Corelli's Mandolin

by Louis de Bernières

We should care for each

other more than we care for ideas, or else we will end up killing each other. Am I not right?’

A guilty man wishes only to be understood, because to be understood is to appear to be forgiven.

He seemed suddenly to have become a dream-creature of frightening and infinite fragility, something too exquisite and ephemeral to be human.

The word ‘heartbroken’ occurs to me, except that this is inadequate to describe the sensation of being utterly broken in both body and soul.

but finally it is impossible to escape those monsters that devour from the inner depths, and the only ways to vanquish them are either to wrestle with them like Jacob with his angel or Hercules with his serpents, or else ignore them until they give up and disappear.

‘Symmetry is only a property of dead things. Did you ever see a tree or a mountain that was symmetrical? It’s fine for buildings, but if you ever see a symmetrical human face, you will have the impression that you ought to think it beautiful, but that in fact you find it cold. The human heart likes a little disorder in its geometry, Kyria Pelagia. Look at your face in a mirror, Signorina, and you will see that one eyebrow is a little higher than the other, that the set of the lid of your left eye is such that the eye is a fraction more open than the other. It is these things that make you both attractive and beautiful, whereas … otherwise you would be a statue. Symmetry is for God, not for us.’

After the war I’ll love you, after the war I’ll love you, I’ll love you forever, after the war.

‘Love is a kind of dementia with very precise and oft-repeated clinical symptoms. You blush in each other’s presence, you both hover in places where you expect the other to pass, you are both a little tongue-tied, you both laugh inexplicably and too long, you become quite nauseatingly girlish, and he becomes quite ridiculously gallant. You have also grown a little stupid. He gave you a rose the other day, and you pressed it in my book of symptoms. If you had not been in love and had had a little sense, you would have pressed it in some other book that I did not use every day. I think it very fitting that the rose is to be found in the section that deals with erotomania.’

‘And another thing. Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don’t blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being “in love”, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two. But sometimes the petals fall away and the roots have not entwined.

Imagine giving up your home and your people, only to discover after six months, a year, three years, that the trees have had no roots and have fallen over. Imagine the desolation. Imagine the imprisonment.

Don’t grimace, we all owe a death to nature, it can’t be helped.

‘Koritsimou, I am going to die. Remember me to your father. And I thank God I have lived long enough to love you.’

“Whom the gods love, die young.” ‘ “Man is a dream of a shadow.” ‘ “Even the gods cannot change the past.” ‘ “Men in their generations are like the leaves of the trees. The wind blows and one year’s leaves are scattered to the ground; but the trees burst into bud and put on fresh ones when the springtime comes.”

‘When loved ones die, you have to live on their behalf. See things as though with their eyes. Remember how they used to say things, and use those words oneself. Be thankful that you can do things that they cannot, and also feel the sadness of it. This is how I live without Pelagia’s mother. I have no interest in flowers, but for her I will look at a rock-rose or a lily. For her I eat aubergines, because she loved them. For your boys you should make music and enjoy yourself, doing it for them.

A man makes mistakes, he gets caught up in things, he is sometimes a sheep, and then he learns by experience and becomes a lion.’

And I raised up his body and clasped his head in my breast, and a great cry came out that must have been mine, and I saw as clearly as one sees a mountain that he was the only man I’ve loved who loved me to the end, and never bruised my heart, and never for a single moment failed me.