Mani (45 page)

When Leake visited Gytheion in the beylik of his successor, it was still not much of a town, no more than a hundred wretched houses of mud-brick round a large church with a belfry in which a single bell was suspended. The best house had a floor of trodden mud. But it was full of activity. The lanes
teemed with warlike Maniots with girdles stuffed full of pistols and with whiskers that almost touched their shoulders.

* * *

It is very different to-day. There is nothing particularly magnificent there but the long waterfront, with its anchored steamers and its shops and its one or two hotels, has a certain decaying Victorian charm. Here and there in this battered matrix the blank façade of a modern building is embedded. It is sad that Greek provincial towns began to expand and prosper at a moment when European architecture was at its most unrewarding nadir. If only they had been built with arcaded streets! How splendidly they would ennoble and dramatize those evening promenades! What a blessed shelter from the deluge of winter and, still more, from the onrush of the meridian glare!

It seemed a long time since I was in that barber's shop in Sparta. When I had emerged from the Gytheion hairdresser—un-Praxitelean perhaps, but half de-bumpkinized, with hair neatly combed and my razored chin sprayed with scent and shining cheeks braced with rubbed-on alcohol—I felt that Gytheion was my oyster. Even the hot African gusts of wind coming up the gulf had no effect. I found Joan and together we set off to explore the early evening town.

The whole place was on the move, for it was the very time when—south of a sociological isobar which runs from north-west Spain and then through San Sebastian to Bordeaux, north of Provence, south of the Alps, up through Vienna and Brati-slava; then north of the Hungarian plain and Transylvania, north again to Cracow and across to Kiev and thence, no doubt, far into Asia—it was the time when the citizens of every single town pour into the streets and deambulate slowly for a couple of hours in a dense and complicated ebb and flow. In Greece, unless the mixture is ratified by official courtship or
sanctified by wedlock, the sexes remain rigorously separate. It is a chasm that only the dumb crambo of rolled eyes and fluttering eyelashes can bridge. The prominent citizens in neat white suits and their wives in high-heeled shoes had a strangely smart aspect. There were numbers of schoolboys from the Gymnasium with shaven heads, all of them wearing those hideous shiny-peaked caps with gold braid emblems: headgear that makes even the smallest ones look like miniature admirals or S.S. men. The clanging of Leake's single church bell, now reinforced by several more, hinted that it was some feast day or its vigil. The girls were all in their best white summer dresses. It occurred to us again that Maniot girls must surely be some of the most beautiful in Greece. The very young ones all had their ikon-like aspect enhanced by big white bows like votive offerings pinned to their smooth bobbed hair. But it was the older ones, with their thick dark plaits and their immense eyes under thick brows, their beautifully shaped mouths and the smooth golden brown texture of their skin, who, again and again, arrested and held our glance. Large numbers of villagers, laden with market bundles, were scattered about in the slow urban current and the contrast with the townspeople underlined their stern and resolute features. Those frowns, the jutting bridge of the nose, the sweep of brow, cheekbone, nostril and jaw seemed to be depicted with fierce and slashing pen-blows.

We fished ourselves out of the throng and climbed uphill through a steep warren of lanes which swarms the mountain-side and dies out among the cactuses of a menacing limestone spur. From here we could look down on one side over the cascade of old tiled roofs and the labyrinth that lay behind the waterfront; beyond lay the toy ships of the harbour and the single battered tower on the island which is all that remains of the fortress of Zanet. On the other side the Taygetus resumed its sway, concealing in folds and ledges the many villages of Bardounia whose Moslem Albanian settlers used to be the bitterest
enemies of the northern Maniots. The back part of the town still has the air and the architecture of the slanting mountain village it once used to be. Not five minutes from the centre of the town, the houses died out in a flat no man's land of scattered cottages and lentisk and calamus reed, the edge of the flat country that runs away eastward to the pebbly, alluvial and now half dried up estuary of the Eurotas. Here, among bamboo fences and the byres of a little farm and a small forest of olive trees, the remains of the old theatre sweep in a broken tufted arc round a paved semicircle. The sun had left the stone, but it was still warm. A goat nibbled the grass growing between the slabs and a donkey, still howdahed with its vast saddle, was tethered to a tree. As we lay along the smooth seats, the invariable spell of peace and happiness that hangs over Greek ruins came dropping all round us out of the sky: a sense of shape, space, proportion, reason and ease. An inscription told of a shadowy foundress. Her blessed influence smoothed our brows, cooled the sirocco, arranged and relaxed our limbs along the marble. In such places life seems to fall to pieces and quietly recomposes itself in the right shape.... Through the olive leaves the evening began to glimmer towards night.

