Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Life on a Mediterranean Island (13 page)

Little Loizus—”the Bear”—was a pillar of the Church and a very serious fellow altogether. His deportment betrayed the sidesman, and he spoke in a series of gentle hesitations, stops and starts, like an intermittendy functioning Morse transmitter. He was afflicted by the tiresome village moralizing instinct of the “rustic” novel;
and worse still, bedevilled by his considerations for first principles. If you asked him to build a window he would lick his lips and begin in a faraway tone: “Now windows for the ancient Greeks were holes in a wall. To them the question of light …” he would drone on; only when he had established the Platonic idea of a window and traced it up through the Phoenicians, Venetians, Hindus and Chinese, did he emerge once more on to the tableland of the present and add: “I can’t because I’ve broken my plane.” But he was gentle and industrious, and had an endearing way of putting out his tongue as he tried to get his spirit-level to show a true surface—which it almost never did.

Mr. Honey was another new acquaintance with marked idiosyncrasies. He was tall and lean and very shortsighted; and he walked about the village swaying gracefully and manipulating his long graceful hands in gestures which reminded one of a lady of fashion in the period of Madame Récamier. His long dark face with its glazed eyes betrayed a fond vague happiness. He was the grave-digger; but as nobody died in the village he had a lot of time free for self-examination, and since a man must eat he had turned his talents to the digging of cesspits at so much a cubic meter. He was the philosopher of main drainage. “What is the meaning of life?” he asked me once in a tragic slurring voice. “It all goes in here,” raising a bottle of wine to his lips for a long swig; “and it all goes out
there,
” pointing to the pit he was digging. “What does it all
mean?” Poor Mr. Honey! I have often pondered on the subject myself.

These, too, together with Andreas and Michaelis, were my first historians of Cyprus, and hardly a day passed without my learning something about the island’s past; each added a piece of the common fund of knowledge about Cyprus which belongs to the large vague jigsaw which Panos had established for me. It is the best way to learn, for my informants told me these things in their own tongue, and acted them as they did so. I can never think of St. Barnabas reproving the naked pagans at Paphos, or praying for God to blight the ancient shrine of Aphrodite, without seeing Michaelis’s curling moustache as he dipped his shaggy head in an illustration of prayer, or with flashing eyes apostrophized the pagans in the very words of the saint: “Hey, you, walking about like plucked chickens with your private parts open to heaven … have you no shame?” His illustration of the thunder-flash was dramatic, too; looking heavenward in terror from under his raised forearms with their clenched fists as the great radiance of the Light dawned in the sky. “Bang! went the saint, and Bang! Bang!” Then spreading his fisted arms he gazed slowly at the ruins caused by Barnabas’s prayers, pityingly, uncomprehendingly, raising here a head and there an arm of a pagan to see if they were dead. They were. The heads and arms fell listlessly back into position. It was all over! Later, on the road to Tammasos, Paul
and Barnabas sat down to a frugal lunch consisting of olives. The trees which stand there today grew from the pips they spat out. Andreas himself had been a workman in Paphos when they discovered the coneshaped black stone, idol of Aphrodite, in some abandoned byre. According to him the youths of Paphos still go out at night and anoint the stones of the temple with oil and almond-water on a certain night of the year, while women leave their rings and fragments of their petticoats as
ex votos
against barrenness.

Heaven knows how true all this was: but it was true for them. And the bibliography of Cyprus is so extensive and detailed that the truth must somewhere be on record.… That could come later, I felt. I preferred to learn what I could from the lips of these peasants with their curious mediaeval sense of light and shade, and their sharp sense of dramatic values. Oddly enough, too, their stories proved true sometimes when they sounded utterly improbable; Andreas, for example, in describing ancient Cyprus to me produced a homemade imitation of a hippopotamus walking around and browsing in my courtyard which was worthy of Chaplin. It was nearly a year before I caught up with the report of the dwarf hippopotamus which had been unearthed on the Kyrenia range: a prehistoric relic. It was only justice, I suppose, that I myself should be disbelieved by them when I claimed to have seen a brown seal floating lazily in the tepid summer water by the little mosque where later I used to bathe.

No, they were not often wrong; and their versions of historic events had the merit of giving me a picture-gallery of faces to interpret the events by: I still see the Governor Sergius being converted to Christianity by Michaelis—only he wears forever the gaping rustic face of Mark the concrete-mixer as he leans on a shovel to watch the storyteller.

