The Age of Magic

by Ben Okri

  ‘At us, or at you?’

  ‘At us.’

  ‘That’s not what I saw.’

  6

  They went on walking, keeping the mountains in sight. They had gone for a while in silence without any car passing them, when Lao said:

  ‘That church doesn’t seem to be getting any nearer.’

  ‘I was just thinking that.’

  ‘In fact, the longer we walk, the further away it seems.’

  ‘Maybe it’s a strange church.’

  ‘All churches are a bit strange.’

  ‘Maybe it’s not a church at all.’

  ‘What is it then?’

  ‘A mirage?’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘You are falling into seeing is believing.’

  ‘No, I’m not. That church is real. I can see its spire.’

  ‘It’s a conjuration.’

  ‘We’re walking to it at an angle.’

  ‘It’s a sickness.’

  ‘There is a perfectly straightforward mathematical explanation.’

  ‘It’s a cure.’

  ‘A cure?’

  ‘Something to do with vectors.’

  ‘Ah, vectors,’ said Lao, dreamily.

  7

  A sudden breeze blew against them, whipping up the dust. There were figures in the dust, faintly seen but not seen. Then the wind dropped and the forms settled.

  The heat was solid but gentle. Sunlight played on the wild roses along the roadside. They passed a vacant petrol station and empty hotels. There was a large billboard with faded images of yesteryear promising paradise. One signpost gave the distance to towns and villages. Another told them they had crossed a boundary. Beyond this was a thin faded ribbon of road that rode up into the sky.

  They took a sharp right and suddenly found themselves in the concealed heart of the town. They went down streets of pretty houses. This was where the real life was lived. It was like stumbling into a quiet suburb on another planet.

  The houses were like painted façades and everything was dream-like. Lao turned and saw, not too far away, the dazzling steeple of the church. They made for it.

  8

  In the translucent light the church appeared to change colour and form. Cream coloured from a distance, they were amazed to find it muted blue as they got closer. From a distance it looked almost Gothic. Close up it was austere.

  The church door, solid wood with metal studs, was shut. It was a plain and uninteresting-looking church with a boring little cemetery. The headstones were old and decrepit and colourless. Its dead were not interesting and had nothing to say for themselves. They who are normally so eloquent.

  9

  Much later Lao and Mistletoe were to remember the visit to the church very differently. They were certain that in the environs of the church they had fascinating encounters with people they couldn’t clearly recall.

  Lao was to say much later that it was to a conversation with a caped man he met in the church doorway that he owed the transforming creative idea of his life. Mistletoe was to say later that it was while listening to a kindly old lady in a green shawl among the gravestones and acanthuses that she had the inspiration for the world famous series of paintings she called Daughters of Pan.

  10

  But that afternoon, all they saw was a church whose architecture was unexceptional, its wooden door plain, its cemetery average, its paths overrun with weeds. There was nothing there to see but neglect and dereliction.

  They had walked an interminable distance from the hotel, drawn by the church’s spire, only to arrive and find nothing of any note whatsoever. The church was bolted and dead as though no one had worshipped in it for decades. And it was a Sunday.

  Lao and Mistletoe were so disappointed that they went round the church three times. They felt cheated, their minds rendered empty by the emptiness of the church.

  They were starting to leave when it occurred to Lao to knock on the door. He knocked three times, and waited.

  The silence elongated time. Nothing stirred within.

  11

  While they waited they stared at the curious cross-like patterns of the door’s metal studs, and while gazing they fell into a gentle trance.

  In that waiting, staring at the door, many things happened and they were not aware of them. Many excellent notions entered their minds that would bloom in the years to come. Many changes began in their hearts that would not be visible for a long time. Many dialogues took place that would alter the course of their destinies.

  But they would never be able to trace the alteration of the unfolding years to that moment of empty-minded waiting, outside the door of the boring church.

  They stood there, waiting for something to happen, when in fact everything was happening.

  When they got no response from knocking on the door, they left.

  Section 4

  1

  Something made them look back after they had walked some distance. They saw that the church was now golden. Like certain paintings, like certain people, the church was more intriguing from a distance. It glimmered, as if it were smiling at a private joke.

  The notion of a smiling building was a little disquieting.

  They wandered down a charming street that ran through the interior of the town. Here, they thought, is where the real townsfolk live. Through the open windows they saw beautiful interiors, like film sets. They saw no one.

  Without knowing it, they were happy as they wandered down the beautiful street, gazing at the spectacle of life lived in the mysterious town. They looked into the houses and saw televisions, aquariums, bird-cages, sofas, perfectly laid tables, impeccably made beds, paintings on the walls, bookshelves laden with books, mantelpieces, well-appointed kitchens, children’s rooms with orderly arranged toys.

  In the gardens they saw swings hanging from trees, bicycles leaning on porches, treehouses, cars in driveways, lawns lovingly tended. Order and contentment radiated throughout and there was a fragrance of jasmine in the air.

