“Doesn’t the one tend to lead rather quickly to the other?”
“Only in wicked or stupid hands.”
“Then why the need for all this secrecy?”
“Some things shrivel in the light,” he sighed. “But this is Fontanalba, old thing, not Wewelsburg. I assure you my friends and I have nothing in common with Heinrich Himmler.”
“Are you sure your minions understand that?”
“My dear man, if you’ve been inconvenienced it’s entirely your own fault. Adam did ask you to stay away from the villa until he sent for you.”
“And because I didn’t, that gives you the right to set the dogs on me?”
“Yes, well we’re sorry about that, of course. This is the first time we’ve had to put such measures in place. You merely happened to trip the wires.”
“So who are you protecting, Larry? “
Behind his mask, Larry glanced away across the room.
“There’s someone here who brings his own security?” I guessed. Still he said nothing. “That’s why you wanted to see me off, right? Because I’m a journalist? Because I might recognize someone in your little mystical coterie and blow the gaff on him? Who is it, Larry? A politician? A billionaire? Some celebrity or other? Royalty?”
“The real question,” Larry said, “is just what we’re going to do with you right now. You’ve already mucked things up for me this evening. Can’t have you wrecking it for everyone else.”
“Wrecking what, Larry?”
“Surely Adam’s told you all you need to know? I thought the two of you had reached some sort of agreement? Not that I expected you to honour it.”
“Does he know I’m here?”
“Of course, and in the circumstances he’s decided it’s best if you stay. So let’s get those manacles removed and we’ll fix you up with a room for the night. We have a very full house, so it’ll be rather basic, you understand? Gabriella suggested we install you in faucibus Orci.”
“Install me where?”
“In faucibus Orci. Have you forgotten your Virgil, old soul?”
“I never had your classical education.”
“The Aeneid. Book Six. It means, ‘in the Jaws of Orcus’.”
“I’m no wiser.”
“Orcus, one of the underworld gods. Another name for Hades, if you like. So don’t be surprised if it’s a bit hellish compared to your usual standards of comfort! But then, as I recall” – the mask concealed what I imagined must be a wicked smile – “you’re not unused to basements.”
I was prepared for something simple, but not for the room that Larry ushered me into – a windowless, dimly lit vault with painted walls somewhere under the main house. A glass and several bottles of spring water stood on a table no higher than a footstool. Apart from a large couch, there was no other furniture, so I assumed that the passage at the far end of the cellar must lead to a bedroom. Larry pointed that way. “The usual facilities are through there.”
I went into the passage, saw one closed door ahead of me and another to my right that stood ajar on a small white-tiled lavatory and washroom.
“The flush works on a sort of pump,” he said. “Makes a bit of a noise.”
I tried the other door and, when it didn’t budge, said, “Is this the bedroom door?”
“There’s no bedroom. This is it.”
“Just the couch? You’ve got to be joking.”
“However, you’ll find a pamphlet of mine which might prove of interest, and you do have the wall paintings.”
Not an inch of the plastered stone was unpainted, but the single bulb in the room emitted such low wattage that I could make out no detail.
“How long do you expect me to stay down here?”
“Till we’re ready for you,” Larry answered. Then he slipped out of the door, which clicked shut behind him.
There was no handle on my side of the door. I banged a few times, but only a hollow echo answered. I went back through to the far door and knocked on that one too, with no better result. The cellars were built of stone. No matter how much noise I made, it was unlikely that anybody in the rooms above would hear me. The security man had taken my mobile phone when he emptied my pockets – though down here it would have been useless anyway – so until someone came to fetch me, I was cut off from all human contact. Nor was I even sure what time it was. My watch too had been confiscated.
