The Age of Magic (4 page)

Sam, the cameraman, also sat towards the front, on a seat all by himself. He played with his ponytail and stared out of the window. He was in a thoughtful mood. It had been a good day filming and he had caught many wonderful shots of the mountains and the passengers in different states of contemplation, sleep, or empty-mindedness. He had also taken a few more difficult shots which pleased him. It was the difficult ones that really made a day of filming worthwhile for him. But work was over now for the day, and as the coach drove past charming towns with well-lit houses where perfectly ordered middle-class lives were being lived, a thoughtful look came over him. His mind was empty and he was not thinking of anything in particular. As he looked at the suburban houses he entertained a passing longing for a domestic Arcadia. As a cameraman he was always away on one shoot or another and it wouldn’t be unusual to have such a yearning without even being aware of it. He had a touching look on his face. He may have become aware of that yearning for, a moment later, he switched on his reading light and turned his attention to Camus’
Selected Essays
. Sam thought of himself as an existentialist.

Jim, the director, sat towards the back of the coach. He was wide awake, making lists and calculations in his notebook. He wasn’t paying much attention to the world outside the coach, to the well-made houses and the symmetrically planted trees. Jolted every now and again by the swerving of the bus, he would look up from his work, stare blankly ahead, and plunge back into his lists and diagrams, anecdotes and calculations.

Lao, sitting nearby, found his eyes drawn by the words on a page of Jim’s open notebook. The reading light shone on the page and the words were unavoidable. They made Lao shudder, as if he had seen inside the director’s mind. In horror and amazement he saw, written vertically in capital letters down the page: KILL MALASSO. The page was festooned with violent images, a knife, a gun, skull and crossbones, a swastika, a grinning face without eyes. Then, over the course of the journey in the dark, Lao saw Jim compose from each letter of the words an acrostic poem:

Kings do not dream at night

In lonely castles by the sea.

Love does not respond to might;

Love, if true, must be free.

Murder could end this deal.

Allow blood to stream the stars.

Lend the film the truth of the unreal

And to the viewer distracted hours.

Sow havoc among Arcadians

Show them death in flowers

Or treat them like barbarians.

Jim spent most of the coach ride writing this poem. And when he had finished he switched off his reading light, and gave a little laugh in the dark.

For the first time on their journey, it occurred to Lao that Jim was cracked, that life had driven him over the edge.

The laughter, more than a little fiendish, and very uncharacteristic, went on ringing in Lao’s head. No one else seemed to have heard it. But Mistletoe, who had been asleep, woke up, and looked about her like a startled bird. Then she stared out of the window into the ink-coloured sky.

Lao began wondering why Jim’s disturbed mental state had not become clear earlier. As he ran his mind over the whole journey he found memories that so mixed the sane with the ambivalent that nothing stood out.

In the darkness, Jim was stabbing at his notebook with his pen, and tittering to himself.

The mood of the coach was heavy with silence and sleep. Even Sam who had been reading was asleep. He had been re-reading Camus’ introduction to his essays and had come upon the following lines:
The place where I prefer to live and work (and something more rare, where I would not mind dying) is a hotel bedroom. I have never felt capable of indulging in what they call home life (which is so often the opposite of an inner life); bourgeois happiness bores and terrifies me.
The words had set up a conflict in Sam, had disturbed him, and he had paused to stare out into the dark countryside. Unable to settle his thoughts he had flicked through the book till he came to an essay called ‘The Desert’. It was an essay about Florence. He would read a few lines and drift off into reverie.
Living, of course, is slightly the opposite of expressing.
This made him think.
What counts is not poetry. What counts is truth
. This made him question his art.
But sadness in this country is never anything but a commentary on beauty
.
And as the train travelled on through the evening I felt a tension in me slowly giving way
. This made Sam marvel at its appositeness.
We must learn how to lend ourselves to dreams when dreams lend themselves to us
. This made him drift off. Soon Camus’ essays lay on his lap, pages open, existentialism read by the night.

