The Age of Magic by Ben Okri
Section 2
1
That night, while they lay in bed, the spirit of the young man came between them.
Lao could not get out of his mind the vision of the young man kneeling. He had looked the very image of a medieval knight. Mistletoe was calmly drifting off to sleep when Lao shook her. She was annoyed to be woken.
‘What exactly happened between you and that chap?’
‘That chap…?’
‘Nothung, that was his name.’
‘Nothing.’
‘What do you mean nothing?’
‘I mean nothing.’
‘Something must have happened.’
‘Nothing happened.’
‘A man doesn’t just fall to his knees like that.’
‘Nothing.’
‘On his knees like he was proposing to you.’
‘Can I go back to sleep?’
‘Something must have happened.’
‘Nothing happened.’
‘He was on his knees like he was prepared to do anything for you.’
‘He fell to his knees himself.’
‘You must have said something to him.’
‘I told you. I said nothing.’
‘You must have encouraged him in some way.’
‘Why do you men always think that?’
‘Think what?’
‘That women encourage men.’
‘I’m not saying always.’
‘What are you saying then?’
‘Come on, don’t insult my intelligence. You must have said something to him.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘There must have been an exchange.’
‘Yes, he was bothering me and I was trying to get rid of him…’
‘Not trying too hard, eh?’
‘You’re an idiot.’
‘Don’t call me an idiot.’
‘I’m going back to sleep.’
‘We have to deal with this.’
‘I tell you the truth but you won’t believe it.’
‘The truth?’
‘That nothing happened.’
‘Are you saying he became obsessed with you just like that?’
‘Yes.’
‘What? He claps eyes on you and suddenly he’s obsessed?’
‘Yes.’
‘You must have done something.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like look him in the eye.’
‘In the eye?’
‘Yes. In the eye.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Did you make eye contact?’
‘Eye contact?’
‘Why do you keep repeating everything I say? It’s annoying.’
‘The questions are unbelievable, that’s why. I can’t believe you are asking me these things.’
‘What things?’
‘Like did I make eye contact.’
‘Did you make eye contact?’
‘Am I supposed to go round with my eyes shut?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘That’s the gist of what you’re saying.’
‘Nonsense. You’re exaggerating.’
‘Am I supposed to go round blindfolded, so I don’t make eye contact?’
‘I just asked if you made eye contact with this chap.’
‘Eye contact with this chap?’
‘You’re doing it again.’
‘Do you blame me?’
‘You have something to hide.’
‘I have nothing to hide,’ yelled Mistletoe.
‘You must, or why are you getting upset?’
‘Upset?’
‘Yes, upset.’
‘Look, I was sleeping, and you wake me up and subject me to this grilling. Of course I’m upset.’
‘So you’re upset?’
‘All this grilling, because of that chap?’
‘All I asked was did you make eye contact?’
‘Goodness, so I am being punished for making eye contact with every human being?’
‘Don’t avoid the question.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Did you talk to him?’
‘Talk to him?’
‘Yes.’
‘He addressed me.’
‘So you did talk?’
‘Not really.’
‘Either you did or you didn’t.’
‘It wasn’t as straightforward as that.’
‘I see.’
‘What?’
‘So there’s something complicated between you then?’
‘Of course not. You’re twisting what I say.’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘You are.’
‘It’s quite clear something happened between you and you don’t want to own up.’
‘Nothing happened.’
‘I think it did.’
‘I tell you nothing happened.’
At that point Lao exploded. He accused Mistletoe of inflaming the young man, of deviousness, of wanting to test her powers of seduction.
‘I’m gone for one minute and you get up to all kinds of stuff,’ he shouted.
The paradise of their room had turned into purgatory.
2
At first Mistletoe retreated into silence. She turned a blank face to him, which exacerbated his mood. The more she withdrew, the more suspicious he became. The more suspicious he became, the angrier he was. He made coarse insinuations. He invented incriminating reasons to explain the young man’s behaviour. He lashed her verbally, took advantage of her silence, and distorted what she said. He whipped himself into a fine fury. He was quite irrational. And yet he was oddly lucid, oddly aware of himself. Though he fumed, he really wanted her to do or say something that would free him of his rage.
Mistletoe made no reply to any of it. She bore his outrageous suggestions with a neutral silence. It was her way. Silence was her weapon. But then something he said, some allusion to the past, pierced her silence. Her face reddened. When she could bear his words no longer, she too exploded. Furious at being accused, angry at his blaming, she was soon too caught up in her emotions to see round the bends of her own rage.
They verbally flew at one another with all their might. They screamed and cursed one another, faces contorting. They went at one another with a nameless fury, each seeming to hate the other more than anything in the world, inflamed with the passions of hell.
