Sicilian Carousel by Lawrence Durrell
The opening stages of our journey were sensibly enough planned; this first day was an easy one in terms of time and distance. We wove across the vast and verdant Catanian Plain eagerly watching the skyline for the appearance of a stray Laestrygonian—the terrible ogres of the Homeric legend; I had a feeling that Ulysses had a brush with them but wasn’t sure and made a note in my little schoolchild’s calpin to look them up in more detail. I did not dare to ask the Bishop or Roberto. The Simeto, a sturdy little river, together with two smaller tributaries waters the plain, and it is celebrated for an occasional piece of choice amber floating in it, which it has quarried somewhere on its journey. But where? Nobody knows.
The old road turns inwards upon itself and slopes away towards Lentini and Carlentini whence a brutally dusty and bumpy road leads us onwards into the hills to draw rein at our first Greek site—a resurrected city not unlike Cameirus in Rhodes, but nowhere near as beautiful; yet a little redeemed by the site and the old necropolis. What landscape tasters the ancient Greeks were! They chose sites like a soldier chooses cover. The basic elements were always the same, southern exposure, cover from the prevailing wind, height for coolness and to defeat the humidity of the littoral. They had none of our (albeit very recent) passion for sea bathing; the sea was a mysterious something else pitched between a goddess of luck and a highway. It is not hard to imagine how they were—with their combination of poetry and practicality. There was no barrier, it seems, between the notions of the sacred and the profane either.
After a short briefing we were turned loose among the ruins like a flock of sheep—hardly more intelligent either, you might have thought, to watch us mooching about. The Microscopes had begun to feel hungry, and the pile of box lunches and flasks of Chianti were being unloaded and placed in the shade of a tree against the moment when culture had been paid its due. In the bright sunlight the blonde German girl reminded me a little of Martine for she had the same thick buttercup hair and white-rose coloring which had made my friend such a striking beauty. But not the slow rather urchin smile with the two swift dimples that greeted the lightest, the briefest jest. Nor the blue eyes which in certain lights reminded one of Parma violets. But I was sure that here she had sat upon a tomb while her children played about among the ruins, smoking and pondering, or perhaps reading a page or two of the very same Goethe—as unconditional an addict of Sicily as she herself had become.
It was, however, a well-calculated shift of accent, of rhythm—I meant to spend the first day in the open air, lively with bees in the dazing heat, and where the shade of the trees rested like a damp cloth on the back of the neck. Little did it matter that the pizzas were a trifle soggy—but I am wrong: for the first faint murmurs of protest came from the French camp about precisely this factor. And the two graceful Parisians added that the paper napkins had been forgotten. Roberto swallowed this with resignation. Far away down the mildly rolling hillocks glittered the sea on rather a sad little bit of sandy littoral, and here we were promised an afternoon swim when we had digested our lunch, a prospect which invigorated me and raised the spirits of my companion. But some of us looked rather discountenanced by the thought, and Beddoes swore roundly that he wasn’t going to swim in the sea with all its sharks; he wanted a pool, a hotel pool. He had paid for a pool and he was damn well going to insist on a pool or else.… So it went on.
Deeds, on the contrary, declared that things were not so bad after all; that we were all quite decent chaps and that no great calamities or internal battles need be expected. It was true. Even the Bishop, who in my own mind might be the one to inflict deep irritations on us because of his knowledgeability and insularity and patronizing air—even he went out of his way to humor Roberto in terms which almost made him a fellow scholar. I could see that he was a pleasant and conscientious man underneath an evident Pauline-type neurosis which is almost endemic in the Church of England, and usually comes from reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover in paperback. Deeds had got quite a selection of guides to the island in English and French and these we riffled while we ate. He professed himself extremely dissatisfied by them all.