It occurred to me then that no one else in the world knew where I was. Raging that they should dare to lock me up this way, and thinking up all kinds of vengeance, I picked up the pamphlet I found on the couch. Published by the Heartsease Foundation and entitled KATABASIS: The Journey to Hades, it had three epigraphs, one from Jung, another from T.S. Eliot, and the third – its presumption did not greatly surprise me – came from one of Larry’s own works. It said: “Only a foolish mind fails to value reason highly among the instruments of knowledge; only a fearful one clings to it as though there was no other.” Shaking my head, I scanned the pamphlet’s opening paragraph:
Let us begin by acknowledging that we are mysterious creatures inhabiting a mysterious world whose nature we do not understand, and where, if we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that, apart from the inevitability of death, there is nothing fundamental that we know for certain. Despite our best convictions, we do not know who we are, we don’t know why we are here or what will become of us. This is, and has always been, the radical uncertainty of the human condition. Out of that uncertainty arise all the stories and stratagems by which we strive as best we can to connive at life and shape it to our purposes, to seek to make a go of things, to try to become what we believe ourselves to be, while attempting at the same time to make sense of the others around us who are caught up in the same marvellous and fateful game.
I skipped to the next page, and was confronted by a lengthy disquisition on the name and nature of the invisible Greek god Hades, together with accounts of various mythological journeys to the underworld drawn from Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian, Sanskrit, Japanese, Amerindian, Classical and Christian traditions. Flicking quickly through a dozen more pages, I came to the concluding paragraphs:
Thus it can be seen that, whether we are conscious of it or not, our powerful culture is now far advanced on such a Hades Journey. But as long as we continue to devolve the suffering on those less fortunate than ourselves, or to look for solutions in mere amelioration of the attitudes that precipitated the current planetary crisis, we will get lost on the journey and fall asleep in our own dark shadows. Yet to push on through will make severe demands on us. It will require a willingness to subordinate the ego’s narrow ambitions to the wider claims of the compassionate imagination. It will demand more serious respect for those feminine – or lunar – values which, because they are not easily quantified or controlled, have been too long demeaned and neglected in our culture. It will involve a revaluation of the ancient wisdom of the ancestors, not only as found in surviving texts, but as a part of our genetic structure – the dead ancestors alive inside each of us, speaking through our dreams and genes. Lastly, and most comprehensively, it will require an honest responsiveness to the intelligence of the earth itself, of which each one of us is a living filament.
In short, only by undergoing such ordeals of self-divestiture will our Hades Journey be completed. The demands it makes will not easily be answered. But without a willing acceptance of its claims on us we may live and die in ignorance of who we truly are.
Impatient with such pompous rhetoric, I threw the pamphlet aside, and lay back on the couch.
After a time, as though someone was turning a dimmer switch, I sensed the room growing darker round me. I closed my eyes, shook my head and, when I looked again, could see nothing at all. The room was absolutely black, not a cranny of light anywhere, just this dense blackness pressing against my eyes, a blackness into which everything – the paintings, the walls, the vault, the couch on which I lay – had disappeared. And then, somewhere above me, a recorded voice
began to speak.
After a moment I recognized the words as Latin verse, but I understood little of them until a second voice cut in over the first, and I was listening to someone translating Virgil’s hexameters into English:
Here, at the entrance, in the jaws of Orcus,
Grief and vengeful Trouble make their lair.
Here too are foul Diseases and the miseries
Of Age and Hunger driving men to crime.
Here’s Want that causes fear, hard Toil, and Death;
Death’s brother Sleep, and every wicked Lust
The mind conceives. And at the door where Furies
Rage in iron cages, War brings yet more death,
While Discord binds with snakes her bloodied hair.
A glimmer of light returned, the room grew brighter again, much brighter than before, until the whole vaulted chamber became a radiant gallery in which the paintings glowed around the walls in lurid colour.
My first thought was that this must once have been a chamber where some ancestor of Gabriella’s family had indulged his secret vices. But as my eyes took in more of the detail, I saw that many of the images were drawn from contemporary sources, that the work was recent, executed within the last decade or so, and evidently with an apocalyptic moral purpose.
