by Ben Okri
That day, with the dreadful crew gathered in that appalling suburban flat (of which the owner was inordinately proud), I received one of those messages. I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know who passed it to me. Everyone there absolutely denied having had anything to do with it. But it appeared in my palm, while I was raging against the camera. The message was typed on a piece of red paper. And it read: Beware the inscription.
8
That is when the name Malasso first sounded on our journey. I told no one at all about the message. But when no one claimed responsibility for having planted it, a voice from out of nowhere suggested that the message might have come from Malasso. There was a peculiar silence after that.
‘Who is Malasso?’ I asked.
No one said anything. Everyone returned immediately to their tasks. For the first time that day my mood changed. I entered a different emotional zone. It was as if an illness had crept into my blood through my ears. My energy levels changed as well. There are certain names, with their inscrutable syllables, or their suppressed and diabolical vowels, that have the power to make you ill, or to lose your memory, or to forget what love is, or to distort your vision, or to send you spiralling, in encoded dread, towards some ambiguous doom.
I took it then, from their silence, that Malasso was not a name to mention at all, if it could be helped. There are certain peoples who invent a character to explain all the inexplicable mishaps and disasters and tragedies that befall them. These characters are responsible for the failures of harvests and for clothes missing from washing lines and manholes being left open and burglaries with no break-ins and road signs facing the wrong way. When a house mysteriously burns down, they say it was Procous that did it (Procous being the name of this imaginary semi-deity of disasters, mischief, local catastrophes, lost things, improbable thefts, and unlikely rumours). In our case, it seemed as if the crew had invented such a figure to explain lifts that wouldn’t open on the fifteenth floor, missing schedules, disasters in the air, money that vanished, stations that never existed, and all the finely calibrated tortures of the adventures ahead. They were all caused by Malasso. That was at first what I took it to mean; and I adjusted my inner being to make space for the presence of this mysterious force in our lives, this malign Prospero figure who would have such dreadful power over our lives as we travelled on towards that illusory goal of Arcadia. I made space for this new fiend, and I asked no further questions for the time being, and didn’t mention his name any more. But I confess that with the receiving of the message something changed in me, something that had always been there.
I sometimes believe that when God wants to turn your life around he puts more of the devil in you. My life was being turned upside-down, and a strange kind of daemon had awoken in me, making more keen the edge of my perceptions. I was, as they say, not myself. There are certain men in Africa who shake hands with you and afterwards you don’t feel well. There are certain people in Africa who give you peculiar objects, and once these objects touch your palm a sleeping paranoia awakens in you, and washing your hands a thousand times with carbolic soap or herbal potions can’t rid you of the sensation of being spooked. These are travellers’ tales which I happen to believe, being intelligent. So it was with the message that was passed on to me. I wasn’t the same afterwards. I was never the same again.
9
I became obsessed. The curious nature of my obsession became clearer to me only much later. At first it manifested itself as a kind of vague irritability, the invidious irritability that specialists in psychosomatic creativity identify as preceding unusual irradiations of perceptivity. In simpler words, I became more sensitive than usual. It is a common misunderstanding that bad-tempered types are impervious people, thick-skinned, insensitive. It may be nearer to the truth, in some cases, to say that they are hypersensitive, but not fey, merely more sensitive to the coarse material of everyday life, to the brutish fabric of day to day dealings, of commonplace politeness, of average good manners. It seems to me that most people who are not bad-tempered, who are even-keeled, mediocre in their tranquillity – are the true insensitive ones. The wonderful possibilities of life brush past them without so much as stirring vague impulses of a greater way of being, a rage at the limitations that so much of society imposes on their sense of the unsuspected sublimity of being human. To have this sense lurking in you, and to find no way of expressing it, or living its fire, can either make a raging homo sapiens of you, or turn you towards the excessive sensitivity that can only, at best, incline towards the monastery.
My obsession took, at first, a curious form. I became aware of words heard out of context, and invested them with more meaning than could have been intended. I became a hunter after floating words. Things overheard started off complex trains of thought, of fantasy. I began to weave whole fantasies out of these hanging words. Take, for example, my overhearing some of the crew members talking. The word TREASURE drifted across to me; I froze, and listened harder. Who had mentioned it? What treasure? I began to suspect that, hidden in the agenda of our journey, was something that had to do with treasure. It didn’t take long for me to put the two mysteries together: Malasso and treasure. Voilà. Our journey was overtly to find Arcadia, but covertly to find hidden, illegal treasure, with Malasso as the invisible metteur en scéne. I mentioned nothing of my suspicions, but kept a closer eye on all the team members. They became enormously interesting to me for the first time in all the years I had known them. They gained in menace, in untrustworthiness, in depth. These were thorough failures, desperate media people, haunted by the marvellous and crushing contempt that the great goddess of fame had heaped on them, haunted by their complete inability to make any sort of mark on the vile fabric of the age. They were, therefore, willing accomplices of the corporation of the devil, desperadoes of fame and urban fortune. I had no reason to think them incapable of anything. Once one glimpses a person’s ruling failures, without seeing anything of a counter-balancing ruling principle, then that person becomes plain. One sees clearly their capacity for mild evils, evils that can slide, slowly, into greater ones. There was no reason, to my mind, why the crew wouldn’t sell me to cutthroats, if it would favour them. I had reached the finest zone of my honed paranoia. For the first time, the journey began to stimulate my keenest appetite for life, and adventure.
