Starbook (37 page)

A
nd then it wasn't long before the Mamba noticed the new pupil. He was the first to publicly notice him. And when the Mamba drew attention to the new pupil, he began to lose his protective invisibility.

The Mamba disliked him on sight; and, without provocation, began a campaign against him, to get him evicted from the village as a spy. At first no one paid the Mamba any attention; but he became obsessed, and his obsession, fed by the bitterness of having won the contests but not the maiden's hand, gave him a powerful clarity of voice and a strange prophetic authority. Not for the first time, the Mamba was losing his mind; but this time it appeared he had never been in greater control of himself. Having won the fights, with the skill, the brutality and the mastery he had displayed, coupled with the dark mystery he had gathered to himself during his disappearance, the Mamba was now being seen as a figure of great public power and leadership. People felt inclined to follow his lead; they felt, for the first time, that here was a leader they had never had, who would take them to a new destiny. Sometimes a sense of doom makes a people susceptible to that which in normal times would horrify them. Maybe that is why, in history, a people sometimes chose the very leader who would lead them over the precipice that they feared, and wanted to avoid, in the first place; they chose the one who would deliver them to the doom which they dreaded.

And so, inexplicably, the Mamba became the voice of the tribe. And the tribe, inexplicably, ceased to heed the warnings of the oracle, or the guidance of the masters who had, for centuries, brought them to various stations of their promised land.

The Mamba spoke out with a new voice of the destruction of the tribe by the stranger from beyond. He spoke of the stranger among them who was invading their lives, insinuating himself into their secret ways. He made a powerful and terrifying speech at the gates of the village, where he conjured visions of the end of their history, of hordes descending on them on white steeds. He sang passionately a song called 'Destruction is coming' and another one called 'Beware of the stranger', and he had the women in tears and hysterics, and the men quaking with fear and foreboding. Then, later that same day, under the unpredictable spell of his obsession and to the complete astonishment of the tribe, the Mamba challenged the new pupil to the ultimate contest, to win the hand of the maiden. The tribe was amazed at this act because they had never heard of or noticed the new pupil before. Nor did they know that he was considered a suitor.

That same evening the Mamba turned up at the maiden's house and did something strange. He brought out from his bag a gigantic skull of beautiful ebony that he had carved; and, with a faintly sinister and quite charming smile on his face, he banged the skull down on the table, and said:

'This is my shadow. My transformation is my story. Your love is my dream.'

Then he strode out.

After a long silence, the maiden's mother said:

'Trouble has come to our house.'

After another silence, the maiden's father said:

'Only the deep can speak to the deep.'

The new pupil did not know what to do. He had been challenged. He was no longer invisible. He did not believe in fighting. And yet there was no way out of this moment ...

Slender, frail, sensitive, he took himself to the forest and asked the animals and the birds to teach him how to fight, how to prevail, how to win without winning.

And the crane taught him to balance on one leg. The lizard taught him elusiveness and the scuttle and how to abandon your tail if this would save your life. The spider taught him the art of ugliness and the web. The ant taught him the art of tenacity and the cunning of being small. The lion taught him majesty of presence and how to intimidate through stillness. The mosquito taught him the art of irritation and oblique motion. The bee taught him the art of madness and the sting and the possibility of impossible flight. The bat taught him the art of fighting without sight, of comfort in the dark, and the art of being upside-down. The mole taught him to go deep into the spirit of things. The goat taught him to use his head. The elephant taught him that weight is a hindrance as well as a force, and the art of memory. The art of awkwardness and the mystery of dwelling on two levels were the gift of the snake, as well as the art of the unthinkable. The art of love and the art of fighting through beauty of spirit was the blessing of the flowers. The frog taught him the unpredictable leap. The termite taught him the art of devouring within a structure. The eagle taught him the art of suddenness and surprise. The vulture taught him the art of stealth. The chicken taught him how to confuse by flapping his arms. The rabbit taught him its short-arm punch. The cat taught him sinuousness, elasticity, and how to fall; the python, how to coil and grasp; the lioness, ferocity; the antelope, speed; the trees, economy of movement, longevity in stillness. The silence taught him serenity. The tortoise taught him how to use time, patience, paradox and cunning. The praying mantis taught him that even a good fight is a form of prayer. The fly taught him how to frustrate, pester and disorientate. The tse-tse fly taught him the art of inducing sleep in the middle of a campaign. The heron, the new pupil's favourite creature, taught him the incommensurable art of fighting without appearing to do so, and winning when you are losing, and the art of transcending winning and losing, and sublime invincibility through always being in a higher state. The seeds of trees taught him the art of being reborn even when dying. The dew taught him the art of heaven meeting the earth. Sunlight taught him that all things come from a miraculous source. And the laughter faintly echoing in the air reminded him of his mysterious noble origin.

