A Dream of Horses & Other Stories (8 page)

We found a table near the dais and ordered aperitifs. In the corner, close to the man playing the trombone an area had been kept clear of any furniture for the guests to dance in case the music broke their reserve. On the dais was a grand piano shrouded in semi darkness. A shadow moved over it. Then, just as the trombone-player was concluding his piece, the shadow joined in and a comping began. Before long the quirky cadences had immersed the entire place in a mad wave of delirium.

Post the performance, the trombone-player slipped past the curtains, leaving behind the shadow to entertain the audience. That shadow knew how to play. In no time the melancholy strains of the piano had drowned every other sound in the bar. It felt like a piece by Zez Confrey.

All this while people had been trickling into the nightclub,
and the applause burst on us like a bomb. The shadow stepped back into the darkness. Now the place was overflowing with people. Voices more prominent than the soft waltz filtering through the speakers, bodies emitting sweet and musty smells by turn. The air was full with strains of music, jabber of people, clinking of glasses, and the smell of alcohol and sweat and perfumes.

A voice grows prominent with each word. The shadow at last gets a face, the colour of honey with deep dark eyes. Hands that could only belong to that face – those long knotted fingers, as good for the piano as for the chessmen.

Introductions follow spirits, spirits curl into smoke. We clink our glasses and the tiny air-globes shoot upwards. Amelio and Tahiti talk in whispers. Then she kisses me, takes his hand, and off they go to the dance floor. The music now has a quicker tempo and several people are dancing to its happy beats. Soon they are moving effortlessly with it, as if in a state of trance. Chutes of red light colour their faces. Even from a distance, I can see Amelio’s shirt is nearly spoilt by sweat. Yet his cuffs are dry and sober, held fast by stone cuff links that sparkle with an orange flame. He is moving her about him like a child spinning a top with a sudden twist of his arm. And she moves like a tamed animal, with pleasure and abandon.

Later we talk and eat and drink. Amelio is telling us about his school days in the Andalusian mountains. He has read
Don Quixote
six times, but other picaresque novels of the Golden Age bore him silly. And in school he once acted in a play by Lope de Vega. His voice goes round and round like a blanket that keeps one warm on winter nights.

She has slid her arm into mine without a word. Suddenly, I can hear a staccato rhythm take over the music. A million pins enter through the soles of my feet and swiftly climb upwards. My head is swimming. She is holding me so close that I can feel the rise and fall of her chest. But – how can this be? – my feet are
moving smoothly, in rhythm with her quick short steps. We must be in love to dance like this. Now she opens the embrace, now she closes in swiftly, flying off the ground.

When the beat ends, I kiss her on the nose. She kisses me back on the mouth. Bliss leaps in my heart, washes away the patina of pain. Off you go noble angel, I am done with your cold elegant wisdom!

Near midnight we come out into the street. Infinite universes spread their wings in the sky. So you heard me that night, I say to her. Of course, I did, she replies, tightening her hold on my arm. Eyes full of mischief. Eyes adept at hiding despair.

IX

Who says beauty is ephemeral, that it withers with the moment. Show me the person and I shall tell you he is a deceiver, a conjurer of falsity. For amid these elevations it is eternal, from sunup to sundown, from the first pine to the last star.

I now worked each day, some days more than others. Beginning with the present, I twisted time and made it circular, perhaps even arbitrary. Once more, I began shaping a world whose walls I built each day higher and higher, and into which I retired with sincere delight. Sometimes I saw a swallow alight on a branch of the deodar from where it sang to me its slow, sombre tunes. Each day the sun rose above the snows over the distant hills in the east, each night the moon hung in their cool shadow. I went along writing. Some days words easily slipped through my thoughts and took shape, on other days their indolence caused me great fatigue – I poked them here and there, and they turned and twisted without obliging. Till noon I worked in this way, seldom afterwards. Then I went out to explore the hills.

