Starbook

by Ben Okri

  Some sensed that the end of time is contained in the seed of an insignificant event. Stories in their fullness are beyond telling. They arc from here into spaces beyond words and things, where stories do not dwell, nor images, nor sounds, nor colours. Stories start in their already-existence and cease in mid-space, the rest vanishing into the invisible.

  Only the living and dead united can tell the fullness of stories. Even then only isolated strands. All the gods in all the lands could not tell the fullness of a single story all the way from its pre-beginnings to its infinite end.

  Only fragments are left to us to make structures out of, that please and hint and delight us through the labyrinth.

  Fragments glimpsed in the invisible book of life.

  CHAPTER FORTY–SIX

  The Mamba was not an insubstantial man. In fact, he was a man of stature, who had already crossed the line that elders attributed to those of promise. He was promise in fulfilment, a solid badge of the tribe, a man of stone and strength, whose prowess had been proven as much on the battlefield as on the farms. He was a man who had saved many lives: he had saved people from drowning, men at the battlefront, women from the savage jaws of the feared crocodiles of the swamp. He was of near heroic stature, for he was already famed for having wrestled with an alligator that had snatched a child, and had broken its thick serrated neck with a howl that was nearly legendary. And it was on account of his battle with a deadly mamba, which had caught him in a ferociously coiled embrace, and which he had wrestled with under the horrified gaze of a few witnesses from the tribe till he broke its neck with a grip which he sustained for nearly an hour, that he got his celebrated name.

  He dragged the mamba back with him to the tribe's shrine and all gasped at how huge and long it was, huger than a tree trunk and as long as the village stream. He coiled it out at the front of the shrinehouse as a dedication to the gods, and afterwards fashioned a mighty sculpture of this mamba that amazed and delighted the tribe in its likeness, its power and its sinister presence.

  All admired the sculpture, except some women, many rivals, and the masters. The masters saw the achievement, solidity, fluency, fierceness and hard work, a man's work, in it; but no mystery, or suggestiveness. It did not have what they called shadow, or dark life, or hidden light. It was substantial, but it did not have the lightness of that which can writhe, coil and move effortlessly. It had power, but not simplicity, or sadness. It had strength, but not weakness, the weakness that all living things have. It had glory, but not heart. It amazed the eye, but not the vision. It did not set the masters dreaming. The sculpture did not suggest something they hadn't suspected was there, something more than itself. In fact, its very fluency and power and strength implied something troubling and sinister about the spirit of the artist. And some of the masters detected in it an inclination to self-mythology, megalomania, and a secret craving for power and authority. He was not called to the guild of masters. And so the masters kept silent about the work, and withheld judgement. However, the Mamba got his name and his fame; but he became bitter about his rejection by the masters, and brooded about it often.

  CHAPTER FORTY–SEVEN

  Quite apart from his personal achievements, the Mamba came from a good family. He was of respectable birth. There was some wealth in the house. His father was a well-considered carpenter and maker of images, and his mother was not undistinguished in her patterning of images on cloth, with many-coloured dyes.

  His father was not a member of the council of masters, and none of their lineage ever had been. His mother was not of the council of the wise women of the tribe either. This was of no great account, for they were a people liked and respected in the tribe, who paid their dues, did their duties, and were much consulted in important decisions affecting the well-being of the people.

  The Mamba grew up, as did most people, under the shade of his father's philosophy and his mother's admonitions and gently guiding stories. But with time he came to amaze his parents with his great strength, his prowess and his cunning. He grew up to be a loyal son of the tribe, a solid young man, and quite early had been singled out as a future member of the council. He would be the first of his family ever to have such an honour, and ascend to such heights. But his successes made him rash, his strength made him too confident, his winning ways with women made him visible, and his rude virility lent an impetuous but unenduring brilliance to his artistic creations. He worked with great verve and swiftness, but lacked patience and stillness; and all things touched with mystery were a genuine puzzle to him.

  And yet the force and vitality of his creations, like his grasp of an opponent while wrestling, was powerful and arresting. His inclination to the gigantic, to things of great size, and weight, and mass, drew crowds and tempted the children into treating his creations as things to be clambered on and hide behind and play games on. They also made people gape, but not linger. He seemed to specialise in short-term astonishments. Every time a work of his appeared people knew it was his immediately, and they enjoyed going to see it, to have something to talk about for a short while, like witnessing something unusual but not profound. The people enjoyed the unusual creations and bestowed on them a certain popularity, from the sheer pleasure of talking about them. It was as though such works were needed to aid the conversation and gossip of a people, a not inconsiderable function in society

  But this very quality and the success it brought him made him continue in that way of being; and it never occurred to him that there were other modes, or alternatives. And this way he came to be, with his popularity, his facility, his victories in wrestling, hunting, harvesting and on diverse battlefields, slowly did something peculiar to his reputation, which he never noticed. And with time the possibility of the path that led to the council of masters quietly vanished from the map of his life. Yet he thrived and stood high in the estimation of the people. After all, he was a man who had built his habitation with his own hands, and wrestled with wild animals and broken their necks ...

