Tales and Imaginings Page 3

  When I was a quarter of the way round the arcade I found a narrow path hacked through the bamboo; it led me to a shrine in the centre of the courtyard. A net of creepers now held together the inverted bell-shape of crumbling brick and plaster which it had long ago split open to reveal an empty cavity. An incense-stick was burning in a tin can jammed into the crack. Striped like a tiger by the shadows of bamboo, I sat, listening to the creaking of the stems, watching the thread of blue scent rising slowly in the torn brickwork. When a third of the incense-stick had wilted into a fragile worm of ash, a green lizard appeared and sat up with its long forelegs straight, like a dog. The ash lengthened, the lizard by degrees turned brown. The ash fell, the lizard ran off with its tail in the air.

  The path, continuing across the courtyard, brought me out facing the arched doorway of the temple. The sunlight, full of golden dust, hung like a curtain across the door; I took one step into the chill darkness beyond. As my eyes adjusted to shades of black, I found myself facing the soles of two enormous feet, the toes of which formed an irregular battlement above my head. A noise behind me made me turn to see Shimdi and Sonra in the colour and heat outside the doorway, their teeth busy at the last shreds of fruit-flesh in great spiky segments of husk, their eyes vacantly towards me invisible to them in the darkness. They stepped in and discovered me with delight. On the soles of the giant feet they pointed out fragmentary remains of inlaid scenes from the life of the god. Only one episode was still comprehensible, and this they explained to me in gestures: after a day of observing foam on the seashore, comes the invention of the chiliagon.

  We sidled along the narrow space between the wall and the great cylinder of the leg, until in the dusk of the furthest recesses the face of the god rose like a vast moon over the mountainous body, with a dim glimmer of worn gold leaf. The head was bent forward and sideways to accommodate its crowning spire in the most distant corner of the roof. The clenched fist of the cramped god blocked our way forward; water trickling out from between the fingers had formed a dark pool at our feet.

  A snake! We tumbled over each other until we were out in the sunshine. Shimdi and Sonra fetched the pole, and we set off immediately.

  *

  ‘We go back now.’

  I looked round the little clearing. ‘But how do I get to Dark’s house?’

  The shorter carrier parted spiny branches and showed me a little path leading downhill. I looked along it doubtfully; it was very steep and muddy. Shimdi and Sonra were already running away, crashing through clouds of blossom, leaping and skipping over tangled roots; the jungle swallowed up the sound of their retreat almost as soon as they were out of sight. All around, large leaves presented blank faces to me, waiting to see which I would press aside.

  I reopened the mouth of the path and stepped down into the dank cellarage of the forest. Coiling roots formed a dislocated spiral staircase round a gigantic tree trunk which vanished just above my head into a tangle of crooked poles and hairy bundles of rope. A muddy sediment of light drifted down from where a few dazzling scraps of sun hung in this motionless web, which completely hid the upper layers of the forest. These rippling, murmurous, sunlit levels hanging above, full of laughter and weeping and dreamy conversations, weighed with a stifling pressure on the region of excrement and death in which I was struggling. The path became a series of footholds kicked in a slide of poisonous green mud; the branches towards which I reached for balance were all covered in rows of squat hooks or hair-like spines. Something falling brushed the back of my neck; when I whirled round, barbed creepers swung silently at my face.

  Some way further down, quick triangles of blue and silver came and went in the crevices of the undergrowth. I tore my way through, and eventually fell out of the net of creepers onto the gold-dust bank of a little stream. A row of fish that had been sitting on a fallen tree plopped into the water and swam away, their eyes above the surface like pairs of bubbles. I bathed my scratched face and hands, and then sat with my feet in the idling flow and looked up a funnel of shadow to where the sunlight flickered in the treetops round a ragged circle of fading sky. Up there were hanging gardens of dusky purple, and a dancing golden cloud of insects. The babble of the canopy had faded to a drowsy hum. Great black butterflies came spiraling down towards me, and slipped sideways into the obscurity of the undergrowth. The coming night was welling up in the forest.

