Mani (39 page)

“The men,” I began.

“Now for the men!” one muttered.

“The men are for ever stalking forth in search of plunder, seeking how they can outwit their neighbours. Hither and thither they go seeking whom they may rob, everyone lying in wait to slay someone. One stands on guard in his tower lest another should capture it, one hunts one, another another. Neighbour looks on neighbour, godbrother on godbrother, true brother on true brother as if each were Charon himself. One claims death in vengeance, another is the debtor.... One lies in wait for the brother, another for the son, another for the father, another for the grandfather and another for the greatgrandsire himself...yet another for cousin or nephew or indeed, any other kinsman. And when they find them, to Hades they send them straightway and they are held accursed till they are avenged. They neither change their clothes nor wash nor barber their chins till they have their vengeance. You can see
them there all bearded and smothered in filth, armed to the teeth and wilder than vampires: old men of eighty and even more, all bristling with arms. Savage is their frown and hideous their glance; their eyes are red and their nails as long as the talons of savage beasts. Only when someone dies a natural death who should have been slain do they weep, someone from whom they might have wrung vengeance and consolation. When children are born they distribute pancakes to bring him luck, and everybody gathers at his door and fires off his gun. The widows and married girls gather...and cry: ‘Welcome! May he live and learn how to handle arms and wipe out all his foes!...'”

“That's correct,” the
koumbara
said.

“When strangers stray into their regions by chance they turn them into godbrothers and bid them to table. But when the stranger rises to leave, they hold him back, talking in soft and cozening voices. ‘Godbrother,' they say, ‘we have only your welfare at heart, please don't misunderstand us. Quick! Off with that jacket with its hanging sleeves,
[8]
your waistcoat and sash and those baggy trousers too in case an enemy should steal them. Should an enemy strip you bare, should others rob you, great shame and ill-renown would fall on us! That is why, dearest godbrother, it is best to tell you outright that we would be happier if you left your fez and your shirt with us as well. And off with those slippers, they will be no use to you. Now, at last you are safe from all harm.' Thus they strip the wretched stranger down to the bone and send him pitilessly on his way.”

This passage was accompanied by a crescendo of laughter, concluding in a happy outburst and murmurs which were half amusement and half censure laced with admiration.

I think the sheer impossibility of such a crime against the
laws of hospitality—nowhere more binding than in the Mani as the reader will have gathered and as all the memoirs prove—placed it in the realm of pure clowning and robbed it of its sting, harming neither satirist nor satirized.

There is a tradition that Niphakos was beaten up somewhere in the Deep Mani, probably in Kitta,
dia gynaikodoulies
, for “woman-business”—improper suggestions or worse. His gall seems unstaunchable. “Woe betide, if ever, for her sins,” he goes on, “a sailing ship chances on these shores, be she French, Spanish, English, Turk or Muscovite, be she large or small—everyone wants his share, my son. They dice for shares on the backgammon board without another thought in their heads. They have neither shame before man nor fear of God; they have neither compassion for the poor nor pity for strangers. Such are their rawness and beastlike madness that they bear no likeness to humankind. They sully the earth they tread upon, the devil himself is their only companion. These are the men who have given the rest of the Mani a bad name. Men and women, old and young, none of them even smell like human beings. Even to eat with them were a pollution and a curse on the soul. No one should as much as bid them good-day, but fly from them as from a serpent.”

A parliamentary cry of “Oh!” went up.

“Only the men of Tsimova are any good—and even they are merchants on the outside, but really secret corsairs. May the winds blow them all away!” He winds up with a repetitious lamentation about the internal discord of the Mani, the savage customs, the illiteracy and the general declension from the great old days of the Spartans. “Ah! Ah! Would I could shed a river of tears to submerge my fatherland! Once it was alive and famous, now it is dead and befouled. My country, covered once with glory and renowned through all the kingdoms of the world, what has become of you? Where are all your lances and your bows?”

In view of the Maniot passion for arms, it is a singularly inappropriate and ill-conceived peroration.

It was bedtime, the night was warm and still except for the drilling of crickets and the intermittent note of the little owl. The moon shone almost as bright as day, and we were led by three of the sons, carrying pillows and blankets and a water-pitcher, to a straw-padded threshing floor on a ledge of rocks just above the house. The beautiful
koumbara
was still spinning on the descending steps, the moonlight sending her shadow and a long loop of silver across the dark floor indoors.

“Light sleep and sweet dreams,” she said, “but remember where you are. Better put your clothes under the pillow.”

“Don't worry,
mamá
,” cried one of the sons, “I'll get their coats and shirts, whatever happens.”

