People of the Book

by David Stacton

  But a Mysendonck older would be a Mysendonck worth the saving, so Ariel is sent by the Magician to whisper in Gonzalo’s ear:

  My master through his art foresees the danger

  That you, his friend, are in; and sends me forth—

  For else his project dies—to keep thee living.

  It is a pity, but one needs his men.

  While you here do snoring lie,

  Open-eyed Conspiracy

  His time doth take.

  If of life you keep a care,

  Shake off slumber and beware:

  Awake, awake!

  Lars glanced at Mysendonck, he did not know why. Mysendonck seemed not to know that he was sleeping.

  Ferdinand is set to his tasks and trials. It is impossible to believe in Ferdinand, but it is very like Trojeberg, a summer game in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, in which young men must thread the maze to find their young women; the Troy game, desire that takes us deeper into the labyrinth, though only Ariadne can teach us how to return.

  No, thought the Magician, she wouldn’t dare, and sat upright. The plot went on around him. He paid no attention; he considered.

  MIRANDA: … and my father’s precepts

  I therein do forget.

  He did not care for this little fable of Ferdinand and Miranda. It bothered him.

  CALIBAN: As I told thee before, I am subject to a tyrant, a sorcerer, that by his cunning hath cheated me of the island.

  ARIEL: Thou liest.

  CALIBAN: I would my valiant master would destroy thee; I do not lie.

  Mysendonck put his head in his hands. The torches in the hall made too much smoke. His eyes were watering.

  CALIBAN: Beat him enough. After a little time

  I’ll beat him too….

  He’s but a sot, as I am, nor hath not

  One spirit to command: they all do hate him

  As rootedly as I. Burn but his books….

  And that most deeply to consider is

  The beauty of his daughter….

  I never saw a woman,

  But only Sycorax my dam and she;

  But she as far surpasseth Sycorax

  As great’st does last.

  Though driven by the stentor of the preacher at his back, Mysendonck never thought about his parents. Ariel clapped his wings. There was a banquet. The banquet disappeared.

  ARIEL: I have made you mad;

  And even with such-like valour men hang and drown

  Their proper selves. You fools! I and my fellows

  Are ministers of Fate….

  If you could hurt,

  Your swords are now too massy for your strengths,

  And will not be uplifted….

  Ling’ring perdition …

  … shall step by step attend

  You and your ways; …

  Which here, in this most desolate isle,

  … is nothing but heart-sorrow

  And a clear life ensuing….

  For clear, in this case, means innocent, as clarified like butter.

  PROSPERO: If I have too austerely punish’d you,

  Your compensation makes amends; for I

  Have given you here a third of mine own life,

  Or that for which I live….

  There was another transformation scene, ladies in cars, Iris and Ceres and the Queen of Heaven, all of which Prospero can explain. He can explain anything. They are

  Spirits, which by mine art

  I have from their confines call’d to enact

  My present fancies.

  IRIS: … Come, temperate nymphs, and help to celebrate

  A contract of true love: be not too late.

  Hannale wriggled. Her attention wandered. But she was sorry when the pageant heavily vanished. She said good-bye to wonder, and unexpectedly groped in the dark and took, not Lars’, but the Magician’s hand.

  The Magician was touched, for Prospero, in his made-over Faustus costume, was now up to that weary sad speech which has always the power to move us and disturb us, and make us desperate for all lost fading joys.

  Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

  As I foretold you, were all spirits and

  Are melted into air, into thin air:

  And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

  The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

  The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

  Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

  And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

  Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

  As dreams are made on, and our little life

  Is rounded with a sleep.—Sir, I am vex’d:

  Bear with my weakness; my old brain is troubled.

  Be not disturb’d with my infirmity.

  The Magician clasped Hannale’s hand. What is so desperate as resignation? We bow to the wind; we are hurried on. It is a long farewell. It is a cantilena. Men need not be great, to have greatness in them. Some receive it like a ray. For greatness is an emotion. He would have liked to say to Mysendonck:

  Greatness is only a disease like any other, except that unlike hope, it cannot be cured. One can only die of it. Sometimes the course is long, sometimes brief. It is a parasite. It eats us hollow. And what is worse, nobody knows what causes it or where it comes from, except that it chooses its own host. Do not be alarmed: you are immune.

  So was he. Nonetheless, we may partake. There suddenly steps forward from the play, not Prospero, but the Magus, the wonder-worker, the Magician, with his great kindness and his great sorrow. Around him darkness falls from the air, there is the snuffed glow of lights going out one by one, it is the “Turning of the Leaf,” the “Falling of the Leaf,” a little clavier music by Byrd, a reverberation, an echo. The Magician is no longer there. We go back into our night, and there is nothing, there is nothing for us but the night. We walk among cypresses, back over the rim of the dark world.

  So great is the silence after the great farewell, you never notice what happens next. What happens next, is more. We do not get to take our walk so easily, as that we should go now. Worse even than the marriage of Miranda is the last good-bye to Ariel, and never to see him more. We give him a freedom which neither of us wants.

