42 How like a Woman is a Mandolin

42 How like a Woman is a Mandolin

How like a woman is a mandolin, how gracious and how lovely. In the evening when the dogs howl and the crickets chirp, and the huge moon hoists above the hills, and in Argostoli the searchlights search for false alarms, I take my sweet Antonia. I brush her strings, softly, and I say to her, 'How can you be made of wood?' just as I see Pelagia and ask without speaking, 'Are you truly made of flesh? Is there not here a fire? A vanishing trace of angels? A something far estranged from bone and blood?'

I catch her eye in passing, her gaze so frank and quizzical, holding mine. Her head turns, a smile, an arch and knowing smile, and she has gone. I see her go for water, and then she comes, the urn upon her shoulder, a living caryatid, and as she passes she permits a splash upon my epaulettes. She apologises, laughing, and I say 'Accidents will happen', and she knows I know that it was no chance. She did it because I am a soldier and an Italian, because I am the enemy, because she is funny, because she likes to tease, because it is an act of resistance, because she likes me, because it is contact, because we are brother and sister before she is Greek or I am invader. I notice that her wrists remind me of the slender necks of mandolins, and her hand broadens from the wrist like the head that holds the pegs, and the place where the heel swells to meet the soundbox gives the same contour as her line of neck and chin, and glows the same with the soft polish of youth and pine.

At night I dream of Pelagia. Pelagia comes, undressing, and I see her breasts are the backs of mandolins moulded in Napoli. I cup them in my hands and they are cold like wood and warm like yielding mother's flesh, and she turns about and I see that each buttock is the rounded pear-shaped singing mandolin, swelling in tapered segments, purfled in pearl and slivers of ebony. I am confused because I

am caught between looking for strings and the pain of the loins' longing, and I wake up moistened by my own lust, clutching Antonia, pricked by the scratching ends of strings, sweating. I put Antonia down and say, 'O Pelagia,' and I lie awake awhile, thinking of her before I force myself asleep because then it will be morning sooner, and I will see Pelagia.

I think of Pelagia in terms of chords. Antonia has three chords that live together in the first three frets, doh, re, and sol, and they all need two fingers apiece to stop them. I play sol, and I move it one space across and I make the doh, and they ring in each others' aftermath like soprano and alto in the same key in a Tuscan song. I play the re, twisting my hand, making a double space, and it belongs with the other two, but it is sad and incomplete, it is like a virgin unfulfilled. It begs me 'Take me back where I can find my peace', and I return to sol, and all's complete, and I feel like God Himself who made a woman and found His world perfected by a final and a consummating touch.

Pelagia shares these simple, merry chords. She plays with a cat and laughs, and it is sol. She raises an eyebrow when she catches me observing, and pretends to reproach me and reprove me for the guilt of admiration, and it is doh. She asks me a question, 'Haven't you anything useful to do?' and it is like re, requiring resolution. I say, 'Il Duce and I are conquering Serbia today,' and she laughs and all is brought back and clarified. She throws back her head and laughs, her white teeth sparkling, and she knows she is beautiful and that I find her so. I am reminded of sparkling whitewashed houses on a distant hill in Candia. She is glad and proud and withholding, everything has circled back upon itself. She has returned to sol. I find myself laughing also; we are octaves apart, laughing in octaves together, mandola and mandolin, and far away a gun roars at imaginary British planes, there is a spurious rattle of machine-guns, and behold, there is our timpani.

Pelagia hears the guns and frowns. We were happy together, sitting on this balcony shaded by bougainvillaea visited by bees, but now it is the war; the war has returned, and Pelagia knits her brow and frowns. I want to say, 'I am sorry Pelagia, it was not my idea, it was not me who stole Ionia. I was not inspired to take your goats technique for rendering them palatable, and she detested the feeling of insecurity engendered by her own confusion; she dreaded the idea of serving up something that would turn out to be slimy and repulsive, and was fearful that if she cooked a bad meal she might be lowered in the captain's estimation. The warm and jubilant glow which she felt after the discovery of their mutual love was now being threatened not only by the furtive guilt of it,

but also by the appalling thought that if she did the wrong thing with the snails she would at best revolt him, and at worst perpetrate a poisoning.