10
There was something else I noticed on that day of our trial run through the logistics of filming. I noticed that, not long after I received my special message, most of the other crew members started to act strange. This too was clearer to me much later. The schedule that we were supposed to be discussing, for example, revealed itself to be patchy. Our journey depended on nebulous instructions to be received at various future points, in various cities. Someone, in Italy or France or Greece, would disburse the necessary funds to us when we got there. All this was very peculiar, and downright unprofessional. But it was, apparently, a way of saving money, of making better use of favourable exchange rates, and so on. And then it turned out that we had to meet someone in Paris who would give Jim clear instructions; and that this person would leave clues and hints as to the next point of our journey, the next collecting place, the next man or woman to meet, the next complicated interview. All this would be communicated to Jim as we went along.
I began to feel strongly under the influence of people I didn’t know. I felt I was in a bad movie. I expressed myself very severely to all the crew members on the vileness of this haphazard way of dragging us across Europe, on a pointless journey, to clandestine meetings with shady people, following tentative hints, lugging cameras and equipment around, as if we were refugees from good sense and proper methods of film-making. I protested loudly and drunkenly. I swore and cursed. I insulted the director and foamed and stamped, and they heard me out with mournful expressions. And when I had fairly talked myself out, as it were, Jim called me aside and told me, in that mild-mannered, irritating whisper of his which brings me out in a maniacal fury, t
hat we simply had no choice.
‘This is our only chance. Our last chance,’ he said lugubriously. ‘We either take it or leave it. We either go for it and try and make a good film, or we all go home now, and forget the whole thing.’
Put like that the ever-vigilant pragmatist in me came creeping out. We had no choice. We were the original last-chance-salooners, the cream of the bottom of the heap. We were all desperate, me as much as anyone else – hence my coruscating judgement. Yes, we had no choice, no hope, but to accept the terms presented and make the best of them.
Mad as it may sound, we took our chance. We cowered. We accepted. We plunged forward.
And so, miserable and downcast, with a sense of doom and a whiff of the abyss, and with the gloomy courage that starving rats have, we dispersed for the day, having agreed to meet again at an appointed hour, on an appointed day, at Waterloo Station.
11
The world lay motionless in the golden spell of summer. The deep shade beneath the trees, the blinding fingers of sunlight, the windless warmth, the humidity that causes a peculiar ennui in the city, the dazed look of sweating commuters, the traffic fumes, the distracted tourists, the impassive grandeur of the city’s architecture, the leaves of trees caught in summer’s yellow enchantment, the childhood dreams of happier times by the seaside, the faded hopes of adulthood, the failed loves, the collapsed ambitions, time’s merciless betrayal of our youthful certainties of becoming one of the masters of the world, the elusive nature of success and happiness, of a life with work and fun in rightful measure, the faintly disreputable middle-class aspirations now in their death-throes on summer’s splendid lawns of life’s ironies – these are the sweet poisonous sensations that accompany you homewards as evening draws nigh, with the sun still deceptively high in the heavens. Mariners must know this feeling, this sinking feeling, of islands glimpsed from a long distance, receding, dissolving into the fata morganas of the sea.
Oh, how life bites those who did not set out early, with stoutness of heart, and single-mindedness of intention, and a certain invaluable stupidity of soul, the stupidity that makes you pursue society’s truest measure with all bullishness and crudity, with shamelessness. Oh, to be too sensitive to fight for the vulgar things of life, and then to find that the vulgarity is the very stuff that makes life in society possible; to find, too late, that the vulgarity has a hidden sublimity to it, the sublimity of leisure, of holidays, of social freedom, freedom from the awful slavery of being poor, and taking a load of nonsense from the rich, who freely admit to their superiority, the wonderful superiority of being stupid enough to put the least important things in life absolutely first – which is to say the healthy, robust, and the utterly fascinating pursuit of money, the grovelling slavering slobbering greed and lust for it, the barbaric gloating for it, the superhuman translation of all the finest energies and intelligence in the human spirit into an unholy scrum and scree for money, the gagging gasping frothing passionate crawling for money, wherever it can legitimately, or quasi-legitimately, be found, and accumulated. For here the gorgeous vengeance begins; the price has been paid; and all those who didn’t pay the price, make the effort, who didn’t bleed and beg and lick and stab for it deserve their unfreedom, their slavery, their unbearable airless lives, their despondency, their rat-like psychotic resentment, their bitterness and bile, their horrible envy, and their dreadful stinking powerlessness.
