Captain Corelli's mandolin (5 page)

I, Carlo Piero Guercio, testify that in the Army I found my family. I have a father and mother, four sisters, and three brothers, but I have not had a family since puberty. I had to live among them secretly, like one who conceals leprosy. It was not their fault that I was made into a thespian. I had to dance with girls at festal, I had to flirt with girls in the playground of the school and when taking the evening passeggiata in the piazza. I had to answer my grandmother when she asked me what kind of girl I would like to marry and whether I wanted sons or daughters. I had to listen with delight to my friends describing the intricacies of the female pudenda, I had to learn to relate fabulous histories of what I had done with girls. I learned to be more lonely than it ought to be possible to feel.

In the Army there was the same gross talk, but it was a world without women. To a soldier a woman is an imaginary being. It is permissible to be sentimental about your mother, but that's all. Otherwise there are the inmates of the military brothels, the fictitious or unfaithful sweethearts at home, and the girls at whom one catcalls in the streets. I am not a misogynist, but you should understand that to me the company of a woman is painful because it reminds me of what I am not, and of what I would have been if God had not meddled in my mother's womb.

I was very lucky at first. I was not sent to Abyssinia or North Africa, but to Albania. There was no fighting to speak of and we were blissfully oblivious to the notion that the Duce might order us to invade Greece: It seemed more likely that we would eventually become involved in Yugoslavia, and that they would be as useless and cowardly as the Albanians. It was common knowledge that the Yugoslavs hated each other more than they could ever hate a foreigner or an invader.

It soon became clear that everything was in chaos. No sooner had I settled down and made friends in one unit than I was transferred to help make up numbers in another, and then I was transferred again. We had almost no transport and we were made to march from the Yugoslav border to the Greek one and back again, seemingly at a whim of the High Command. I think I must have been in about seven units before I was finally settled in the Julia Division. There were a lot of reasons why the Greek campaign was a fiasco, but one of them was that personnel were moved around so much that there was no possibility of developing any esprit de corps. Initially I did not have time to make anyone a Jonathan to my David.

But with the Julia Division I enjoyed every moment. No civilian can comprehend the joy of being a soldier. That is, quite simply, an irreducible fact. A further fact is, that regardless of the matter of sex, soldiers grow to love each other; and, regardless of the matter of sex, this is a love without parallel in civil life. You are all young and strong, overflowing with life, and you are all in the shit together, You come to know every nuance of each others' moods; You know exactly what the other is going to say; You know exactly who will laugh and for how long over which particular type of joke; you acquaint yourself intimately with the smell of each man's feet and perspiration; you can put your hand on someone's face in the dark, and know who it is; you recognise someone's equipment hanging on the back of a chair, even though his is the same as everyone else's; you can tell whose stubble it is in the washing bowl; you know precisely who will swap you a carrot for your potato, a packet of cigarettes for your spare pair of socks, a postcard of Sierra for a pencil. You become accustomed to seeing each other frankly, and nothing is hidden. Unless your desires are the same as mine.

We were all young together. We would never be more handsome, we would never be more lean and strong, we would never again have such water-fights, we would never again feel so invincible and immortal. We could march fifty miles in one day, singing battle songs and lewd songs, swinging along together or trudging, limbs in unison, the cockerel feathers of our helmets black and glistening, tossing. We could piss together on the wheels of the Colonel's car, as drunk as cardinals; we could shit unashamed in each others' presence; we could read each others' letters so that it seemed that every son's mother wrote to all of us; we could dig a trench all night in solid rock in the pouring rain and march away at dawn without ever having slept in it; on live-firing exercises we could lob mortar bombs at rabbits without permission; we could bathe naked and beautiful as Phoebus and someone would point at someone's penis and say, `Hey you, why haven't you handed that in to the armoury?' and we all would laugh and make nothing of it, and someone else would say, `Watch out or there'll be a negligent discharge,' and the victim of the joke would say, `No such luck.'

We were new and beautiful, we loved each other more than brothers, that's for sure. What spoiled it always was that none of us knew why we were in Albania, none of us had an easy conscience about this rebuilding of the Roman Empire. We often had fights with the mantas of the Fascist Lens. They were vainglorious and useless and stupid, and many of us were Communists. No one minds dying in a noble cause, but we were haunted behind the eyes by the strange pointlessness of loving a life that had no reasonable excuse. My point is that we were like gladiators, prepared to do our duty, prepared to be stoical, but always perplexed. Count Ciano played golf, Mussolini conducted vendettas against cats, and we were in an unmapped waste, wasting time until the time ran out and we were thrown into mismanaged battle against a people that fought like gods.

