Well, the doctor, having pronounced upon his client, rose to take his leave; he did not elaborate about taking out the spleen — one could hardly do this in the lounge. He simply shook hands all round, discussed his fee in a gruff tone with Roberto, and slid through the tall doors of the hotel into the sunlight. Much reassured by such a matter-of-fact approach, the female Microscope rose to her feet looking very much better. Her husband, in a surprising gesture of sympathy, put his arm round her and led her up to her room to lie down. Yet all had ended on a note of interrogation, nothing finally had been decided. But Roberto sent a hotel messenger out for the medicine and we all hoped for the best. “In my experience,” said Deeds, “the French have only one national disease and it is not the spleen — it’s the liver. And a more honorable thing than a French liver you could not have. It comes from them being the most discriminating people on earth when it comes to food and drink.” He did not want to labor the point for he saw Beddoes hovering around with the intention of making some dastardly remark, probably about morning sickness. It was time for an early dinner and bed, for we planned an early start on the morrow — unless hampered by the spleen of the French lady.
4: Agrigento
MARTINE: “BUT AGRIGENTO for me is the acid test and I am sure you will feel it as I have; it reminded me of all our passionate arguments about the Greekness of a Cyprus which had never been either geographically or demographically part of Greece. What constituted its special claim to be so? Language of course — the eternal perennity of the obdurate Greek tongue which has changed so little for thousands of years. Language is the key, the passport, and unless we look at the Greek phenomenon from this point of view we will never understand the sort of colonizers they were. It was not blood but language which gave one membership of the Greek intellectual commonwealth — barbarians were not simply people who lived other where but people who did not speak Greek. It is hard for us to understand for we, like the Romans, have a juristic view of citizenship — in the case of the British our innate puritanism makes it a question of blood, of keeping the blood untainted by foreign admixtures. The horror for us is the half-caste, the touch of the tar brush. It is a complete contrast to the French attitude which resembles in a way the ancient Greek notion in its idea of Francophone nations and races. The possession of the French tongue with its automatic entry into the riches of French culture constitutes the only sort of passport necessary for a non-French person whatever the color of his or her skin. It is easier to find a place in a French world than in a British — language determines the fact; yes, if you are black or blue and even with a British passport it is harder to integrate with us.
“This little homily is written in the belief that one day you will visit the temples in that extraordinary valley below the horrid tumble of modern Agrigento’s featureless and grubby slums — and suddenly feel quite bewildered by finding yourself in Greece, one hundred per cent in Greece. And you will immediately ask yourself why (given the strong anti-northern and secessionist sentiments of the Sicilians) there has never been a Greek claim to the island. You will smile. But in fact if we judge only by the monuments and the recorded history of the place we are dealing with something as Greek in sinew and marrow as the Argolid or as Attica. How has it escaped? Because the language is no longer a vital force. There are a few pockets where a vestigial Greek is still spoken, but pathetically few (luckily for the Italians). There is an odd little Byzantine monastery or two as there is in Calabria. But the gleam of its Greekness has died out; its language has been swamped by Italian. Only the ancient place names remain to jolt one awake to the realization that Sicily is just as Greek as Greece is — or never was! The question of Greekness — and the diaspora — is an intriguing one to think about. If we take Athens (that very first olive tree) as the center from which all Greekness radiates outward … Sicily is about like Smyrna is — if we take its pulse today. O please come and see!”
Not very well expressed perhaps, but the sentiments harked back to our long Cyprus arguments in the shade of the old Abbey of Bellapais. The dust raised around the question of Enosis with Greece, which constituted such a genuine puzzle to so many of our compatriots. Their arguments always centered around the relative amenities offered the Cypriots under our unequal, lazy but relatively honest regime. No military service, standards of living etc.… all this weighed nothing against a claim which was purely poetic, a longing as ancient as Aphrodite and the crash of the waves on the deserted beaches of Paphos. How to bring this home to London whose sense of values (“common sense”) was always based upon the vulgar contingencies of life and not on its inner meaning? You would hear nice-minded civil servants say: “It’s astonishing their claim — they have never been Greek, after all.” Yet the Doric they spoke had roots as deep as Homer, the whole cultus of their ethnographic state was absolutely contemporary, absolutely living. Was it, then, the language which kept it so? The more we disinterred the past the Greeker the contemporary Cypriot seemed to become.
Through all these considerations, as well as many others — for I had been living in the Mediterranean nearly all my adult life — I had started very tentatively to evolve a theory of human beings living in vital function to their habitats. It was hard to shed the tough little carapace of the national ego and to begin to see them as the bare products of the soil, just like the wild flowers or the wines, just like the crops. Physical and mental types which flowered in beauty or intelligence according to what the ground desired of them and not what they desired of themselves or others. One accepts easily enough the fact that whisky is a product of one region and Côtes du Rhône the product of another; so do language and nationality conspire to evolve ways of expressing Greekness or Italian-ness. Though of course it takes several generations for the physical and mental body to receive the secret imprint of a place. And after all, when all is said and done, countries as frequently overrun and ravaged as Greece cannot have a single “true” Greek, in the blood sense, left.
If indeed the phrase means anything at all. What is left is the most hard wearing, even indestructible part, language whose beauty and suppleness has nourished and still nourishes the poet, philosopher, and mathematician. And when I was a poor teacher in Athens striving to learn demotic Greek I found with surprise that my teacher could start me off with the old Attic grammar without batting an eyelash. Much detail had obviously changed, but the basic structure was recognizably the same. I could not repay this debt by starting my own students off with Chaucer; the language had worn itself away too quickly. Even Shakespeare (in whose time no dictionary existed) needed a glossary today. What, then, makes a “Greek”? The whole mystery of human nationality reverberates behind the question. The notion of frontiers, the notion of abstract riches, of thought, of possessions, of customs.… It all comes out of the ground, the hallowed ground of Greece — wherever that was!
This train of thought was a fitting one for a baking morning with a slight fresh wind off the sea. The little red bus had doubled back on its tracks and was heading north briefly before turning away into the mountains. Today we would climb up from sea level into the blue dozing escarpments which stretched away in profile on our left. Mario plied his sweet klaxon to alert the traffic ahead of us — mostly lorries bringing building materials to Syracuse. Roberto hummed a tune over the intercom and told us that it would be nice and cool in the mountains, while tonight we would find ourselves once more at sea level in a good hotel just outside Agrigento. Deeds felt like reading so I pursued my long argument with Martine’s ghost, upon themes some of which had invaded my dreams. I saw her irritating the Governor at dinner by being a trifle trenchant in support of the Greek claim — it made him plaintive for he felt it was rather rude of her, which perhaps it was. What could he do about a situation fabricated by his masters in London?