The Age of Magic

by Ben Okri

  Nothing impressed her. She was doughty, impenetrable, unflappable. She wielded her stern qualities like a club. She was always a solid pillar in whatever group she belonged to. Many a person, crossing her in some way, had been heard to compare her to an articulated lorry. She inspired, on the whole, impregnable images.

  10

  In the most unlikely way, on a journey whose theme she privately despised, she was struck by a kind of nemesis. She was the victim of an emotion that, had she detected it in another, would have drawn from her nothing but sarcasm.

  The fact is that when she stumbled, disorientated by the journey, into the hotel with her heavy luggage, and found herself being assisted by a jovial middle-aged man with a smoky moustache, she was taken by surprise.

  He held her hand and seemed to know that she needed firm steadying. When he lifted her four pieces of luggage as if they were weightless and carried them the full length of the foyer, she was impressed.

  With a roguish smile, he said:

  ‘I fix you a vintage Swiss brandy to bring back the beauty to your cheeks.’

  When he fixed her with cheerful eyes behind his tortoiseshell glasses, isolating her from all else in the universe, like a connoisseur picking out a pearl from a trunk full of vulgarities, she felt again her forgotten girlishness.

  Suddenly she didn’t know what to do with her hands, her flaming cheeks, her eyes. Her feet seemed all mixed up. She scurried from the foyer, her neck reddening.

  Out in the dark she fumbled among other people’s luggage. She got in the way and did not hear a word anyone said. Peculiar music rang in her ears and new sensations darted in her belly. She felt as if something in her might rupture. In a bit of a panic, she leapt to the conclusion that something was wrong with her. With a great effort she managed to bring her emotions under some control.

  11

  She saw Sam and Lao talking near the pile of luggage. When she approached they turned to her and smiled. There was something odd about their smiles. Were they smirking? She detected smirks on a few other faces, anyone who just happened to look at her. All men.

  Then it occurred to her that someone was playing a trick on her. She couldn’t see what the trick was, but she sensed it was there somewhere and they were all in on it. Someone was making a fool of her; she was being set up for a humiliation. Then it crossed her mind that it wasn’t a trick. That it was something worse. Someone had put her under a spell.

  Beneath Jute’s imposing façade lurked a superstitious nature. Superstitious people are susceptible people. Stories rang in her mind of men who had cast spells on women and reduced them to love-slaves. She had heard that love potions could be bought in Egypt and Spain, from Gypsies and Africans and fairground herbalists. She had heard of women who had been used and dumped. They became wandering wrecks, forever pining for the men who had bewitched them, prepared to do anything to get them back.

  12

  When she seriously considered that she might be under some kind of spell, the name Malasso flashed into her mind and she woke with a shock. She was at the edge of the lake, staring at the darkness that was the mountain.

  She shook her head, not understanding how she had come to be at the lake’s edge. She found herself fascinated by the lake and she stared at its glimmering surface, into its depths. Tears were streaming down her face, but she was unaware of them. Then she heard voices. At first she thought they came from the lake.

  ‘Jute isn’t herself.’

  ‘She’s just staring into space.’

  ‘Maybe Nature’s got to her at last.’

  ‘I always wondered what it would take.’

  ‘It’s either the lake or it’s love.’

  ‘It’s the lake. It’s having the same effect on me. I want to drown in it and be made new.’

  ‘I think it’s love.’

  Then they laughed, in irony or jest it was hard to say.

  Furious at the merest hint of sentimentality, Jute pulled herself together. As she went back to the hotel, she noticed Propr and Sam a short distance away in the gloaming. They had not noticed her. Tiptoeing back to the hotel, she was determined that she would not fall under the spell of the charming hotelkeeper.

  The thing to do, she decided, was not to look at him. This proved difficult; after all it was her job to make sure everyone was checked in properly so she had to talk to him. She tried to be abrupt with him, but could not help thinking him attractive. She tried crushing him with her laconic drawl, bringing the full force of her stern personality down on his head, but he was unperturbed. Rather he seemed enamoured of her brusque manner and became more tender than ever. Instead of destroying the spell, she fell more deeply into it. Fortunately her severe glasses kept her emotions concealed. She checked everyone in, handed around the room keys, and went upstairs.

  13

  She was delighted to find that Hans had given her a very splendid room with a large balcony overlooking the lake. The room, with its king-size bed and plush sofas and its sparkling bathroom, at once comfortable and luxurious, softened her spirit.

  The twinkling lights across the lake, climbing high up towards the dark sky, drew her to the balcony. She stared at the shadow of the mountain. She breathed deeply. The distant bells sounding over the wind-sculpted surface of the lake made her heart tinkle.

  Memories welled up in her, memories of a sad childhood spent among fairy tales and dreams of escape. She dimly remembered that once in her life, when the world was very unclear, a little green being had befriended her. The memory surprised her and she wasn’t sure if it had really happened or if she had imagined it. While she was thinking about that, a moment came to her from far away in her past, so far away it seemed to belong to someone else.