3
Deeper and deeper into the maelstrom of their quarrel they descended till they were trapped in the labyrinths of an evil current. They went on hurting one another, wreaking vengeance, raking up the demons of past deeds, as if possessed.
They were unrelenting and unforgiving; but deep down they each wanted the other to say or do something that would turn the anger back into love. But neither wanted to be the first to give in. The shouting and quarrelling satisfied some raw hunger.
When they began to wish horrible deaths on each other, they passed beyond the boundaries of their personalities. They were no longer themselves. Some poison had insinuated itself into them. It was as if they were delirious actors in a play whose performances had taken them over completely.
Lao would stamp out of the hotel room, swearing never to come back, banging the door behind him. A few moments later he would return. Then a few minutes after that Mistletoe would storm out, and then come back. The quarrel would keep on beginning again and again, fuelled by their delirium.
4
They swirled in this heart-heating inferno, hacking at one another. Their demons raged till ash-coloured dawn lit up the mountains and feathery daylight played on the surface of the lake.
Then something mysterious settled in them and they gradually became quieter. Their spirits stilled as they saw the sun rising over the mountain. Golden tints danced like little angels on the face of the lake.
Lao and Mistletoe had been awake all night. Soon they dropped off out of sheer exhaustion, like children who are lost and have fallen asleep in a garden; their faces were strea
5
That night a man with a bouquet of roses and a bottle of Dom Perignon slipped into Jute’s room.
They talked about how they would sustain their love beyond the Arcadia journey. Then with a gasp and a sigh she received him, and eagerly took him into herself.
Section 3
1
In the morning, at breakfast, they had an encounter with Hans, the hotel owner, who was in a cheerful and expansive mood. He wore a cream-coloured suit and a blue tie and was clean-shaven, his moustache groomed. He was even friendly to Lao.
The other crew members had woken early and gone off on their different adventures. It was a day off from filming. Lao and Mistletoe were just finishing their breakfast of muesli and croissants when Hans joined them. Mistletoe had expressed an interest in the little town and Hans obliged them with its curious story. He was in a very good mood and addressed his story mainly to Mistletoe, with sliding glances at Lao.
‘This town used to be very famous,’ he said. ‘The rich came here from all over the world. Goethe, Mark Twain, Hesse, they all fell in love with our mountains. Turner painted our sunsets. Princes, kings, tycoons, playboys, they all came to us in huge numbers. Then the others followed. They came in spring and summer and the town became immensely successful and rich. Once there were fabulous yachts on our lake with names like Midas, Utopia, and Nefertiti.’
‘What happened?’ asked Mistletoe.
Hans turned on her a kindly eye.
‘They drank, they gambled away huge fortunes, they took drugs of all kinds. And there were the constant scandals. People committed suicide over failed investments, gambling debts, and women. It all became messy. The wheel of fortune turned, and everything went bad.’
Hans paused. He looked sadly out of the window at the mountain.
‘The rich and famous destroyed us. They ruined our way of life. They corrupted our daughters, confused our sons, seduced our wives, made our menfolk restless and greedy. There were duels at night. People were regularly found dead in flowerbeds. Others were found dead in their hotel suites, having shot themselves in the head, point-blank. One of them left a suicide note that read only: Too little luck. Another left a note saying: I could have hung on, but it’s too beautiful. What on earth does that mean? This man was found hanging in the presidential suite of one of our finest hotels.’
Hans twirled his moustache thoughtfully.
‘And so with fame, with money, with neuroses, they ruined the town. More people came than ever. It was like a stampede. The roads and lanes were crowded with cars. You couldn’t move. There were beautiful women in furs everywhere, money splashed all over the place, opera stars, screen idols, high society women, shipping magnates, they all flocked to our little town by the lake. Popularity, success, hysteria, killed us. Our town was written about in all the magazines and newspapers across the world. We were photographed to death. Our cemeteries became places for bizarre love-making. Our young men were paid to make love to the wives of rich old men, while the old men watched. Money became a plague, an epidemic, a curse. Hotel prices went up and up. The townspeople became greedy. We who had been like a large family, we fought and hated one another. Then something happened which changed everything.’
Hans paused again. He looked round the table and helped himself to a little coffee, taking a new cup. He had a few sips.
‘One night,’ he said, resuming his story, ‘a young man of the town murdered one of the rich old men, whose wife he had made love to while the old man watched. The trouble was that the young man was madly in love with the wife. He murdered the old man with a knife, stabbing him twenty-two times in a crazy fit of humiliation, jealousy, and confusion. The woman of course didn’t love him at all and she ran out of the hotel naked and screaming and the young man plunged the knife in his own heart and died instantly. It was the biggest scandal. It was in all the papers. After that the rich and famous stopped coming. They found somewhere else. The town fell silent overnight. Then it died. It became a ghost town. Many years passed and slowly the flowers started to grow again and freshness returned to the air.’
