Captain Corelli's mandolin (49 page)

Antonia had no intention whatsoever of reaching Pelagia's age, and said so.

`I want to die before I'm twenty-five,' she said. `I don't want to get old and crusty.'

She foresaw an eternity of infinite youth stretching out before her, and, with fire in her eyes, she told Pelagia, `You old people caused all the problems in the first place, and it's up to us young ones to sort them out.'

`Enjoy your dreams,' commented Pelagia, who was not surprised but was still shocked when Antonia, at the age of seventeen, announced not only that she was going to get married, but that she was henceforth a Communist.

`I bet you cry when the King dies,' said Pelagia.

It was at about this time that mysterious postcards in rather truncated Greek began to arrive from all over the world. From Santa Fe came one that said, `You would like it here. All the houses are made of mud.'

From Edinburgh: 'The wind at the top of the castle knocks you off your feet.'

From Vienna: `There is a statue of a Russian soldier here, and everyone calls it "The Monument to the Unknown Rapist" .'

From Rio de Janeiro: `Carnival time. Streets full of urine and heartbreakingly beautiful girls.'

From London: `Mad people; terrible fog.'

From Paris: `Found a shop that only sold trusses and hernia supports.'

From Glasgow: `Knee-deep in soot and fallen drunks.'

From Moscow: `Works of art in the metro.'

From Madrid: `Too hot. Everyone asleep.'

From Cape Town: `Nice fruit, rotten pasta.'

From Calcutta: `Buried in dust. Abysmal diarrhoea.'

Her first thought was that her father's maritime soul had taken to revisiting his favourite foreign climes, and was sending her communications from beyond the grave. But Moscow was hardly by the sea. Her second thought was that they might be from Antonio.

But he too was dead, he had not known sufficient Greek to read or write it, and for what reason would he be whirling about the world from Sydney to Kiev even if he were still alive? Perhaps these anonymous cards were from someone with whom she had corresponded during the writing of the History. Puzzled, but intrigued and pleased, she bound her collections of quirky cards together with rubberbands, and stacked them in a box.

`You've got a secret boyfriend,' maintained Antonia, who was pleased to entertain such a possibility because it might distract attention from her own romance, which both Pelagia and Drosoula were attempting to discourage.

They had met whilst Antonia was earning a little cash by helping to serve coffee in a busy cafe on the plaza of Argostoli. There had been a noisy brass band from Lixouri playing in the square, and the gentleman concerned had had to rise and shout his order in the young girl's ear, at the same moment realising that it was a splendid and appealing young ear that positively cried out for nibbling at night beneath a tree in a dark street. Antonia in her turn had realised that here was a man who smelled of the exactly correct admixture of virility and aftershave, whoa breath was as cool and calming as mint, and whoa perpetually startled brown eyes bespoke both gentleness and humour.

Alexi idled conspicuously at the cafe day after day, choosing the same table for preference, his heart bursting with the longing to see the young and statuesque maiden with her perfect teeth and slender fingers that were made respectively for amorous biting and caressing. She waited for him faithfully, vehemently forbidding the other girls, the waiters, and even the proprietor himself, to serve him. One day he took her hand when she was putting down a cup, looked up at her with dog like adoration, and said, `Marry me.'

He rotated an eloquent hand figuratively in the air, and added, `We have nothing to lose but our chains.'

Alexi was a radical lawyer who could not only prove that when a rich man evaded taxes it was a crime against society, but also that when a poor man did it, it was a valid, meritorious and powerful action against the class-oppressors, deserving not merely the support of every right-thinking citizen, but even the full approval of the law. He could reduce a judge to tears with his heartrending accounts of the unhappy childhood of his clients, and equally could bring a jury to a standing ovation with his acerbic condemnations of police who brutally and unreasonably sought to uphold the law in the course of their duties.

Pelagia saw immediately that Alexi would become an arch-conservative in later life, and it was not his political affiliations to which she objected. The fact was that she could not abide the thought of Alexi and Antonia making love. She was very tall, he was very short. She was only seventeen, and he was thirty-two. She was slim and graceful, he was plump and bald, and inclined to trip over objects that were never there when he looked. She remembered her own passion for Mandras at the same tender age, shuddered, and forbade the marriage outright, determined to obviate a sacrilege and a blasphemy.