Drosoula told her emphatically that what you had to do was leave the snails overnight in a pot full of water, with the lid on to prevent escape, and in the morning you had to wash them thoroughly. Then you heated them alive in water, and waited for froth and scum to appear on the surface. At this precise moment you had to throw in some salt and begin to stir them clockwise ('If you stir them anti-clockwise they'll taste horrible'). After fifteen minutes you had to pierce a hole in the back of each shell, 'to let the devil out and the sauce in', and then you had to rinse them clean in the water in which they had boiled. She did not explain to Pelagia how it was supposed to be possible, when performing this operation, to dip one's fingers into water that was still boiling hot. Drosoula also maintained that you could only eat snails that had been feeding on thyme, and Pelagia, whilst not believing this for a minute, became yet more anxious nonetheless.

Kokolios' wife told her at the well that this was all nonsense, because she remembered how her grandmother had done it: `You don't want to listen to that Drosoula. The woman's almost a Turk.'

No, what you had to do was pinch each snail, and if it moved it was alive. `But how do I pinch it when it's gone inside?' asked Pelagia.

`Wait for it to come out,' replied Kokolios' wife.

`You still pinch it. It's best to be sure. Then you take a pointed knife and clean around the mouth of the shell, and then you take clean water and wash each snail twenty-one times. No more because that will wash away the flavour, and no less because then they will still be dirty, and then you leave them to drain for half an hour, and then you put salt in the mouth of the shell and all this disgusting yellow bubbly slime starts to come out, and that's how you know they're ready. Then you fry them one at a time in oil, with the mouth downwards, and then you add wine and boil them for two minutes, no more no less. And then you eat them.'

`But Drosoula says you ought to . . .'

Pelagia asked Arsenios' wife, and she asked Stamatis' wife. She even looked up `snails' in the medical encyclopaedia, and found no entry for it. She felt like throwing them down onto the floor of the yard and stamping on them. In fact she felt so frustrated that she wanted to cry or shout. She had been told five different ways of preparing the gastropods themselves, and had heard four different recipes: boiled snails, fried snails, Cretan snail stew, and snails pilaf. There was no rice, so the pilaf was out. At the memory of rice her mouth began to water, and she wished all over again that the war would end.

But how do you know how many snails to use? Drosoula said a kilo for four people. But was that with the shells or without them? And how on earth were you supposed to get them out of their shells anyway? And how did you weigh them without getting slime on the scales? The kind of slime that would not even wash off with hot water and soap, and just transferred itself to everything you touched it with, as though it had some mystical ability to multiply itself to infinity.

Pelagia looked down at her shiny cargo of mucilaginous animals, and poked them with her finger when they tried to crawl nut of the pot. She began to feel terribly sorry for them. They were not only very grotesque, with their erectile horns and their helplessly slow weaving of the body when you held them upside down, but they were also deeply pathetic in their sad and pitiful faith in the safety of their carapace. She was reminded of herself as a child, when she had honestly believed that if she closed her eyes, then her father would not be able to see her doing something naughty. Proding at the snails, she was saddened by the cruelty of a world in which the living can only live by predation on creatures weaker than themselves; it seemed a poor way to order a universe.

Her practical and ethical quandaries were broken by an excited cry of, 'Barba C'relli, Barba C'relli,' and she smiled as she recognised the voice of Lemoni in a

state of high excitement and pleasure. The little girl had taken to calling the captain `Old Man' and coming every evening to relate to him in breathless and childish Greek every event of the day. 'Barba' Corelli would listen patiently, failing to understand any of it, and then he would pat her on the head, call her 'koritsimou', and begin to throw her up and down in the air. Pelagia could not see what possible pleasure there was in this for either of them, but some things are inexplicable, and Lemoni's piercing shrieks of joy were a conclusive testament to the improbable. Pelagia, glad of a distraction, went out into the yard.

`She says that she saw a great big spiky rustball and she climbed all over it,' translated Pelagia.

Carlo and Corelli exchanged glances, and blanched. `She's found a mine,' said Carlo.

`Ask her if it was on the beach,' said Corelli, appealing to Pelagia.

`Was it on the beach?' she asked.

`Yes, yes, yes,' said Lemoni gleefully, adding, `and I climbed on it.'