* * *

Where should we go next? We had paused at a kapheneion on the waterfront to ponder the matter. Cythera and Anticythera, stepping-stones on the sea-road to Crete, beckoned us down the shimmering gulf; but we had been there two months ago. Should we advance inland to the heart of the Peloponnese? Cross to the Messenian peninsula? Penetrate the Tzakonian villages of eastern Arcadia and listen once again to their strange Doric dialect? Sail to the Ionian islands or to Epirus or Roumeli or Macedonia? To the Sporades or the Cyclades...? We toyed lingeringly with all the golden possibilities and finally
shelved our verdict until the next day or the day after that.... Meanwhile there were more pressing matters to discuss. We had passed two tavernas in our swift tour of the town. In front of one of them stood an elaborate tabernacle, equipped with four iron shelves of glowing charcoal, before which a yard-long perpendicular cone of
dönnerkebab
was turning, the summit of the spit adorned with a little brass pigeon with outspread wings. It gyrated briskly with the tapering and roasting layers and savoury fumes had courted our nostrils as we passed. In the other taverna, where we explored the cavernous kitchen and lifted the metal lids to haruspicate from the steaming contents of the great cooking pans, lay half a lamb
stiphado
. We were swayed too by the thought that there had also been an old woman in the corner of the kitchen busy cutting the swords off a bundle of those miniature blue swordfish called
sargánes
...(These odd and delicious little creatures have curious electric blue and fluorescent spines, as if a filament were threaded through the bone.) Also the retsina, brought from Attica and offered us by the landlord in small thick tumblers, had been excellent.

The wind from the south had died and the air was cool and still. The lights along the waterfront, a long necklace of lamps strung obliquely up the mountain-side along the road that passed the bishopric and the occasional red or green of a neon sign—so hideous at close quarters and so pretty from a distance—gave the little town the air of a flaunting and Babylonian metropolis. It might have been some blazing marine
Haupstadt
full of equestrian statues and pleasure-domes.

Somewhere in these buildings a gramophone scattered tangos into the dusk. The Marathonisi, faded to a dark shape, now lay black against the amber smoulderings of the sunset. The name means Fennel-Island. It is quite bare now but they say that fennel once covered it: a low forest, each tuft spring-ing into the air in a yellow and blue-green Corinthian capital
interspersed, perhaps, with the tall thin kind which, when it dries up, makes the whole Maremma reek of curry-powder. The air was suffused with pale blue Venetian light. The lamps on the mole sank plumb lines of reflection into the imperceptibly rocking water: columns of radiance disrupting and rejoining and floating adrift again as though the particles were strung on a thread which loosened or tautened, by turns releasing and marshalling those flashing and fluctuating gold fragments. Then the water grew smooth and motionless and the reflected lights were still. A boat, its dark shape looking faintly ominous, sculled towards the island and broke these flimsy reflections to smithereens. The shards scattered round the boat's track and widened to a flurried rout of gold brackets, their onion-outlined turnmoil separated by a band of darkness from the boat's private commotion: an expanse which reflected not the lamps from the mole, but the moon, in a cold flawed circumference of broken silver from which sprang two cool widening tracks of mercury wake, a long silver isosceles. We rose to go. The taverna was calling us. The
stiphado
, the swordfish.... The waiter swept our little heap of drachmae from the table.

“Do you know about the Marathonisi in the old days?” he suddenly asked us. “Many years ago?”

“Zanetbey used to have his castle there,” I said.

The waiter brushed the Bey and his castle aside. “All that was recent—my great-great-grandfather was one of his pallikars. I mean long, long ago.”

We said we knew nothing more.

“Ah!” he glowed with the prospect of giving information. “When Paris, a Trojan prince, stole the beautiful Helen from her husband, the King of Sparta, that,” he pointed to the Marathonisi, “is where the runaways first dropped anchor. They left the caique and spent the first night together on the island. Homer wrote about it. It used to be called Kranae.”

We were dumbfounded. Kranae! I had always wondered
where it was. The whole of Gytheion was suddenly transformed. Everything seemed to vanish except the dark silhouette of the island where thousands of years ago that momentous and incendiary honeymoon began among the whispering fennel.

 

[1]
This branch of the family (which was originally from Alika in the western Mani) had been powerfully established for a long time in the region of Skoutari and Ayerano, past which we had sailed that afternoon.

[2]
It is now joined to the harbour by a mole.

The links below refer to the page references of the printed edition of Reveille in Washington. While the numbers do not correspond to the page numbers or locations on an electronic reading device, they are retained as they can convey useful information regarding the position and amount of space devoted to an indexed entry. Because the size of a page varies in reflowable documents such as this e-book, it may be necessary to scroll down to find the referenced entry after following a link
.