“It took me some time to analyze why—it’s the sheer multiplicity of the subject matter. The damned island overflows with examples of the same type of thing—you have six cathedrals where in other places you would save up your admiration for the one or two prime examples. How can a guidebook do justice to them all? It just can’t, old man. Here you get six for the price of one, and the very excellence of what it has ends by fatiguing you.” I wondered if he was right. The illustrations, however, to his books seemed to bear him out to a certain extent. Perhaps that is why Martine had remarked more than once in her letters, “What we lack here is a ‘pocket’ Sicily; there hasn’t been one since Goethe. The present guides lack poetry, and the existing star system devised for ruins is rather unsatisfactory. Please hurry up.” But it was not a task that could be undertaken on such brief acquaintance with the place; I would never manage more than a journal of voyage with a brief snapshot of her from time to time—the absentee landlord of Naxos. Nor did I dare so much as to regret her death—I could hear the chuckle which would certainly have greeted such a sentiment. On many domains Martine might have been deficient and lacking in human experience; but on what I considered prime matters like death and love she was wise beyond experience. She would frequently disappear to India without leaving me a word; there was some Indian princeling there who was as attached to her as I was. When she returned it was always with carpets and shawls and screens to deck out her house on the promontory. But this was not all, for her Prince sent her back laden with issues of the Pali texts, annotated in a spidery hand by his father, and bearing a royal bookplate. These we would read together and discuss at great length, lying in the deep grass of the ruined Abbey of Bellapais, or among the shattered pillars of Salamis. The range and prolixity of Indian thought haunted her with its promises of a serenity at the heart of self-realization, but there was no way to advance in this direction without self-discipline. She had quite defeated tobacco and only drank very modestly, out of mere politeness, and indeed with something approaching distaste. At least she eyed my heroic potations with an expression which might be described as compassion bordering on scorn!
Her Prince encouraged these fragile aspirations which were (so she hoped) going to transform the spoiled society girl, anesthetized by too many parties, into someone very valuable to herself and to others. No, the aspirations did not go as far as sainthood. But she planned for calm, balance, and a personal freedom in her solitude. She, like me, had wanted to settle in Greece, but the vagaries of the Control Exchange had defeated these intentions. But Cyprus was a sterling-area Greece, and that decided us.… Though I had not actually met her for about six months—during which we were both taken up with buying a house, or land, and in general feeling our way towards an island residence—I had seen her about the little harbor of Kyrenia, always alone, and usually reading a book. She wore a Wren’s white mess jacket with brass buttons and a dark swimsuit which showed off to perfection not only her line but also the blonde skin which the sun turned to brown sugar. Nobody could tell me who she was—indeed I knew nobody to ask. But once or twice a week I passed her as she lay asleep on the mole, myself also with a towel and a book. Then one day we found ourselves sitting together at a lunch party and felt the tug of a familiarity which we had been too polite to profit by: we already knew each other so well by sight. She was amused and pleased when she found out that I spoke Greek and could become a friendly Caliban for her; myself, as I was passing through a particularly lonely period of my life, I was delighted by such a chance friendship. From then on we met once or twice a week for dinner—and when there was any need for an interpreter she had no hesitation in driving up to Bellapais and digging me out.
Our friendship prospered in the very notion that we were going to become neighbors; and that we were both going to live alone and work. I showed her a half-finished novel called Justine, while
Inevitably our book discussions found a place in the general context of all the others—of the readings of Indian texts, of the amateur attempts upon the world of breathing exercises, attempts at meditation. It was an idyllic time spent in blue weather on the green grass of the ancient Abbey; I had been elected what the Chinese called (so she said) “a friend of the heart.” And indeed so had Piers who made frequent summer appearances in order to advise her about her house and add afterthoughts to his own beautiful house in Lapithos. It was the last summer before the Fall—before the political situation, envenomed by neglect and stupidity, burst into flame and turned into a fully-fledged insurrection. For a longish while, however, the manifestations of the crisis remained quite moderate—for the Cypriot Greeks were most peaceable people and they knew that the British people in the island were not the architects of the policies which ruled it. But with the arrival of troops and the gradually mounting toll of incidents and counter incidents tempers wore thin and at last wore out altogether. All our hopes of a peaceful and productive life in this paradisiacal place went up in smoke.
As the problems connected with the buying of her land, and permission to build upon it, proved somewhat long—for the Government, if honest, was somewhat dilatory—Piers persuaded Martine to build an encampment of mock Indonesian huts on her land where she could live during the summer and see her house emerge from the scrub and arbutus of the little promontory. The island, we discovered, produced an excellent rush matting in several thicknesses and the heaviest proved tough and weatherproof for walls and roofing. The idea was miraculous in its simplicity—the local carpenters could run up a whole room in a day. It was like playing at dolls’ houses; for a couple of hundred pounds Martine built herself a temporary matting house with room enough to invite her summer guests, with kitchens and bathrooms—everything, for there was water on the land which Piers could later draw off for the big house.