I am not a cynic, but I do know that history is the propaganda of the victors. I know that if we win the war there will be shocking stories of British atrocities, volumes written to show the inevitability and justice of our cause, irrefutable evidence compiled to reveal the conspiracies of Jewish plutocrats, photographs of piles of bones found in mass graves in the suburbs of London. Equally I know that the reverse will be true if the British win. I know that the Duce has made it dear that the Greek campaign was a resounding victory for Italy. But he was not there. He does not know what happened. He does not know that the ultimate truth is that history ought to consist only of the anecdotes of the little people who are caught up in it. He ought to know that the truth is that we were losing badly until the Germans invaded from Bulgaria. He will never acknowledge this because the `truth' belongs to the victors. But I was there, and I know what was happening in my part of the war. For me that war was an experience that shaped the whole course of my thought, it was the deepest personal shock that I have ever had, the worst and most intimate tragedy of my life. It destroyed my patriotism, it changed my ideals, it made me question the whole notion of duty, and it horrified me and made me sad.

Socrates said that the genius of tragedy is the same as that of comedy, but the remark is left unexplained in the text because the people to whom it was addressed were either asleep or drunk when he said it. It sounds like the kind of thing that aristocrats say to each other at parties, but I can illustrate its perfect truth simply by relating what befell during that campaign in northern Greece.

Let me begin by saying that I, Carlo Piero Guercio, upon joining the Julia Division, fell in love with a young married corporal who accepted me as his best friend without ever once suspecting that he constituted the entire population of my most fevered dreams. His name was Francesco and he came from Genoa, complete with a Genoese accent and an understanding of the sea that was of no possible use in Epirus. There was no doubt at all that he should have been in the Navy, but the skewed logic of the times decreed that he should volunteer for the Navy, get posted to the carabinieri, but find himself in the Army. He had arrived via a regiment of Alpini and a regiment of Bersaglieri, not counting two days with the Grenadiers.

He was an entirely beautiful boy. His skin was darker than mine, like that of a southerner, but he was slender and smooth-skinned. I recollect that he had only three hairs in the centre of his chest and that his legs were completely hairless. You could see every sinew of his body, and I used to wonder particularly at those muscles that one only sees on particularly fit individuals; the parallel tracks down the back of the forearm, the ones at the side of the abdomen that curve and taper to the groin. He was like one of those elegant, lanky cats that give the impression of immense but casual strength.

I was attracted most of all to his face. He had a black and misbehaving forelock that fell about his eyes. These were very dark, set in the slavic fashion above prominent bones. His mouth was wide, composed into a permanent, ironical, and lopsided smile, and he had an Etruscan nose that seemed inexplicably to have fallen a little crooked at the bridge. His hands were large, with slender spatulate fingers that I could only too easily imagine lingering upon my body. I saw him mend a tiny link on a filigree gold chain once, and I can testify that his fingers had all the immaculate precision of an embroiderer. He had the most delicate fingernails imaginable.

You will understand that we men were often naked together in one context or another and that I knew and memorised every last detail of every part of him; but I rebel against the charges of perversion and obscenity that would be made against my memory, and I will keep these recollections to myself. To me they are not obscene; they are precious, exquisite and pure. In any case, no one would know what they mean. They are for the private museum that each of us carries in our heads, and to which not even the experts or the crowned heads of Europe are permitted access.

Francesco was a man of impetuosities, ludicrous jests, and complete irreverence. He made no secret of respecting no one, and could entertain us by mimicking the cockerel antics of the Duce and the antic Prussianisms of Adolf Hitler. He could reproduce the gestures and intonations of Visconti Prasca and deliver absurd speeches in the Prasca manner, full of extravagant optimism, wild plans, and obsequious references to the hierarchy. Everybody loved him, he never got promotion, and nor did he care. He adopted a wild mouse and called it Mario; part of the time it lived in his pocket, but when we were on route marches we used to see it poking its whiskers out of the top of his backpack and washing its face. It used to eat the peel of fruit and vegetables and was annoyingly fond of leather. I still have a little round hole at the top of one of my boots.