Corelli knew enough Greek to recognise the word for `yes', and he stood up suddenly, and then just as suddenly sat down. 'Puttana,' he exclaimed, taking the little girl into his arms and hugging her tightly, `she could have been killed.'

Carlo put it more realistically; `She should have been killed. It's a miracle.'

He rolled his eyes and added, 'Porco dio.'

Corelli looked at her shamefacedly, and then grinned; 'He will probably say, "What figlio di puttana taught my little girl to say puttana?"

They gathered about it at a respectable distance, and the captain and Carlo went in close in order to inspect it.

`How much explosive, do you think?' asked Carlo.

`God knows,' answered the captain. `Enough to blow a battleship out of the water. We'll have to cordon it off and explode it. I wouldn't know how to make it safe.'

`Magnificent,' exclaimed Carlo, who, despite the horrors of Albania, loved explosions from the bottom of his heart and had never lost his boyish delight in harmless destruction.

`It's Turkish,' said Carlo, pointing to the swirling characters that were still barely visible amongst the great flakes and pits of rust. 'It must have been floating about

for twenty years or more, ever since the Great War.'

`Won't it be a big bang then?' asked Carlo ruefully.

`It will be if you get enough dynamite, testa d'asino.'

Corelli turned to Pelagia, who was still gazing wonderingly at the immense and ancient weapon, `Tell Lemoni that if she ever finds anything, anywhere, that's made of metal and she doesn't know what it is, then she mustn't ever, ever, touch it, and she's got to run and tell me about it straight away. Tell her to tell all the other children the same thing.'

Corelli asked Pelagia to translate for him, and gestured to the villagers to gather round. `First of all,' he told them, 'we are going to have to explode this device. It might be a very big explosion indeed, and so when the time comes I want you all to go back to the top of the cliff and watch from there, because otherwise there could be a serious accidental massacre. Whilst we're waiting for the dynamite, I need some strongmen with spades to dig me a trench about fifty metres from this thing, over there, where I can get down in safety whilst I detonate the device. It has to be about the same size as a grave. Any volunteers?'

He looked from face to face, and the eyes in those faces were averted. It was not a good thing to help an Italian, and, whilst everybody wanted to see the big bang, it would have been a matter of shame to be the first to volunteer. Corelli saw those truculent faces, and flushed. `There'll be a chicken to share between you,' he announced.

Kokolios held up two fingers and said, `Two chickens.'

Corelli nodded in agreement, and Kokolios said, `I will do it with Stamatis, and we want two chickens each.'

Pelagia translated, and the captain grimaced, `Each?'

He rolled his eyes in exasperation and muttered, `Rompiscatole,' under his breath.

And so it was that Kokolios and Stamatis, the Royalist and the Communist but two old friends nonetheless, and united in hunger and entrepreneurial acumen, returned to their houses and came back with spades. In the place indicated by the captain they began to dig a rectangular hole, piling up the sand on the mine side of it to form a protective rampart. When it was only four feet deep it began to fill with water, and the captain looked down at the ochre slush with some disapprobation and dismay. `It's filling up with water,' he remarked unnecessarily to Pelagia, who was standing with everyone else watching the labour of the two old men. She looked at him and laughed, `Everyone knows that if you dig a hole in a beach it fills up with water.'

Corelli frowned, and began to have reservations about this whole idea, which only made him more determined to carry it through.

Carlo returned, not only with the dynamite and the other equipment, but with an entire truckload of troops, all of them heavily armed and wonderfully eager to witness the forthcoming spectacle. Corelli was annoyed: `Why didn't you tell Hitler too, and invite the entire German Army?'

Carlo was impenitent and aggrieved: `They made me bring all these men because it's against regulations to transport explosives without an escort. It's because of the partisans, so don't blame me.'

`Partisans? What partisans? You mean those bandits that loot the villages when we're not looking? Don't make me laugh.'

`It's too close,' persisted the engineer, `the shock wave will pass straight over this hole and suck your eyes and brains out, and then we'll have to dig you out, unless it's your wish to rest there in peace.'

`Listen Corporal, let me point out to you that I am a captain and you are a corporal. I am in charge around here.'

