Mani (11 page)

 

 

[1]
The physical fact of death has no palliations or disguises. The sealed coffin of western Europe and the cosmetics and mummifications of North America are undreamed of. Every Greek child has heard again and again the agony of the death-rattle and seen the shrunken grey chaps, the fallen jaw and the closed eyelids of their elders. The coffin is left open until the last minute and only lowered into the grave when everyone has kissed the dead cheeks good-bye. The smell and touch of death are known to all, and dissolution too, for, three years after burial, the bones are ceremonially dug up to join those of the family. Even I have seen the bare skulls of two old friends; one in Crete, one in the Argolis.

[2]
In printed anthologies these eight-foot verses are often split up into two lines, divided after the fourth foot.

[3]
Improvised rhyming couplets in the ordinary fifteen-syllable metre of which each must be complete and epigrammatical, as they are sung antiphonally, or couplet after couplet, by each member of a company.

[4]
In this instance,
kefi
means well-being, high spirits. It has several senses.

G
EORGE
had taken us under his wing. When we set out for the bus that was to carry us further south, there he was wrestling with us for our bags, insisting hotly that we were strangers and guests and that it would be a disgrace to him if we carried them even a step. “It would bring dishonour on our town,” he said. Again there was the little flutter of salutation as we threaded the lanes of Areopolis. In the space by the bus stop an old man was sitting with his hands crossed over the crook of his stick enjoying the afterglow.

“See that old man?” our guide whispered. “Guess how old he is.”

“Eighty? Eighty-five?”

“He's a hundred and twenty-seven.”

The old man confirmed this through toothless gums and followed his affirmation with a complacent chuckle. The departure of the bus cut off any further talk, and we rattled across the cobbles knee-deep in poultry on the front seats with bunches of basil and marjoram and rosemary on our laps which Eleni the dirge-singer had sent as a leaving-present. We shook free of the outskirts of the town, and the remains of daylight were fading fast over the gulf below us in a smoky trail of amber and blue-green. A hundred and twenty-seven! He was born two years before Byron died in Missolonghi. George IV, Charles X, and Alexander II were on their thrones, Wellington, Metternich and Talleyrand scarcely more than middle-aged.
His earliest memories would include Petrobey at the head of his rough Maniot army, with each guerrilla a bristling porcupine of long-barrelled guns, scimitars, khanjars, yataghans and silver-bossed pistols, lugging bronze cannon across the cobbles of Tsimova... The first thing he overheard must have been tales of burning towns and pyramids of severed heads, the slaughter of Ibrahim's negro cavalry, decapitations and impalements. Perhaps he heard, across the gulf and the mountains, the sudden roar of the guns from Navarino, and dimly realized, with the sudden clangour of bells, that Greece was free.... Speculation proliferated in the falling shadows. The decomposing bus travelled, bucking and rearing, deeper into the Deep Mani. Restless hens clucked underfoot, olive trees whizzed past in the dark. At one stop, outside a rural café, a woman lifted a small boy to the level of our window and told him to take a good look at the strangers. “He's never seen any before,” she said, apologetically; then added, “neither have I....”

We pulled up at last at the furthest point the bus could manage on that battered road in the solitary tree-lined street of the village of Pyrgos and found quarters—palliasses stuffed with straw and laid on planks—in the khani. Like so many of them, it was half tavern, half grocer's shop, lit by a hurricane lamp on a table where old men were drinking. The khani-keeper and his wife were a kind, gentle couple, greatly distressed at luxurious Europeans putting up with their summary accommodation. After a supper of beans we were alone in the shop except for our hostess with a black clout tied round her head and her feverish son who lay beside her in the shadows under a pile of blankets. She was winding wool. A black and white cat slept on a sack of groceries. Joan wrote letters and I worked at my notes by the uncertain lamplight. The windows opened on to a moonlit waste of rock and stone, and a little distance off a tall thin tower, silvered by the moon along one of its rectangular flanks, rose into the boiling night. Our pens
scratched industriously. Suddenly the innkeeper's wife broke silence.

“What are you writing?” she asked Joan.

“A letter to England.”

“Well, tell them in London that you're in the Mani, a very hot place where there's nothing but stones.”

“That's just what I'm saying.”

* * *

The surrounding rocks appeared even bleaker by day than they had done by moonlight. The rough skyline of the Taygetus had sunk considerably, and the successive humps went leapfrogging southwards in diminishing bounds. The tall tower stood on the edge of the same seaward-sloping ledge as the village and here and there about the stony landscape similar solitary towers rose like pencils. A young policeman on leave offered to accompany us to the nearest and tallest, after which (as “
Pyrgos
” is the Greek for “tower”) the village, like a hundred others in Greece, is presumably named.

It stood there like a blank rectangular Italian campanile or a tall Early English belfry stripped of its gargoyles and finials. It looked doubly tall as there was no pointed doorway, no west window or church's roof-tree to break the line of the eye from base to summit. It was built of massive, well-squared stone. In appearance it was a relic of the Dark Ages and in western Europe it would have been adorned with battered scutcheons. But there was nothing except a clumsily hewn date over the doorway. Inside it was cold and dark. The sunlight filtered through grim slits at the end of diminishing angular funnels cut through walls a yard thick. It suggested a belfry so convincingly that one expected to see ropes disappearing through slots in the thick beam-borne planks overhead, their tallies waiting moth-soft and wine-coloured in mid-air for the grasp of bellringers.
There was the familiar creak of the step-ladders, the danger of worm-eaten or missing boards, the same thrusting open of trap-doors as a new layer of cobwebbed emptiness met the eye from floor level; the childish feeling of adventure as storey after storey fell below (how long will it go on?). At last we reached the fifth and highest from which the lower world of olives and rocks and sea appeared in fore-shortened oblongs through apertures which louvres should have sliced into cross-sections. Our interruption had set the dust moving and a thin golden shaft of light falling aslant the dungeon-like gloom was alive with whirling motes. The policeman slapped the cold slabs affectionately.