  From the other side of the stream a clear path led upwards. I scrambled across by the fallen tree, and almost ran up the slope. Round one bend from the stream, the silence started. A firefly drifted up the tunnel of leaves before me. The path divided; I took the wider branch, which after a time ended in a tangle of barbed thongs. As I turned back, the silence above me started to howl, and then held its breath again.

  The other path was darker. At its entrance a loop of sticky creeper caught me under the chin. I began to run again, but the track eventually dwindled into diamond-shaped gaps in a bamboo thicket, and then failed completely. I turned back again, and found a yet narrower way which someone had hacked out of the cage of branches. After a few steps I wasn’t sure if it was a path at all. I stopped and listened. There were little noises like the muffled tickings, whirrings and chimings of buried clocks coming from all directions. When I tried to shout, my voice wouldn’t come out, but all the tiny sounds stopped dead. Then I shouted at the top of my voice, again and again; the night closed round me like a trap; I burst through into a place full of black feathers and muddy snakes, I slipped and fell into a clinging bed of fungus.

  I was rigidly still. I strained my eyes into the blackness and held my breath. The silence was absolute. Then someone started to tear the jungle apart, slowly, leaf by leaf.

  *

  ‘When I heard you crashing about at the bottom of the garden last night, I just threw a bottle and hoped whatever it was would go away. The forest folk say that at night the space between two twigs becomes another twig; it’s the only explanation for your getting lost between the stream and here. Tomorrow I’ll go and see if a tree is down across the path. Anyway, how are you feeling now?’

  ‘Much better, thanks. I must have slept all day.’

  ‘We’ll take our beers out onto the verandah, and watch the sun set. Would you like the long chair, to rest your ankle? You should be all right by tomorrow; I’ll drive you down to the station, and you’ll be back in time for the Festival.’

  ‘I didn’t know there was a road up here.’

  ‘Oh, there definitely is a road. I wonder if it wasn’t a little careless of Persimmon to send you round the back way so late in the day? However that may be, I have your company for an evening. It’s some time since Persimmon arranged a visitor for me; I realized that last week when I began re-numbering my rubber-trees. I talk to myself too much. And now talking to someone else gives me the sensation of walking too fast on stilts; I can only avoid falling flat by lurching on with increasing strides. So if you get tired please go to sleep; any other way of stopping me would be too abrupt. Would you like another beer?’

  ‘Not just yet, thanks. Tell me, do you know Persimmon well?’

  ‘We correspond. No, that’s hardly true, I rarely write. Though in another sense it is true; we correspond, he in his city, me in my forest. I suppose our correspondence in the one sense eliminates the need for it in the other. No, I’m isolated; I have no connection with the city. It amuses Persimmon to think I still exist, perhaps more than it amuses me, but that’s all. Up here, in my orderly grey-green plantations, every day I walk around; each tree has its little cup slowly filling. Endless weeding. I supervise the work, and in the evenings the men go off to the labour-lines to watch Tarzan films, and I come back here and sit on the verandah. Not this one; this is for when I have a guest, and at the back there’s another. The view there is of a countable array of rubber-trees. Whereas on this side

  Tiny birds or large moths hung in the mist of their invisible wings over a border of flame-shaped blossoms, behind which the slopes of jungle f
ell away sharply, leaving the eye hovering over depths of light. Cloud lay in pools like dull mirrors in various laps of the mountain below. The oily blue-green forest terminated sharply against an emerald plain of rice-fields stretched under a silver web of canals converging to a slow turn of the great river. Further away still, dark forest slopes again, a layer of mist, a mountainous horizon that perhaps was cloud, then a bank of clouds like mountains, mist; and above, among sleeping flame and high cool air, the ageing sun.

  Down in the brilliant plain palmtrees stood in rows along paths linking little villages; a boy was riding a water buffalo. Every temple spire and tree and tiny figure cast a long precise shadow. ‘A clock with two hands tells the time better than a clock with one; a clock with three hands is more accurate than one with two. Here I have a clock with an infinity of hands; an instant is defined before our eyes, that at which the evening breeze begins …’ A fan-shaped sail was swung up on the distant riven. The pools of cloud below us were stirred, crept up the forest slopes, and broke slowly over the rims of the valleys. The shadow of the mountains opposite swept towards us across the plain, and overhead the evening rushed to meet it in silent gales of green and violet. The flowers trembled, the hovering things vanished.

