much did she really know him? What evidence did she have that he was patient and humane? He brought gifts, that was sure, but would the gifts not stop when the bargain was secured? Wasn't he too young and too full of impulses? There was something too decisive about his movements, his unconsidered responses; can you trust someone who replies immediately, without thought? Someone whose actions and words are poetic rather than solidly cogitated? She was frightened by the suspicion that there was something adamantine about the structure of his heart. `Could he be a romoi,' she wondered, `without even knowing it himself?'

And how do you tell the difference between desire and love? She listened to the tinny buzz of a mosquito as she compared her fiancé to her father. She adored the latter, yes, that was love. But what did it have in common with her feelings for Mandras? Was it conceivable that service to him would feel so much like liberty? Was it just that there were different kinds of love? If it were not love that she felt for Mandras, then why this breathlessness, this bottomless and perpetual longing that furred her tongue and gave her palpitations? Why, like God or a dictator, did this emotion command her without reason, irresistibly? Why, like the arbitrations of Patir Arsenios, did it seem to have the force of law without the law's formality? The moon shifted behind the olive tree, casting a ceaseless motion of leaves upon the wall, the melancholy bells of the gets of Mt Aenos rang through the gentle chill of the night, and outside Psipsina could be heard foraging in the yard. `Catching her own mice,' thought Pelagia, as she lay listening to the palpable hunger of her body. She thought of the capricious joie de vivre of the pine marten, its innocence and its complete absorption in the business of being itself, and realised quite suddenly that she had exchanged the carelessness of youth for something very like unhappiness. She imagined that Mandras had died, and as the tears came she was shocked to discover that she also felt relief. She banished the image sternly, and told herself that she was vile.

In the morning she betook herself to the yard and created tasks for herself that would cause her to see him as soon as he came around the curve of the road, the same curve where he had been shot by Velisarios. She inspected the ruminating goat for ticks, burned them off with a hot needle, and then burrowed through the coarse hair all over again. She looked up repeatedly to see if it was Mandras who came. Her father went to the kapheneia for breakfast, and it occurred to her that Psipsina might also have ticks. She set the animal on the wall, even closer to the road, and with her fingers brushed the fur against its natural lie. Pelagia buried her nose in the soft fur of its stomach, and felt at once saddened and comforted by the sweetness of the smell. Psipsina wriggled and squeaked with pleasure as the busy fingers found two fleas and broke them between the nails of thumb and

forefinger. Unwilling to leave the wall, Pelagia brushed the marten vigorously and pulled out the matted knots of fur. She draped Psipsina about her neck and decided to fetch water, which would take her round the curve altogether. Psipsina slept as Pelagia sat by the well and engaged the other women in conversation; but she forgot every detail of the scandals that were discussed, and her eyes kept flicking away. She began to feel a little sick. She drew more water than she knew how to use, and decided to irrigate the herbs. Wearied with waiting, she sat in the shade of the olive with her arm about the scrawny neck of her goat, which indifferently continued to chew as though there were no other world than its own. Longing turned to impatience, and thence to irritation. In order to spite Mandras, Pelagia decided to go for a walk. It would serve him right if she were not there when he came. She walked along the road in the direction that he would come, sat on a wall until the day grew too hot, and then wandered into the maquis, where she came across Lemoni, who was looking for crickets.

Pelagia sat on a rock and watched as the little girl hurried from one patch of scrub to another, closing her plump fingers over thin air as the crickets took evasive action.

`How old are you, koritsimou?' Pelagia asked suddenly.

`Six,' said Lemoni. `Just. After the next feast I am going to be seven.'

`Can you count to ten yet?'

`I can count to thirty,' said Lemoni, who then proceeded to demonstrate. `. . . Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-shiny.'

Pelagia sighed. She reckoned that before the elapse of two more feasts, Lemoni would be set to work in the house, and that would be the end of hunting for small creatures in the maquis. It would be a question of lapsing into the monotony of spoiling the men-folk and only being allowed to discuss important things with other women, when the men were not listening or were in the kapheneion playing backgammon when they ought to be working. For Lemoni there would be no freedom until widowhood, which was precisely the time when the community would turn against her, as though she had no right to

outlive a husband, as though he had died only because of his wife's negligence. This was why one had to have sons; it was the only insurance against an indigent and terrifying old age. Pelagia wished that there was something better for Lemoni, as though it were idle to wish better things for herself.

Lemoni wailed suddenly, startling Pelagia out of her reflections. It was a sound very like that of a wauling cat. Tears started from Lemoni's eyes, and she clutched a forefinger, doubled over, and rocked back and forth. Pelagia ran forward and uncurled the little girl's fingers, saying, 'What happened, koritsimou? What hurt you?'