  He did not drink much, but was not disinclined to bursts of celebration. He was therefore considered sober and serious; and yet there was about his brooding presence, and his big bulk, and his powerful good health and his strong cunning eyes, something unexpressed. He did not speak much, but his reputation was not one of a man of silences. He had more presence than he had absence. Which is to say, when he was there he was there; in fact, he was too much there. And when he wasn't there, he wasn't there at all; in fact, it was as if he had never been there. He was noticed when in society, but not missed when he wasn't. People talked of him, but not about him. He generated rumours, but not gossip. And, oddest of all, he didn't inspire stories. The people didn't tell stories about him, in spite of his dramatic deeds. Or maybe the stories they told didn't linger, or last. They came quickly, and were quickly exhausted, and needed more deeds from him in order to generate more stories. He seemed to live, without knowing it, in a race against the way time devoured his deeds. He lived chasing story-making events. This gave a desperate restless energy to his life; and made him a man whose presence was constantly alert to opportunities to do things that would turn quickly into stories.

  He seemed to have an unusual intuition for knowing when stories about him were being told. Then he was in his element. Only then did he radiate a certain charged serenity.

  Thus his eyes were ever flashing, looking about, to see if he was being noticed, if he was being mythologised. There was something in him that reacted to the magnetism of public mythology, no matter how shallow. This quality made him one of the most alert men of his generation. If he had more patience he might have made a good actor.

  These qualities in him also made him do things that were ambiguous, things he didn't recognise in himself. He thought of himself as a good man ... but his character was strange, even to him ...

  ... as if he harboured other selves, unsuspected, from a distant past ...

  ... or future.

  CHAPTER FORTY–EIGHT

>   He was indeed known to have cracked the spine of a large thrashing serrated alligator that had snatched a child in the nearby marshes. He was indeed something of a hero, but he was also suspect, on account of the sinister air of the diabolical that he had about him. It was rumoured that he conjured dark spirits associated with the evil one, and that this was the source of his powers. It was also rumoured that he used these dark spells on girls and women, and that his successful seduction and possession of many a woman who refused to speak about him afterwards was entirely due to his dark transactions.

  Women didn't so much come under his spell as be compelled, by an unpleasant but irresistible force, to succumb to his summons. But this power of his, this crude magnetism, didn't work on all women. Indeed, in the case of certain girls or women, his very power worked against him; it worked on him instead; and it cast a dreadful obsessive spell on him which he could rarely shake off. He tended to avoid such women, if he recognised their type in time. And he was mostly successful, for he knew the qualities in this unique breed of women that so turned his own infernal powers back on him and made him a slave and prisoner to his own sinister passionate sorcery, and which threatened to drive him mad with the powerlessness to resist the monstrous spell he cast on himself. These women tended to have certain qualities in common: there was simply no accounting for them, that is all. They need not be beautiful, clever, brave, rich, sensuous, fat, thin, cunning, devious, vulnerable, disdainful, foxy, flirtatious, man-wise, dependent, or anything like that.

  They were simply other. They were unique. They possessed some peculiar unaccountable anti-spell. Nothing worked on them. Anything attempted on them rebounded on to the perpetrator. And they were always innocent of their powers. It was something they had, something they were born with, a simple genius. It had nothing to do with will or intention. And it could not be regulated, turned on, accentuated. This strange quality without a name was the one he feared most, and which most fascinated him in a woman. It was the quality he sought for most in a woman; it represented for him the ultimate challenge to his nature, a challenge more terrifying than fighting a lion or an alligator, or wrestling in distant villages with legends of the art of combat. And this quality, so rare, so magical, so unmistakable, was one possessed by the maiden.

  CHAPTER FORTY–NINE

  His desire to possess the maiden, to win her hand, made him obsessed, slightly crazed, constantly on the verge of hallucination, almost mad.

  At night he couldn't sleep for thinking about her. And when he did sleep he ground his teeth so loudly that he often alarmed his neighbours. Because of this slight madness he was constantly tense, constantly working his jaws and clenching his fists. His eyes developed an odd maniacal light, and his face twitched. He took to brooding, and strange propensities surfaced in him from unsuspected depths. He became aware that he was suddenly capable of the most unlikely deeds. His mind developed a sinister inclination. Murders, vague vile notions, an inexplicable desire to do something amazing and monstrous took possession of him on account of the reverse spell of the maiden.