The wedding day was nonetheless delightful. In early spring the fields and hillsides were clothed in crocus and viola, white stachys, and yellow sternbergia, and pale lilac colchicum nodded on exiguous stalks amid the already sere grass of the meadows. The couple followed the custom of having fifteen best men and women at the wedding, and Alexi even capered successfully through the dance of Isaiah without disgracing himself or falling over. Antonia, radiant and delighted, kissed even the strangers standing by to gawp, and Alexi, perspiring with alcohol and joy, made a long and poetic speech that he had composed in rhyming epigrams, much of it very wisely in praise of his mother-in-law. She would always remember the exact moment during the celebrations when she had seen suddenly what it was about him that had awakened Antonia's heart it was when he put his arm about her, kissed her on the cheek, and said, `We are going to buy a house in your village, with your permission.'

His sincere humility and his implied doubt that she might not want him near was enough to cause her to adore him. From that time onwards she devoted many happy hours to embroidering his handkerchiefs and mending the holes in the socks that Antonia always tried to persuade him to throw away. `My darling,' she said, if only you would cut your toenails, you would spare me so many scratches, and save my mother from so much pointless work.'

Pelagia waited impatiently for a grandchild, and Drosoula immersed herself in work. In the empty space by the quay that had once been her own house, she erected a straw roof and some romantic lanterns. She begged and borrowed some ancient, rickety tables and chairs, set up a charcoal stove, and grandly founded the taverna that she would run with eccentric and erratic diligence until the day of her death in 1972.

The tourists were just beginning to ebb into Cephallonia. At first it was the rich yacht owners who passed on supercilious information to their friends about the quaintest and most ruritanian places to eat, and then it was the rucksacked spiritual inheritors of the lugubrious Canadian port's way of life. Connoisseurs and aficionados of Lord Byron trickled in, and went. German soldiers who had turned into prosperous and gentle burghers with vast families brought their sons and daughters and told them, `This is where Daddy was in the war, isn't it beautiful?'

Italians arrived on the ferry via Ithaca, bringing with them their nauseating white poodles and their individual ability to eat entire fish that were large enough to feed the five thousand. As the owner of the only taverns in the little port, Drosoula earned enough in the summer to do nothing whatsoever in the winter.

Lemoni, who was now married, stirringly fat, and blessed with three children, helped out with the serving, and Pelagia came down ostensibly to work, but in fact to have the opportunity to speak Italian. The service was not fast; it was dilatory in the extreme. Sometimes Drosoula would send away a child on a bicycle to fetch the fish that had been ordered, and if the oven had not fired properly it was quite possible to wait two hours whilst food was prepared and baked. The guests were treated unapologetically as members of a patient family which it was her business to discipline and supervise, and quite often there was no service at all if Drosoula happened to like a particular customer with whom she was deep in conversation. She soon discovered that foreigners thought of her as exotic, and she would sit at their tables amidst the skeletons of mullet and the torn-up shreds of bread, unselfconsciously and unashamedly feeding scraps of leftovers to Psipsina's mewing and begging descendants, and concocting preposterous tales about local ghosts, Turkish abominations, and the time she had been to Australia to live amongst the kangaroos. The foreigners adored and feared her, with her bovine eyes, her slow shuffle, her turkey's jowls, her bent back, her colossal height, and her spectacular spouts of facial hair. They never complained about her forgetfulness and her indefinite delays, and would say, `She's so nice, poor old thing, it seems a shame to hurry her.'

Meanwhile Pelagia waited for her grandchild that never came. She forgave Antonia for taking up smoking and wearing trousers, and agreed with her that it was a good thing that dowries had been abolished. She smiled when Antonia cried in 1964 over the death of King Paul, even whilst maintaining between her sobs that the monarchy was a corrupting anachronism. She moved temporarily into Antonia's house to comfort her when in 1967 Alexi was arbitrarily but briefly locked up by the Colonels, and again in 1973 when he was imprisoned for wrestling with a policeman during the student occupation of the Law Faculty at Athens University. Later on she would withhold her doubts over Antonia's support of Papandreou's socialist government, and even concede that Antonia had a point when she insisted upon going to the mainland in order to participate indecorously in feminist demonstrations. She felt that she could not pour scorn upon such touchingly utopian and optimistic faith, and in any case it was her own fault; she was reaping the inevitable whirlwind consequent upon having taught the girl to think. In addition, she still liked the idea that she had cherished in her own youth, that everything was possible.