With all these qualities what could have been the outcome? When the day of the fight came, it was all foregone. The fight was won and lost in advance, over before it began. It had happened, it was quick, and it was a mystery that was never unravelled. The fight was an unqualified work of art that so dazzled and amazed the tribe that it instantly entered their mythology and never left.

For it is still talked about in numerous stories all over the world till this day, and tomorrow, how the new pupil vanquished the Mamba. All that the people saw was not the fight, but its shadow, its aftermath. For they missed the event, which happened before their own eyes; it was so full of mysteries.

The Mamba appeared in all his physical and mythic glory, his muscles like bronze, glistening. The new pupil, slender and frail, appeared. He was still. He was smiling. It was almost a smile of forgiveness. The women's hearts went out to the frail one, who seemed so alone, an orphan.

The Mamba pounced, and caught a shadow. The Mamba grasped and wrestled with that which had no form. The Mamba lashed out, and struck the face of the wind in his fury. The Mamba chased after that which flapped. The Mamba heard buzzing in his ears. The Mamba heard a roar unnatural from a reed. The Mamba couldn't find the antelope which sped beneath his hulking shape. The Mamba was perplexed by the stillness of that which wasn't there when he charged it; and then he found it was behind him. The Mamba heard whispers of falling leaves. The Mamba saw a light flash in his brain. The Mamba charged the thousand forms of the same things all over the arena, out into the crowd. The Mamba cried out for the new pupil to stay still. Then the Mamba whispered for the servant to move, to fight. Then the Mamba saw the glory of the sun shining above the head of a young crowned prince. Then the Mamba, bleeding from so many self-inflicted wounds, heard a great wonderful sound of laughter in the clouds. Then the Mamba sank to his knees, and fell in prostration. Then, with a howl of horror and a cry of joy, the Mamba fell over on his back, and didn't move again for three days.

The prince hadn't struck him once. The masters declared this one of the greatest works of art they had seen in a generation.

The maiden fell completely, insanely, lucidly, sublimely, and shyly in love with this new revelation of man whom she had not noticed all this time, but who instantly healed her of all her sicknesses ...

And eventually, at last, she recognised the one for what he was: anonymous, in disguise, a part of all the delays, there and not there, in the competitions, indirectly, in secret, winning them all, humbly, without entering them and without knowing; that which she had been seeking for she had found, humble and lowly though it seemed; and to everyone's astonishment she declared him to be the one she loved and wanted to marry ...

Her father's response to all this was completely mysterious. Around this time he unveiled what he had been working on in secret. He had created one final sculpture to heal the horrors the last one had unleashed. Then he sculpted no more. His tone of tragic sublimity vanished from the tribe and the land, echoing now and again in the lesser works of those who came much later. His last sculpture was a work of pure beauty, and it had the same effect as the last one, except in the opposite way. The masters said it was his spiritual offering to the mystic wedding of his daughter, to a wedding that took place among the stars. People came on pilgrimages to see the sculpture, even as the suitors and their entourage left the environs of the village. Their noisy, rowdy presence was replaced by pilgrims to a new revelation, as if the image unveiled were a new god or goddess incarnated in the land.

The sculpture was beautiful indeed, and its beauty was mysterious. It induced sleep, graciousness, good manners, profound and vivid dreams in which guides appeared to the dreamers. It also induced an odd vacancy in all those who saw it. Suddenly the young wanted to die in its presence; and the old, dying, wanted it to be the last thing they saw before they passed away ...

And what was it, this mysterious sculpture? It was more than it seemed. And its mystery was as much in how it created a shimmer of illumination around itself, against the sky, as it was the spirit-charged nature of the stone, as it was that of which it was an eternal sign, a question mark without a name, concentrating the magic of the heavens into the illusion of space. It was the figure of a being, a man or woman or god or goddess or dream; and the figure stood with both of its arms stretched out unnaturally wide, embracing the whole universe, in a mighty act of acceptance. Arms outstretched and legs spread out wide, doubly embracing all of life, the universe, all suffering, all joy, the beginning, the end, life, death, and beyond ...