It was a way of traveling, too, by standing still; or rather by sitting still, under an olive tree with a can of wine beside one. Michaelis had suffered from the stone, and his great pilgrimage in search of a cure was a saga in itself. He had stumped up the verdant crown of Olympus to try the wonder-working image at Kykko; had panted along the dusty road which is ruled across the green plain to the dry well where Barnabas’s bones were found, near Salamis. He had consulted the withered head of the martyr St. Heracleides in its glass case, touching the red velvet with his finger to take some dust from the relic which he sniffed up into his right nostril: without avail. Everyone told him he would have to submit to the knife. But somehow he couldn’t believe that the island saints would let him down, even though the mineral springs might fail him. (I learned of their qualities, which he illustrated by a series of grimaces—so that each spring has an accompanying picture. Worst of all, Kalopanayotis provoked intestinal rumblings which suggested something even more powerful than the prayers of St. Barnabas. Banging his fist on a lintel he imitated these tremors, and added:
“Days and nights of remorseless bombardment after only a pint of it.”) But at last he found his cure; on the dramatic scarp where Stavrovouni rises he said his prayers to the holy relic which he said was part of the cross of the Penitent Thief, bequeathed by Helena, the great and good Empress. (“Empress of where?” “I don’t know.”) In a dream he was told to live for two months only on the juice of the Prodromos apples and cherries, and this at last cured him.

But while these fellow villagers of mine brought me knowledge of saints and seasons, of icons and wine, the swallows were beginning to gather—the human swallows which make life endurable for those who elect to live on islands. Life in a small island would be unbearable for anyone with sensibility were it not enriched from time to time by visitants from other worlds, bringing with them the conversations of the great capitals, refreshing the quotidian life in small places by breaths of air which make one live once more, for a moment, in the airs of Paris or London.

So it was that for a whole day I was able to gossip with John Lehmann on the empty beach at Pachyammos, eagerly questioning him about new books and new writers; or talking of the writers who were to follow him out to Cyprus as we gathered anemones at Klepini or walked through the haunted moonlit streets of old Famagusta at midnight, listening to the ravens sleepily crowing. These are the lucky interludes one enjoys nowhere so much as on an island—to see the
Lion Mount, as if for the first time, through the cool rare eyes of Rose Macaulay, herself bound for ruins stretching still further back into time than this Gothic castle in the shadow of which I lived. (“Have you ever wondered how it is that the utilitarian objects of one period become objects of aesthetic value to succeeding ones? This thing was constructed purely to keep armies at bay, to shatter men and horses, to guard a pass. How do we find it more beautiful than the Maginot Line? Does time itself confer something on relics and ruins which isn’t inherent in the design of the builder? Will we ever visit the Maginot Line with such awe at its natural beauty?”) The thoughts of a fellow-writer which tease the mind long after she has gone.…

But among the swallows were one or two who had built their nests upon this fertile range. I had noticed, for instance, a fair haired girl. She walked about the harbor at Kyrenia with a book and with the distracted air which betokened to my inexpert eye evidence of some terrible preoccupation—perhaps one of those love-affairs which mark one for life. I had seen her, too, in her little green car, driving about the hills with the same
princesse lointaine
expression. The mystery was only made plain to me when I met her and found that the subdued air of anguish on her face could be traced back to preoccupations which matched mine. She was trying to build a house on a spectacular deserted point opposite the little Tekke of Hazaret Omer—a remarkable site for the choice of a private house. You would
think that such a choice betokened an inordinate world-weariness, yet Marie was anything but world-weary. She flashed in and out of Cyprus half a dozen times a year bringing with her the best conversation of three capitals as a staple; and until the house should be ready she had constructed a small hut of bamboos of a strongly Indonesian flavor where she spent her time, reading and writing. We were drawn together by common enthusiasms. I was able to translate for her—for she was still engaged in buying her land from the dozen or so peasants who owned it. And for her part she enjoyed coming up to the Abbey to see how work on my house was going, bringing with her an armful of books with sketches of architecture and garden-layout to add oil to the fire already raging among my villagers. With her blonde head and brown eyes she seemed to them something rare and strange—which indeed she was, being so solitary a creature; and when she kicked off her shoes to walk about the green grass of the Abbey, Andreas would nudge Michaelis at the coffee shop and say: “There goes the nereid again.”