  PROSPERO: I will plague them all,

  Even to roaring….

  Let them be hunted soundly. At this hour

  Lie at my mercy all mine enemies:

  … and thou

  Shalt have the air at freedom: for a little,

  Follow, and do me service.

  So, for a little, Lars does, but Prospero does not concern him. He merely wrote the play. He did not build the wind machine, or rattle tin thunder, nor did the world applaud when he appeared. He is a necessary nothing, for these people he has drawn from nowhere can do without him now, and liked him no more than a child does its father. Ariel, farewell. You were my heart’s child. I know no more of thee, than I must free thee.

  PROSPERO: I shall miss thee;

  But yet thou shalt have freedom;—so, so, so.

  There was a stir, the robbers were leaving. They always leave before the play is done, for only low comedy appeals to them. There was a sigh among the players that went from chest to chest, and Selina rustled, settling back in her seat.

  ALONSO: Some oracle

  Must rectify our knowledge.

  But I cannot free thee. I will not have the play desert its master. I am too weak.

  CALIBAN: How fine my master is! I am afraid

  He will chastise me.

  PROSPERO: He is as disproportion’d in his manners

  As in his shape.—Go, sirrah, to my cell;

  Take with you your companions: as you look

  To have my pardon, trim it handsomely.

  Mysendonck had not left with the robbers. From time to time he looked at Lars unhappily, and, with another misery, at them all.

  PROSPERO: Sir, I invite your highness and your train

  To
my poor cell….

  And so the Magician had. The actors were afterwards to participate in a ball.

  It has ended happily. The play has voided its appearances. There remains only the Magician, who having said farewell to his daughter, must now say farewell to his powers as well.

  Now my charms are all o’erthrown,

  And what strength I have’s mine own;

  Which is most faint….

  … release me from my bands

  With the help of your good hands.

  Gentle breath of yours my sails

  Must fill, or else my project fails,

  Which was to please….

  As you from crimes would pardon’d be,

  Let your indulgence set me free.

  Then Prospero, too, vanishes. It is perhaps too much play. And yet we do not want to see it over with. Nonetheless, here is the epilogue. No one has died, but the dream has faded, so we too must die, and leave the theatre quietly. For a moment, despite its crackling fires, the hall was cold. And then the musicians came down the great stair, playing lute and recorder and trumpet, the players sauntered back through the arches, and there was a late supper, wine, and dancing.

  It was a dance in darkness. No one equals the grace of the dancer in darkness. This music teaches us how to be merry slowly, and El Dorado was once a man.

  Eying Prospero warily, the Magician saw that he had no idea of what he had just done, except while doing it. He was only a coarse fellow, able to simulate anything without inquiring as to what it was. The players were happy, for they had been promised, in exchange for this performance, a safe-conduct from the wood, food to take with them, money, and a horse. It was all they wanted and more than they had hoped to get. These men who walk among the stars, in daily life are satisfied with all too little. It is sadly so.

  “Oh I liked that,” said Hannale, the only one there moved by the enchanter.

  “Then we must dance,” said the Magician gravely, vastly pleased, for he was aware it was Prospero she had liked; her eyes had never left him. Stooping slightly, he handed her his arm. Placing a virginal upon a table, Alonso played now again the “Falling of the Leaf,” a stately, wistful air.

  Across the flickering checkerboard, the tall bent worried man and the little girl at last merry moved constantly, inconstantly, and looking up at him, she no longer wanted to go away. She was a slim, darting child, but she had a stone poise.

  The others fell in behind, moving like thistledown—wayward, white to gray, moved to destinations it does not intend, away it goes again, in flight on an updraft we cannot feel. From each umbrella, as though from tongs, the latent seed depends. For it is the fluff that likes to voyage, not the seed. The seed weighs earthward, swaying, like one of Leonardo’s plumb-bobbed handkerchiefs. Sebastian, unaware of arrows, footed it with Caliban. Selina paraded with Ferdinand. Iris, Ceres, Juno, Nymphs, Miranda, acned adolescents with breaking voices, moved with Mysendonck, Lars, the Magician, Gonzalo, Trinculo.

  Prospero, finding himself with the Magician, was caught up into something he knew not what that frightened him. We dance with ourselves, only to find we are alone with a stranger. Which one of us does that frighten the more?

  Selina, by an inevitable happenstance built into the figure, moved with Lars, saw him flushed with wine, looked around her, saw she was unobserved, and thought: He is a boy. Why not now? I must know. And besides the young are charming, charming. Behind her smile, her tongue pressed against her teeth. Christine Natt och Dag could have ripped the heart out of his chest, alive and beating. When it stops beating you throw it away and get another one.

  Selina, with a practiced eye (it was not hers), led him toward the stairs. He is exactly ripe, neither drunk nor sober. No one noticed them. There was no one in the corridor. She shut the door of her room behind them.

  “My name,” she said, leaning against the lock, “is Miranda. It is a name that billows as you say it with a complacency of skirts. Mi-randa. One shucks them off.”