  2

  As they walked down the quiet street, Lao became aware of a presence behind him, following him like a shadow, sticking to the periphery of his sightline.

  At first he thought he was imagining it. Every time he turned, it had vanished. But when he began walking again, it was there again.

  He pretended not to notice this thing that kept effortlessly to the blind side of his vision. He went on, gazing serenely into the houses as if he were at a picture gallery.

  The world seemed beautiful to him at that moment. The neatness of the houses giving an intimation of life lived in right measure. The rooms, the gardens, the perfectly trimmed hedges, all indicated lives without stress or anxiety. The houses and chalets were all different, in colour, in design, and yet they all complemented one another. There was an absence of regularity and yet the street gave them a sense of harmony.

  After a while, Lao began to wonder what this harmony might conceal. Could it not be achieved at the expense of creativity, at the expense, even, of humanity? It gave him a longing for wildness.

  3

  They didn’t speak as they walked. They did not encounter another human being, nor any animals. But they had just passed a garden with a magnificent oak tree, when Lao sensed that presence behind him again. It seemed to be hopping from one side of the street to the other, from one foot to the other, on tiptoes, in long elegant leaps.

  Lao stopped and looked back. All was normal behind him. All was still. There were canna lilies, roses, elderflowers, hydrangeas, and long pink blooms in the garden; and the oak tree was solid, its trunk healthy and gleaming, its leaves barely stirring in the light breeze. The street stood bright and clean in the transfixing light of the sun. Nothing moved.

  When he resumed walking, it was there again, stepping out of the air and only becoming real when he wasn’t looking.

  Lao breathed slowly, trying not to think, trying to act naturally so as not to awaken Mistletoe’s suspicion. He stopped, l
ooked around, and acted as if he were just making a detailed study of the singular unreality of the street.

  But he couldn’t shake the feeling that whatever was following him was intent on him. With long legs, it skipped diagonally, behind him, along the street.

  4

  Then, as they walked, his mind became momentarily vacant, and Lao caught a glimpse of the Quylph out of the corner of his eyes. His heart beat faster. It was only a glimpse, but this time he saw it and remembered it from his dream on the train. He remembered exactly their exchange, and the somewhat sinister warning. Memory flooded him like an epiphany and for a moment he experienced an extraordinary expansion of being bordering on vertigo.

  He tried to breathe normally and walked on, a little unsteadily. He swung a glance backwards. The Quylph was not there. He forgot all about it, and there it was. The Quylph, in its mischief, its perversity, seemed only to exist in Lao’s oblique sight, his peripheral vision. Seeing it was not something he could will. He could not do it deliberately. When he tried, he failed. When he did not try, he succeeded. It was agonising. It was impossible. It was a challenge to the management of his mind. It gave him the curious notion that the best way to see is to not see. To unsee. And that in trying to see he only failed to see. Then he had an even stranger notion, that there is a whole world he was not seeing because he was looking; and that whole world, that vast reality, came into being when he was not looking, when he was not trying to see. It occurred to him that this might be true of doing too. This idea was so astonishing to him that for a moment darkness swam across his eyes.

  5

  When he came back to himself, the world was re-established in greater splendour. Colours were clearer and more dazzling. The blue of a gable, the green of a garden gate, the yellow of a flower, the red of a hobbyhorse on an emerald lawn.

  Lao glanced at Mistletoe and was glad she appeared to have noticed nothing. He resumed the adaptation of his mind to the arduous task of emptying it so that, without effort, he might see. But it proved more difficult than he wished.

  Then he realised that when he looked straight ahead, at the houses, the flowerbeds, the rooftops, he saw the Quylph quite clearly, but in an indefinable way. When he tried to look into the periphery of his vision, the Quylph would slip further into that periphery. It was like one of those nimble childhood friends who hide behind you and keep frustrating your ability to see them.

  The Quylph was long and thin and green. It moved on its two long legs like a cartoon creature. Was it a spy, a guardian figure sent to keep an eye on wandering strangers?

  6

  Lao played a game with himself. He stopped suddenly, and the Quylph stopped too. It seemed to stop in mid-air, in mid-motion. Lao moved, and it moved too. There was no doubting it. He looked at Mistletoe. She had been looking at him, quizzically.

  ‘Do you notice anything?’ he said.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Anything unusual.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you see anything unusual?’

  ‘Not especially.’

  Lao was silent.

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘No reason,’ Lao replied, walking on.

  A feeling of wellbeing ran through him. He stared at the white houses and blue chalets and he gazed down lanes and little streets and he thought about their invisible stories. He noticed that the trees emerged from the earth so perfectly that they seemed like stage props. He admired the rooftops of the houses, and noticed the stained-glass quality of the air. Far away, the mountains loomed. There again was the diagonally skipping presence.

