Manoli
VICTORIA HISLOP (born Bromley, 1959) went into publishing and advertising after reading English at Oxford University, and then began travel writing. Her first novel, The Island, came out of a trip to Crete, inspired by the story of the leper colony of Spinalonga. An international bestseller, it became a Greek TV series. Her second novel, The Return, is set in Granada and recalls the Spanish Civil War. Victoria lives in Kent with her husband and two children, and has a house on Crete. www.victoriahislop.com
I met Manoli Foundoulakis on 20 January 2007, in a hotel in Crete. It was at exactly six o’clock in the evening. His punctuality was only one of the many differences between Manoli and every other Greek I had ever encountered. We met because I had written a novel set on Spinalonga, a small island off Crete, which was a leper colony from 1903 to 1957, and Manoli had been asked to write a foreword to the Greek edition. He was a former leprosy sufferer, and still lived in the village opposite the island.
When I wrote The Island, my complete lack of Greek meant that I had not been able to do any research about the people who had lived on Spinalonga. Everything about the island itself, the patients and the doctors came from my imagination as I sat at my desk back in England. Indeed, Manoli was the first European with leprosy that I had ever met. I had always maintained a firm conviction that those who suffered from this disease would be as funny, clever, charming and wise as anyone else. Why would they not? And in Manoli, I saw how close to the truth my instinct had taken me.
When he emerged from the shadows of the hotel foyer to shake my hand, I was shocked. This was not because of the way he looked as, in spite of the very obvious damage that had been done to his face by the disease, Manoli was still a handsome man. It was more the feeling that a character in my novel had come to life.
I was anxious that Manoli might be critical of the assumptions I had made about the lives of people with leprosy. Instead he thanked me for lifting the stigma which had blighted his life for so many years. However, at that first meeting, someone had to translate every sentence we spoke to each other. I decided there and then that I would find time to learn Greek in order to talk to Manoli. I began my lessons in London shortly afterwards and gradually realised my ambition.
Manoli lived in the hills overlooking Spinalonga, in the village of Ano Elounda, where the streets are too narrow for cars and the population is largely made up of beautiful but elderly widows in black. In summer, we used to sit on the steps in the street, beneath his vine, sipping the overpowering raki that he had distilled himself and in winter we sat inside, my back almost melting from the heat of the wood fire that constantly blazed in the hearth.
Whenever I planned a visit to Manoli, I would put a dictionary in my bag and we would talk. His patience was matchless. One evening, when I took the narrow road up to see him, secure in the knowledge that he would be there, because he always was, I forgot both my dictionary and glasses. So Manoli and I shared his thick-lensed spectacles along with the Greek-English dictionary which he kept in his kitchen, and for many hours we ‘talked’. It was painstaking but meant that each sentence had to be worth constructing.
Manoli knew I loved to sit on a particular chair with my back to his fire and after a few hours there, I would emerge suffused with the aroma of wood smoke, my stomach full of horta (Greek spinach, for which he knew I had a passion), barbounia, and coffee, which I would make under his careful instruction. He taught me so much. The most obvious lesson was that, in spite of everything he had lived through and suffered, there was no place for self-pity. Unlike so many people, he never talked about himself, never once complained of anything.
Manoli was a very gifted man. He had immense powers of oratory, and when something stirred him, he could deliver a speech that moved everyone around him, mixing intellect and emotion in a way that even the most talented politicians often fail to do. He became chief advisor and consultant on the TV serial made for Greek television from my novel, and his house became a focal point for all actors who wanted to know what it felt like to suffer from this ancient disease. The series was dedicated to him.
He had an exceptional memory too. One afternoon during the last few weeks of his life, I visited him in hospital with a Greek actor, Theodoros Katzafados, who was playing a lead role in the TV drama. Through the filter of his oxygen mask, Manoli began to recite verse after verse from the Erotokritos, an epic love poem written in the seventeenth century in Cretan dialect, by Kornaros, Greece’s equivalent to Shakespeare. At a certain point, Theodoros joined in and they spoke the lines together but even he, who had held the stage at Epidauros every summer for decades, was amazed at Manoli’s delivery and his powers of recall, which held us both spellbound.
Age meant nothing to Manoli. Until a few weeks before his death last spring, he was as sprightly as someone half his age. Sometimes when I was with him, I felt that his walking stick was just a stage prop and that he might break into a dance routine like Fred Astaire. When he went across to Spinalonga to play a role in the scene when the patients are all cured and leaving the island, he left his stick behind and marched through the tunnel holding my arm. It felt to me that I was supported by Manoli, not the other way round. He was determined to show the reality of the cure, and nothing could have demonstrated more eloquently that leprosy had been conquered than the sight of his abandoned walking stick.
His energy characterised everything – from his passionate devotion to his family, to his strong religious faith, to the way in which he expressed his ideas. Unlike so many people with firm opinions, he would speak and listen with the same level of concentration. Whenever people talk of Manoli, they always mention his psychi – his ‘soul’. I think of this in the way I think of his hands: larger than life, generous, other-worldly. Perhaps both his soul and hands were shaped and moulded by his experience of leprosy. The positive effect he had on those around him was something very out of the ordinary.
The timelessness of the village in which he lived and the calmness with which we always talked made me feel that Manoli had all the time in the world. I felt that he would live forever: there seemed no reason for him not to, after all the physical and emotional assaults that he had survived.
Just before he died, he told me he was ready to go. With his immensely strong faith, I know he was and, moreover, was looking forward to it. On 28 May 2010 he died, peacefully at the age of eighty-seven. For him it was the right time: his punctuality was immaculate to the end.