  It was soon enough over, for the young are too clumsy for deliberative delay. But it was what she had wanted. She felt infinite. She felt superior. She had at last been fed by young enough blood.

  Lars turned on his stomach, and said into the bolster, “Teach us how to die,” clutching the edges of it.

  Men have their own ideas about virginity. The first time around it is the freedom of the maniac, and then the gyre grows narrower, and like a maniac, one repeats and repeats and repeats the same event in a smaller and smaller room. There is an ache when pith is strained. He had been used, and this is only a little death, it is not permanent, it has not humanity in it.

  “You are not like the other one,” said Selina, with her customary serene dishonesty. “I prefer the other one. You want it to mean something. Children do. I don’t. I don’t want anything human to mean anything.”

  “Why not?” Lars was shocked. And besides, the other one was Mysendonck.

  “Because I am not human. It is my safety.” And she laughed, for though they very likely sold themselves for creature comforts, slaves want always their revenge. And now she had had it. She could not have been airier. She had scored off the Magician, off Manglana, off the child, off Lars, off Mysendonck.

  “The child will know. She is a nice little girl, but she loves you too much, and I do not like her. Your friend will know, too. I do not like your friend. And he will not like it either. He visits Manglana. You are just another one. That’s all you are. Go back and dance.”

  Manglana, a peasant, would perhaps have been kinder. But Selina was a puritan young woman, and forgave no one for what she chose to do when there was no danger of her being caught out.

  It was another loss. He did as he was told. He was troubled.

  She was not. She had interfered between friends. That was a triumph. Whatever they had between them, now she had it, too. She had destroyed it. It was now her they must want. What they want themselves did not matter. But she remembered Miranda and was dissatisfied. They must not touch me, and they don’t. Nothing must touch me, and it doesn’t. But that being so, how shall we ever be touched, how shall we cut the emptiness? To be inviolate is to make no friends.

  Satisfied because she was dissatisfied, there was no chink in her anywhere, she went to sleep.

  In the corridor Lars was not. For in an empty world, he would have had emotion, affection, feeling; it leaves a bad taste in the mouth otherwise, one salivates against alum. It is a smurch. Unable to face the others, for Hannale would know, he found his way through darkness to the Manuel altarpiece, and in the moonlight, saw that Mysendonck was right. Men are tortured. They writhe. They would rather die together. To know this is to be God’s athlete. He wanted Mysendonck, he wanted to be slapped, he wanted … someone there. In this room, where the Magician and Selina had paced with candles to scare the world away, and had themselves been solemn, he wanted help.

  *

  “Get up,” ordered the Magician and with his candelabrum splattered hot liquid wax down on her face, to scale her over.

  Manglana had expected Mysendonck. The scalding drops made her twitch. She opened her eyes, and there stared up at him the bony death of Christine Natt och Dag, come as usual to taunt him. He would have smashed it, but you cannot smash the dead.

  “Where is Lars?”

  “It was not I. It was Selina. Selina wanted him. I don’t know why.”

  The Magician slapped her, and went on slapping her.

  “That’s incest.” His eyes had turned rheumy.

  “Is it?” asked Manglana.

  “You know it is.”

  “Then you must kill her.” Manglana stood naked on the floor, pushing him aside. “Do you think I care about him or her? I am Manglana. I have the other one, the strong one. We could go away and leave you. He has asked me to. But you were kind to me, so I stayed. But once we go, where will your Selina be? I am tired of it. We will go and we will take the boy, too, and the boy will take the girl. Do you think any of the
m has any use for you? It was that horrible person you put into me who did this. She does not love you either. This time we will go,” shouted Manglana.

  It was the Magician’s flaw, not to be able to believe that anyone could love him. She had not before seen this look in those eyes. Punishment came next, and of punishment she was afraid. She looked forward to it, it was release, but she feared it.

  But all he did was to leave. That frightened her even more. Determined to save herself, she slipped through the dark back passages of the building, terrified to be watched, and let herself into Mysendonck’s quarters.

  Mysendonck, who had been able to live a long time without furniture, was sitting against a wall, with his hands dangling from his knees, staring at the closed double doors opposite him. He did not get up.

  “You shouldn’t come here.”

  She told him what Selina had done. It was the act of a stranger. It did not concern her. And yet she knew that this time she had gone too far.

  Mysendonck was not that impressed by the distinct nature of Selina. They might be different people, but they didn’t have different bodies. And he knew how Lars would take it. It wouldn’t just be something that had happened, it would mean something. Mysendonck was sick of meaning. What a thing is, is enough, without driving yourself crazy finding a name for it, and like as not, the wrong one.

  “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “I didn’t do it. She did.”

  She did not tell him what she had said to the Magician, or how the Magician had taken what she had to say. For men and women have different concepts of essential information. No woman is going to give herself away if she can help it; otherwise how could she remain slandered, traduced, and pure? Not that men are any less devious, but their notion of purity is more restricted and less exact.