Before a month had passed, I had walked all the trails in all the mountains, I had discovered a tarn in the hills behind the settlement, I had stared at the heights. At other times, I would
descend into a valley, where not infrequently I found a hamlet adjoining which men tilled small blocks of land, one below the other, that appeared to descend straight into the heart of earth. People lived in such hamlets frugally, content with their routine lives. The strong sun had browned their faces and shoulders, but their gaze reflected serenity of mind, having arrested life in its threadbare yet lovable form which the mountains had shielded for ages.

From time to time, I went to visit the librarian. Almost always he was to be found in the library, either sitting by the window listening to the stream that passed hundreds of feet below, or reading or tending to books. Occasionally, he agreed to take a walk through the garden of the abandoned church. Wild grass had all but covered the mud path that cut through the garden and ended at the edge of the precipice. There were lilacs and wild roses, and in patches where the grass had been unable to take root it was not difficult to pick out some old graves. The old man had an elfin step and I could keep pace with him only with slight effort. It reminded me of Achilles and the tortoise, a race where Achilles’ quickness has no match for the slowness of the tortoise.

One day I found him in the rear of the building contemplating the mountains, a hazy pink at that hour, through a small window. A cool wind was blowing in short sudden gusts as if it descended straight from those lofty summits, evading the deep valleys and the trees and spirits that peopled them. His attendant had just served lemon tea, and he asked me to join. It was pleasant to sit there and wait for the night to fall in the hills. Then I asked him about the paradox. So, am I the tortoise? he chuckled.

We discussed the paradox – rather he spoke and I listened. One by one he took apart the refutations put forth by Mill, Bergson, and Russell. He quoted from memory several passages (even a few lines in Latin he didn’t care to translate), and while
he spoke, his voice grew excited and foreign by turn. Finally, he came back to Bergson, attempting to show the faults in his reasoning – something to do with divisibility of space and indivisibility of time or some such thing. From Bergson to Proust to Kazantzakis, the discussion went on for over two hours. By then the sky was a hazy violet and the evening star had appeared over the horizon. I said it was beginning to get dark, not realizing that his world had darkened already.

A hundred thoughts swirled in my head as I walked back to the cottage. In the growing dark, the silhouettes of trees appeared slightly diffused. I looked askance at them and increased my pace: a ghost could descend from one and trouble me with its lonesome tale. When the woods were behind me, I saw the stars enter the sky and make interesting designs. The dome of the club glowed softly. I thought of having a drink.

Days went on in much the same way. Time here was a pointless intrusion, and one would do all too well to stay clear of its awareness.

While writing one day an image grew on the page. Two forms wrestling on the floor, serpentwined, tearing and eating each other in a room luminous with heat. Now her warmth is entering me and so is the cold of the stone underneath and yet neither can fathom my depth. Later we are on the terrace. The sun is a useless orange disc over the horizon about to slide through the last chink in it. Nearby a kite flutters with wanton zeal. A tear has burst over my cheek. She is taking it on her tongue.

The image left me ill at ease. A longing had set in, a longing that grew with each moment, a longing that had traversed many a mountain and landscape, traversed the stretch of time, of life itself: a longing to touch her again. I had not thought of her in a while, but, for once, I felt she was close by. Perhaps this very moment she was wandering through the bazaar.

I walked out of the cottage into a slow wind. The sun had been anemic since morning, but now it was completely lost in the mist
that clouded the sky and lingered over the mountaintops. From there it leisurely crawled down into the valley consuming all that obstructed its march. Soon I was climbing the hill that lay at the other end of the settlement. From there I could see but the last three cottages, for the mist had handsomely spread everywhere and chloroformed the pines.

Following a rough mountain track, I rounded that hill and the next. And after toiling for nearly an hour I came out into a clearing through which flowed a stream of crystalline water. It cascaded down the slope at the far end. At its bottom were very fine white pebbles. Tiny blue fish swam in it unaware of the happenings in another medium. They moved with a swiftness that excited the eye. The stream appeared to originate from under a huge rock covered in moss behind which swayed a few trees with purple flowers.