I sat up under the gaze of an African woman who would have had all the solemn beauty of a Benin bronze had not one side of her face been eaten away, from eye socket to jaw, by the ebola virus. All about her were images that might have illustrated a medical encyclopedia – a horrifying freak show of frightening diseases. When I turned away from them, it was only to encounter the famished eyes, brittle rib cages and bloated bellies of starving men, women and children.
An entire wall was given over to the depiction of such suffering. Another to the obscenities of war – soldiers with stomach and head wounds, helicopter gunships spraying fire, skeletal corpses crudely stacked or tipped in ditches, men dangling from scaffolds, bodies tangled in wire, frozen into rigid postures, mutilated beyond repair, with tanks exploding around them and cities in flames. Here and there I caught allusions to the work of other artists – the fiery landscape of Brueghel’s Mad Meg, tormented figures out of Hieronymus Bosch, Goya’s Caprichos and the mutilated corpses from his Disasters of War. But there were also people and places I recognized from photographs and newsreel footage – the man in the Balkans whose head was being sawn off by his grinning captors, the Chinese child with chopsticks pushed into her ears, the frightened eyes of the little Jewish boy with hands raised under the muzzle of a gun. Unquestionably I was looking at a late-twentieth-century vision of hell – the kind of inferno through which I’d been travelling for most of my adult life. And when I turned round to take in the wall at my back, I was faced with another kind of obscenity – a life-scale painting of an orgy in full swing.
Every conceivable mode of sexual congress, from the voluptuous to the worryingly sinister, was portrayed in shameless detail. People of every size, shape and race were bucking and humping, sucking, grasping and thrashing in a depraved, sometimes comical, more often grotesque tangle of organs, mouths and limbs. But the skin tones of these naked creatures gave off a weird bluish light, like that of rotting fish, so there was nothing remotely arousing in those images. If they were pornographic, it was a pornography that took no pleasure in its appetites and vices.
At the still centre of the orgy knelt an anomalous figure with her hands clasped at her breast. I recognized her immediately as another study of the naked woman kneeling in the desert – the figure I had first seen among the frescoes in the cottage, with silver-white hair gathered about her like a shawl. Her presence here confirmed what I had already guessed – that these murals were also Marina’s work, that in the days before her sight was gone, she must have spent many gruelling weeks transferring this infernal pageant from her imagination to these underground walls.
What I also saw was that this figure was intended as a self-portrait. It was how, presumably in some grave crisis of revulsion at the entire human condition, Marina had seen herself. It left me grieving for her, and yearning for her too.
I have described the pictures in the cellar of the villa at Fontanalba as I first saw them. I have not yet conveyed their hallucinogenic impact over many hours on my isolated senses. During the grim nights of imprisonment in Makombe Castle there had been six of us thrown together in that squalid cell, all frightened by the hideous sounds along the corridor. Here there was no one else to turn to, and nowhere to fix the attention except on the hellish vision of a world where – in stark repudiation of all our claims to progress – the apocalyptic horsemen, Disease, Famine, War and Death, still marauded among us unchecked.
Through long hours I stared at the images. The images stared back at me, and when I closed my eyes it felt as though the usual roles were reversed and I had become the object of observation around which representatives of the mutilated, dying and dead people I had filmed over the past thirty years were gathering to pity and to grieve.
At moments, too, I seemed to sense other presences in the room. To my left lay Hal Brigshaw – not the vigorous figure I had known in my youth, but the crumpled victim of a stroke, stretched out on the bed I had seen in the sitting room at High Sugden, breathing only with difficulty, unable to speak a word. To my right, confined in the darkness of the starvation bunker, Maximilian Kolbe, saint of Auschwitz, knelt in prayer. Yet, when I opened my eyes and looked to either side, neither of those figures was there.
