UNDERGRADUATE PAGE
Portrait of Lita
By STEWART SANDERSON (University of Edinburgh) 46 H! there is an organ playing in the street—a waltz too.
I must leave off to listen. They arc playing a waltz which I have heard ten thousand times at the balls in London.
Music is a strange thing." So wrote Lord Byron, flung down his pen, and limped to the window of his study in Ravenna, cars straining after the melody from the barrel-organ in the street outside, memory straining after the colour of a dress, the shape of a face, the perfume from a wrap, a thousand details once clearly observed, then com- pletely forgotten until the thousand-and-first detail, the waltz he
had once half-heard through the hum of conversation, through snatches of laughter and the clink of glasses, brought the past vividly to his mind as he stood at the window of the Palazzo Guiccioli ten years later.
The times change, and we change with them. One could not, indeed one would not wish to, go hack, but there arc moments when nostalgia assails us, when a half-remembered scent, a certain pattern of sunlight and shadow, a chance phrase overheard in the street, send our thoughts coursing over the past, over a scene now remote and dreamlike, once immediate and alive. This is not the nostalgia of Ulysses, driven by tempests past his island home, nor is it the nostalgia of the mystic for the City of God, nor is it yet Baudelaire's nostalgic de la bone ; one would not go back. Rather it is Eliot's nostalgia for la figlia the piange ; it is a nostalgia that sometimes steals upon us in the troubled midnight and the noon's repose, compelling us for a moment to wonder, idly, almost dispassionately, how things would have been, and compelling us especially to remember how things were in that distant past which now can scarcely move us, and to which we would not return.
Thus it was when I heard a cheap little tune on the radio as I at smoking after dinner by my Scottish hearth. A cheap little tune I have called it, and so it is ; but it was sung in Greek by a cabaret- star I have heard not once but many times, and always when I was with Lita ; and the sound of it took me back to those far-off days in Athens. It seemed almost to have been written for her, for it tells of two green eyes framed by jet-black lashes, and Lita's cycs were the colour of a green olive, bright in the strong Greek sunshine, soft and moon-washed in the night. Her skin was very white, her hair very dark and wavy, and her eyes and mouth were set significantly in this oval frame of black and white, the eyes rather widely placed, the nose high-bridged and narrow, the mouth not large but generously- curving as if perpetually trembling into a smile. So I have seen her sit on many evenings, head thrown slightly back, one hand toying with a wineglass, while we heard the orchestra of the Miami play this sentimental tune.
It was at the Miami that I met her, on my second evening in 'Athens. Lunch that day had been a hurried affair in the King George Hotel, composed mostly of Martini cocktails to celebrate a home appointment for one of the Embassy staff. " If you want some homework while your ship refits," he said, scribbling on a thousand-drachma note, " try this. She's a typist in U.N.R.R.A.— good-looktr but rather quiet. I've only just discovered her. Meant ;to take her out tonight myself—there," and he thrust the note into my hand, a crumpled brown note patched with stamp-paper and bearing in a shaky scrawl " Lita, Odos Parmenidcs 17, phone 37211." The note is lying on my desk at this moment, the pencilled words slightly faded, just as the sunburn has faded on the hand into which it was thrust four years ago. This is the hand that picked up the telephone that evening, the hand that drew back a chair as she came to my table, the hand that first slid round her waist. It is also the hand that quietly lifted the latch of her door as she lay asleep the morning I sailed from the Piracus ; it is the hand that tore up an unopened letter from her two years later ; it is the hand that now holds my pen.
Lita, phone 37211. A good-looker, but rather quiet. Certainly she did not say very much on that first evening, nor on many subse-
quent evenings as we sat under the oleanders at the Miami, sipping our wine, dancing a little, watching the floor-show which started at midnight. Sometimes we would sit for half an hour without saying a word, content to be with each other at our table under the trees, asking for no more than the -:ertainty of that timeless moment in which mind and body were at case in the warm summer night ; sometimes we would exchange idle comments on the people around us or on the cabaret turns ; sometimes, when my attention was wandering, she would call it back by leaning forward to brush my ear with her lips as she murmured my name. I can almost feel that gentle touch now, soft as the touch of a falling petal from the oleander trees. Sometimes we would chuckle spontaneously, for no reason at all.
In Greece perhaps the women are the only true stoics ; they have had to be. I was not the first man in Lita's life, nor I suppose the last. She accepted me as inevitably as she accepted the good warmth of the sun and the clean smell of the sea ; as inevitably, too, as she accepted life's dirty tricks. She did not like to talk about the past, not I think from any bitterness, but because she was indifferent to it. One evening, however, she told how her fiancé had been killed .when the Germans broke through at Argyrokastron, how her father had been condemned to heath for sheltering a British major, how the German commander had offered to rescind the sentence if she became his mistress, how she had consented only to have her father and mother shot by a firing-squad next day. Lita was then nineteen.
She had of necessity learnt to accept without question, to be glad of the good moments and not to be aware of the bad. It was my fortune to be accepted as one of the good things. When I knew that my ship was almost ready to sail, I knew that she would take the news with that same quiet acceptance. It was not allowed to spoil nor to affect in any way our last few days together. She must, to some extent, have persuaded me into that same unquestioning fatalism, for it was not until my ship had passed the breakwater that I realised I should never again visit the apartment on the Odos Parmenides. Then, suddenly, I understood. For six perfect weeks I had lived as man is meant to live, uncritical of circumstance, unaware of things external, of present, past or future, yearning not for the infinite, but having absolute knowledge of the four square walls that bound one's life. This was the old Greek way ; it is still the way of the peasants in remote villages that have seen no change ; it is a way which few of us have the fortune to stumble upon in this twentieth century. There were exceptions, but only exceptions of course. . . .
It is a way I shall not know again. Four years have passed, years spent poring over books, analysing emotions, dissecting the moods of poets and the theories of philosophers, anatomising my own experience with the scalpel of theirs. One is bound to become self- conscious ; that is what universities arc for. There are many ways, and many potential selves ; but one has learnt the necessity to select one certain way and one certain self. When the walls collapse to expose new vistas, one must rebuild one's house. The site is different. the rooms more numerous ; it stands four-square to the world, yet through the brittle windows one can sec hills and valleys which might some day become one's own property. The apartment on the Odos Parmenides was too small. One could not go back.
The dead are dead ; that Greek lesson remains. Two years ago there came a letter from the grave ; how could-I open it ? And now a song from the past ; yet how can I fail to hear ? Nonetheless I would not go back. This history is for a quiet hour.
Previous page
