The Age of Magic (12 page)

She was twitching slightly as she spoke.

A little bewitched, he hired her on the spot.

When Sam told Jim about having hired the girl, he kept quiet about her strangeness. She would be his secret weapon, his mascot during the vicissitudes of the filming. She turned out to be more than a mascot. She was a hard-working, efficient machine of an assistant, a faithful hound with a mercurial quality who contrived often to be unseen.

When they arrived at the hotel in the town of B—, something changed in Riley that made her more visible than she had been. People who hadn’t noticed her previously suddenly asked her questions. Lao found that if he stared vacantly into the space where she sat he could fix her in the flesh, make her palpable.

Riley felt this subtle change in herself and it made her uneasy, which made her fidget. She took to sliding away from people’s glances, hiding when she sensed eyes settling on her. But her attempts at hiding, at sliding away, only made her more noticeable.

‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ Jim had asked her suddenly at dinner that night.

‘I don’t know,’ was all Riley could say. ‘Something’s in the air. It’s as if someone I know but can’t see is here… My skin feels like it’s on fire.’

Jim no longer saw her for she had become still while she spoke, and when she was still it was often difficult to see her.

Besides, Jim had already returned to his exposition of the will.

Apart from the occasional comment which she made without wanting to, Riley stayed silent for the rest of the dinner.

No one noticed when she slipped away. She went out into the dark and sat on a bench at the edge of the lake, listening to the barely audible whisperings of waves on the shore. She felt the presence of the one whom she could not see, while the mountain wind soothed for a time the heat on her skin.

That night Propr lay in bed and listened to the fragments of sound from the beginning of time.

He listened to the mountain, the wind, and the lapping of water on the rim of the earth. He listened to the lake, heard its songs. He heard the dance of water and rock, and the winds twisting round the crags of the mountain.

Slightly drunk, he took soundings from the new place he was in. From the sounds he heard he gave the world form. Sounds created worlds for him, worlds more interesting than worlds seen. For Propr, hearing was believing, hearing was being. Seeing things reduced them for him, stripped them of mystery.

As he lay there, absolutely still, he could hear wind-chimes in a distant village. He could hear the wind slapping the rugged face of rock on the other side of the lake.

His listening led him into childhood moments: the arc of a swing, the silence between tocks of a grandfather clock, a heron taking flight across a meadow.

He remembered the piping of birds on hot afternoons in the hills, the river murmuring along the stony banks, insects in the summer stillness, the whirring of a quail’s wings in the Welsh woodlands.

Propr dissolved into listening as other people dissolved into their fantasies. It was the closest he ever got to a religious experience. While others would go to church to worship, Propr would sit on the banks of a river, or lie on the floor of a forest, and lose himself in concerts of sound.

He would listen with eyes closed to the most remote of sounds: the fall of a feather, the distant dance of a bumble bee, waves on the riverbank, the wind in faraway trees, the murmur of the open sky, even the diaphanous light of the sun.

Listening to such subtleties, he could no longer distinguish between earth and sky, water and wind. All merged into a listening that opened out into the infinite vastness of being.

In his hotel room he listened himself into an expansive world, like a universe glimpsed at sunset, in an aeroplane high above the clouds.

He listened to the spaces. He heard the mountain as a cascade of dark eternal melodies. He heard a magic being riding the surface of the lake. She was the woman of his dreams, and she faded into the wind.

He was happy in his listening till he heard them making love a few rooms away. His mood darkened. Then he heard it again, the sinister whispering that had haunted him ever since the journey to Arcadia began.

Endlessly repeated, like a child’s taunt in the playground of Hades:

Find the treasure… Find the treasure… Find the treasure…

Sunlight streamed through the stained-glass window of their awakening. They rose like dolphins from the blue depths of sleep.

New eyes opened on the hotel room, taking in the shining wooden floor, the white ceiling, and the Giorgione print on the lilac wall.

Their consciousness had been cleansed in sleep. Everything was made new. They felt a thrill and a freshness in every fibre. It was as if, until that morning, they had never lived before.

Sunlight made all the colours brilliant. They were struck dumb by the wonderful light of the lake and the white summits of the mountain.

How does one awaken to the quintessence of such a day?

How does one live it right, drink in its magic without the little flaws in one’s temperament spoiling the promised beauties of being?

They felt happiness pouring in through the windows, pouring its golden rays into their core. It was the kind of day that makes the body, like Faust, utter the vertiginous cry:

Make this moment my eternity.

Rising up into such a dawn, Lao and Mistletoe felt like Adam and Eve in an alternative Genesis. They did not eat of the apple. They had not been cast out to wander, as Adam and Eve had, for millennia in what Jacob Böhme called
the fury and wrath of nature
.

They woke with a sense of grace and good fortune. History was the nightmare, and joy the true reality. They went about on tiptoes, barely speaking, so as not to breathe evil on such a blessed day. They went through their morning rituals, gathering flowers in their hearts.

It was Lao’s day off and the rest of the crew had gone filming. Lao and Mistletoe had the day’s discoveries all to themselves.

Dawn was the garden redeemed by sleep.

They watched a steamboat sail past their hotel, blasting its horn. They went down to the lake, whose water now was gold and blue.

The air was crisp and clean. It made them breathe consciously. They drew the ionised air of lake and mountain deep into their bellies. Then they exhaled, emptying their lungs.

Breathing deeply cleared their minds and prepared them for the unusual. They were like children on the first day of their holiday who have woken early and gone to the garden to play.

They breathed to the rhythm of their walking, cleaning out the years of neglect. One’s breathing is shallow in cities, thought Lao. Shallow breath, shallow life: as you breathe, so you live. He felt taller for the intake of mountain air.

The quality of the light by the lake seemed to transfigure Mistletoe. It became her element. She walked on light, gazing at the mountains without seeing them.