Intoxicated by this discovery, she at once launched into what gradually turned into a miniature village almost, with a main square from which all the huts led off, with grouped water points and drainage and septic tanks. Piers, the born architect and planner, was lost in admiration and envy at this freestyle building and often, when he ran into problems with the big house, would swear and ask her why the devil she could not live forever in a matting house, repairing it at little cost as fast as it deteriorated? There were times when she almost agreed, when the big house seemed too solid and too consciously thought out—for at heart, like all the family of Gainsboroughs, Martine was something of a gipsy. The instinct had perhaps worn itself out a little—though her father, old Sir Felix, had expressly chosen a traveling profession—diplomacy—which sent him to a new country every few years. She had been marked by this wandering life, and she spoke with eloquence and insight of what it had meant to her and to her brother, in terms of actual domicile, to inhabit buildings which were beautifully appointed but in which nothing belonged to one—everything belonged to the Office of Works, even the choice plate. One brought one’s books and pictures into play to be sure, but an embassy for all its comfort could never be a home. But this was how she knew Rome, Moscow, Buenos Aires: and this was how she had become a linguist. But her childhood had been full of this strange sense of not belonging; lying awake at night listening for the official Rolls which wheeled on to the gravel after midnight, bringing their parents back from some boring reception—so fatigued by their social duties that they could hardly exchange a word and often even dined alone in silence; simply to recover from the deep wasting fatigue of a life which was a mirror life. Only at holiday times did things seem to come alive, but then the cottage in Devon was owned, it was theirs like the mill in Ireland and the flat in Capri. The subtle difference cut very deep; but was it really necessary to own the house one lived in in order to feel happy? Surely there was something false about the proposition? Then perhaps it was simply the artifices and limitations of the diplomatic life? She had begun to look upon diplomats as kindly lampreys gesturing in the dark pools of the profession among the fucus and drifting weeds of protocol and preciousness. Nor was this really fair—for Sir Felix was far from being a mountebank, hence no doubt his frequent relegation to quite minor missions in the role of a lifesaver or life-giver—to ginger them up, or to create new openings as he had in Latin America. But Martine in a dim incoherent way wanted a different life: and here it was.
These long-lost events, which my memory had so carelessly and capriciously stored away, came back to me now with full force as we munched our stale pizzas and drank heartening draughts of Chianti; it was a memory touched off by the fact that here, like in Cyprus, we were seated on the hot time-worn stones of a vanished Greek civilization, in the drowsy heat of the Mediterranean sun. Sacked temples, quake-shattered citadels, ruined fortresses, exhausted wells … the old tragic pattern was the same, a long barren lesson in history which seeks always for the stable and is undermined by the shifts and betrayals of man’s consciousness itself as reflected in the ebb and flow of temporal events. And yet—what was he not capable of, man? Any benevolent tyrant who could enjoy a thirty-year rule was capable of launching humanity on a new vector, on to the peaceful pursuits of husbandry and art and science. Then, abruptly, like the explosions from some Etna of the mind, the whole thing overturned and both guilty and innocent were drenched in blood. One would have to believe very deeply in Nature to expect a meaning to emerge from all this senseless carnage; if one were really truthful one could not help but see her as some frightful demented sow gobbling up her own young at every remove. But Martine, underneath the spoilt playgirl or fashion plate, was hunting after some absolute belief in the Tightness of Process—and only the philosophy of the Indians seemed to offer that.
Nearby in a mulberry tree, half-dead and desiccated by the sun, there was a great concourse of ravens or rooks—I could not tell which. They were like Methodist parsons holding one of their amusing conventions in some Harrogate hotel. They submitted with modest attention to the theological addresses of two obvious elders of the church. Almost they made notes. We watched them with wonder and curiosity, trying to imagine what could be the subject of their grave colloquy. In vain. After a long moment, and in response to no immediately visible signal, the whole company wheeled suddenly up into the sky and performed several slow and rather irresolute gyrations—as if they were trying to locate a beam of light or sound, an electrical impulse which would orient them. They wheeled several times in a most indecisive manner; then suddenly a breakaway group detached itself and headed northward, and the rest, their minds set at rest, wheeled into line and followed them. Direction assured they broke into several clusters the better to talk; one could hear their grave club chatter as they diminished in the distance, leaving the field clear for the drone of bees and the sharp stridulations of the cicada. I was dozing. I was nearly asleep in fact. It was a good way to start off, with a siesta in Sicily.
It had become very hot up there in the dusty foothills, hotter than Provence at this hour in summer. The light wind which had cooled us all morning had subsided and the whole of nature, it seemed, was itself subsiding into the death-like composure of the siesta hour. Sensible men in such places preferred to sleep in a shuttered room until almost sunset when the coolness once more started and when a walk upon the Gorso and a Cinzano at a cafe became imperatives. I lay for a while in the shade with my eyes closed, recalling another a