  Dark refilled his glass. ‘Did I say a countable array? My trees are numbered according to a system; I start from a place where natural chaos ends and my orderly forest begins. I penetrate deep into the plantations until the numbers become unmanageable. At some point on the boundary I start again. In fact I suppose the trees are numbered according to several systems; some have several numbers, others none. Philosophically, too, I have the instincts, but not the stamina, of the system-builder. To tell the truth, my thoughts and beliefs have faded, like memories. My character has become diffuse, like the thoughts of a solitary man, and repetitive. The memory of me visitors like you carry away must be like my forests, featureless, labyrinthine. I save you half the trouble of forgetting me; in myself I am half forgotten. Why does Persimmon still send people to me? I used to be able to reassure them when they were distressed to find their adventures had no moral, to say “Yes, we must pull down those deserted temples of the mind‚” or “You see, even indifference is a familiar face.” But now?’

  The breeze had ceased already. Around the horizon lightning was dancing noiselessly inside tall purple clouds; they were filled for a minute with a pulsating glow, and then sank back into the darkening sky. Somewhere a bird was putting crescent parentheses round various silences.

  ‘Sometimes I wonder if I should go back to England. A room, with a few trusted objects, a slow clock by which to relive some memorable sunsets …’ Dark’s voice seemed to come from farther away; it took a measurable effort to make my question reach him: ‘What brought you out here in the first place?’ He sipped his beer regularly, without haste; behind that he seemed to be choosing an answer with care, quietly opening drawers full of shadows, unfolding them, considering, and eventually selecting: ‘I came out as an entomologist, to help build the Empire of Linnaeus. But I became discouraged, not just at the thought of a lifetime spent counting the small change of the animal kingdom, but by the numbers of individuals of each species, the great wandering books of chance and fantasy I was sealing up with simple titles, taking a little word to lie about a multitude of eyes that look into and out of every corner of this jungle, whose leaf presses against leaf from coast to coast … But that was a stage only. The story of King Solomon and the Queen of the Ants, perhaps you know it. He paid her a state visit, and her subjects marched past in review. After the third day, or the third week, Solomon made some remark; let me try to remember what it was, now

  Dark became silent. My eye was wandering among freshly scattered stars; eventually I could say, ‘How odd to see Orion directly overhead, and upside down! And there’s the Great Bear, pointing to the horizon!’

  ‘The stars, yes; we won’t talk of them.’ He went into the house, and came back with more bottles. After drinking in silence for some time, he suddenly began, ‘… which shows that one doesn’t need the wisdom of Solomon to pass the stage of feeling outnumbered. And abandoned by some invisible guarantor of one’s dominion. There is a period of groping and stumbling among the dazzling afterimages of belief; the negative ones in particular seem comforting, the emptinesses and absences as resonant as ever was the huge imaginary ally, despair as proud a feather as immortality, life a condition to which one was condemned (in absentia, as it were, the absent one being the judge, thus doubly deaf to pleadings), a condition uniquely, beguilingly, singled out by that condemnation, in dramatic opposition to the rest, the ‘indifferent’. But beyond all that

  ‘After all that, the charms of monoculture became apparent?’

  ‘Yes, I tried to simplify myself; after all, why should one animal count another? Though that too is not forbidden.’

  The moon, hidden from us by the house, had resurrected a frail landscape. The network of canals and paths that had marked it by day was still faintly discernible, like writing on the ash of paper after the flame has left it.

  ‘Our ways of seeing betray what we are looking for: a person, a letter from a person. We persist in seeing as indecipherable what was never a text; we see as a face, even if an averted one, something that never was such an organ of expression. We have to learn not to read, not to peer for mirrors …’ He flung a bottle; it became a gleam of moonlight for a moment, and was noiselessly received by the silver web hung below us.