The king was wandering about the kingdom looking over the sleeping forms of his people, marvelling at the beautiful darkness rich with the minerals of the stars, and came upon a maiden in white kneeling in front of the village shrine. She turned a smiling and beautiful face to him, and genuflected without speaking. And he said:

'What are you doing here at this hour when the world sleeps?'

'I found myself here not knowing how.'

'Then you must have a reason.'

'This evening I took to wandering, walking and thinking and trying not to think, and I found myself here.'

She listened to the incommensurable music of the distant constellations. Did she expect a response from the mysterious personage? She had the wisdom to listen to the silence that seemed to come from him, a silence like that of a river at night when all is still and all the stars are out.

'Also I brought an offering,' she said.

She revealed a piece of sculpture she had placed before the shrinehouse. The sculpture was of a radiant king wearing a ten-pointed crown. In his right hand he held a staff with two serpents coiled round it, and at its summit was a globe. And in the other hand the seated king, in his majestic throne, held a book that was also a six-pointed star. The sculpture pleased the king immensely. And he laughed in great warmth, and the young lady, touched by the humour of this majestic being on so beautiful a night, found herself laughing too; and together they laughed happily under the clear stars of the sleeping world.

She woke earlier in the morning than she had ever woken before. She woke with a strange new clear joy in her head and a clear strong irrational hunger between her legs and a deep hollow dark happy feeling in the pit of her stomach. She could not seem to breathe right and whenever she drew breath she felt her heart go light and her head swim and she had the queerest sensation that something in her was going to jump out of her body and leap out into the air, towards the sun. Her head was clear but she could not think clearly. She got out of bed and bathed and oiled herself and cleaned herself and anointed herself as if in a dream, as if she were going to be presented to a king. She did everything dreamily, for indeed she no longer knew if she were dreaming or not, or if she were alive or if she had become a spirit, for she no longer seemed to be in her body, but in a sort of bliss that was like a beautiful death. And when she felt clean enough, when she felt so happy and so beautiful that she lost all sense of herself, she left the house silently and went to her father's workshop.

She was surprised when she arrived not to find the prince there. She was so surprised that she went among all the statues and touched them one by one, and stared into their faces, into their eyes, expecting one of them to move suddenly and come alive, revealing the one and only love she would ever have in her life, in this life and the next. But not one of the statues moved, or changed, or stirred into life, or became the one she had yearned for and loved, the one who could not be named, who have lived in her, it seemed, all her life, and before.

Then a sort of terror came over her, a terror that bordered on madness at the thought that she would never see him again. She stood absolutely still in her father's workshop, among the statues of stone, of wood, and of bronze. And she felt, for a moment, how cruel a fate it was that all this time she had not seen him when he was there, and now that she could see him and craved for him and wanted him more than life itself, he was not there. She felt keenly her punishment at her blindness, at her inability to see. And she felt, as she stood there, that there was nothing left for her any more, not on earth, not in life. She had no idea how long she stood there in silent lamentation and intolerable grief, for one she had loved without knowing it, and who loved her as the sun loves the earth, as the birds love the air. She had no idea what to do except die. Death seemed the only answer to her loss. In a dream of death, of the joy of dying for the loss of the unknown love of her life, she locked the workshop and wandered to the forest, singing a lullaby. All who passed her early that morning thought she was both happy and mad.

In a daze she wandered through the forest, picking flowers of every colour, singing gently a song of happy death while she did so. She picked wild roses, and white lilies, and blue flowers with mysterious calyxes, and yellow flowers, and marigolds, and hibiscuses, and held them to her face and wandered to the river. She did not notice anything. She did not hear the birds, nor the wind, nor see the gently gold and red and quivering yellow of sunrise, nor did she even feel the dew or the softness of the sand beneath her feet. She dreamt only of one thing, guided by the angel of love that had blanked out her mind to all awareness except the happiness to be found with her loved one who was waiting for her in the kingdom of the goddess in the depths of the river.

She began to sing a song of farewell to all things. Then she fell silent and rose and, holding the flowers in her hand as an offering to the goddess, she began to walk towards the river, away from life as she had known it. She was gone from life now, gone from her body, gone from the earth; she was going to the only legend that was forever true, the legend of love, of death and love, beneath the river.