She put her fingers next to her mouth and waggled them, 'They've got big jaws with pincers. It'll stop hurting in a minute.'

Lemoni clutched her finger again. 'It stings.'

Pelagia pretended to do a special spell for curing cricket bites, and led the placated Lemoni back to the village. There was still no Mandras, and everything was unusually quiet as people crept about, nursing their hangovers and inexplicable bruises. A donkey brayed ridiculously and at length, receiving a ragged chorus of 'Ai gamisou' from the dark interiors of the houses. Pelagia set about the preparation of the evening meal, thankful that tonight it would not be fish. Later, as she sat with her father after the customary peripato, he said quite unexpectedly, 'I expect he hasn't come because he's feeling as sick as everyone else.'

Pelagia felt herself flood with a kind of gratitude, and she took his hand and

kissed it. The doctor squeezed her hand and said sadly, 'I don't know how I'll manage when you've gone.'

He squeezed her hand again. 'We used to have some Arabs on one of my ships. They always said "inshallah" after every sentence; "I'll do it tomorrow, inshallah." It could be very annoying, because they seemed to expect God to do things when they couldn't be bothered themselves, but there is some wisdom in it. You will marry Mandras if that is what providence decrees.'

He turned and looked at her gently. 'He's too young. Everyone is too young when they marry. I was. Also, I have not done you a favour. You read the poetry of Cavafy, I have taught you to speak Katharevousa and Italian. He isn't your equal, and he would expect to be better than his wife. He is a man after all. I have often thought that you would only ever be able to marry happily with a foreigner, a dentist from Norway or something.'

Pelagia laughed at the incongruous thought, and fell silent. 'He calls me "Siora",' she said.

There was a long pause whilst they both gazed at the stars over the mountain, and then Dr Iannis asked, 'Have you ever thought that we should emigrate? America or Canada or something?'

Pelagia closed her eyes and sighed. 'Mandras,' she said.

The doctor stood up and went inside, re-emerging with something in his hand that gleamed metallically in the semidarkness. Very formally he handed it to his daughter. She took it, saw what it was, felt its ominous weight, and dropped it into the lap of her skirts with a small cry of horror.

The doctor remained standing. 'There's going to be a war. Terrible things happen in wars. Especially to women. Use that to defend yourself, and if necessary use it against yourself. You may also use it against me if that is what circumstances demand. It's only a little derringer, but . . .' he waved his hand across the horizon, '. . . a terrible darkness has fallen across the world, and every one of us must do what we can, that's all. Maybe you don't know it, koritsimou, but it might happen that your marriage will have to wait. We must make sure first that Mussolini does not invite himself to the wedding.'

The doctor turned on his heel and went into the house, leaving Pelagia to the fear that was growing in her breast, and to a most unwelcome solitude. She remembered that in the mountains of Souli, sixty women had gone to one of the peaks, danced together, and thrown their children and themselves over the precipice rather than surrender to the slavery of the Turks. After a few moments she went to her room, put the derringer under her pillow, and sat on the edge of her bed, absently caressing Psipsina and imagining once again that Mandras was dead.

On the second day after the feast Pelagia repeated the same slow ballet of pointless tasks that failed to counterbalance the absence of her lover, but became instead a kind of frame to it. Everything - the trees, Lemoni playing, the goat, the antics of Psipsina, the self-important, cumbersome waddle of Father Arsenios, the distant hammering of Stamatis as he made a wooden saddle for a donkey, Kokolios' raucous rendition of the 'Internationale' with half the words missing - all was nothing but a sign of what was missing. The world retreated and gave place to a pall of hopelessness and dejection that seemed to have become a property of things themselves; even the lamb with rosemary and garlic that she prepared for dinner embodied nothing other than a poignant lack of fish. That night she felt too exhausted and dispirited to cry herself to sleep. In her dreams she accused Mandras of cruelty, and he laughed at her like a satyr, and danced

away across the waves.

On the third day Pelagia went down to the sea. She sat on a rock and watched an enormous warship steam portentously away to the west. It was most probably British. She thought about war, and felt her heart grow heavy, reflecting that in the old days men were the playthings of the gods, and had advanced no further than to become the toys of other men who thought that they themselves were gods. She played with the euphony of words; 'Hitler, Attila, Caligula. Hitler, Attila, Caligula.'

She found no word to accompany 'Mussolini' until she came up with 'Metaxas'. 'Mussolini, Metaxas,' she said, and added, 'Mandras.'

