chapter3-page_51-63

Chapter 3.

The new villa was enormous, with daffodil yellow walls, green shutters, and a fox red roof.

It stood on a hill above the sea, and was surrounded by olive groves, and lemon and orange orchards.

The place was old and melancholic.

The house with the cracked walls, the huge rooms, the garden covered in last year's leaves

and overgrown plants.

It was as though the villa and the area around it were half asleep.

Spiro had found the place and organized our move efficiently.

Four days after seeing the villa for the first time, we had moved.

There was a little cottage at the end of the garden, where the gardener and his wife lived.

They were an elderly pair.

His job was to look after the garden, pick the fruit, crush the olives, and get honey from the 17 bee hives beneath the lemon trees.

Mother hired the gardener's wife to work for us in the villa.

Her name was Lugaretsia, and she was a thin, cheerless person.

She was extremely sensitive, and Mother soon gave up criticizing her work because she would start crying.

The only thing that made Lugaretsia smile was talking about her illnesses.

When we first moved there, her stomach was worry in her.

We would hear the news about the state of her stomach at seven in the morning when she brought us tea.

She would move from room to room with the trays and explain to us the details of how her stomach had been the night before.

Can't you do something about that woman, Larry asked Mother one morning?

What can I do?

I know she's a bit annoying, said Mother, but after all, the poor woman is suffering.

Nonsense, said Leslie.

She's enjoying it, like Larry does when he's ill.

We just have to put up with her, said Mother.

There's no one else we can get.

I'll have Theodore examine her next time he's here.

Shortly afterwards, Lugaretsia's stomach got better, but almost immediately she started complaining about her feet.

She would move around the house, groaning loudly.

She would silently appear from behind you and groan loudly in your ear.

Larry started to have his breakfast in his room because she would take off her shoes in the dining room to show us which toes were hurting.

Besides Lugaretsia's illnesses, we had other problems in the house.

The furniture that came with the house was very old and had not been used for 20 years.

The pieces were ugly and unpractical and would crack loudly and create dust every time you walked past a room.

The first evening, the leg of the dining table, came off.

Some days later, Larry sat down on a chair and its back broke.

When Mother tried to open a wardrobe, its door came away, so she decided something must be done.

We can't let people stay in a house where everything falls to pieces just by looking at it, she said.

We need to buy new furniture.

The next morning, Spiro drove Mother, Margot and me into town to buy furniture.

After a long bargain with the dealer, we bought some new furniture.

Really, these guests will be the most expensive ones we've ever had, said Mother.

So we settled into the villa.

Larry moved into the attic and had two bookshelves built there.

Leslie used the large veranda behind the house to practice shooting.

Mother spent most of her time in the large kitchen, preparing food and listening to Lugaretsia's complaints.

Roger and me, of course, we explored the garden, the vast paradise.

I was without a teacher at the time because George had left the island.

I could spend the whole day outside, returning to the villa only for meals.

I found many creatures in this land.

Some were old friends, the rose beetles, the blue carpenter bees, the ladybirds, and the trapdoor spiders.

But I also discovered many new ones.

Little black scorpions lived in the old walls of the garden.

Green tree frogs lived in the fig and lemon trees.

Various kinds of snakes, lizards, and tortoises lived up on the hillside.

Under the roof, the swallows had nested.

They had arrived a short time before us and had just completed their mudhouses.

The houses were still wet, and as they were drying, the parent birds brought pieces of root, wool, and feathers to cover them.

Two of the nests were lower than the others, so I decided to examine them closely.

I climbed on a ladder very slowly, over a period of two days, until the birds got used to me.

The parent birds seemed not to be disturbed by my presence, and continued to work on the nests.

I learned a lot about these swallow families, as I watched their daily work with interest.

The two females were very similar in behavior.

The two males, on the other hand, were different characters.

One of them always brought excellent material, but never took his work seriously.

He would easily get distracted and fly over the flowers, making his wife complain.

The other male was eager to do his work, but always brought the wrong material.