Lao listened to the world rush by as the coach hurtled down the winding roads. Bruno had a fixed expression in his eyes. He drove as if he were in a movie.

Lao reconsidered Jim’s case.

It has been said that when someone sets out to change their life in some way the demons in the psyche rise up and all one’s habits protest. The old dispensation rises in revolt and it can feel as if one were going mad. Psychologists say that this is not surprising. After all one is trying to change the existing order, to dethrone the old king. Forces in the psyche will not let this happen without a punishing fight. That fight can feel like insanity.

It had often occurred to Lao that something terrifying attends the heels of change. He had heard that those who are trying to overcome addiction often report shooting pains in the head, hallucinations, night-sweats, nightmares, panic attacks, sudden sweeps of hot emotions, rages, mood-swings, rampant desires – civil war in the soul.

They are, more or less, hints from the
ancien régime
that the old life is best. They are powerful persuasions against change.

That is the power of habit, Lao thought. It has the force of demons. Alarmed by the convulsions tricked up by the old guard, most people abandon their attempts at change. It can seem more trouble than it is worth. Who can say that change will be better? It might be worse. It might be boring. The old dispensation, thought Lao, always appears indispensable.

The worse the revolts, the closer to victory. The demons have the best weapons: they have one’s past. The angels have only one’s possible future. The past is more real than the future. But to make that crossing to a possible future, a death must take place. The old self must die. Lao remembered an African saying:
The seed must die before it can grow
. He had heard that people who are on the verge of major changes in their lives often dream they are drowning, or that they are in car crashes in which they die. The curious thing about those dreams, Lao often remarked, is that the dreamers who witness their own deaths do not die.

They say that to find order one must go through chaos, to attain success one must pass through the polished gates of failure. Lao wondered whether to arrive at Arcadia one must venture through madness.

In Virgil’s
Eclogues
, one of the primary texts that shaped the idea of Arcadia, there is a sinister intuition. Something in the landscape of Arcadia creates inner disorder. Some of the dwellers in Arcadia are haunted by madness and extreme passions. This had always bothered Lao. He was never sure why madness lurked among Virgil’s shepherds. Lao often thought that maybe Virgil had intuited the power of the god Pan, or maybe that lonely shepherds in mountains are prey to obsessions.

Was the quest for Arcadia driving Jim mad? When a man as harmless as Jim takes to writing words of murderous intent it is reasonable to consider his sanity.

Why does he want to kill Malasso anyway, Lao wondered? None of the film crew had ever seen Malasso. No one knew what he looked like. No one knew whether he even existed. Wanting to kill him therefore was itself a sign of disturbed thinking.

Lao listened to Jim breathing deeply in his sleep. Then, to Lao’s surprise, Jim dug an elbow into his ribs. Lao turned to look at him but could only make out the snarled outline of his face in the dark.

‘I’ve just had this dream, in which I had a long chat with the Devil,’ Jim said.

‘Really?’ Lao replied.

‘He told me what to do.’

‘To do about what?’

‘The Devil only tells you what to do one step at a time.’

‘Why?’

Lao could feel rather than see Jim shrug. The outline of his face showed caverns and shadows.

‘Our destiny is not our destination,’ Jim said, with an odd, knowing laugh.

‘But what did he tell you to do?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You said the Devil told you what to do.’

‘Yes.’

‘About what?’

There was a long pause. The coach sliced smoothly through the night. Its purring engine was now muffled and distant. The coach tore down winding roads. Inside it was still and dark. Lao thought Jim had fallen asleep again. Then came the voice, new, clear, unreal.

‘To square the circle, control the factors, master the chaos, fulfil my wishes.’

He paused and said, as if thinking aloud:

‘Suddenly, one day, I will emerge as one of the great masters of my art, and everyone will be astounded.’

The unreality of what Jim said lingered in the air a moment. He made a face in the dark, re-arranging its lines into something ironic.

‘Jim?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you been drinking?’

‘Have I been thinking?’