“I've got my eye on their shoes,” another said. “Never fear.”

We climbed up the rocks past an enormous clump of cactus. The pewter-coloured blades, that seem moonlit even at noonday, were shining now like a sheaf of platinum. A small figure—the youngest of the sons—stepped from its shadow with a stage moan, his eyes eerily ablaze with a most peculiar light. We all jumped, as we were intended to. The still, fiery eyes were hauntingly strange and enigmatic. Suddenly he seemed to pluck them from their sockets and then to place one in each of our hands. They were enormous glow-worms which he had somehow stuck on his eyelids. He skipped off downhill. A strange conceit.

 

[1]
The word is originally the same as
compadre
in Italian and Spanish. In Crete, where the godbrother network is very strong (I know, because I am deeply involved in it through many font-side ceremonies during the war), the word
synteknos
is used for the baptismal tie. The relationship is sometimes used as a joke, in addressing total strangers—“
Yassou, Koumbare
.” It strikes a note of friendly collusion.

[2]
This invaluable work, of which I at last possess the twenty-two enormous volumes, can be found and consulted in the Greek Lycée or the Demarcheion—Town Hall—of any decent-sized town.

[3]
I have translated the bits which appear later from a version in the oft-mentioned book by Mr. Dimitrakos-Messisklis.

[4]
Helios?
Makrynas
—the Far Away One—is the demotic name for the Taygetus as well as for the demon of the Mani. See p. 83.

[5]
The Turkish commander-in-chief.

[6]
Prickly pear.

[7]
The modern Greek “
Tk, tk, tk!
”

[8]
The embroidered Greek loose-sleeved jacket known as the
fermelé
, in Crete the
yeléka
or
zopáni
.

Aphrodite, Cythera
, was painted smartly across the poop of the fast and racy looking caique we boarded next morning. Indeed, everything was as bright as a pin. There was silver paint on the cleats and, along the bows, touches of grass green, ox-blood and gilding in the swirl of carved wooden foliage from which the bowsprit sprang. The mast was painted in the blue and white Greek colours in a bold barber's pole spiral for a third of its height. A tin framed picture of St. Catherine was nailed to it and on a folded sailor's jacket a sleek and well-fed tortoiseshell cat stretched sleepily at the pother of embarkation. The entire glittering craft, presided over by a jolly whiskered Cerigiot captain who abetted our embarkation with cheerful cries of “
aidé!
” and a hauling hand stretched overboard and avuncular pats on the back, was as full of livestock as Noah's ark. There were the usual trusses of chicken, three Maniot pigs and a whole flock of goats. There was even a donkey with its foal. As though this were not enough, just as we raised anchor, a cicada, rashly flying a few yards out to sea, alighted on the gigantic white whisker of an old man who lay sleeping with his mouth open in a stertorous recurring semibreve. After a few seconds on this flimsy perch it struck up. The din, so close to the sleeper's ear, must have sounded like an alarm clock. He broke off in mid-snore and leapt up beating his head while the insect went whirring inland to safety.

* * *

I shall fill the leisure of our journey up the gulf with a digression on cats and divers kindred themes.

Caiques often have pet cats on board and I have twice seen an important sailing held up—not that this takes much; anything suffices to postpone or expedite without warning the departure of these Bohemian barques—until the ship's cat was hunted up among the rubbish and fishbones on the quay. A story told me by my old friend Tanty Rodocanaki
[1]
suggests that their presence is sometimes to be ascribed to more utilitarian reasons than pure cat-fancying. It seems that once upon a time a sea captain, distressed by the quantity of rats that infested his caique, summoned a priest and asked him to perform the special service for casting them out. The appropriate chants were intoned and the priest censed and aspersed the ship from stem to stern. Pocketing the usual fee, he assured the captain that he would have no more trouble with vermin: the rite had never failed yet. “But there's just one point,” he said. “What's that, Father?” The priest stooped his bearded head to the seaman's ear and whispered: “Get a cat.” Since then the phrase “getting a cat” means, in maritime circles, making surety doubly sure.

Dogs are much less frequent members of a crew but you see them now and then. Once, during a hard winter storm between Samos and Chios, I heard barking through the thick mist. It grew louder till the mist cleared for a few seconds to reveal another caique dangerously near and lurching unsteadily among the great waves. A brown dog, with his forepaws on the bulwarks, was barking desperately into the storm. The mist soon obscured the other craft but I could hear the dog's hallucinating
protest for long seconds after it had vanished, growing fainter as the wind drowned it. Perhaps cats are better sailors.