The nereid and I made common cause, exchanging figures and costings, worrying poor Sabri for advice, and in our spare time swimming together on the rugged rock-beaches round her land.

But Marie’s design for living differed from mine, for she was an incurable romantic, and moreover a great traveler; her house was to have features of almost everything she had loved between Fez and Goa;
recessed doorways with moldings, Arab shutters, a fountain from Bundi, a courtyard from Castile.… The list changed daily but it was always an extensive one, and her enthusiasm was so touching and warming that it seemed cruel to tell her that the workmen in Cyprus could not execute designs so rare. “Nonsense, we’ll make them.” It went without saying that she was a person of fortune as well as a romantic; if Beckford had been alive he would surely have been among her many friends and correspondents—and perhaps he might have assisted at those early deliberations by the sea, or sipping Clito’s country wine in the cool shade of his cave.

It was concern about her plans—for it is one thing to knock an old house about, but quite another to build from the ground—which made me so happy when Pearce Hubbard turned up, clad in his gold thread jeans of local weave, dark shirt and sandals. I knew him by name through many common friends, but we had never met. With his delightful insouciance (it seemed unfair to have the looks of a matinee idol, plus brains and taste) he burst in upon me as I was making heavy weather with a bank statement, and refusing to countenance any excuse, insisted that I must accompany him to Lapithos to meet Austen Harrison. He knew Bellapaix well and was a close friend of Kollis with whom he shared a passion for roses, and on this visit I recall he had filled the back of the car up with a wobbling forest of potted plants in the midst of which
I sat, feeling rather foolish. As we bounced and swayed towards Lapithos he told me of his own Turkish house there and of how he and Harrison, for their sins, had become residents of Lapithos and owners of old houses. As architects their work took them about the world a great deal and Cyprus was a useful jumping-off place in which to have a drawing-office; it was also the ideal place to spend a summer, he added wryly, and he had sent his family out on several occasions. “And now that you are here,” he added, offering me a fellowship in the wine and landscape, “it’s going to be splendid. I’m not here very much myself, but Austen spends a good part of the year in Lapithos. I know you’ll like him and I hope he’ll like you. He’s an awful recluse—can one blame him? One wouldn’t come so far from the haunts of man if one were a gregarious or clubby type. And his house will fill you with despair—may give you an idea or two. By the way, go a bit deeper, another ten foot for the end of the balcony, just to be sure. You don’t want the whole thing to sit down one rainy day in the sludge and refuse to move—or to turn over on its side when you are giving an
ouzo
party on the roof.”

“Did the house seem fairly sound?” I asked nervously, though I had sworn not to try to cadge a free consultation from him. Pearce laughed. “Depends on what you mean. An English builder would have apoplexy. But it’s as sound as mine or Austen’s—no, not quite: we’ve rebuilt extensively. How long do you intend to live?”

I was content with the implied reassurance and flattered by his approval of my general plan.

But all this was swallowed up in despair and envy when we entered Austen Harrison’s house and found its romantic owner seated gravely by his own lily-pond, apparently engaged in psychoanalyzing a goldfish. He was a noble personage, with his finely minted Byzantine emperor’s head and the spare athletic repose of his tall figure. But the austerity was belied by a twinkling eye and brisk lively humors. One felt immediately accepted; and as I sipped a drink and listened to his conversation I suddenly realized that I was in the presence of the hero of
South Wind or
an early character from Huxley. He represented that forgotten world where style was not only a literary imperative but an inherent method of approaching the world of books, roses, statues and landscapes. His house was a perfect illustration of the man. He had taken over an old Cypriot wine magazine, or perhaps stable, and converted it with a tenderness and discretion which made the whole composition sing—the long arched room lined with books, from whose recesses glowed icons; the shaded terrace with its pointed arches, the summer house, the lily-pond. All this was an illustration of philosophic principles—an illustration of how the good life might, and how it should, be lived. For him too the island life was only made endurable by friendly visitants from the world outside and I was delighted to find we had friends in common who came through
almost every year and stayed for a day or two specially to make the pilgrimage to Lapithos. Of these Freya Stark and Sir Harry Luke remain as forever identified in my mind with the place, for each of them had something special to give me.