  She remembered how one evening an angel had flown out of a book she was reading and she had run to tell her mother about it. She had been answered with such scorn and harshness that the little angel flew out of the window and disappeared forever. After that, Jute never saw anything unusual or wonderful again in the world.

  That was the end of her belief in the magical. She grew up to think novels, poems, plays and all art and anything of the imagination a waste of time. She only believed in hard work.

  14

  The memory of the departing angel came back to her fleetingly. She leant against the railing and stared at the dance of lights on the lake, and she cried.

  Cool breezes played on her face. When she lifted up her eyes to the dark mountain a shadow seemed to pass through her. Everything clouded over for a moment and a stab of panic went through her heart. Suddenly she wanted to climb over the balcony railing and fall into the lake. The desire to drown came on her from nowhere. She was staring at the lake in a honey-dark happiness, when she heard a voice.

  ‘Die while you’re happy. It’s all downhill from here. Jump!’

  The voice was soothing. The beauty of the night almost overcame her, the sublimity of the lake and the mountain, the thousand and one lights that festooned the dark.

  ‘Jump!’ the voice coaxed.

  For a moment she glimpsed the tranquillity of oblivion.

  ‘Death is beautiful,’ the lovely voice whispered. ‘It’s what you have been longing for all your life. Die while you’re young. It’s easy. Jump!’

  It was easy. She could see herself leaping over. She could feel the rush of the wind. She would leap like a dancer. She would die in the dark loveliness of lake and sky. She would seize the best opportunity in her life for that rarest of blessings, a happy death. She felt the coldness of the railings as she began to climb, but a sudden wind with the fragrance of roses blew in her face. With an effort of will she stumbled back from the edge.

  15

  Half expecting to see someone standing behind her, whispering into her ear, she spun around. She was alone. But she had a dim suspicion that Malasso was there in the night.

  ‘What’s happening to me?’ she wondered aloud.

  This softening of her iron façade, this flirt
ation with love and death, it all filled her with a sweet confusion. She had no idea what she was becoming.

  She went back into the room and began to unpack. She looked at her clothes as if she had never seen them before. Then, swaying on uneven ground, she went to the bathroom and took a shower. Feeling a little better, she dressed and went downstairs for dinner. Apart from a few interjections, made purely to keep up form, she had been silent. No one noticed that the alchemy of the journey had already started working on her.

  16

  Riley was a creature of changing moods that she could not control. It was the secret of her expressiveness: the plaintive look of a doe and the liveliness of a mime-artist. With sweet sad eyes she was like an orphan with a gift for happiness.

  She was skittery and boyish. Her willingness to perform whatever task she was given made her an ideal camera assistant.

  She was quite indefinable. When Riley stood still she had the uncanny knack of vanishing. She would simply melt, unnoticed, into a silent space, right before the eye.

  Sam often had great difficulty finding her when she was right in front of him. It was a sort of trick she had. She would look straight at you and then she’d disappear. You’d be looking for her and then she would be right there again, like a magician’s conjuration.

  She had a beguiling way of pulling at the heart, the cunning of a young fox, the swiftness of a desert snake, and the resilience of a whip.

  Sam found her intriguing; he had never known anything like her before. Both her parents were alive and well, and yet she seemed like an orphan. She had a handsome boyfriend, and yet she was boyish. When she wore a sexy skirt and make-up she transformed into a head-turning beauty. She obeyed instructions without questions, and yet she had the air of an anarchist.

  With an engaging smile that inspired confidence, she went about her mysterious activities, never offering any explanation of herself. She seemed to invent new tricks every day, as if she were not quite made of flesh but of some quicksilver element, some protean substance. More spirit than matter, she seemed a halfway Ariel trapped in a tough and fragile body.

  Her facial neutrality was particularly disconcerting. It meant she could be in people’s company all day long and they didn’t notice. When they thought back on that day they would be struck by an odd note, the sense of a watchful presence which the memory could not quite resolve.

  She made holes in time. She made a virtue of her absence, made absence into a kind of force. With her neutrality she turned the dramatic power of the mask into an enigmatic emptiness.

  Sam found he had to rediscover Riley all the time. She was like an unfinished painting, alive with potential. Like a chameleon, she was attuned to every mood. And yet she had the strange ability to anticipate a person’s next move, sometimes miming it moments before.

  No one was in more perfect resonance with Malasso than Riley.

  17

  Sam’s first encounter with Riley remained an unsolved puzzle. But it was the puzzle that got her hired.

  She was the fifth person to answer Sam’s advert for a camera assistant. She left a message on Sam’s answer machine. It said:

  ‘I’m Riley, your camera assistant, I think. Am I the fifth? I’ll be wearing red. Goodbye. Oh, one more thing. I’m worried about my goldfish. Do you like goldfish?’

  On the day of the interview, in Sam’s flat, only four people showed up. No one was wearing red. The four applicants, two men and two women, were eager and sold themselves well. After the interview, Sam thought any one of them would do. But he was vaguely restless.

  He kept expecting the fifth person. He kept going to the door, checking his messages, looking out of the window. He felt twitchy and expectant. A little exasperated, he decided to go for a walk.