Eastern European cats bear little resemblance to the ribboned pussies of the West. They are a completely different shape. The division runs roughly north and south through the Istrian peninsula. East of this line, their ears grow to the size, proportionately with their bodies, of bats; their bodies, their necks and their tails are longer. They are more alert, intelligent and enterprising, above all, wilder and distinctly more raffish. They are to be seen at their most disreputable in Constantinople, where the city pullulates with them. After dark these noble but sordid streets seem to move and writhe in the lamplight, an illusion induced by the criss-crossing itineraries of thousands of cats, sometimes alone, sometimes in little troops, all of them setting out on thousands of dark and questionable errands. Many of them have the air of broken-down musketeers with fractured noses, tattered ears and the equivalent of eye patches, their moth-eaten tails carried swaggeringly like long rapiers in worn-out scabbards. The Turkish attitude to dogs is one of contempt and hatred. It is well-known how they rounded up the myriads of dogs that once ran riot there and marooned them without food on an island in the Sea of Marmara until they had all eaten each other or starved to death. Their attitude to cats is different. They never kill them, nor do the Greeks, though both races expose unwanted kittens to die or to fend for themselves and survive as freebooters. So outlaw cats abound. I have heard this Turkish—or rather Moslem—forbearance attributed to a whim of Mohammed. The prophet was about to set off on a journey; rising, he found that a cat was asleep in a fold of his robe and, rather than wake it, he called for scissors, cut the cloth all round it and set off with a round hole in his cloak, leaving the cat still asleep.
[2]
The Greek attitude to dogs—some of the noisiest and often most frightening barkers in the world—is, like much of the Mediterranean, roughly affectionate, sometimes thoughtless and inconsiderate, seldom cruel. In some parts they have the quaint custom of calling them by enemies' names in order to be able to speak sharply to them. I have often heard Cretans shout: “Come here, Achmet! Mustapha, be quiet! Boris—outside!” During the war they were called Mussolini, Benito, Ciano (a favourite bête noire of the Greeks), Hitler and Goebbels. Then it became Stalin, Gromyko, and Molotov. (Now, alas, perhaps Andoni or Selouin.) Cardinal Manning enjoyed scolding his butler, who was called Newman, on exactly the same principle.

The cats of Athens, like the citizens, are very intelligent. Just after the war I used to eat almost every night in an open-air ta-verna in the Plaka. One end of the garden was separated by a high wall from an outdoor cinema, and at the same moment every night, a huge black and white tom-cat stalked over the tiles to sit with his back towards us on this wall, intent and immobile except for the slow rhythmic sway of his hanging tail. After exactly five minutes he would saunter away again over the roofs. The waiter's verdict on this procedure was obviously correct: “He comes for the Mickey Mouse every night,” he explained. “You could set your watch by him.”

In far-away islands each community develops with the centuries on slightly different lines; just as each island or isolated region puts forth various botanical species which are to be found nowhere else in the world. Crete, for instance, has over a hundred, and the small island of Hydra where I am writing these pages, two: the blue
campanula tayloria
which lodges in wall-crevices and the strange brown and butter-coloured Rodokanaki fritillary which grows high up the watershed. It must surely be the same with island cats, interbred for generations in steep un-cat-like habitats with only an occasional outside strain that comes to flower after the brief visit of some caique-dwelling tom. Certainly the two small animals crossing the middle distance as I write these words have little in common with any other kittens I have seen. It is not their markings—white with tabby patches like a sudden drift of mackerel sky on the face or flank—nor is it the engaging absurdity of the enormous bat-like ears, the wide kohl-rimmed eyes, the lean elegance and the bold carriage of their tails. They were found mewing desperately, their eyes just opened, and brought here to the walled and terraced seclusion of Niko Ghika's house. Growing up without seeing or being corrupted by other cats they are Garden of Eden animals free of original sin and there is something peculiar and prelapsarian in their conduct. Stroking or fussing is uncongenial to them; they take no notice or walk away. But should one go for a walk they follow, but at a distance, as though their presence were fortuitous. The other day I found them both nibbling a cactus. The same evening I brought them the delicious remains of a red mullet wrapped in a newspaper. They sniffed the remains for a second, then went back to a slice of melon peel they had discovered somewhere; the fish remained untouched. They are as lithe as jaguars and their behaviour swings between almost lunatic activity and the loose-limbed stretching contortions of an odalisque, rolling over and over with all legs outstretched and suddenly falling asleep
on their backs with their mouths open and their forearms wide apart and hanging like the flappers of capsized turtles.