The mist had – almost incredibly – left the place untouched. Close by was a bamboo grove through which jutted wild yellow flowers. It was here that I entirely exorcised the phantom that plagued me. Into a corner I receded, resting my back against the tall, slender stems and looked above at the piece of sky left me. About me, birds and squirrels filled the air with their timeless melodies, and nearby the tiny blue fish sent tiny, soundless ripples to the surface of the stream.

X

It was one of those days that take birth prematurely, that once born neither breathe in the light nor in the dark, hanging aimlessly between the two. All day long, damp, solemn winds had been descending from the clouds – that had thrown the city into a perpetual twilight – and hinting at rain. The streets were quiet and gloomy, and not many people walked them. Traffic was sparse, its noise muffled by the moisture in the air. All in all, it was a day soaked in melancholy.

By this time I had spent two months in London. My only regular outdoor trips were to the neighbourhood library. At times I accompanied my sister to the supermarket, while at other times I went with her for a drink to her favourite club off Tottenham Court Road.

I had neither money nor debts, and was quite content to idle away my days reading and listening to music. That is when I began to think that there was something going on between books and music, jazz music to be specific.

A book is an enigma. Words that fill its pages present a shifty, relative universe. Through a reader, they create constructs where the past attempts to meet the future, the present arranging the meeting. In this present, as the reader receives and breaks apart the text – revives the past, contemplates the future – he, unknowingly, merges the two and makes the present fluid, expansive, eternal: he defeats time.

But the author waits for the reader in the heart of his labyrinth. Should one go in search of the other? And how? Here, at last, music comes to his help. Through its notes, variations and cadences, through its silences held tightly between its rhythm, the reader at last can glance into that inferno which is the centre of the maze, which is the long dead and yet still palpable soul of the author, for they are one and the same. Never believe the profane talk that goes around in certain places.

I had read Flaubert till late the night before, and awoke unmindful to the murkiness outside. In my sleep, I had had a dream where I happened to meet the Master. He was sitting in the garden of his stone house, contemplating the river as dusk fell over Rouen. I went strolling by, humming softly to myself. Then Flaubert called my name, and bade me to come inside. He looked handsome even in his corpulence and his eyes burned with creative passion. Offering me coffee, which tasted like the ink he must have used to write, he turned away once more to watch the river. Now in his solitude, it seemed, he often remembered Emma
Bovary. I had a suspicion that his days were like each other, filled with writing and masturbating, masturbating and writing. Life was one never-ending onanism between the bed and the desk. All of a sudden he looked at me. His eyes had turned on themselves, and his face resembled a sage in his moment of ecstasy. Had he been smoking something? I felt a distinct chill climb down my spine. I was shivering to tell the truth. Then, beneath the heavy moustache, his mouth twitched. Did I write? Somehow I took control of myself and said that I had felt the desire to write once or twice, but hadn’t yet attempted it. Hearing this, he became excited: Don’t let this streak die in you, my boy. It can help a writer in more ways than you may imagine. Look how I labour here, away from the joys of everyday life, away from love, to produce a work dear to me. Each day I wait for
this desire
to fill me, but alas it avoids me. I’ve to make up by endless hard work. By God, I find it hell to write. So the next time it strikes you, seize it with both hands.

The dream lingered in my thoughts while I prepared and ate a late breakfast, listening to Ellington and Coltrane by turn. I went over to the window. The clouds appeared so low and heavy that a finger would have punctured them. Soon someone had touched them, for a drizzle had erupted. I don’t recall how long I’d stood there when I saw a girl walking in the street below, holding up a blue parasol to the heavens. She had a light step and swayed tenderly to some inner melody. I was overwhelmed by the image. Seize it with both hands, Flaubert’s voice emerged over the strains of the saxophone. I hurried to the desk and, switching on the lamp, turned the cover of my red notebook. For a moment, the infinity of the blank sheet nauseated me. Then it came out thick and fast, like bodies in a bad crime novel. Once I couldn’t go on anymore, I bent over my notebook and tried to touch the words fastened on the sheet. But they did not respond to my caress. All I felt was the smoothness of paper. My eyes grew moist. That night I slept well. A book had been born.