  In the hallway he saw a boy sitting cross-legged in front of the lift. In his hands was a polystyrene bag in which a languid goldfish swam. The boy gazed at the iridescent goldfish with rapt attention and a half-formed smile. The boy seemed to find something both wonderful and humorous in the whirligig motions of the small fish.

  As Sam got closer, the boy stood up. The lift door opened and the boy went in ahead of Sam, but when Sam stepped in he found the lift empty. Thinking that he was hallucinating, he stepped back out and looked around. No one was there. He noticed an empty sweet wrapper on the floor. There were no doors nearby, and the emergency exit was across the hall. It would have taken unnatural swiftness to get there so quickly.

  Mystified, Sam went back into the lift. He pressed the button for the ground floor but the lift went up to the fifth instead. When the door opened, Sam had a sudden rush of vertigo. The same boy was sitting cross-legged in front of the lift. He was without the goldfish, wore red trousers, and was apparently asleep.

  Before Sam could rouse himself from his stupor the door shut. In the crack he could have sworn he saw the boy run off. The lift cranked without further incident to the ground floor.

  18

  It was a bright and beautiful day in Stoke Newington. There were hints of gold in the sky. Sam went for a turn round the green but strayed to a nearby street market. He wished he had brought a camera for it was a rare summery London day and full of signs.

  He noticed on a toy stall a white car with the word Arcadia in red letters. He went towards the stall. Then he found himself in front of another that sold goldfish. He watched them circulating in their bubbling aquarium. He was about to turn away when he heard an aerial voice.

  ‘Do you like goldfish then?’

  Sam started, looked around, and found no one. People were browsing or wandering past with their shopping. The stall attendant, a bluff red-faced clean-shaven man, was staring at a girl across the street who was bending over to tie her shoelaces. Something made Sam’s heart quicken.

  ‘I bought three more to keep Lassie company.’

  And there he, or rather she, was. Right in front of him like a mirage made flesh.

  ‘Aren’t you…?’ Sam began, but he never finished what he was saying for she was gone. Sam turned round, and found her behind him, zipping up her rucksack.

  Before Sam could speak again, she said, ‘If you want a camera assistant, I’m your fox. I come from the Black Forest in Germany but I live in London. What do you think? Do you like me?’

  She was twitching slightly as she spoke.

  A little bewitched, he hired her on the spot.

  When Sam told Jim about having hired the girl, he kept quiet about her strangeness. She would be his secret weapon, his mascot during the vicissitudes of the filming. She turned out to be more than a mascot. She was a hard-working, efficient machine of an assistant, a faithful hound with a mercurial quality who contrived often to be unseen.

  19

  When they arrived at the hotel in the town of B—, something changed in Riley that made her more visible than she had been. People who hadn’t noticed her previously suddenly asked her questions. Lao found that if he stared vacantly into the space where she sat he could fix her in the flesh, make her palpable.

  Riley felt this subtle change in herself and it made her uneasy, which made her fidget. She took to sliding away from people’s glances, hiding when she sensed eyes settling on her. But her attempts at hiding, at sliding away, only made her more noticeable.

  ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ Jim had asked her suddenly at dinner that night.

  ‘I don’t know,’ was all Riley could say. ‘Something’s in the air. It’s as if someone I know but can’t see is here… My skin feels like it’s on fire.’

  Jim no longer saw her for she had become still while she spoke, and when she was still it was often difficult to see her.

  Besides, Jim had already returned to his exposition of the will.

  20

  Apart from the occasional comment which she made without wanting to, Riley stayed silent for the rest of the dinner.

  No one noticed when she slipped away. She went out into the dark and sat on a bench at the edge of the lake, lis
tening to the barely audible whisperings of waves on the shore. She felt the presence of the one whom she could not see, while the mountain wind soothed for a time the heat on her skin.

  21

  That night Propr lay in bed and listened to the fragments of sound from the beginning of time.

  He listened to the mountain, the wind, and the lapping of water on the rim of the earth. He listened to the lake, heard its songs. He heard the dance of water and rock, and the winds twisting round the crags of the mountain.

  Slightly drunk, he took soundings from the new place he was in. From the sounds he heard he gave the world form. Sounds created worlds for him, worlds more interesting than worlds seen. For Propr, hearing was believing, hearing was being. Seeing things reduced them for him, stripped them of mystery.

  As he lay there, absolutely still, he could hear wind-chimes in a distant village. He could hear the wind slapping the rugged face of rock on the other side of the lake.

  22

  His listening led him into childhood moments: the arc of a swing, the silence between tocks of a grandfather clock, a heron taking flight across a meadow.

  He remembered the piping of birds on hot afternoons in the hills, the river murmuring along the stony banks, insects in the summer stillness, the whirring of a quail’s wings in the Welsh woodlands.

  Propr dissolved into listening as other people dissolved into their fantasies. It was the closest he ever got to a religious experience. While others would go to church to worship, Propr would sit on the banks of a river, or lie on the floor of a forest, and lose himself in concerts of sound.