The soldier was undeterred, `And let me point out to you that I am a sapper and you are a mad son of a bitch.'

Corelli's eyes opened at first with surprise, and then opened yet wider with rage. `Insubordination!' he shouted. `I'm putting you up on a charge.'

The sapper shrugged his shoulders and smiled, `You can do what you like, because a dead man can't press charges. If you want to die, OK, I'll watch.'

`Carogna,' spluttered Corelli, and the soldier repeated, `Mad son of a bitch,' and strolled away. Disowning the entire proceeding, he went to the top of the cliff, lit a cigarette, and squinted against the lowering sun as he watched the preparations below. It was lovely. The sea was a multitude of shades of aquamarine and lapis lazuli, and he could see the dark mounds of rocks and the swaying tresses of weeds beneath the waves. He was looking forward to seeing what was going to happen to that idiot officer.

Corelli placed a charge of dynamite beneath the mine, and unreeled the command wire, which was just long enough to reach his soggy trench. Then, anxious that what the sapper had said might just be true, but determined nonetheless to complete his purpose, he and the excitable troop of soldiers piled a thick wall of sand about the mine so that most of the blast would be directed

upwards, until eventually it looked like the exact opposite of a doughnut, an excavated ring containing at its centre a column of sand, domed by a forlorn- looking bristle of rusty and truncated spikes. Drosoula was not the only woman who reflected that it looked very like a megalithic penis in repose.

`Avanti,' cried the captain at last, and the soldiers and spectators wound their way back up the slopes of the cliff, perspiring and panting even though the evening sun had by now lost most of its heat. Down below, Corelli looked little larger than a mouse. The soldiers settled down and argued about whether or not it would be a good beach for playing football. The engineer corporal expatiated vehemently and acidly upon the lunacy of the officer, and offered to take wagers upon his survival. Pelagia began to feel deeply worried, and she noticed that Carlo was sweating with anxiety. She saw him cross himself repeatedly, and mutter prayers. He caught her eye and shot her an imploring glance, as if to say, `You are the only one to stop him.'

Down in his trench, Corelli peeped over the rim of his bunker, and was struck by the implausible propinquity of the mine. The more he looked, the closer and larger it grew, until it actually seemed to be twenty metres high and sitting in his very lap like a grotesque, enormous, and unwelcome whore in a brothel that one has naively mistaken for a bar. He decided not to look at it. His bowels churned in a most disconcerting fashion, and he realised that he was soaked up to the knees and that his boots had filled with irritatingly gritty and startlingly wet water. He put both hands upon the T-piece of the plunger, and depressed it a couple of times in order to accustom it to the idea of producing a discharge. Then he connected the terminals.

Concerned about the vivid possibility of having his eyes and brains sucked out, he practised in his imagination the swift manoeuvre of depressing the plunger and immediately transferring his hands to the sides of his head whilst simultaneously screwing his eyes shut. He raised his gaze to heaven, crossed himself, composed himself, and smartly thrust the plunger down.

There was a sharp crack, an almost infinitesimal pause, and then a basso profundo roar. The folk on the cliff saw a vast column of debris ascend with majestic certainty and grace past their eyes and up into the sky. With awe in their faces they discerned slowly revolving dark plates of steel, effulgent gouts of water glistening with momentary rainbows, sloppy and distended clods of wet sand, powder storms of dry sand, and billowing efflorescences of black smoke

and orange flame.

`Airs!' cried the exhilarated Greeks, and, 'Figlio di puttana di stronzo d'un cane dun culo d'un porco d'un pezzo di merda!' cried the soldiers. Quite suddenly the shock wave swept upon them and bowled them flat on their backs like the impotent mortals who in ancient times were swatted by the hand of cloud- compelling Zeus. 'Putanas yie!' muttered the stupefied Greeks, and, 'Porco cane!' the soldiers. They were just beginning to struggle to their feet when they looked up and saw that the seemingly inexhaustible ascent of materials had ceased. In fact it had not only ceased but was flowering inexorably sideways, spinning out in a magisterial and all-encompassing arc. Horrified and mesmerised, the people on the cliff watched and craned their necks ever backward as the perilous but beautiful dark cloud spread above their own heads. Pelagia, like Carlo and so many of the others, was overcome by an icy and paralysed calm, a terrible and helpless dismay, and then, like them, she flung herself face down upon the thorny turf of the cliff and buried her face in her arms.