  There grew in him, suddenly, overnight, out of his brooding, an inextinguishable desire to command, to crush, to compel, to be powerful, to dominate, to overcome all obstacles to his will. He brooded often on power, and on the domination of the tribes. Something in him wanted to rule the world ...

  But first, he knew, he had to win the hand of the maiden, and overcome her innocent power over him. He knew that if he did not win her, and annex her mystery into his powers, he would never be able to lead the tribe. Beginning with the tribe, then the surrounding tribes, he could make the great land his own, and spread his legend to the farthest stars.

  It is impossible to say when the notion came upon him that the maiden was the key to his destiny. She had grown so powerful in his mind that he came to see that if he could not conquer her he could never conquer anything or anyone else. She became the obstacle, the riddle, the door, the sword, the rock, the mystery, the dark night, the great fear, the magic formula that stood between him and greatness.

  When such notions grow in the mind of a man he develops the strangest instincts. There is nothing more powerful than when a great instinct is harnessed to an overwhelming desire. Such people conquer the world, or destroy it.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  He had the gift of second sight and in his dreams he knew things about people that baffled them. This ability of his made him a formidable opponent in most endeavours. He was able to divine people's secrets, without knowing how. He dreamt of fights beforehand and knew what tactics his opponent would use, and could therefore neutralise them. He had visions and often heard what people were saying about him, so he knew how to take advantage of rumours, or when to kill them. Even with women he knew where their sweet-points were, where their weaknesses lay, because often he had successfully seduced them in his inexplicable dreams, and so in real life he knew exactly what to do to make them surrender to him completely, of their own free will.

  He had some kind of innate power and talent in these things, but they were sporadic. They came and went. He had an innate ability, but he was not a master, and this infuriated him. He was so at the mercy of the apparent randomness of his gift for second sight, that without a vision that gave him advantageous insight, without a dream from which he could deduce a method, he was hopeless, he was in the dark. This filled him with fear. It meant that he could only undertake that which he had already gained an insight into by virtue of his erratic gift. This gave him an air of shallow enigma, fascinating to the undiscerning majority, perfectly transparent to masters, initiates and the innocent.

  He was a man in constant dread of being deserted by his gifts. For someone with his ambitions this was indeed a great and dangerous flaw; and he was keenly aware of it; and could do nothing about it, on account of the structure of ambition upon which his life had grown. He wanted so much to control his gift, to be in control of it, but he wasn't and he couldn't. Second sight came to him when it came. He couldn't control it, and he couldn't conceive of living without it, managing a life of narrow certainties based on hard work, practical possibilities, and at the mercy of ignorance.

  The Mamba preferred his occasional but greatly advantageous visions to a life of fighting without extra knowledge. And so he was unpredictable, even to himself; confident when he knew; frightened, and constrained to hide it under bluff, when he didn't.

  And because of his lack of mastery over his talent for seeing more than most people saw, he felt an impostor in the real and higher things of life. Fortunately, he discovered, as he got older, that most people were utterly blind to these things anyway. He discovered that even without his second sight he was better than most. With it, he was superior to almost everyone.

  This ability was to prove invaluable in his competition with the suitors to win the hand of the maiden.

  CHAPTER FIFTY–ONE

  On a day that he had been in the forest brooding and cutting wood for a sculpture he hoped to make of the maiden in her finest glory, he fell into a deep sleep and had a vision that the maiden was being spied on by an alien, by a strange slender creature with doe-like eyes. In the dream he saw at once that the maiden found it out and fell in love with the creature's eyes and wept over it and cried out loudly that she wanted this creature alone to be her husband. In the dream the tribe was horrified that the maiden wanted to marry an animal that no one had ever seen before. And this caused such outrage and confusion that elders were dispatched to the Mamba. They begged him to kill the creature and free the illustrious tribe from this threat of an abomination.

  In the dream the Mamba set off into the forest, hunted the creature for seven days, and brought it back alive to the village. Then in full view of everyone he set the creature free and challenged it to an honest wrestling match. During the match he broke its neck with a crack so loud that it caused astonishment. The creature died instantly, and the Mamba became an instant hero, celebrated in songs and dances.

&n
bsp; However, on the seventh day of the celebrations, the creature rose again. It had changed into a man, and it stood like a colossus in front of the shrine. It stood there silently, not saying a word, while the clouds passed across his clear soft face, now obscuring it, now revealing it. And there was the most unnerving stillness in the village while the colossus stood there, and did nothing, just staring in perfect tranquillity at the Mamba, who was now as tiny as a little cat in the presence of such gentle might.

  The Mamba woke up from the vision and knew he had to do something. His whole world was in danger, but he did not know how. And so he made sure that the tribe felt that its whole world was in danger too, and did not know why.

  First he needed proof of what his instincts had picked up. He began to spy on the secret life of the maiden.