He would, for example, bring a feather which was too big for the nest.

His wife would spend several minutes to explain to him that the feather would not fit the nest.

Disappointed, he would drop the feather on the ground.

When the nests were ready, the eggs were laid, and the babies came out.

The two husband's characters seemed to change.

The eager one was now carefree, while the other male became a responsible father.

He would fly in search of food for his babies, until he got exhausted.

But he would always bring the most unsuitable things, such as large spiky beetles, with long legs,

or completely uneatable dragonflies.

He would never get the babies to eat these insects, so, eventually, he would drop them to the ground.

I was happy about this, because I picked them up and added them to my collection of insects.

Behind the villa, there were some small hills.

They were covered with green mertle, tall heather, and cypress trees.

This part of the garden was full of life.

Hunting wasps were digging tunnels.

Gray, fat, furry caterpillars of emperor moths were feeding slowly,

and the mantids were hanging around in the mertles.

I soon discovered that these hills really belonged to the tortoises.

One hot afternoon, Roger and I were hidden behind a bush, trying to catch a butterfly.

It was the first really hot day of the year.

As we watched the butterfly, I noticed something else.

There was a movement on the ground.

A small area of soil was pushed upwards.

I wondered what the cause of this movement could be.

An earthquake?

A mole?

As the soil moved one more time, the wrinkled head of a tortoise appeared,

and a long, skinny neck followed.

The sleepy eyes blinked and looked at me.

Then, he lifted himself out of the ground, walked a few steps, and dropped down to sunbathe.

He lay there for about ten minutes, and then rose slowly, and walked down to find some dandelions

and clovers to eat.

This must have been the first tortoise of spring.

Shortly afterwards, the hills suddenly became covered with tortoises.

I have never seen so many in such a small area.

Sitting in one spot for an hour, you could count ten tortoises past you.

And on one afternoon, I collected thirty -five of them in two hours, just walking around the hillside.

I watched the daily lives of the tortoises so closely that I came to know many of them by sight.

I could recognize some by their shapes and color, others by a physical defect, such as a lost toenail.

There was one honey -colored female who had one eye.

I got to know her well, and named her Madame Cyclops.

She came to know me well, and was not afraid of me.

I would sometimes bring her a lettuce leaf, or some tiny snails, which she liked extremely.

One day, I found her burying nine white eggs into the ground.

I was really excited, and I wanted one of those eggs to add to my collection.

I did not take it while she was there, so I had to sit and wait patiently until she walked away into the bushes.

I then carefully dug out one of the eggs.

It was the size of a pigeon's egg, oval in shape, and with a rough chalky shell.

I carried it back to the villa, and added it to my natural history collection in a small glass -topped box.

I wrote a label for it, which said, Egg of Greek Tortoise, Testudo Grasse, laid by Madame Cyclops.

Throughout the spring and early summer, the villa was filled with Larry's friends.

Immediately after one group left, another boat would arrive.

There were always taxis and carriages bringing more people to the house.

Sometimes, the new group would show up before the old one left, causing great chaos.

The house and garden would be full of poets, authors, artists, and playwrights, arguing, painting, typing, and composing.

Larry had said they would be ordinary, charming people,

but they all turned out to be extraordinary eccentrics, who were so cultured and sophisticated that they had difficulty in understanding each other.

One of these guests was Zatopic, an Armenian poet.

He was short and fat, with long silver hair.

He arrived wearing a long black coat and a big black hat.

He had a deep voice and would shake the whole house when he talked.

He talked from morning to night.

He was quite old, but was still interested in women.

He treated mother and Margot very politely, but ran after the village girls.

Another of the guests was Jean Quill, who was an artist from East London.

I didn't come for holiday.

She announced when she arrived.

I came to work, so I'm not interested in fun and picnics.

I'm here to work.

So she went to the garden and lay under the sun until she left.

Michael was a painter, a fat little man, who had also come to get some work done.

He was fascinated by the colors of the island and told us that he wanted to do a giant painting of Corfu.

He was eager to start right away.