They took their shoes off and walked barefoot on the smooth grass. They walked by the side of the lake and let the dew and the light work on them.

there are things whose beauty grows the more attention you give them, Mistletoe was thinking. They admired the whimsical houses of the town. Lao noticed a church; it was small and beautiful. Something about the dawn made it seem like a sign.

They crossed the road, went over to the church and were disappointed to find its door locked. It occurred to them that they were meant to receive their message from a less obvious door. They went round to the back, and came upon the dead.

The graves were neatly laid out. There were gravestones and steles of great beauty and variety. There were marble and granite gravestones, inscribed with names and dates of birth and death, along with a biblical quotation or a note of lamentation. The gravestones had Greek, looped, or Maltese crosses, exquisitely masoned. The paths between were bordered with roses, lilies, fuchsias, and carnations. There were even orchids. The sense of order was astonishing.

Death had been made into a thing of splendour. There were glazed pictures of the dead on every grave. The images in living colours were spooky in their realism. There were fresh flowers in a vase in front of each stone. The dead were being kept alive every day in thought, the ancient as well as the newly dead.

Some gravestones spoke of the deaths of babies, of children, young men at war, old men at sea, young ladies snatched away too soon. One woman died
for love
; another died
for peace
. Most died of time. On some gravestones there were marble busts of the departed. Most of the graves had lamps that burned perpetually.

It was the most enchanting cemetery they had ever seen, a communal work of memory. Its labyrinthine paths led to innumerable forms of grieving. It was grieving as an art.

Lao and Mistletoe wandered through this strange cemetery where the dead seemed luckier than the living. It made death seem a happy place.

Then they noticed some women in black in tears around a grave. They gazed in silence at a photograph on an unfinished gravestone.

It was time to leave. They didn’t want to be tourists at other people’s grief. Both of their parents were still alive, and they didn’t know what grief was yet. They were in a happy dream, and didn’t know it.

Watching the women’s tears they felt, from a distance, the chill shadow of loss. They felt like children in the forecourt of death.

Dark thoughts had entered the radiant day.

They left the cemetery, crossed the road again, and walked on in silence. The cemetery had altered them.

For the first time, Mistletoe really saw the mountains. When she did, so did Lao. As if they had been given surprise gifts, they exclaimed at the same time.

With death-cleansed eyes, Mistletoe saw the blue mountain range, the jagged high rocks, and the smoky peaks. The rock-faces were of ice and stone, defined by a sky of uncanny blue. Thick white light poured out from the dense clouds around the mountaintop.

She saw how the mountain shaded into smoky blue distances, like matter dissolving into spirit, or spirit condensing into matter. Emotions choked her and suddenly she had an attack of homesickness, but it was for a home mysterious to her, connected to the remote mountain peaks fading into those invisible distances. She steadied herself on Lao’s shoulder for a moment.

‘This town is merging with its dead,’ said Lao suddenly, after they had resumed walking.

Then he was silent. His words stirred many thoughts in her. She knew enough to let the silence enrich the words. Working with silence was an art they were constantly refining.

‘I get the feeling it yields its mysteries when you encounter the spirit of its dead,’ Lao said after a while.

It was Mistletoe’s turn to be silent. Walking on the dew in the grass, they breathed as much through the soles of their feet as through their noses.

Lao gazed into the distance where rock was indistinguishable from air.

‘On the mountains towns like this are disappearing into legend,’ he said.

‘It treats its dead so beautifully, like newborn children,’ said Mistletoe.

‘The silence here mirrors the silence there, among peaks of snow.’

They walked on. After a long moment Mistletoe drew in her breath.

‘What?’

‘We have just passed into the mirror of the town. There’s a touch of silver in my eyes,’ said Mistletoe.

They both laughed. They felt unaccountably inspired.

‘Like incense, flowers with their beauty bear our thoughts faster to other realms,’ said Lao.

‘The dead hear what we are thinking about them as clearly as we hear the wind streaming down the mountains,’ said Mistletoe.

‘Somewhere in us the absent is most present.’

‘It takes as much effort to keep the dead alive in us as to keep the living present to us.’

They were approaching a pier. Beyond it was the sparkling lake and the cloud-crowned mountain.

‘What can you do with all this beauty? The frosted peaks, the silver lake, the light, this dawn?’ Lao asked. ‘It fills my heart, I want to do something with it, and I don’t know what.’

‘I know,’ Mistletoe said. ‘It’s a kind of despair. Beauty makes me despair sometimes.’

‘Beauty often makes me think of death.’

‘Can you be so happy that you want to die?’

‘Is there a link?’

‘Some people say death is the greatest happiness, that it’s not the dead we really mourn, but ourselves who are still here.’

They gazed at the lake.

‘It’s the best kept secret.’

‘If we knew how beautiful death was, we wouldn’t fear it.’

‘We would have more courage.’

‘To live our lives.’

They both fell silent, but went on walking, their breathing slower and deeper. Then Mistletoe broke the silence.

‘I think death must hold the key to life.’

‘Or maybe life holds the secret of death.’

‘Perhaps they need each other – like light and darkness.’

‘But which is light, and which is darkness?’

‘Life is darkness.’

‘So death is light.’

‘Yes, we’re living in darkness.’

‘And we’ll die in the light.’

‘We have to find light in darkness…’

‘And begin again.’

‘Rising and falling.’

‘Till we get to the mountaintop.’

‘But we need some lunch before that.’

‘And wine.’

‘And a siesta.’

‘And some reading.’

‘And some kissing.’

They laughed and wandered on up the jetty. They mingled for a few moments among the tourists who were waiting to board the steamboat that would take them to the villages further down the lake.

They walked on through the streets, staring at the cottages, the gabled houses, the fairy-tale chalets.