The Age of Magic (3 page)

‘Did you just make that up?’

‘I don’t know. It just slipped into my mind.’

‘Maybe it’s the spirit of the journey,’ Lao said.

They did not notice how the journey was altering them. They did not notice how each place they had arrived at, stayed in, and passed through, was subtly transforming them.

When they got off the train, they also did not notice the purity of the air, or the late afternoon light, or the porcelain blue of the sky. They were too engaged with the hassle of disembarkation. Jim gathered the troops together and each person was not only responsible for their own suitcases, but also for carrying down the film equipment in its tough cases.

A sort of military mood came over them as they got their luggage off the train at Basel. They had twenty-two pieces altogether. The luggage seemed to have acquired new weight, to have grown in size. Grown also was the crew’s capacity to bear it. It was as though their luggage had made them stronger.

Riley, with her fragile frame, carried the heavy camera cases as though she had become a slender female Hercules. Sam, with professional stoicism, helped his young assistant. Everyone pitched in – Propr, the temperamental sound man; Jute, the dour manager; Husk, with her nervous beauty; Mistletoe, with her smile; and Lao, presenter and poet. All pitched in, silently.

And even as they struggled with the chaos of their baggage, they were being worked on by the theme of their journey.

Is there a name for that peculiar feeling of getting off trains? The hermeticists say that things on earth are mortal counterparts of things in heaven. Plato’s ideal forms express the same idea. The person on a train does not move across a landscape: it is the vehicle that moves. But there is an illusion of movement. A train is a bridge between two realities, a space that enables people to take stock, to dream, to muse. It gives a sense of freedom. Maybe that is why people like train journeys.

At the end of a long train journey a phase is over. Gone is the fluidity of the place between. A new reality beckons.

To arrive means to become defined. To be, to do, to be done to. It may also mean having serious work to accomplish, with no time to adjust.

Their battle with the luggage, conducted grimly, had a comic side. Their boxes and cases were heavy and resistant. They fell when they were lifted, they acquired odd angles that made them more than an armful, and they managed to achieve all kinds of collisions between those carrying them. The luggage took on a life of its own, as though impregnated with the spirit of perversity. It became abstract and severe. Those rectangular shapes, those faceless lumps that people lug around with them, made the travellers seem like sinners with their sins in Hades.

Those inanimate objects, crammed tight and bolted, that carry useless necessities, mean everything to travellers and nothing. To lose the luggage would be traumatic but not fatal; and yet they drag their luggage behind them like crimes, like secrets.

Lao paused in his shifting and carrying and again a presence passed across his eyes. He saw the monsters had also come off the train. He realised that the monsters had not been left behind. They had merely grown more invisible on the journey, till it was as though they were not there.

Skulking behind the twenty-two pieces of luggage were the monsters they had brought with them. On the station platform they were getting acquainted with one another.

Lao was astonished to see his ghommids chatting with Jim’s trolls, to see Jute’s niebelungen gibbering with Riley’s gnomes, Sam’s harpies conversing with Mistletoe’s sprite. They seemed to keep no secrets from one another. They talked and laughed about their owners as if the evils they knew about gave them much amusement.

Lao saw all this, but didn’t register it. He didn’t really grasp it at the time.

‘What are you looking at?’ Jim said as Lao stood there staring at the stacks of luggage.

‘Nothing,’ Lao said, shaking his head. ‘It’s just that, for a moment, it seemed as if…’

‘Are you seeing things?’

‘I think so. I’m not sure.’

Jim slapped him on the back.

‘Join the club,’ he said, and went off to supervise the moving of the film equipment.

The luggage that had been hauled off the train had been piled high on a motorised trolley and driven off to the exit, where it was to be loaded on to their waiting coach.

Lao stood on the platform aware that a theme-note was being played in him, with its variations and inversions. As he watched the others head for the exit, after all their exertion, it seemed to him that there were two kinds of experience in life: the experience of the moment as it is lived and the experience of it afterwards when the whole is sensed. Micro-experience, and macro-experience.

He watched the twenty-two pieces of luggage being driven away. There are twenty-two letters in the Jewish alphabet, twenty-two cards in the major arcana of Tarot, and twenty-two paths on the tree of life. He only discovered this synchronicity much later.

Then he would pay attention to the small print in the text of life.

While waiting for the luggage to be loaded on to the bus, Lao went wandering in the station. He came upon a large object on a plinth. All wheels and pulleys, it was like a whirring mechanical insect and it made screeching factory noises. He felt he was seeing something familiar in an unfamiliar guise. The machine disturbed him and he had to find out what it was.

Something about his encounter with the mechanical sculpture suggested the strangely pleasant feeling of being in the midst of a language he did not understand. And because he understood nothing, everything took on the quality of an encryption. Objects appeared in a new light.

Lao wandered down passageways, reading signs on doors and walls. He had the curious sensation of seeing objects separated from the names by which he knew them. They became unfixed: they became ideas again.

As he wandered past shops and kiosks, the people hurrying past did not seem to notice him, and he too began to feel unfixed, separated from his function, his name. At first the feeling was disquieting; he felt himself dissolve into anonymity. But then the sensation of fluidity grew on him, and he felt that he could become anyone, or no one.

Brushing past crowds of strangers in suits and dresses, with handbags, or briefcases, hurrying from work, or to meetings, or just commuting – walking among them – he felt momentarily free of the law he had invoked and set in motion: the law that says you are what you think you are. He also felt free of the other, more pernicious, law: the one that says you are what the world thinks you are.

For a moment Lao felt free of the prison of the constructed self, free also from the tyranny of attachment to things.

He wandered through the station gazing at faces, at designs on the walls, noting the great height of the ceiling, the quality of the light, the kind of clothes people wore, the obscure headlines in newspapers.