A malicious and gigantic pat of wet sand slapped her stingingly across the back, knocking the breath out of her body, and a white-hot shard of metal shot into the soil next to her head, audibly singeing its way to the rock beneath. A splinter snapped into the sole of her shoe, neatly separating it from the heel. Burning motes of rust settled upon her clothes, charring tiny pepper-holes that tormented her flesh and made her squirm from sharp darts of pain that stung and then lingered and mushroomed like the venom of hornets and wasps. Her mind emptied of anything but the vacuum of resignation that afflicts the hopeless in the imminence of death.

It ended, after an eternity, with a gentle and tenderly consoling rain of dry sand that drifted down out of the sky and pattered softly all upon and about them, piling up in symmetrical cones on the backs of their heads, sticking like icing sugar to the irregular splashes and streaks of wet sand, insinuating itself with insidious skill down behind the collars of their clothes and inside the uppers of their shoes. It was warm and almost metaphysically pleasant.

Tremulous and weak as kittens, the people began to stagger to their feet. Some people fell over as soon as they were almost upright, and others fell over because someone nearby had reached out a hand to steady themselves. It was a festa of standing up and falling over, a festa of groping and blundering, a carnival of inexplicably weakened knees and looming pallid faces streaked with congealed

or dripping gloops and glots of sand. It was a solemn and stately lumbering of incredibly and bizarrely modified coiffure and unrecognisably tattered clothing, an otherworldly and Stygian celebrazione of lurching bodies, and staringly virgin eyes anomalously inserted into nigger-minstrel faces.

The calming drizzle of sand was unrelenting; it powdered them, it settled like tiny yellow mites upon their lashes and brows, it clung with tenacious electrostatic force to the hairs within their noses, it ingratiated itself horribly into the saliva of their mouths, it found its way obscenely into the underclothes and horrified the women, it attached itself gratefully to the perspiration of their armpits, and fortuitously it rejuvenated the old by filling up their wrinkles.

The people clung wordlessly together, dazed with astonishment, watching the spectacular black cloud of filthy smoke massively growing and spreading, blotting the sun and sky and aborting the light. They wiped the sand from their faces with their sleeves, succeeding only in replacing one streak with another. One or two of them began to inspect their cuts and watch with fascination as the crimson-welling blood rose up beneath their dusting of sand, darkened, and congealed.

No one could recognise anybody else, and Italian and Greek peered into one another's faces, denationalised by coughing, by grime, and by mutual amazement. Suddenly a choking voice cried out.

As though galvanised, the people gathered around the corpse of the smug engineer, his neatly severed head smiling seraphically up through its white powdering of sand. The body lay nearby, chest downwards, guillotined by a smoking disc of rusty and jagged steel that was buried to its radius in the turf. 'He died happy,' came a voice that Pelagia recognised as that of Carlo, 'you can't ask more than that. But he won't be collecting any bets.'

Abruptly seized by dread, Pelagia ran to the edge of the cliff and peered through the falling sand with panic in her heart. What had happened to the captain? She

saw a crater thirty metres wide that had already been filled by the curious sea. There were tangled ribbons of metal scattered for hundreds of metres, variously shaped satellitic craters and mounds, but of the captain and his trench there was not a single sign. 'Carlo!' she howled, and clutched at her chest. Stunned by grief she sank to her knees and began to weep.

Carlo ran down the path to the beach, as much emptied by horror as Pelagia, but more accustomed to the duty of overwhelming it. His mind expanded with the remembrance of the pieta of Francesco, with his shattered head, dying in his arms in Albania, and nothing but running could forestall the hurricane of mourning that was about to burst his heart.

He came to the point where he guessed the trench had been, and stopped. There was nothing. It was all obliterated and unrecognisable. He raised his arms as though reproaching God, and was about to start pounding at his own temples when there was a movement at the corner of his eye.