‘No. Drinking. Have you been drinking?’

‘No, I haven’t been drinking. I am as sober as a newscaster.’

The idea of a drunken newscaster made Lao smile.

‘Have you been reading Goethe’s
Faust
?’

‘You mean as research for our visit to the Goetheanum?’

‘No, I mean have you been reading too much
Faust
?’

‘No more than necessary. Why?’

‘It’s because of all this Devil stuff and being told what to do by him in a dream.’

Jim laughed again. Even his laughter was unreal. Can a man change so quickly, Lao wondered? Maybe it’s just that he is breathing better. His laughter sounded at once very sane and a little mad.

After a short pause, during which the register of his voice shifted, and in a tone that was clear and firm, Jim said:

‘Many years ago, when I craved success more than anything else in the world, I offered to sell my soul to the Devil.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

There was a long silence.

‘But he wouldn’t have me.’

‘Why not?’

‘He said my soul wasn’t good enough.’

Lao stared at him with faint incredulity.

‘He said my soul wasn’t interesting enough. It was too mild. It didn’t have enough potential for good or for evil.’

Jim unburdened himself of a mildly unhinged chuckle.

‘Apparently I have a middling soul. The soul of an English sheep.’

He paused. His voice turned more serious.

‘Apparently I have an ordinary will. The sort of chap who would vote with the crowd. The kind who keeps his head below the parapet. Would always choose the safe option. Not much use to God or Satan. Middle of the road. Always muddling through. You know the type. The country is populated with us. Maybe, even, the world.’

He paused again, and his features in the dark rearranged themselves into what Lao realised was a smile. A light from a passing car revealed Jim’s eyes. Heaven help us, Lao thought, sitting up straight. It seemed to him that Jim was possessed, and that a hint of evil had brought out his true personality.

Lao turned to face him; a question he had not prepared sprang from his lips.

‘Jim, how does one sell one’s soul to the Devil? I mean how does one actually do it?’

Jim flashed Lao a look so piercing and unexpected that he felt the back of his neck go cold.

‘Why?’ asked Jim with cool irony. ‘Is your soul up for sale?’

Lao tried to stay calm. He struggled for the right response.

‘I just wondered how it works,’ he said.

Jim invested Lao with a long candid scrutiny. Lao was not sure if it constituted an evaluation of his soul, and whether, in Jim’s estimation, the Devil might be interested in its purchase. Jim’s silence was inconclusive. When he eventually spoke it was with quiet authority.

‘Nearly driven insane by the astonishing success of some of my mediocre colleagues,’ Jim said, ‘I fell on my knees one night and summoned the Devil. I did this, following an ancient prescribed ritual that I found in an antiquarian bookshop, for seven consecutive nights. And then, after my blood was involved, he appeared.’

‘He appeared?’ Lao asked incredulously.

‘He appeared, in my room, in person, in all his satanic majesty. He was not at all what I expected.’

‘What did you expect?’

‘He was not ugly, he had no horns, he had no hoofs, and no fires burned around him. His aura was not horrible.’

‘What was he like?’ Lao asked in the voice of a child.

‘He had a very sweet smell,’ said Jim, without drama. ‘He was simply dazzling. I realised at once that he had indeed been one of the brightest angels in heaven. His charm and beauty were seductive beyond belief. He was the image of the most successful, the most famous, and the most youthful person you can imagine. You sensed, in his presence, that he knew everything. And there he was, in person, in my house, in Kent.’

Jim paused. He appeared to be musing. Occasionally a street lamp would light up his face. After a moment he continued in the same tone as before.

‘His presence brightened the house and glamorised everything in his vicinity. The Devil, as I saw him, was beautiful, delightful, thoughtful, reasonable, and kind. He understood everything. His conversation was exquisite. I had never known before that conversation could be one of the ecstasies of life.’

He paused again, like one whose every memory was a rare pearl which had to be examined in a magical light. Then he shook his head, and turned on Lao an intense pair of eyes that burned with cherished reminiscence.