Lawrence Durrell - Sicilian Carousel - Adventures on an Italian Island

I hardly recognized the chauffeur lover after such a long lapse of time — he had grown fat and hairy, and spindle shanked. But he panted with pleasure like a bull terrier at meeting me again and ushered me into the car with a good deal of friendly ceremony. I was glad that I had been fetched when he started to negotiate the steep descent from the mountain to the coast where the villa was. It was a labyrinth of crisscrossing roads, with snatches of motor road to be crossed. But at last we arrived in that cool garden full of olives and oleanders and the smell of rushing water in dusty fountains — the house had been designed by water-loving Romans. And there was Loftus frail and smart as always, though a little greyer, waiting for me.

Terraces led down to the sea; there were candles already burning on a white tablecloth; wide divans with stained cretonne covers were laid out under the olives. The parrot Victor had gone to bed; his cage was covered in a green baize cloth. Smell of Turkish tobacco. “Dear boy,” said Loftus, “I can’t rise to greet you as is fitting. I had a small ski mishap.” His crutches lay beside him. The tone and temper of his conversation was reassuringly the same as ever, and I was glad to feel that now it would never change. It belonged to an epoch, it marched with the language of the eighteenth century whose artists (like Stendhal?) discovered how to raise social gossip to the level of an art. The trivia of Loftus had the same fine merit — even though he had not much at present to recount. Various film nabobs from Beverley Hills had come and gone. Then Cramp the publisher from London. There were two amusing local scandals which might lead to a knife fight. “All this is simply to situate you, dear boy. You are in Taormina now which has its own ethos and manners. It is very degenerate in comparison to the rest of Sicily which is rather straitlaced.”

In this easy and languid style the conversation led him closer and closer to the last days of Martine. She had spent a lot of time with him; she would bring over her two children and a picnic and spend the day on his little beach, reading or writing. She had never been happier, she said, than during that last summer. She had spoken of me with affection, and indeed had rung me up once or twice for advice about a book she was planning to write about Sicily. I surmised it must have been the “pocket Sicily” for her children — Loftus agreed that it was. “Finally she gave up and said she would make you do it. She found that in Sicily there is no sense of time; her children inhabited a history in which Caesar, Pompey, and Timoleon were replaced, without any lapse of time, by Field Marshal Kesserling and the Hermann Goering division — the one the Irish knocked about.” He smiled. “It’s difficult to know how you would have dealt with that sort of Mediterranean amnesia. Everything seems simultaneous.” By the same token Martine seemed as ever present as Loftus himself — the mere intervention of death seemed somehow unreal, untruthful. “She took everything calmly, gaily, lightly. Her husband was marvelous, too, and made it easy. Also she wasn’t encumbered by any heavy intellectual equipment like a theological attitude. She wasn’t Christian, was she?” As far as I knew she wasn’t anything, though she observed the outward forms for fear of wounding people — but that was just part of a social code. What Loftus really meant was that she was a Mediterranean, by which he meant a pagan; she belonged to the Astarte-Aphrodite of Erice rather than to Holy Mary of Rome. I did not elaborate on all this, it was not our business.

At any rate she had satisfactorily managed to answer the question I had put to her in the Latomie at Syracuse; the word “yes” had been exactly where I had asked her to arrange for it to be. But about the question, it went something like this: “Do you remember all our studies and arguments over the Pali texts and all the advice you got from your Indian princeling? Well, before you finally died, did you manage to experience that state, however briefly, which the texts promised us and which was rendered no doubt very inadequately in English as ‘form without identity’?” Rather long winded, but it is hard to express these abstract notions. Yet I was delighted to think that perhaps she might have experienced the precious moment of pure apprehension which had so far eluded me — which I could intuit but not provoke: poems are inadequate substitutes for it.

Loftus said: “After dinner I must put you on a tape recording of a dinner party we had once here; she wanted to ask me some questions about Theocritos and Pindar, and then she forgot to take the tape. I found it long afterwards. It’s pleasant to hear her voice again.”

So it was, and the setting was not the less pleasant, this warm olive grove steepening towards the sea. The chink of plates and the little rushes of laughter or the clash of people all talking together. Martine’s swift Italian. Somewhere she said that she had given instructions to her lawyers to let her lie in state one whole night on the beach at Naxos, close to the sea, so that like a seashell she could absorb the sighing of the sea and take it with her wherever she was going. “I don’t know if she did,” said Loftus, “but the idea struck me as typical of her and I dreamed about it for several nights. Martine, all dressed in white, lying in her beautiful coffin which was like a Rolls, lying on the beach almost within reach of the waves, under the stars.”

It was late when the chauffeur finally dropped me back in Taormina, but despite the lateness of the hour there were cafes open and I felt sufficiently elated by my evening to want to prolong it for a while; to have a quiet drink and think before turning in with my Pliny. I had, in a manner of speaking, recovered contact with Martine. It was reassuring to feel that she was, in a sense, still there, still bright in the memory of her friends. On the morrow I had promised to return and lunch with Loftus, bathe, and work out an itinerary for my last few days in Sicily. He on his part would have the little Morris serviced and fixed up for my journey on which he would have accompanied me had it not been for his ankle. I must say I was glad, for though he was good company, I still felt a little bit as if I was on a pilgrimage and wanted to spend the time alone before I took off once more for France.

I sat long over my drink, tasting the cool balm of the midnight air and listening to the occasional chaffering voices in the dark street. Taormina had fallen asleep like a rooks’ nest; occasionally there was a little movement, a few voices — as if a dream had troubled the communal sleep. Then everything subsided once more into a hush. My waiter was almost asleep on his feet. I must really finish up, I thought, and have pity on him. Yet I lingered, and if I reflected upon Martine the thoughts were relatively down to earth and free from all the nostalgias which tend to lie in wait for one when the mysterious matter of death comes to the front of the stage. I was still very conscious of that tiny chuckle with which my friend had always demolished anything slack or sentimental, anything sloppy in style or insipid. Truth to tell, I hardly dared to mourn the girl so much did I dread the memory of that chuckle. For her even death had its own rationale, its strictness, and inevitability. It was thus. It was so. And it must be accepted with good nature, good grace, good humor.

Even Loftus, homo beatus as he used to call himself (sitting in the garden in a deck chair looking out to sea through an old brass telescope) — even he could not speak of her without a smile, as if of recognition. “You know,” he said, during our dinner, and apropos of the tape recording of her voice, “the English can be disappointing in so many ways, but in friendship they have no peers.” Due, I think, to this quality of smiling good sense which made it easy to confront life and death without a false Roman stoicism.