Corelli was indistinguishable from the wet sand because he was perfectly covered in it. The blast had concussed him, and the updraught had sucked him high into the air and then flung him down upon his back. He was now lying face up, modelled perfectly into the beach by a chamfering and moulding of precipitated sand. Floundering and failing to sit up, he looked very like a monster from a film. Carlo laughed out loud, but at the same time his hilarity was tempered by the anxiety that this man whom he so much loved might yet be terribly injured. He could think of nothing else he could do but pick him up in his arms and carry him into the sea; it brought back once again the memory of carrying Francesco from where he had fallen between the lines, and he heard again the gallant cheering of the Greeks.

In the waves Carlo washed his Captain down, and found him wildly disorientated, but apparently uninjured.

Corelli saw his lips move, but heard no sound at all. In fact he could hear nothing but the prolonged bonging of the biggest bell in the world. 'Speak up,' he said.

Of the aftermath of this episode there is much to be said. Corelli was deaf for two days, and suffered the most extreme mortification at the thought of losing his music forever. For the rest of his life he would suffer periods of tinnitus, an enduring souvenir of Greece. He was put on a charge by General Gandin because of the death of the engineer and for causing the immediate mobilisation of all Axis troops on the island, an unexpected invasion by the Allies having been adduced from that terrific blast and regal mushroom cloud. He was very nearly demoted, but General Gandin concluded that since the Germans were paying the salaries of the Italian garrison, no material benefit would accrue to Italy. In any case, it was already a cause for friction that the Germans would not avow the Italians to promote anyone because of the expense to the chancellery, and the general was not about to present them with even a minimal saving. He charged Corelli for acting on his own initiative without permission, for not handing over the responsibility to the qualified authority, for reckless endangerment, and for conduct unbecoming to an officer. He was sentenced to a severe reprimand that would rest on his file for the length of his military career. Corelli flamboyantly and ingeniously presented the general's desirable secretary with a red rose and a box of contraband Swiss chocolates, and the reprimand disappeared mysteriously from the file after smouldering ominously therein for only three days.

The captain enjoyed the luxury of being pampered and fussed over by Pelagia as never before, and she expressed her relief by means of bombardments of kisses, tender words and promises that easily outshowered the rain of sand.

Gunter Weber brought over his wind-up gramophone and sat by his bed teaching him the words to 'Mein Blondes Baby' and 'Leben Ohne Liebe', and Carlo came in and out reporting the steady and saddening erosion of the crater by the sea. Lemoni called in, from now on an unparalleled expert in the finding of pieces of rusty metal, and forced him to get out of bed to come and identify an old ploughshare, the nosecone of an expended anti-aircraft shell, and a squashed tin can. Her disappointment at the realisation that none of them could be blown up surpassed adult understanding by a measure that might accurately be described as infinite.

But on the evening of that splendid event, the enraged doctor emerged from the kitchen, intending to find Pelagia and give her a piece of his mind, when not only his daughter but an entire crowd of inconceivably filthy, exhausted and ragged folk turned up at the yard. An unrecognisable man as large as Carlo, who later turned out to be Carlo, was bearing in his arms the raving body of someone who later turned out to be the captain. A young woman who looked like some mad and irredeemable slut from the most iniquitously impoverished quarter of Cairo turned out to be Pelagia. A tiny thing that could have been either a boy or a girl dug from an early grave turned out to be Lemoni. He would be busy all night cleaning cuts, and he would earn a spectacular profit in aubergines, which at that time were just coming into season.

But at that moment, confronted by the sorry crowd of disorientated and beggarish soldiers and Greeks, all he could think of was the repellent and astounding spectacle he had just encountered in the kitchen. `Who,' he roared rhetorically, `has had the audacity to fill my house with snails?'

It was true. There were snails everywhere. They were on the windows, under the rims of tables, perpendicularly sideways on the walls and on Psipsina's bowl, in the water jug, glued inadvisedly to the mats, proceeding with determination towards the vegetable basket, and clinging with quixotic relish to the stem of the doctor's pipe and the glasses of the spectacles that in all innocence he had left upon the sill.

Pelagia put her hand to her mouth in guilty horror, and Lemoni, perceiving the silvery, meandering, criss-crossing, glistening trails, and the delightfully random distribution of the beasts themselves, clapped her hands together in joy. `Porca puttana,' she said, and a man who must have been her father clipped her sharply about the side of the head.