CORFU

The fishermen turned out to be correct. The wind died at four and by six we were on our way. The Captain did not plot a direct course to Corfu, but made across the mouth of the Gulf, so that if the weather kicked up again, we could make port in Gallipoli, on the heel of the boot. As it turned out, we ran into some wind and were tossed about rather badly for two or three hours in the middle of the night, but we continued on, and when I came on deck in the morning the first islands of Greece were in sight, bare, lonely hills set in a calm, glittering sea, and the flag of Greece had replaced the Italian flag on our mast and was fluttering brightly in the sunshine.

I had made one visit to Greece before this one. Up to that time I had regarded the writings on Greece of American and English travelers with a mixture of irritation and suspicion, as being gushingly rapturous about the beauties of the land, the quality of the light, the color of the sea, and the charm of the people. After my visit I changed my mind. The travelers had not exaggerated. What I had supposed to be flights of fancy were in fact sober reporting.

Though Corfu was not really Greece, according to our Greek deckhand, who came from Athens, and though the people were really half Albanian and half Italian, I found my reaction to both the place and its inhabitants exactly the same as my reaction to the other places and people I had seen in Greece; that is, continuous delight.

To get to the city of Corfu by sea one has almost to scrape the hills of Albania, which loom over the straits, bare, steep, unpopulated, and somehow blindly menacing, like the walls of a fortress. The knowledge that Greece to this day is still technically at war with its neighbor, and that in American passports there is a stamp warning that the passports are not valid for travel in Albania, adds to the feeling of uneasiness as you glide through the sea in the shadow of that forbidding escarpment.

By contrast, Corfu seems to be opening white welcoming arms as you come into the harbor, and a succession of graceful arches beyond the little park on the waterfront seems to invite you into the interior of the city.

We arrived in the middle of a blazing afternoon, when the place was deserted and the fiacre horses were dozing in the shade of the trees. We went ashore for lunch, moving slowly under the punishment of the heat. The banks were closed for the siesta hours and we changed some Italian money into drachma in an establishment that rejoiced in the name of the Spoty Dog Bar.

The best way to see a new place on a hot afternoon is in a fiacre. You are in the shade, you go at a leisurely pace, your feet do not ache, and you get a chance to look into the faces of the people you pass. We went along the handsome seaside promenade, examined an impressively luxurious new Swiss-run hotel facing the sea, saw with some misgivings that at the bathing club there was a net to keep out sharks. We had ignored the idea of sharks on the whole voyage. Our Captain insisted that in his forty years in and out of the Mediterranean he had never seen any swimmer molested by one, and he himself blithely jumped off the prow of the boat in any waters when we stopped to swim. Still, the memory of that ominous-looking net remained with us, and from that time on, I think we all stayed a little closer to the boat when we swam in deep water.

Continuing on our way, we passed women striding, sandaled and erect, on the baking roads, carrying jars on their heads. Heavily burdened minute donkeys with their tragic braying shattered the somnolent peace of the green fields and drowned out the afternoon chorus of the cicadas. Houses were tiny, whitewashed, or painted pastel pinks and blues, flowers were everywhere, fields were green, well-watered and rich-seeming. Cars (mostly ten-year-old Pontiacs and Chevrolets) came almost to a full stop as they passed each other on the narrow roads. I have been told that Greek drivers are all suicidal, but my impression of them was completely different. Their courtesy was so impressive after the streets of Paris, the roads of Italy and wheeled Germans wherever you find them, that if it were feasible I would have Greek chauffeurs sent out by missionary societies all over the world to teach other races how to drive. They seemed to me to be the last polite drivers on the face of the earth. I would certainly contribute to such a cause. For an agnostic, saving pedestrians seems like a more praiseworthy occupation than saving souls.

We were driven past the airfield, where DC-3’s take off regularly for Athens. The word is, alas, that next year the field will accommodate jets. Tourism, spurred on by the movie Never on Sunday, has become a major industry in Greece, and Corfu is not being neglected, even though it is a good many sea miles from the street in Piraeus where Miss Mercouri entertained her many friends. The dowdy and hilarious palace of the Empress Elisabeth of Austria on Corfu was to become a gambling casino, I was told. This, I suppose, is a just fate for that pompous pile, adorned with some of the worst paintings and sculpture of which the late nineteenth century was capable, and in which there still is the desk and the curious saddle-seat where, according to our guide, Kaiser Wilhelm sat, a mock, persistent, indoor cavalryman, and drew up the plans for the conduct of the First World War.

With the approach of evening we walked around the town. The shops are modest in the goods they display, but there are quite a few well-stocked bookstores, and the streets themselves are adorned by that most welcome of urban features, arcades. Arcades somehow humanize a street. They make it more useful in sun and rain, and generously extend the idea of shelter, which is a city’s first function, to native and barbarian alike.

On the great main square, with its dozens of cafés and restaurants, an enthusiastic crowd had collected to watch a cricket match. The field was of bare, sun-pounded earth, innocent of grass, but there was a tent located in the most proper style at one end and a matting stretched between the wickets as a pitch. Some units of the English fleet were due in port in a day or two and the local teams were getting ready for the challenge match. While I watched, one of the bowlers retired three straight batsmen without yielding a run. I imagine that if this had been America, he would have been signed, with a bonus, by the New York Yankees, before nightfall.

At sunset we watched from the deck of our boat, as the flag was hauled down at the naval headquarters under the fortress, to the blare of a bugle. Everybody within earshot stood stiffly at attention during the ceremony, laborers on the docks, taxi drivers, beggars, old ladies in black, waiters with trays in the cafés, and their customers with their drinks, all frozen for a minute or so into rigid patriotism. Our Captain, remembering the Royal Navy, ran down our Union Jack at the same time, and told me of a retired naval officer for whom he worked before the war who, with all hands and passengers ordered to be present, conducted the flag lowering ceremony on his yacht each day to the sound of “The Last Post” on a phonograph.

Some American friends of ours, a man and his wife (writers, naturally), who had come to Corfu to work in seclusion and fine weather for a year, came on board for drinks. The fine weather had not quite materialized. It had rained steadily all winter, they said, and they were going to try Norway next. We hired a taxi and went out of town to a restaurant in a garden overlooking the sea. En route we passed a rustic tavern, almost lost in flowers, where a whole lamb was turning on an outdoor spit, while men danced with each other, separated by a twisted handkerchief, to the twanging music that has become so familiar to us since the showing of Miss Mercouri’s movie. The scene was different from Crotone in that women, though not dancing, were at least present and drinking, and could, ostensibly, join the men for dinner when the lamb was ready.

The restaurant to which our friends led us was lit softly by lanterns hung from the branches of shadowing trees. The meal was delicious, the wine good, the night air fragrant with jasmine and salt. It was hard to understand, that evening, how anyone could contemplate Norway after Corfu.

When I wanted to pay our driver at the end of the evening, he asked, in Italian, how long we were going to stay on the island. When I said three or four days, he waved away my money and said he would keep an account for us and we could pay it just before we sailed. I intend to suggest this amiable system of transportation on credit next time I take a taxi in from Kennedy Airport and see what the reaction will be.