At other times I was surfing on a sea of memories in a state between sleep and waking, thinking of Marina and of everything she must have endured in order to be able to paint this terrifying vision on these walls. My heart ached to remember her as she had been in the early days – her passion for storms, her courage and candour, the easy way with which she had chatted to my parents on the day she had unexpectedly come to visit us in Cripplegate Chambers. Larry had joked that I had once been familiar with basements, and it was true enough; and here I was again, back in that cellar which had once been my home, believing myself to be some sort of underground creature, a troglodyte, living with the faint smell of damp and chilled by cold draughts blowing through the vaults.
Then I must have fallen asleep for a while, because I jumped up trembling from a dream that had shocked and frightened me. In the dream I was looking up at the dingy frosted glass in the windows of our cellar living room when I saw my father grinning back in at me, young, handsome and virile again.
“What are you doing?” I said. “You’re dead. You’ve no business here.”
“That’s what you think” – an unnerving green glint shone in eyes tricky with mischief – “but I’ve not been dead at all, lad – just hiding. And now I’m back!”
I jumped awake. Did I dream I was shouting, “Why won’t you let me go?” or was I actually shouting it? Only gradually did the shock of the dream abate. What remained was a heart-wrung awareness of everything that had been left unresolved in my life – of that and of the uncrossable distance between the living and the forever dead.
19
Trust Game
In Vietnam I learnt to inhabit a strict exclusion zone of the emotions. After being picked up from a firefight and flown by chopper through an electric storm, I named that condition my “Faraday Cage”. It was where Crowther’s Law prevailed while the intolerable voltage of warfare flashed outside. From there I saw what happens when villages are incinerated and mortar shells explode in close proximity to human flesh. I saw body bags filled with enough bits and pieces to make up the weight of a single son, and though I would never be inured to such sights, I no longer retched at them. But when news of Emmanuel’s assassination caught up with me, it hit me hard.
That night I lay in sweaty fatigues, smoking dope as I listened to the stoical banter of a bunch of black infantrymen gathered round a radio. A rock band was driving a heavy beat across the airwaves. I took another drag on the joint and felt my brains scooped up and tilted
backwards into space. Silently, with tears streaming down my face, I recalled each act of kindness the African had shown me, first in those snowbound days at High Sugden, and again, later, when he welcomed me as his friend in the Presidential Palace of Equatoria. I remembered his pride, his proverbs, his humour, his warmth. Yet the shock and pain of Emmanuel’s death quickly blurred in the heat of the next day’s action. I was twenty-eight years old then, and living in a world of phantasmagorical violence to which, with each adrenalin rush of terror and excitement, I was increasingly addicted.
Six weeks later I returned to a London in thrall to a delirium of its own. After Vietnam, the city’s newly acquired taste for love and revolution felt about as likely to put right the structural injustices of the planet as might the revels of an unruly street carnival. But it did offer scope to indulge my hyperactive senses.
More than a month passed before I travelled north to Calderbridge. It was my first visit to my parents in a long time, but I’d learnt that Hal was back at High Sugden, having escaped out of Africa alive. It was him I wanted to see.
From the moment of my arrival, I felt restless and estranged in my parents’ new home. Since my father had been appointed warehouse foreman at Bamforth Brothers’ mill, they had moved out of Cripplegate Chambers into a terraced house with two bedrooms and a small garden, which they rented from the mill. My mother fussed over me, while my father preserved his usual taciturn air of judgemental detachment.
My mother now worked as the cleaning lady for a family in Heathcote Green, who thought of her as their treasure. Though she seemed to take pride in the title, I told her there was no call for her to work, as I earned more money than I needed, and would be glad to send some of it her way. She answered that she wouldn’t know what to do with her time if she gave up the job, and she was sure the family’s two teenage girls, for whom she had become a trusted confidante, would be lost without her. Meanwhile, my father remained entranced by his television set, watching out the evenings after work more or less indiscriminately. On fine weekends they had taken to driving about the local countryside in their ageing Ford Prefect, of which they were very proud.
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