by Ben Okri
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.
Book 3
A Moment with the Devil
1
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?
2
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.
3
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.
4
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 ha
d 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.
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.
5
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.
6
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.
7
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.
8
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?’