Unfortunately, he suffered from asthma.

Equally, unfortunately, Lugaretsia had left a blanket that had been used in horse riding on a chair in his room.

In the middle of the night, we woke up to the sound of Michael, coughing and struggling to breathe.

We all rushed into his room to help him.

Margot went to make him some tea, Larry got some cough medicine, Leslie opened the windows,

and mother put him back to bed and covered him with the horse blanket.

To our surprise, he got worse.

He could still speak, so we asked him about his condition and its cause.

Psychological, said Larry, Michael shook his head to say no.

I wonder what could have caused this, said mother.

Are you allergic to something, Michael?

Unable to breathe, Michael told us that he was only allergic to three things, the pollen of the lilac flower, cats and horses.

We all looked out of the window, but there was no lilac tree in the garden.

We searched the room for a cat, but there was none.

Larry said I had probably brought a horse into the house, but I said this was not true.

Michael was about to die when we noticed the horse blanket.

Mother had pulled it up to his chin. Thankfully, we were able to save him.

However, the poor man was not able to paint at all during his day with us.

The old wall around the garden of the house was a great place for me to find animals.

It was an ancient brick wall that had been plastered over, but now it was covered with green moss.

There were many cracks, some wide, some very narrow.

If you looked close enough, you could see a land of its own on this wall, villages of tiny toadstools, mountains of green moss, and forests of small ferns.

The inhabitants of the wall were many different animals.

Some were day workers, and some were night workers.

Some were the hunters, and some were the hunted.

At night, the hunters were the toads and the geckos.

Their prey was the crane flies, moths, and beetles.

During the day, it was difficult to tell who the hunter was and who the hunted.

The wasps searched for caterpillars and spiders.

The spiders hunted for flies.

The dragon flies ate spiders and flies, and the lizards ate everything.

But the shyest and most dangerous ones lived in the cracks of the wall, the little black scorpions.

They looked strange with their flat bodies, their crooked legs, their enormous claws, and their tail, like a string of brown beads.

The scorpion would lie there quietly as you examined him, and only raised his tail if you breathed too hard on him.

I grew very fond of these scorpions. They were pleasant and modest creatures.

They treated you with respect, unless you did something silly, like putting your hand on one.

All they wanted was to go away and hide.

One day, I found a fat female scorpion in the wall.

She seemed to be wearing a fur coat.

I looked more closely and realized that it was not a coat, but lots of tiny baby scorpions on their mother's back.

I was fascinated by this family and decided to take them into the house and up to my bedroom.

I wanted to watch them grow up.

Carefully, I moved the family into a matchbox and hurried to the villa.

It was unlucky that lunch was served when I entered the house.

I put the matchbox carefully on a bookshelf in the sitting room and went to the dining room and joined the family for the meal.

As I ate my food, fed Roger under the table and listened to the family arguing, I completely forgot about the scorpions.

At last, Larry finished eating and went to get the cigarettes from the sitting room.

He came back, sat down, and with a cigarette in his mouth, picked up the matchbox he had brought.

I watched him as he opened it.

I maintained to this day that the mother scorpion was not trying to harm anyone.

She was a little annoyed at being inside a small box for a long time, so she took the first opportunity to escape.

She jumped out of the box and on to Larry's hand.

Larry felt something on his hand and looked.

At that moment, everything went into chaos.

Larry gave a loud cry, which made Lugaretsia drop a plate.

Roger came out of the table and started barking wildly.

Larry shook off the scorpion, which went flying.

She fell onto the table between Margot and Leslie, and the babies scattered all over the place.

The mother scorpion was angry, so she went towards Leslie, who jumped up and caused his chair to fall.

With his napkin, he sent the scorpion towards Margot, who led out a scream that was very much like the loud whistle of a train.

Mother, who could not understand the reason for the sudden chaos, put on her glasses to see what was happening.

At that moment, Margot threw a glass of cold water at the scorpion, but missed the animal and poured it all over mother.

The scorpion had now gone under Leslie's plate, while her babies were running wildly on the table.