But she did object to Antonia's insistence that she did not have to provide a grandchild. `It's my body,' maintained Antonia, `and it's not fair to expect me to be constrained by an accident of biology, is it? Anyway, the world's already overpopulated, and it's my right to have a choice isn't it? Alexi agrees with me, so don't think you can go and bully him.'

`Everything is all right, isn't it?' asked Pelagia.

`Mama, what do you mean? No, I'm not a virgin, and there isn't a problem . . . like that. It's still very good, if you must know. I don't want to be mean, but you're so old-fashioned sometimes.'

`No, I don't want to know. I'm an old woman, and I don't need to hear. I just want to be sure. Don't you think I have a right?'

`It's my body,' repeated Antonia, turning the eternal wheel of their dispute back to its original point.

`I'm getting old,' Pelagia would say, `that's all.'

`You'll live longer than I will, Mama.'

But it was Drosoula who died first, perfectly upright in her rocking chair, so quietly that it seemed she was apologising for having lived at all. She was an indomitable woman who had lived a few short years of happiness with a husband that she had loved, a woman who had disowned her own son as a matter of principle, and lived out the rest of her days in ungrudging service to those who had adopted her by apparent accident, even earning them their bread. She had husbanded the little family like a patient shepherd, and gathered it to her capacious bosom like a mother. After she was buried in the same cemetery as the doctor, Pelagia realised with desperate clarity that she not only had another flame to tend, but that she was alone. She had no idea any more how to run a life, and it was with fear and hopelessness in her heart that she took over Drosoula's taverns and fumbled for a living.

Alexi, now completely bald and having travelled from the ideological arctic of the puritanical Communist party into the sub-tropical clime of the Socialist party, discovered with some initial anxiety and guilt that his success as a lawyer had indiscernibly precipitated him into the very class that he had professed to despise. He was a sleek bourgeois with a big Citroen, a purportedly earthquake-proof house complete with terracotta pots bursting with geraniums, four suits, and a loathing of the corruption and incompetence embodied by the party of his heart. He spoke volubly in favour of the socialists at meetings and parties, but in the ballot box he furtively marked his cross against Karamantis, and then affected terrible despair when the latter won the vote. He hired an accountant and became as efficient in evading taxes as any other conscientious Greek with a long tradition to uphold.

Antonia held out for four years after her womb began to clamour for an occupant, seeing no reason to cave in to a body that made such unreasonable and ideologically suspect demands, until eventually she conspired with it and allowed it to cause her to forget to take her pills. There was no one, therefore, more genuinely surprised than she when her belly swelled unseasonably and a child began to form. She and Alexi started to hold hands again in public, stared dewy-eyed at babies and baby clothes, and compiled long lists of names, only to cross them out on the grounds that, `I knew someone called that, and they were awful.'

`It's going to be a girl,' said Pelagia upon those frequent occasions when she pressed her ear to Antonia's ever-expanding belly. `It's so quiet, it can't be anything else. Really you must call her Drosoula.'

`But Drosoula was so big, and. . . '

`Ugly? It doesn't matter. We loved her all the same. Her name should live. When this child is older, she should know how she got her name and who it belonged to.'

`O, I don't know, Mama . . . ' `I am an old woman,' declared Pelagia, who gained substantial gratification from reiterating this refrain. `It might be my last wish.'

`You're sixty. These days that isn't old.'

`Well, I feel old.'

`Well, you don't look it.'

`I didn't bring you up to be a liar,' said Pelagia, terribly pleased nonetheless.

`I'm thirty-four,' said Antonia, `that's old. Sixty is just a number.'

The little girl transpired without a shadow of a doubt to be a little boy, complete with a fascinatingly wrinkled scrotum and a slim penis that would undoubtedly prove serviceable in later years. Pelagia cradled the infant in her arms, feeling all the sadness of a woman who has remained a virgin and technically childless all her life, and began to refer to it as Iannis. She referred to it so often by that name that it soon seemed obvious to its parents that it could not be Kyriakos or Vassos or Suatis or Dionisios. If you called it Iannis, it smiled and blew slimy bubbles that burst and trickled down its chin, and so Iannis it was. It had a determined and obstinate grandmother who would only ever talk to it in Italian, and parents who talked earnestly about sending it to a private school, even though there was thing really wrong with the state ones.