And then she heard the voice on the wind that she had heard long ago, the voice that had first woken her from the sleep of her life, the voice that she had once taken to be that of a god. And all about her everything sprang to life. All at once she saw the river, big and swollen and mighty, and she feared that it would without warning engulf her and take her under, to a frightening kingdom. Then she saw the sky, vast and clear and of a blue so pure she felt that it would snatch her soul away. Then she noticed the sunrise, golden and gentle red and quivering on the rim of the river and so beautiful that she felt if she breathed she would be wafted away to some homeland beyond the stars. And then she heard his voice again and all the clamour and agitation in her heart, her belly, and the wild unknown hunger between her legs came awake in her and she stood rooted to the sand, not hearing what was said. Then a darkness passed over her eyes and cleared and she found herself staring into the blinding adoration and passion of his gaze. His eyes were all the world then and she did not see the sky or the shore or the sunrise or the forest or the river, just his eyes. And she stood there gazing into the depths of his eyes completely lost to everything else on earth and in heaven or maybe she had found everything that she sought on earth and in heaven. And before she knew it they were lying side by side on the shore, near a bank of flowers, just gazing into one another's eyes, mutely, almost without breathing.

They say that it is not just things of this world that one sees but one does not know one is seeing. And as the prince and the maiden gazed into one another's eyes, as they gazed deep into the depths of the whites, and into the mystery of the emerald or green or brown or golden centre at the centre of the eyes they caught glimpses of what they had been to one another in time past beyond memory and what they would be to one another in the beautiful time to come beyond death, in another life, where their true story of love would seem to begin. They gazed as into crystal balls and were mesmerised and slightly frightened by the intolerable depth of love they saw deep within the other. It seemed a love too strong for mortal life, a love that would make itself the sole purpose of living, a love that was like eternity gazing into the mirror of eternity, a love that would do nothing but simply exist in the blissful light of the other as in the light of the sun after the darkest night. In their silence they exchanged all the tokens and signs and secrets of mutual revelation so that, among the millions of people who dwell on the earth, if they were to meet in their appointed future hour of destiny, it would take only a glance into the other's eyes to know that this was the one they were seeking. And so they planted the certainty of finding one another in the life to come by the depth of the speech of their mutual gazing into the mystery of each other's eyes. And not only that: for as they gazed they journeyed through time, through many realms and planes of pure happiness where they already lived the joyful life they were meant to live. They touched those other lives and returned refreshed and reassured. And then the prince changed the nature of their mutual enchantment.

Without seeming to breathe, quivering in the warmth of the world at sunrise, the prince peeled off the maiden's wrapper and her white blouse and beheld the beauty of her clear pure skin. It shone like the surface of the river in the tenderness of sunrise. Then without touching her he passed his open palms along the surface of her skin, not touching her and yet touching her more deeply than if he had grabbed hold of her in a wild passionate embrace.

He passed his hands over her face and lingered over her eyes, her cheeks, her ears, her forehead, her chin, and hovered over her throat. At first she was still. She breathed gently. Her eyes were shut. Then something strange happened to her. She felt a fire pierce her heart and it burned her right through in a golden pain and then she was gone. Breathing felt as if the air was made of a beautiful deathly powder, for every breath she drew was a sublime agony; and as he passed his hands slowly over her body the more piercing was the fire in her heart and the fire in her belly And she began to cry out an unknown name and was not aware of it. And soon her cry and her love, her fire and her joy were one. And it was so unbearable that she opened her eyes in a wild abandon, a holy rage at being so unwrapped and so full of an inexplicable yearning.

And then he lay down next to her, so close they were not touching and yet not close enough that they were almost as one. And then he brought his lips close to her tender soft lips ... There was something special, almost forbidden in the manner in which they kissed; it is a secret that is not to be shared. It was a kind of kissing that was unique to them and they had kissed one another thus in all the times past and in all the planes and in all the future time that they had spent and were to spend with one another. It was a kiss that can only be described as the way in which certain angels kiss if such a thing can be imagined; it was the kissing of their souls. It was the only true way that their souls can speak to one another, the only way they can be understood, in bliss.