“This tower belongs to the Sklavonákos family,” he said, “relations of the Mavromichalis and formerly the great Nyklians of the area.”

I had heard this unfamiliar word
Nyklianos
several times lately and never anywhere else in Greece. What did it mean? It appeared from his answer that the Nyklians, in contrast to the
achamnómeri
or villeins, were a sort of military, landowning aristocracy, a rough-and-ready Maniot version of Japanese feudalism, of which the bey or the
bashkapetan
(above all, the head of the Mavromichalis family) was Shogun, and the greater and lesser Nyklians the daimyos and samurais, some of whom would wander abroad like mercenary rônins. I asked him what on earth the word came from; it means nothing in ordinary Greek. He didn't know, he admitted; then, lighting a cigarette with the engaging bashfulness of a patrician among the plebs, he told us that he himself belonged to the Nyklian family of Glezakos of Glezos. This queer feudalism, an odd deviation from the democratic world of post-Byzantine Greece, sounded so peculiar that I determined to find out more.

Vaults were hewn out of the limestone for the storing of powder kegs and a barrier of heavy boulders enclosed a wide expanse of solid, creased stones like unhewn marble all round
the tower. It contained a couple of low stone sheds roofed with slabs and a minute whitewashed oratory. Cisterns drilled out of the hard matrix of rock were reached by a narrow well-shaft with no steyning. Illiterate and feudal, these early war-lords must have lived like tenth-century barons. There was no sign of the amenities anywhere, still less of the arts or of polite learning. We were conjecturing the date of its construction, allowing for every imaginable time lag: we wouldn't be far out, we decided, in the sixteenth century. The date over the door of the tower was, amazingly, 1812.

A tight-meshed network of walls covers this sloping country till the loose ends trail a little distance up the steep flank of the Taygetus and die away among the boulders. They are there for no purpose of delimitation. It is merely a tidy way of disposing of the stones that otherwise cumber the fields in order that, here and there, an inch or two of dusty earth may afford enough purchase for wheat grains to germinate. A little crescent-shaped bastion of flat stones shores up the precious soil round the roots of each olive tree. Winding labyrinths of walled lanes meander among the walls and trees as arbitrarily, it would seem, as the walls themselves. The solid rock of the Mani breaks through the sparse stubble fields in bleached shoulders and whales' backs and tall leaning blades of mineral and all is as white as bone. Sometimes groups of these blades cluster so thick that they give the illusion of whole villages; but when you reach them after clambering a score of walls, there they are in all their bare senselessness: fortuitous dolmens and cromlechs and menhirs. Once in a while, however, the wreck of an almost prehistoric ghost-village does appear: a sudden gathering of walls, the shells of half troglodytic houses with broken slab-roofs and thresholds only to be entered on all fours, the rough-hewn blocks pitched headlong by wild olive and cactus with only a rough cross incised on a lintel or a carved unidentifiable animal to indicate that they date from later than the stone age.
The only other buildings are innumerable microscopic chapels, their shallow slab-roofed vaults jutting like the backs of armadilloes; an occasional farmstead, and the abandoned peel-towers of the Nyklians. The pale marble world of rock and gold stubble and thistle and silver-grey olive-leaves shudders in the midday glare, and one feels prone to test the rocks (like spitting on a flat-iron) before daring to lay a hand on them or to lie down in an olive's fragmentary disc of shade. The world holds its breath, and the noonday devil is at hand.

In summer, ghosts are said to roam the Mani in the hottest hour of the day, in winter at the darkest hour of the night. If their mortal predecessors have been killed by an enemy, they wail for revenge. Summer ghosts haunt graveyards, ruined churches and cross roads. A man's blood is supposed to shout out loud the day before he dies and if he perishes by violence his blood remains wet on the spot until a wooden cross is driven into the ground there; then it dries up or drains away. (The Maniots have a death fixation which is almost Mexican; perhaps the blazing light, the naked rock and the cactuses engender the same processes in either place.) The dead are turned into werewolves until forty days after their death and, stealing indoors at night, they eat the dough out of the kneading-troughs—any trough that is empty when it should be full is a werewolf's work. Witches are said to lead people in a trance up the mountain-side at dead of night to torture them there. Regular sleepwalkers, of which there seem to be a number, are known as the
string-loparméni
, the witch-taken ones. Then there is a terrible devil called Makrynas,
[1]
“the faraway one,” who invariably appears in deserted places in the haunted hour of noon. I have not been able to learn what he looks like or what harm he does, but he is usually encountered by women who run away shrieking in panic through the rocks and olives.
Could he be Pan himself, up to his old game with the latterday descendants of Syrinx and Echo? The nereids, the oreads, the dryads, the hamadryads and the gorgons all survive transposed in the minds of country Greeks. The Faraway One may be the chief woodland god himself.