  The Quylph followed them till they got to the end of the street. It was the most charming street they had ever walked down and they were moved by the open nature of the houses. That they had not seen any inhabitants did not strike them as curious till much later. The entire street might have been a façade, a projection, a waking dream, but this did not occur to them. The unreality of the street was what they took to be its beauty. They would be haunted by its solitary character for years to come.

  7

  They got to the main road and walked in the direction of their hotel. As they went, Lao, without looking, noticed the Quylph standing at the end of the street, with a wistful forlorn air. When Lao turned, it was gone. Only a heat shimmer hung where it had been.

  ‘A Quylph has been following us,’ said Lao.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What is a Quylph?’

  The answer dropped into Lao’s mind a moment before he spoke. Later he would wonder where it came from

  ‘It’s a nature spirit, a guardian of treasures.’

  ‘Are you making this up?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And it followed us?’

  ‘It followed us all the way down the street.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I tried.’

  ‘Is it bad to see it?’

  ‘You’re not supposed to see it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  The answer was whispered to him again.

  ‘They’re supposed to stay invisible.’

  ‘And if you see one?’

  ‘You’re supposed to receive a message.’

  ‘From who?’

  ‘From the gods.’

  They walked on in silence.

  ‘How do you know about Quylphs?’

  ‘They’re a legend of this area.’

  ‘And you saw one?’

  ‘I wasn’t trying to.’

  ‘I’d have liked to have seen it,’ said Mistletoe.

  ‘I’d have liked that too.’

  ‘Maybe everyone has their own Quylph that only they can see.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Lao looked back wistfully. He missed the Quylph. He was glad to have seen it, and he missed the way he had to be in order to see it.

  ‘You really did see a Quylph, didn’t you?’ Mistletoe asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I did.’

  Section 5

  1

  As they approached the lake, notions drifted through them like clouds over the mountains. The notions were sweeter in retrospect. Mistletoe was thinking how all sensations were filtered through the prism of feeling. Lao was thinking that humans are stained-glass beings, giving off the colours of their true selves in everything they do.

  Mistletoe was studying the light refracted through the clouds. Streams of colour. All is conversion, and conversion is all, she thought. Light into colour, air into life, thought into substance. Conversion is all we do. We convert our birth into living, our living into dying, our being into love.

  2

  The day had given the best that it could. They knew it, and they knew also that their interlude was over, their Arcadian days within their Arcadian journey. They now sought to bend the rest of the day to a lasting beauty.

  They lingered on the shore of the lake, no longer looking at the mountains, the lake, the clouds. They let the mountains, sky, and lake act on them. They let go. They surrendered themselves, and vanished into the eternal present.

  It’s impossible to say how long they were gone. Mystics say a moment in eternity is a lifetime in history. It’s possible that in the margins of their immersion is inscribed the history and future of the human race.

  Such moments have no name. They leave no recollections in the mind. It’s a moment’s freedom made real and then forgotten: an angel’s kiss that alters nothing except the total shape of one’s destiny. Altered but not known.

  3

  Standing on the shore, they sensed a syllable streaming through all things. They heard the sustaining hum which seemed to originate in the depths of their hearts and in the farthest reaches of space. The hum washed through them and sweetened the taste of life.

  4

  Then they found themselves walking along the rim of the lake as if they finally understood it. They were walking and talking as if nothing had happened, but a moment of beauty had stolen into
them to remind their hearts of their living rights.

  They were light-headed with an unknown happiness. They felt the need to drink deep of that moment for all the unpredictable times to come.

  Did they know it was one of those moments which endure longer than life itself? Did they dream of using these moments as a sword against despair? Did they sense that these moments were elixirs, life renewed in the laboratory of Arcadia?

  They talked about dinner. Mistletoe fantasised about her favourite dessert, a rich chocolate cake, with cream; and Lao looked forward to a glass of Château Margaux. Then in that light-headed state they reminisced about funny moments on other shared journeys.

  ‘Do you remember that train to Rome that we missed?’ said Mistletoe.

  ‘Do you remember that plane in Greece that had Icarus written on its side?’

  ‘Do you remember that hotel in Biarritz where the owner wept all night?’

  ‘Do you remember that train journey to Spain where the ticket-collector…’

  ‘Stood frozen in the doorway, like the courtier in Velázquez’s Las Meninas…? I do, I remember them all.’

  ‘So do I.’

  5

  Notions dim and strange danced around them in the air. Notions whispered to them from the grass, speaking to the soles of their feet. Things were whispered in their ears, leaving only the silence of the wind. Notions played within them like reflections on the lake.

  At that moment Lao glimpsed a waterfall of clouds on a mountain peak; the light dying on the surface of the lake pierced Mistletoe’s heart. It was such a rare moment that they couldn’t help thinking how they could borrow its power against the darkness, or coax from it the art of living.