The house on the cliff

in the nearly constant absences of the family, cultivated by neighbouring villagers in exchange for the greater portion of the crop. For that matter, the island’s tall olive trees and long ripening season - up to four months - impeded even that harvest. There were grapevines, too, their long shoots mostly trailing on the ground, and their grapes commonly left to ripen overlong and then, once pressed, to ferment with little oversight, resulting in a strong, sweet wine that wasn’t very viable commercially. In this way, even in good years, the relatively small quantities of grapes and wine our lands produced were of poor quality. The villagers in charge suffered all the woes of rural poverty and my father was always willing to forgive a debt, or to put a hand into his own pocket to help out. The house, Villa Ánthimi, originally built as a holiday home for a few weeks in the hottest part of the year, was already run down from lack of maintenance. Only the garden was thriving, thanks to the magical care of the gardener, who in the years of the owner’s absence had also taken on the role of guard. My father’s only income was his salary as a member of parliament, augmented by the little he made from his neglected profession as a lawyer. (The legendary wealth of his maternal grandfather, Márkos Voriás had been lost to the chaos of the Great Schism earlier in the century.) With the dissolution of parliament, the salary came to an end. Thus matters stood when the Velissáris family, the two of us, that is, and the ever-present Loxándra, took up our house arrest, which fortunately also included our lands, in Villa Ánthimi, near the village of Maskouládes, on the island of Corfu. I was one year old. Over the course of the next four years, our land had developed into an exemplary agricultural concern, according to the standards of the time. The only capital invested was my father’s unrelenting effort, and the guidance and shining example he provided. The olive trees had been cleared of brambles and ivy, pruned properly, and sprayed with copper sulphate. Great expanses of wild land had been cleared and planted with saplings of a different variety of olive tree from Ái Mathiás, shorter and with a greater resistance to the olive fly. The trailing grapevines had been raised up on poles, the wine barrels scoured with ash and sand, and dried out in the sun. A new vineyard was planted for red Bordeaux-type wine, then barely known on the island. Does it seem unlikely that just like that, from one day to the next, my lawyer father became a farmer extraordinaire? It wasn’t really like that. My father, Loxándra explained, had wanted, ever since he was a little boy, to train as an agronomist and live on Corfu, making the most of the family holdings and importing the latest agricultural techniques. Of course it didn’t turn out that way.