2
While Hans was speaking, he seemed to change. His eyes were piercing. Lao and Mistletoe realised, almost at the same time, that he wasn’t wearing his tortoiseshell glasses. They noticed also a curious alteration in his tone.
‘Now we don’t trust fame and publicity. We don’t want noise or what people call success. We don’t even want to be on the map but we can’t stop it. We want to be our own secret. We want to be invisible, to show the tourists less than we are, to be more plain, more boring than we really are. Plain and boring is our camouflage against the curious, our protection. We make ourselves difficult to see. It’s a kind of magic. Our lives are quiet and hidden. Only people who are looking for something special find us. We have retreated into myth. It’s not surprising that you who seek Arcadia found your way here. Goethe would have approved.’
Hans gave them a sly look.
‘Nothing here is what it seems. The town bends, changes, depending on who’s looking. That’s how it keeps its magic now. Enjoy your walk.’
3
As they set off on their walk that afternoon, they took the opposite direction, walking away from the cemetery and along the water’s edge. There were steamboats on the far side of the lake and gulls calling in the air. They hadn’t gone far when they saw Jim, Sam, and Husk swimming in the sapphire blue waters. A moment later Riley and Propr stuck their heads out. They looked happy, their faces shining as they splashed and played about. They signalled to Lao and Mistletoe to come join them. Husk shouted something, and laughed, but the wind bore her words towards the mountains.
Lao remembered once seeing in an old book of alchemy a woodcut of a man and woman swimming in a lake of living water. The lake was not a normal lake and the water was supposed to be dissolving dark aspects in the archetypal couple. Lao thought of the woodcut now as he watched the others playing in the silvery water. They are swimming in an unknown element, he thought, and like fishes they will be hooked out and eaten by the universe, as holy food…
Lao and Mistletoe waved back at them, but went on into parts of the town they didn’t know.
4
They walked along a dusty road that seemed to be returning to its origins. The mountains looked like ancient gods.
The light seemed to bend things. Lao wasn’t sure how.
In the distance, rising above the modest height of the houses, a church steeple pierced the sky. They walked in its general direction in silence. Then some spirit in the wind, full of odd notions, made them speak.
‘We change from moment to moment,’ said Lao. ‘When we have the right balance, we’re happy. When we don’t, we’re not.’
‘Right balance of what?’
‘Things of the body and things of the spirit.’
‘Are they not essentially the same?’
‘Yes, they are.’
‘What’s the difference then?’
‘I don’t know. Their frequency?’
‘Like light and sound?’
‘Something like that. Conversion of energies.’
‘If that’s the case,’ said Mistletoe, ‘then seeing is not necessarily believing.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘It’s what they depend on to fool us.’
‘What?’
‘That we believe what we see.’
‘It’s easier to fool people through their eyes.’
‘But people only really believe what they see.’
‘I know. It’s a shame. There’s much more to life than what we see.’
‘Believing only what we see enshrines only what can be seen.’
‘And so we don’t question what we don’t see.’
‘But often we are brought down by the unseen.’
‘I know. Anxiety, neurosis, stress, cancer.’
‘By the time we see what they’re doing to us it’s almost too late.’<
‘We treat the seen symptoms, and die.’
‘But the causes are unseen.’
‘And because they are unseen we don’t believe they exist.’
‘There’s something primitive about the phrase “seeing is believing”, don’t you think?’ said Mistletoe.
‘In a way,’ Lao laughed. ‘Some would say that a chair is a thought you can sit on, a perfume a thought you can smell, music a thought you can hear.’
‘But that’s playing with words. You won’t pay for a shirt that’s just a thought.’
‘One might. The Emperor’s new clothes and all.’
‘Exactly.’
‘So, what are you saying?’
‘When we can see the unseen, hear the unspoken, that will be something amazing.’
‘Science says we do.’
‘With instruments, not unaided.’
‘Some say we do it in our dreams.’
‘But awake would be more wonderful.’
‘Remember what Jung said?’
‘Yes. Who looks outside, dreams.’
‘Who looks inside, awakens.’
‘Truth seems upside down.’
‘And inside out.’
5
They walked in silence. They walked through notions in the air. The little town glimmered. They passed houses with brightly painted balconies. They passed a white horse without a rider. About three minutes later, Mistletoe said:
‘Did you see that tall man on the white horse?’
Lao said, ‘No.’
‘He was holding a riding crop.’
‘Really?’
‘And he was looking straight ahead.’
‘That’s not what I saw.’
‘What did you see?’
‘I saw a beautiful woman on a white horse.’
‘Really?’
‘She had long blonde hair that streamed in the wind.’
‘Hair that streamed in the wind?’
‘Yes. And she looked at us and smiled.’