As though answering her thoughts, a movement caught the corner of her eye. Below, to the left, a body was diving about in the waves like a human dolphin. She watched the brown fisherman with a pleasure that was entirely aesthetic, until she realised with a small shock that he was completely naked. He must have been a hundred metres away, and she knew that he was arranging a buoyed net with a mesh tiny enough to catch whitebait. He was diving for long moments, arranging his net in a crescent, and all about him the gulls wheeled and plunged for their share of the harvest. Guilefully, but without guilt, Pelagia crept closer in order to admire this man who was so sleek, so at one with the sea, so much like a fish, a man naked and wild, a man like Adam.

She watched as the net was curled about the shoal, and, as he stood glistening on the beach, hauling hand over hand, his muscles tightening and his shoulders rhythmically working, she realised that it was Mandras. She put her hand over her mouth to suppress her shock and a sudden access of shame, but she did not creep away. She was still transfixed by his beauty, by the harmony and strength of his work, and could not resist the idea that God had given her a chance to look over what was hers before she took possession of it; the slim hips, the sharp shoulders, the taut stomach, the dark shadow of the groin with its mysterious modellings that were the subject of so much lubricious female gossip at the well. Mandras was too young to be a Poseidon, too much without malice. Was he a male sea-nymph, then? Was there such a thing as a male Nereid or Potamid? Should there not be a sacrifice of honey, oil, milk, or a goat? Of herself? It was difficult to witness Mandras slipping through the water and not believe that such a creature would not, as Plutarch said, live for 9,720 years. But this vision of Mandras possessed a quality of eternity, and Plutarch's imputed span of life

seemed too arbitrary and too short. It occurred to Pelagia that perhaps this same scene had been enacted generation after generation since Mycenean times; perhaps in the time of Odysseus there had been young girls like herself who had gone to the sea in order to spy on the nakedness of those they loved. She shivered at the thought of such a melting into history.

Mandras reeled in his net and bent over to busy himself with extracting the tiny fish from the mesh, throwing them into a line of buckets arranged in a neat row upon the sand. The silver fish flashed in the sun like new knives, transforming their asphyxiation into a display of beauty as they flicked and leapt against each other and died. Pelagia noticed that his shoulders had peeled raw, and had not hardened to the sun despite an entire summer's exposure. She was surprised, even disappointed, for it revealed that the lovely boy was made only of flesh, and not of imperishable gold.

He stood up, placed two fingers in his mouth, and whistled. She saw that he was looking out to sea, waving his arms in a slow semaphore above his head. Vainly she tried to descry the object of his attention. Puzzled, she raised her head a little higher above the rock behind which she had concealed herself, and glimpsed three dark shapes curving in unison through the waves towards him. She heard his cry of pleasure and watched him wade towards them with three larger fish in his hands. She saw him throw the fish high into the air, and the three dolphins leap and twist to catch them. She saw him grasp a dorsal fin and sweep out to sea.

She ran down to the edge of the sand and furrowed her brow in a desperate attempt to exclude the scintillating and shifting darts of light that the sun threw from the water, but could see nothing. Surely Mandras was drowned? She remembered suddenly that it was terribly bad luck to see a nymph naked; it caused delirium. What was happening? She wrung her hands and bit her lip. The sun burned her forearms with an intensity that amounted to vindictiveness, and she clasped them anxiously to her chest. She hovered for a few more moments on the shore, and then turned and ran home.

In her room she hugged Psipsina and wept. Mandras was drowned, he had gone away with the dolphins, he was never going to come again, it was the end of everything. She complained to the pine marten about the injustice and futility of life and submitted to the rasping tongue as it relished the saltiness of her tears. There was a discreet knock on the door.

Mandras stood, smiling diffidently, in his hand a bucket of whitebait. He shifted from one foot to another, and spoke all in a rush: `I'm sorry I didn't come sooner, it's just that I was ill the day after the feast, you know, it was the wine, and I wasn't very well, and yesterday I had to go into Argostoli to get my call-up papers, and I've got to go to the mainland the day after tomorrow, and I've spoken to your father in the kapheneion, and he's given his consent, and I've brought you some fish. Look, some whitebait.'

Pelagia sat on the edge of her bed and went numb inside; it was too much happiness, too much desolation. Officially engaged to a man who was going to wrestle with fate, to a man who should have drowned in the sea, a man who jumbled a marriage together with whitebait and war, a man who was a boy who played with dolphins and was too beautiful to go away to die in the snows of Tsamoria.

He seemed suddenly to have become a dream-creature of frightening and infinite fragility, something too exquisite and ephemeral to be human. Her hands began to shake; `Don't go, don't go,' she pleaded, and remembered that it was bad luck to see a nymph naked, that it brought about delirium, and occasionally death.