  ‘I don’t quite follow you, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t quite follow myself. Sometimes, when the great sleeping-pill of the day is beginning to work in me, I see what I want to say coming towards me, cloudily. And I travel through the evening towards it, becoming more cloudy myself. Sometimes two clouds can exchange a bolt of lightning, can’t they? But instead of the moment of clarity and the giant syllables of truth, nothing but obscurity redoubled. Am I just too old? The new precisions tire my tongue, the old generalities leave me hungry; between the indiscriminate mystic welter and the loveless systems there must be words for my awareness of the material world and my perfect continuity with it. I am the form of the mutual sustaining of my cells; does that reduce me? I see the world, or parts of it, I drink parts of it, parts of it see me, it will drink me; I am not alone. The reasons of the heart have been endlessly rehearsed; those of the centre of gravity are voiceless; yet another night I leave them unspoken.’

  Dark’s voice ceased, leaving him staring out over the blurred treetops and tapping the rim of his glass against his teeth. A moth brushed across my face, leaving a trace of drowsiness. I shut my eyes and waited.

  Nit stepped into my mind out of some vaguely rippling expanse. The harsh letters of her name, which like close-set bars had shut my imagination out of her life, now became as pliant as a curtain, or a lock of hair, to be set aside with one finger; the dot of its vowel floated up to be a moon over sudden depths of sleep.

  When I opened my eyes again, Dark was lurching up from his chair, grasping at the table as he stood. The shadow of the house had shortened, and more of the garden was delivered over into incomprehensibility; each leaf was a silver lid over a black hole. Behind us, the house seemed to have become larger and hollower. Dark turned to go inside; he stood leaning forward with a hand on either side of the door, swaying, and peering in. Then he plunged through the skin of the room’s accumulated obscurity. I heard a crash in the hall, heavy uneven footfalls on the stairs; then a long silence. His voice fell from a window above my head: ‘Keys twisted by anticipation of difficult locks! Half my lifetime, filing and hammering, testing and laying aside! For a door that stands open!’

  A lavatory cistern cried out overhead, and one among the black stems climbing the house was filled with whispers rushing to earth. By degrees a clarity was restored, through which I could read Dark’s stumbling on the stairs, clutching at a doorknob, opening a refrigerator, slamming it shut. I refilled my glass, and watched the increasingly conv
incing constructions of the moonlight.

  Dark fell back into his chair. ‘… but we will not now leave our collection of ingenious keys; we are tired, dulled …’

  Later he stirred again: ‘The earth rounds the sun in such a calm; why can we not keep our feet? What was it Marx said about philosophers and the world? “The problem, however …’”

  ‘The problem, however, is to be part of it‚’ I suggested.

  He swung his blurred face towards me with slow suspicion. ‘Plainly, your generation is less fuddled. One can celebrate the actual, or live it unexamined … or leave it unexamined … or leave it …’

  Dark was asleep. A quarter of a day must have passed since sunset, for the full moon had cleared the house, and stood directly over us.

  IV

  Instruments of interrogation had been deployed against my return. Midgley seated me at the focus of an array of metal full of hungry eyes and round mouths toothed about with digits; here and there a precisely pointed tongue flickered in anticipation of my story. At my elbow a tiny oblong window gave onto a Pythagorean world of numbers tumbling in a greenish glow. In front of me clustered dials of different sizes, protruding on stalks or sunk like lilies into glassy surfaces; some bore upon their faces miniature replicas of themselves. I took it that I was facing lie-detectors of all degrees of acuity, that automatic pens were poised to scale the fevers of the imaginative faculty, that compass needles would unwaveringly point out anomalies produced by my buried selves in the magnetic field of truth. However, when Midgley had swung microphones on mechanical arms around my face, and had thrown a master-switch whose current convulsed the apparatus, but spared me, I was allowed to tell my tale without interruption.

  Afterwards Midgley ran his eye along the reeled-out ribbon of numerical commentary. A little cross-checking enabled him to say, ‘I don’t believe you were carried on a pole.’