Oh, but it was nonetheless summer, and the world was all abreath with the glory of the fine season come round at last with the great benediction of light everywhere spreading delicious warm throbs of lust in the blood of the young girls and the beautiful women who are now all out and transformed from their sylph-like slenderness, their unripeness, into absolute desirousness. Oh, desire was abroad, and love was dancing in the air, cavorting along the invisible passion pylons that connect us all in a gaze. And where desire can find no hope, wracked by poor self-esteem, oh, how summer fills you with an impossible longing and resentment, an envy for all those who are in love and who are just being devoured by the great illusion of it all, the illusion of life’s fairytale, of happy resolutions in the midst of living, when in living there are no resolutions at all, as any intelligent person will tell you, but only the tangled tale that goes on…
In the throes of these tangles, I beheld the world spinning in summer’s richness as I made my way back home. And it occurred to me, amid the dissatisfactions of life, that maybe my screaming nerves had a secret resonance with this forthcoming journey. Besides, I had to start thinking and feeling my way into the journey’s theme. When one’s life is a chaos one only seeks more chaos if what one really seeks is oblivion. But no matter how awful I feel things to be, I don’t want oblivion just yet. I want to hurl a few marvellous surprises into the great jaws of life. I want myself to be the surprise. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life stewing in bile. I too dream of a workable resolution, but I can’t seem to find the will to straighten things out. I can’t seem to go forward, therefore I must go back. I must find the lost beginnings, must reincarnate childhood, find a new reason for breathing, make a new covenant. I must find a way to make death not a threat, an enemy, a terror, an excuse, but a friend, an aid, a liberator. For it would seem that death is the golden key to the mystery of living, but I don’t know how to use it. And so, raging or not, hypocrite or not, loathing the camera or not, cynic or not, I need this journey. I need to find out what reasons other people have for living. I need to be broken down again into the simplest components and re-assembled like a beautiful jigsaw into a more lovely picture of who I really am and what I can be.
Slowly, I was learning to love my theme. Hello to journeys. Salut to escapes. I hope my escape leads me back to myself, by a new route, so that I can see my life and its possibilities as if for the first time.
And so this journey must be a sort of dying for me; a dying of the old self; a birth of something new and fearless and bright and strange.
Book 2
1
They had all lost something. All the voyagers at the station, young or old, had lost something. It was on their faces. It was written there, like secret inscriptions. The camera could see it; could see the anxiety and stress, the loneliness, the odd vacancy that precedes a journey. And when the camera saw it, Jim sensed it too. With his hair practically falling out, he directed Sam to focus on the faces, and to do it so that they wouldn’t notice.
Waterloo Station was crowded. But much more than the crowding of people was the crowding of anxiety and stress. It was palpable. Seen through the demonic eye of the camera it was curiously terrifying, like a hidden growth that has been there all along and suddenly springs into visibility. Death was chewing us all up, devouring us, bit by bit, beginning first with the intangible parts of us, our psyches, our childhoods, our futures, our hopes, the time we had left on this planet.
All around, the crew members were performing their different tasks. Husk was busying herself with the clapperboard, running between me and the director. Propr was taking sound levels with his muffled microphone. Jute was making phone calls to mysterious superiors, reporting on the progress of things; Sam was wielding his devil’s instrument, and I was waiting. And not far from me, among the crowd, was my friend, Mistletoe, a red-haired painter, whom I had asked to accompany me, if she had nothing better to do, because I was certain I would need saving from myself.
The day hadn’t begun well. Significant journeys rarely do. There was the business with the lift, a precursor of worse disasters to come. I could smell the hand of Malasso in it. The crew had taken a lift up a nearby building to get aerial shots of London. On the thirteenth floor, or thereabouts, the lift had come to a halt, and the crew had been trapped in the tiny space for the best part of forty minutes. Sam had fainted, Jute had become hysterical, Propr had maintained a silent stoicism, Riley had fretted and twitched, Jim had kept his nerve but lost more of his hair; and the photographer who was with them smiled, and smiled; God knows why. And
I – I was having a drink downstairs in the station bar. Those whom the devil don’t love, well, they get drunk and slip through his net. I saw them all an hour later. They were much dehydrated, profoundly spooked, and exceedingly humourless. You can imagine my quiet delight. I think I ordered another drink for myself.
2
But I was bothered by what I saw in the station. I think the drunkenness helped. I saw faces lost in a labyrinth, lost in the dark woods of reality. I saw fear lurking beneath youthful certainty, saw care eating the flesh beneath age, and horror walking beside every shadow. No one was alone. They had all brought their baggage with them, their real baggage and their psychic baggage. They had brought their ghosts with them, had brought their fears, their failures, the problems that had haunted their fathers, the nightmares that troubled their mothers. I saw a host of invisible others, writhing in their beings, sitting on their heads, entangling their feet, distorting their smiles, weighing down their minds, clinging to their necks like lovers. It was so terrifying a sight that I began to suspect the beer.
We never travel alone. An extended family of unacknowledged monsters follow us. And they don’t die with us; they become part of our children.
Suddenly I knew why I wanted to make the film, or rather why the film wanted us to make it. The theme had chosen, in the true perversity of all real themes, the most unlikely, the most incompetent, and the most hopeless of people to realise something that the most competent would never think worth saying, or showing. There is a wonderful comedy in a great theme sounding its notes through the most unworthy subjects, or artists.