And after this secret kiss, their lips touched and they moved into the second kind of their secret forbidden kissing. The maiden felt herself to no longer be herself but the prince, and the prince was no longer himself but was now the maiden, and each to the other was a sort of eternity. There is a kind of love, a kind of bliss that borders on blasphemy in that it breaks one of the unwritten laws of life as it is meant to be lived in the body. And that law is thus: thou shalt not feel too much. The prince and the maiden, lost in the labyrinths of their kissing, had somehow gone back to a forbidden moment under the sun. And their lips came together fully and they did not move and all the rivers and seas came together and the laws of time and space were torn asunder and what was to happen to them pressed closer as if the power of their conjoining would provoke the evil that was to befall them in their unimaginable dissolving of one soul into another. It is possible that too much love can awaken an evil destiny: why else are love and tragedy so twinned on earth?

But they plunged deeper and went past the tree of good and evil and lived its consequence and they came to the tree of knowledge and waited under its enchanted fruits, not moving, their hearts still. And they glimpsed the angel of ecstasy and they went past the tree of knowledge in their kissing and went right into the golden place that they'd been in once before in which they heard the sweetest singing in the air. And they dwelt there, like two swans in the lake of paradise ...

And then, seized by a sudden violence, she began to touch him all over. And she felt and loved and moulded every single part of him, singing to him in her mind, mapping him in her pleasure, for she never knew that there could be a pleasure on earth greater than feeling the wood or stone out of which a statue emerges, and that flesh and the body of a man can be more beautiful than dreams. For she had such dreams, such notions and inexplicable feelings as she felt the prince and lavished her senses on the magic of his skin and his muscles and his quivering trembling limbs. And when she had felt him all over, she was astonished to feel her fingertips tingling and her palms shimmering inwardly as if possessed by a supernatural energy, a radiant delight. She had never known this miraculous sensation before, and she was even more amazed to catch, in a glimpse, the way his skin shone all over, and the light that poured out of him, from his skin, as if she had polished a lamp of gold and any moment now a spirit would leap out from it, the spirit of the light that it would shine for ever. And the light around him, full of many colours, for a second resolved itself into a golden aureole and she was so overcome that she fell on him in tears of unmentionable love and adoration. And they held one another in fearful embrace, as if they wanted to become spirit again and penetrate one another's beings, right into the core.

Tightly in their embrace, so that the one did not know where they ended and the other began, they remained still. They just lay still, locked and merged in one another's love, and like that they drifted away together. They could hear whispers at the far end of the village. They could hear the wind over a wave in the farthest reaches of the river. They could hear the call of the sunbird far in the sky beyond the horizon. They could hear the cry of a baby in the remote depths of the kingdom. They could hear footfalls drawing closer to them, and murmurs, and rumours, and the clasping of roots in the black earth, and the flowers opening to the sun, and the dew forming on the silk of the calyxes of roses, and the pure music up in the distant reaches of space among the stars, and the slightest movement of the wings of a butterfly and of an angel, and they could hear all manner of thoughts, of dreams, but they could not hear one another breathing or weeping in silence.

And then having been taught by her what to do, and how deeply it was possible to feel if felt with the enchantment of art and love, he now began to touch her too, mapping in his soul the memory of her body as if he knew that this was the one time only in this life that he would have to love her and enjoy her beyond the limit of what was possible. And so he prayed for the wisdom and the knowledge and the passion and the joy of being able to love and enjoy her more than it was given to a mortal to do during these moments of being alive and having her there before him in all the beauty and glory of her youth and her love.

And when she felt him entering her, the strangest thing happened, and the fire between her legs made sense at last, and she let herself slip into the warm waters of the river and sink slowly into the realms of the goddess, for now she was all liquid and fire and senselessness. And they moved together sometimes as one, sometimes divergently, often in odd wild rhythms, and mostly in the rhythms of the waves of the river as it crashed on the shore or lapped silently on the rim of the land so that it felt that they were both the river and the land, both the sun and the earth.

And then she was falling, not into an abyss, but deeper and deeper to the bottom of the river, falling without end, and she was unbelievably happy in her fall till she became aware for the first time that she could not breathe and she loved it so. The more she gasped for air the more she found herself unable to breathe and the more bliss she felt and this got worse and better and worse still, this inability to breathe and the insane pleasure, that it reached a point beyond which she feared it was too dangerous to go in the excess of her feelings. She knew then that she would surely die and yet she wanted to and she let herself go and he went on moving in her and kissing and clutching at her an irregular way and then she went over and she panicked, for she saw something very dark and fearful and inviting, summoning her, a thing or being vast and dark and bright in the midst of her bliss, and she had come to the end of her inability to breathe and she was going away now, getting utterly lost, and she screamed and cried: