Starbook (15 page)

Suddenly the tribe felt that its future was not determined by its past. The tribe felt, overnight, that its future could now go any number of ways. Before, it had only one future, and that was related to the past. Now it had many futures. It was freed from the past. And it was even free of any of the futures it chose. For the sense of an ongoing freedom was inherent in the magic of the work of the unknown suitor. Like a door that is never open, and never closed. Like a door to heaven that opens both ways. This freedom was new. The work made people dream again that they were not what they thought they were, but more. It made them feel they shared in heavenly glories and power.

This was the first time that the masters had been presented with an invisible sculpture that could be seen by all, a dream, an art of the incommensurable, composed of elements beyond the human hand, borrowing from the divine. The hand of God had been drawn into artistic creation.

There was no competition. The general astonishment, the happy dreams of the people, and even signs from the oracles, were unanimous. The outsider, unknown, prone to invisibility, with a hidden sense of humour and a curious detachment that concealed great compassion, slight of figure and strange of eyes, without appearing to try, and in apparent silence amid the famous and great names with their entourages and their big noises and their tremendous public and critical acclaim; amid all this, the unlikely one had come through. And the tribe, in many ways which it was too proud to admit, would never be the same again.

The marriage was a quiet one, though the tribe was ecstatic in its celebrations. And quietly they slipped, the two of them, into being man and wife, as if they had spent many invisible centuries rehearsing for it. His distinction had been earned by astonishment, hers by tradition. Together they grew, laughed, thrived and prospered, and bore an only child, the maiden of this tale.

In contrast to her mother the maiden was awkward, strange, unpredictable, dreamy, moody, alien. Someone said she looked like a beetle, and that she had beetle eyes. Some said that she looked like a mask, a carving; one that was used to frighten off unwanted spirits. Some said she looked like a spirit herself, one that frightened off human beings. The more charitable said she was just plain, and odd, and that girls like her, as with certain birds, change as they get older, and become very beautiful indeed. They said that you could never tell with her type whether her face would settle into a new harmony of surprising beauty, but that, given who her parents were, it was best to assume that, in due course, she would amaze. But most people did not see her so.

'She is not beautiful, but she is so aloof,' they said.

'She is not pretty, the men do not flock after her, but she behaves as if she were too good for marriage,' the other girls said.

'As if she will not spread her legs when the time comes.'

'As if she won't get fat before she knows it.'

'As if she won't need us when the men let her down.'

'As if she wouldn't cry blood on the day she has to push her hild out into the world.'

'As if blood will not drip down her legs when she is walking o proudly to the river.'

'Drip down her legs and shame her.'

'As if her beauty won't fade.'

'And she still hasn't made the work we are all waiting for.'

'And she won't smile and has only useless girls as friends.'

'I pity her parents such a useless daughter.'

'Such an ugly daughter.'

'Such a mad daughter.'

'Such a lonely person, who none of us wants to know.'

'I pity her too.'

'I don't pity her. She deserves to be lonely. She thinks she is better than everyone, I can't see why.'

'She is not like her mother, who is loved by everyone.'

'Her mother is a flower, the daughter an insect.'

'How come such a beautiful woman gives birth to such an odd-looking creature.'

'If she were a man I would say that daughter is not his child.'

'Life is full of strange things.'

And so it was. The mother was the delight of the tribe, with an irreproachable reputation, like a princess who hasn't put a foot wrong in her standing with the people. But her daughter was different.

Her face was composed of odd angles, and her eyes were unusual and saw too much. There was something disturbing and critical about the cool intelligence in her eyes. She had big eyes, a little watery, and they caught the light and gathered to themselves a mood both dreamy and uncanny, as if she were a witch, or had unusual powers of second sight, or could see the future in any face she glanced at and didn't much like the future that she saw in them.

She was not graceful, or elegant. In fact, she was clumsy, as if all her fingers were thumbs, as if her feet were of lead and each faced in an opposite direction, or as if she had two left feet. She spoke little, sang much to herself, and was born with a perception of the world so unique as to make her fearsome since she was a little girl. For most of her life something about her spirit intimidated people, and yet she was on the small side.

In herself she would not have drawn such illustrious suitors, but as the daughter of legend she was of the greatest interest. Her suitors were not of the myth-making range as her mother's had been, but they were illustrious enough for the tribe to tell stories about in the years to come. The best of the tribe had come forward to earn the hand of the maiden who was as well known for her mysterious nature as for her celebrated parentage.

The artistic competition for her hand turned out to be unique. The most gifted of the tribe, driven to heights of inventiveness in order to win the respect of the master-artist that was her father, surpassed themselves in artistic endeavour.

A
nd all this time the tribe still expected from the maiden an artwork for her own healing. And all this time the great tragic work that had so affected all, still worked on all. And all this time an ennui deep as centuries still drove deep despair into the roots of the people's hearts.

All was not well. Forebodings danced in the forests. The shadow of unmentionable events stalked their dreams. Omens brooding with undeciphered significations appeared amongst the great and the small. Turtles trapped in ropes were found on the far side of the riverbank. A bird shorn of its feathers jumped about insanely beneath an iroko tree. A herd of beautiful antelopes was found dying of a mysterious disease. The seasons were losing their rhythms. It was hoped that the season of the maiden's wooing might prove auspicious, and change the fortunes of the land.

But the maiden couldn't care. They wooed her with songs, and competed for her love with their different sculptures, their varied works of art, and she gazed on their best efforts with a tender indifference: she saw no art amongst them, only artefacts. She looked upon all the works of her suitors with a neutral eye and a gentle distracted smile. What was she dreaming of? Where was her mind? What images engendering immeasurable moods moved about in her spirit? She saw nothing but the mediocrity of her suitors, mediocrity masked by energy. Their works made her long for some incommensurable mood, some quality of being that only love or the highest art could bring about or satisfy. And this longing became, slowly, almost an insane desire for freedom, a lust for transcendence. She longed for an elusive something that would make her not a modern woman, or an antique, a traditional woman, but a transcendent woman. Her longing was for an impossible triangulation, distilled into the image of an eagle earthbound all its days, master of the terrestrial realm, but increasingly plagued with dreams of flight, dreams in which it was flying intermittently.

Then the image got stronger. The eagle, in its sleep, was flying short distances. This was the mood of the maiden's spirit. She dreamt as an earthbound eagle (which thought of itself as a hen), she dreamt of soaring, of the open air, of the clouds beneath, of the land beneath the clouds, and of the clear heavens above, with all its brittle stars.

The works of the suitors, their artefacts, masks, masquerades, songs, little epics, their extraordinary dances, their bronzes, their giant sculpted goddesses, these works were indeed flattering, charming, impressive. But where everyone was delighted by these works, she was cool. She was unmoved by all the noise and fame attending the works that would have swept many a virgin off her feet.

She had been raised in magic, in true mastery. Early in life, she had been dipped in the mysteries. Legend and myth had attended her most ordinary existence. Her eyes were charged with starlight. Her mind had been formed in the forge of the most enlightened laboratory of the tribe. The vanities of beauty, the art of the woman-spirit, the charms of the mother-way, the obscure puzzles of the female silence, had been fed her with her mother's milk. Art was the language with which she read the world. When she looked out at the world, she saw all as art – the trees, the faces, the owl, the rat, all figurations and casual arrangements. All life she gazed on with the intensity of the art mind. This was the silent inheritance of her father. She saw the heart of things without trying. She knew that true excellence, true mastery, comes once or twice in a lifetime, almost never in a generation, and she was not disappointed at seeing nothing from her suitors resembling the true. She expected nothing. Where would it come from? The true can only come from the true, from the hidden. This she had intuited from her father. She awaited her surprise from the margins. Till then she endured her wooings, and suffered her changes and her yearning for something unknown but coming.

The suitors were of many kinds. There were famous mask-makers, respected bronze-casters, and feared image-makers whose images bristled with power and strangeness and were used as war fetishes by alien tribes. There were warriors and dancers, tremendous master-musicians and courtiers. There were chiefs from far-off kingdoms and members of royal families. It made the tribe come alive again to witness such an array of brave young men assemble for the hand of one of the celebrated daughters of the land.

But the maiden herself was indifferent. She drifted in a living dream. She was deaf to the serenades, blind to the works of powerful inventors brought for her amazement, cold to the gifts of gold and cows, to the visits of wealthy intermediaries, and resistant to the pleas of her mother to be more gracious.

And her aloofness worked unintended wonders at inflaming the passions of the suitors for her unattainable hand and her proud untameable spirit.

From her otherworldliness seemed to come the message not that they were not good enough for her, but that she was beyond being interested in them ...

Somehow they had to gain her attention and establish their reality in her consciousness.

To her they were all a blur, they were all variations of one suitor.

A
round this time the maiden took to wandering off with her female companions and lingering by the river. She played games with her few friends when she could, but mostly she just stared at the river, its reflections, its lights. Sometimes she glimpsed future events in evanescent fragments as she stared, lost in deep reverie, into the surface shimmer of the river when it appeared quiet in its steady flow.

Mostly listening to the water lapping on the shore, staring at the birds, always absent-minded, lingering at the hinges between here and there, she dreamt things which her mind barely registered, but which filled her with a delicious sweet melancholy of which those days of youth were composed.

Sometimes, in a flash, in an evanescent mood of a dream surrounded with golden moments, she would see but not register a ship tossing about in the wild billows of a brutal sea, she would smell without knowing the smell of blood and decomposing bodies lashed to wooden structures in a cramped hull. She would feel without feeling her ankles in chains, an intolerable agony from her wrists, and men bearing down on her. She would see herself without seeing that she was standing naked in an alien marketplace being sold like a goat, and would sense the heat of the whip, would glimpse white faces and silk, would hear without hearing an inexpressible cry of abandonment. She would catch without knowing that she caught the mood of an alien land, cold blades in the air and underfoot, a universe empty of hope ...

And sometimes she constructed dialogues dreaming in her head. Were they her thinking? Such things perplexed her lightly as she woke from those golden states, standing. And she would continue a daylight activity, as if there and here were the same. Sometimes such a dialogue went like this.

'Tell us a story,' someone would say.

'I will tell you the story of a girl by the river in Africa,' she said, and never spoke a word of the story. 'But stories can't be told in too much pain, my dear child,' she would then say.

Was she dreaming, or thinking a dream as she thought it? Time has pressures upon the brain, as does timelessness, and presses things there from innumerable spaces.

'Do you remember the moon?'

'The moon died in the big sea.'

'Do you remember the land?'

'The land died with chains around my neck.'

'Do you remember your mother?'

'My mother died when I stood naked sold like a goat.'

'Do you remember your father?'

There was a pause. Then:

'To remember is the worst form of suffering. Spirits torment me saying the past cannot be real. Only death is real. I long to die. And then maybe I will find true happiness.'

And then she would wake from the hinges between here and there ...

... a delicious sweet melancholy of which those days of youth were composed, beside the great river.

The maiden grew to love the river and one night dreamt that a god or goddess would address her from its shore. She dreamt also that a lady of the river would rise in a golden shower and bring her wedding gifts of pure white flowers and a dress made by the mermaids and a ring fashioned by the little people who worked for a king.