Roger ran around the room, barking loudly.

It's that boy again, shouted Larry.

Look out, look out, they're coming!

Screamed Margot.

All we need is a book, cried Leslie.

Don't panic, hit them with a book.

What is wrong with you all?

Mother kept asking, unable to understand.

It's that boy again, he'll kill us all.

Look at the table, covered in scorpions.

Quick, do something, look out.

Stop screaming and get a book.

Shut up, Roger.

But how did the scorpions get on the table, dear?

That boy, every matchbox in the house is a death trap.

Look out, it's coming towards me.

Quick, do something.

Hit it with your knife, your knife.

Go on, hit it.

Misunderstanding the situation, Roger had concluded that the family was being attacked and that it was his duty to defend them.

And, because the only stranger in the room was Lugaretsia, he thought she must beat the enemy, so he bit her in the ankle.

This did not help much.

Finally, the baby scorpions had hidden under the plates.

The family, angry and frightened, went to the sitting room.

While I spent half an hour picking the babies up with a teaspoon and putting them back on their mother's back.

Then, I carried them outside and left them on the garden wall.

The results of the incident were numerous.

After that day, Larry developed a phobia of matchboxes.

And always opened them with extreme care.

Lugaretsia walked around with her ankle wrapped in bandage for weeks, even after the bites had healed.

But, worst of all, mother decided I was becoming wild again, and it was time to find me another teacher.

While they were looking for a teacher, she wanted me to learn French, so every morning,

Spiro drove me into town for my French lessons with a Belgian man.

The Belgian was a sweet little man with a magnificent beard, and a well looked after mustache.

He was always dressed as though he was ready for a formal meeting, in a black coat, striped trousers, a big crevat, and polished shoes.

He used to make me sit down at the table and read from a fat edition of a French dictionary.

It was very boring.

I did not learn any French, but the lessons were good in a way.

By the end of the morning, I was so bored that I enjoyed my afternoon adventures even more than I used to.

And, of course, I also looked forward to Thursdays, when I met with Theodore.

Theodore would come to the villa right after lunch, and stay until late at night.

Thursday was also the day when the seaplane from Athens arrived and landed in the bay close to our house.

Theodore loved watching seaplanes land.

The only part of the house where you could get a good view was the attic.

The plane would always arrive during tea time.

We would hear it coming, and Theodore, in the middle of explaining something, would suddenly stop talking.

Is that, er, you know, is that the sound of the plane?

He would ask.

Everyone would stop talking and listen.

Slowly, the sound would grow louder and louder.

Aha, he would say, putting his fork down.

Yes, that certainly is the sound of the plane.

The sound would grow louder and louder, and finally, mother would ask him the question.

Would you like to go up and watch it land, Theodore?

Well, if you're sure, Theodore would say.

Hurry up, Theo, or you'll miss it, we would all say.

Then all of us left the table and ran up the stairs.

Roger running in front of us.

We went into the attic, out of breath, laughing, opened the windows, and leaned out to see the plane.

The plane flew over the olive groves, going lower and lower.

Then, it would be over the water, and you could see its reflection in the blue surface.

Lower and lower, and then suddenly, it touched the surface.

Flew on, and then settled on it.

Oh, yes, Theodore would say.

It's certainly a very enjoyable sight.

The show was over.

We would shut the attic windows, and walk back downstairs noisily.

The following week, the same thing would happen.

It was on Thursdays that Theodore and I went out together.

Carrying our boxes and nets, we went through the olives as Roger ran in front of us.

We would study everything.

Flowers, insects, rocks, and birds.

Theodore had an infinite knowledge about everything, but when he told you about it,

you never felt like he was teaching you something new.

It was like he was helping you remember the things you had forgotten.

Towards the evening, with our jars, bottles, and tubes full of strange and exciting things,

we would return home.

The sky would be turning gold as we walked through the olive groves, and the air would be cooler.

Roger would walk in front of us.

We would be singing a song that Theodore had taught me.