We soldiers knew next to nothing about what was going on in the centres of power. We received so many orders and counter-orders that there were times when we did not obey any of them at all, knowing that they were likely to be countermanded almost immediately. Albania was a sort of holiday camp without any amenities, and we assumed that these orders had the sole purpose of attempting to keep us busy and were of no serious import.

However, it seems clear in retrospect that an invasion of Greece must have been the ultimate intention; there were clues everywhere, if only we had seen them. In the first place there was all that propaganda about the Mediterranean being the `Mare Nostrum' and the fact that all our road-building, which was supposedly for the benefit of the Albanians, produced nothing but highways towards the Greek border. In the second place the troops started singing battle songs of unknown provenance and anonymous composer-ship, with words like `We'll go to the Aegean Sea, we'll seize Piraeus, and if things go right we'll have Athens too: We used to curse the Greeks for sheltering the ruritanian King Zog, and the newspapers were always full of alleged British attacks on our shipping from Greek waters. I say 'alleged' because nowadays I don't believe they really happened. I have a friend in the Navy who told me that as far as he knew none of our ships had been lost.

I also don't believe any more that story that the Greeks killed Daut Haggia. I think that we did it and tried to blame it on the Greeks. This is a terrible thing for me to say because it shows how much I have lost my patriotic faith, but the fact is that I now know the Greek version of the events, which I got from Dottor Iannis when I went to see him about a bad toenail. It turns out that the man Hoggia was not an Albanian irredentist patriot at all. He had been convicted over twenty years of the murder of five Muslims, cattle-theft, brigandage, extortion, attempted murder, demanding money with menaces, carrying forbidden weapons, and rape. And this is the man that they tried to fool us into thinking of as a martyr. We were never told that the Creeks had arrested two Albanians for this man's murder, and were waiting for an extradition request. In any case I wonder now how the entire Italian nation could have been so naive, and I wonder why we were supposed to be so concerned about the Albanians when we had just taken their country and it had become obvious to all of us that they were only interested in murdering each other. The two men who murdered the `patriot' Hoggia apparently poisoned him and then cut off his head, which is mild indeed by Albanian standards.

A great many things caused me to lose faith, and I commit to paper here an account involving Francesco and myself which demonstrates clearly that it was our side that started the war, and not the Greeks. If we win the war these facts will never come to light, I know, because these papers will be suppressed. But if we lose there may be a chance that the world will learn the truth.

It is hard enough to live at peace with yourself when you are a sexual outsider, but it is even harder when you know that in the line of duty you have carried out the most abominable and filthy deeds. Nowadays I frequently have intimations of impending death, and below you will find my confessions of a guilt for which I have already received absolution from a priest, but which will never be forgiven either by the Greeks or by the families of the Italian soldiers concerned.

Father Arsenios ruminated bitterly behind the iconostasis; how was he supposed to go out amongst the people, comforting the sick and the dying, arbitrating in disputes, disseminating the Word of God, advocating the reunion of Greece, when it seemed indubitable that he no longer had any respect? He pondered briefly the romantic possibility of disappearing; he could go to Piraeus and work as a clerk; he could become a fisherman; he could go to America and make a new beginning. He entertained an ephemeral image of himself, liberated from his grotesque folds of lard, singing bawdy rebetika in the brothels of Athens, swigging kokkinelli and charming the young girls. Conversely he envisaged himself retiring to a hermitage in the mountains of Epirus, being fed by the ravens, and attaining a splendid sainthood. He thought about the miracles that might be performed in his name, and hit upon the unpleasant notion chat he might become the patron saint of the obscenely fat. Perhaps he could write great poetry instead, and become as famous and respected as Kostis Palamas. But why stop there? He might be another Homer. Behind the iconostasis he began to rumble in his deep bass voice, `It vexes me to see how mean are these creatures of a day towards us Gods, when they charge against us the evils (far beyond our worst doomings) which their own exceeding wantonness has heaped upon themselves.'

He faltered and stopped, furrowing his brow; was the next bit about Aegisthus, or was it the bit about Athene having a conversation with Zeus? `My child,' protested Zeus, the cloud-compeller, `what sharp judgements you let slip between your teeth . . .'

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 tips 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 naive 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 tunnelled 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 as exponential rare. `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 donor'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 book, 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 resented 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 39 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 bast 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 said. `You can lean an 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 telltale mural 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 in 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, fording 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 teeter 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 rutted 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 donor 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?'