Seeing familiar things in a new light filled him with unexpected vitality. He felt like a convalescent: he felt he could begin to live again. He had a curious sense of remission. More than that, he felt stealing into him something of the enchantment of the first day in the garden. He had wandered into a happy state of mind.

I would like to master the art of living, he thought, and suddenly he heard demonic laughter somewhere behind him. He turned round but could not identify the source of the laughter. Again the name Malasso slipped into his mind.

Look at how difficult it is to master the art of writing, painting, composition; why should the art of living be any easier, he asked himself?

He went on walking about the station, looking at sweets and books in the well-lit shops, struck by the clean large windows.

The first freedom is freedom of mind, he thought; maybe, even, freedom from mind.

He didn’t know it at the time but there, in the train station, of all places, he had experienced a bit of Eden.

Then he lost it. He lost the moment. He may have lost it because he looked back.

He had found himself in the central hall of the station, with its crowds and its giant screens on which flickered train destinations, times of departure, platform numbers. He was fascinated by the sight of travellers gazing intently up at the screens, trying to find their trains. As he watched he remembered a similar moment some days before in the Gare de l’Est, as they were leaving Paris.

The intensity with which the travellers now stared at the consoles reminded him of
Et in Arcadia ego
, the painting by Poussin that had transfixed the crew at the Louvre. In that enigmatic painting four shepherds in Arcadia have come upon a tomb which bears the famous inscription that provides the painting’s title. The shepherds are staring at the inscription in a manner similar to the commuters in the train station. The similarity, a little tenuous perhaps, surprised Lao.

He found himself thinking about Poussin’s painting in a new way. Were the shepherds happy before they came upon the tomb? Were they losing their happiness as they read the strange inscription? Are we all like the shepherds in the painting, trying to decipher the enigma?

Lao pursued the parallels between the painting and the travellers staring at the console. It seemed to him that, like the shepherds, we wander through the dream-like landscape of life, through days that pass so inevitably until one day we come upon the unavoidable fact of death. Then, like the shepherds, we try to read the mysterious inscription that is written on all mortal things.

It is an inscription written on all departure boards. It is the name of all destinations, but not our destiny. It is written on all faces, the great and the small. It is whispered in our triumphs and our failures.

Aren’t we all trying to read the inscription on the tomb, Lao thought? Aren’t we all shepherds trying to make sense of the small print in the text of life?

Lao engaged in a little thought experiment. He began to think of the shepherds in the painting. He saw them as real living people – people that he knew. He imagined them tending their flock and larking about. He imagined a perfect summer’s day in the mountains of Arcadia. Then he imagined the shepherds coming upon this tomb with its curious inscription.

How long does it take them to read the words? Did they read Latin? Each letter is an unfolding mystery.

The words are read.
Et in Arcadia ego
.
I too have lived in Arcadia
. They look at one another. They have read the words, but what do they mean? They read the words again. The real reading begins when the first reading is over. It begins with their bewilderment.

Meanwhile what has happened to the four shepherds? They are not the people that they were. The inscription has thrown them back on themselves. They are troubled because they do not understand.

Suddenly a question mark quivers over all things. The beautiful landscape is no longer what it seems. The perfect summer’s day now hints at something sinister.

Reading was born, Lao thought, in that moment of exile from a previous state of grace.

Lao realised, with a small shock, that the shepherds in the painting are engaged in an eternal act of reading. All they will ever do is read that inscription and try to make sense of it. They are perpetual readers. And in their endless deciphering something awakes in them.

It occurred to Lao that we too are intrigued by the words because we recognise them. We utter the inscription at the beginning and at the end. It was in our birth cry. It will be in our deaths, as the significance of our tombs. We write those words –
I too have lived in Arcadia
– as a memento to ourselves, to remind us who we are, where we have been, where we are now, and where we are going.

In Basel station Lao lost the golden moment when he made the link between people gazing at the departure boards and the shepherds in Arcadia reading words on a tomb.

Malasso continued to haunt all of them. The haunting took forms so subtle that, at first, no one noticed.

After the luggage had been transported to the coach, and Sam had taken continuity shots of Lao’s arrival at the station, they were driven to their hotel in the town of B— through the falling darkness.

Their driver was a tall eager fresh-faced young man called Bruno. He was the second Bruno of their journey, the first being their driver in France. Lao thought of this new driver as Bruno the Second.

In the bus everyone seemed sombre and tired. The journey had taken its toll. Only Bruno was lively. With youthful enthusiasm he kept asking them questions. From his driver’s seat he asked where they were going, whether it was a feature film they were making, and whether it would be shown in cinemas in Switzerland. He asked what Arcadia meant, and whether they would film him and make him famous. He was in high spirits, and practising his English. He got monosyllabic replies.

They drove from Basel northwest on Münsterplatz, and went from Rittergasse to Wettsteinbrücke. Lao saw the names as they drove. Too tired to gaze at the small print of Swiss life, he gazed at the large print instead. The coach turned into Grenzacherstrasse and they were soon on a toll road. He saw signs for Luzern, Gotthard, and Rothrist. The place names mesmerised him. In his exhaustion he was looking forward to two days of rest. He should have been cautious about days of rest. That’s when hidden things strike, when the small print bites.

They drove for hours. They drove through neat towns with rectilinear houses. They drove past white disembodied forms in the air, past unseen mountains.

Husk and Riley sat together, getting on famously. Every now and then they talked in loud whispers punctuated with prolonged giggling. Husk was prim, Riley something of a pixie, but the journey revealed the things they had in common. Jute sat alone, grim as ever, as if she hadn’t smiled for decades. Propr too sat alone, near the front of the coach. His moustache concealed his mood. He was always melancholic when he had nothing to do.