Mr Cassini

by Lloyd Jones

  This cave I will mark on my map; I may need to find it later. A rainbow above the town is strengthening. Wouldn’t it be strange if the colours were reversed, with the red on the inside… would our aesthetics be altered completely? By the way, if you look closely you’ll notice that the inside of the rainbow is always lighter than the outside.

  The Lakota Indians of North America have a story about colours. Two men out hunting meet a beautiful young woman dressed in white buckskin, carrying a bundle on her back. Overcome by bad thoughts, one of them approaches her – but a white mist surrounds him and he disappears. Nothing remains but a skeleton when the mist rises. The second man is told by the woman to return home and prepare a lodge for her, and when she walks into his village he has completed his task. I have come from heaven, she tells the people of the village, and I am here to tell you how to live, and to teach you about your future on earth. She gives them maize, introduces them to the pipe, and teaches them the seven sacred ceremonies. She gives them colours for the four winds or directions. When she has finished teaching them she turns into a buffalo calf which changes colour – from white to black, to red, and finally to yellow, representing the colours of the four directions. Then she disappears.

  Which brings me to a fitting coda – another passage from ap Llwyd’s masterpiece, Water-Divining in the Foothills of Paradise. I must ask you to return with me to that little Italian café somewhere on a hill in Wales, in a busy town, looking down on a harbour. Ap Llwyd gives no clues, and we cannot even guess where it might be. You may remember that, when we left him, ap Llwyd had found seven interconnected wells which had a common source, deep inside the mountain below him.

  Torch in hand, he had stood at the mouth of the cave, wondering whether or not he should go down in search of the source of the water. To do so alone would be very dangerous. But he believed that deep within the earth he would resolve something important about himself: he would put himself to the ultimate test, and he would emerge either whole or damaged beyond measure. I quote ap Llwyd:

  As I stood at the entrance to that cave, my mind flitted back to the café, and to my great friend Stefano. He had been in high spirits when I left; if I remember correctly he was going through an intensely religious phase at that time and invariably wore a T-shirt bearing the slogan:

  A CHRIST IS FOR LIFE

  NOT JUST FOR DOGMAS

  of which he was immensely proud. ‘I pray for you every hour,’ Stefano had shouted through a cloud of steam as he dispensed one of his wonderful cappuccinos. I paused in the doorway to look back at him. What a crazy man he was, with his heavy Hoxton Handle moustache and his hairy, ape-like arms. His teeth gleamed through the festoonery on his face, and his Groucho eyebrows arched up and down in caterpillar waves as he greeted his customers.

  ‘I will see you in a week or so,’ I said across the room.

  ‘Maybe, maybe not so quick,’ he shouted back, and he suddenly looked serious. ‘Something big is happening, yes? You go careful. You mind out. I have a feeling about this one. Think before you jump. Remember the Well of Souls. I don’t want to pay for your requiem.’

  I laughed. ‘Don’t worry Stefano! I know what I’m doing.’

  He cocked his head in that appealing way of his and his lustrous eyes questioned me in the shadows of his caterpillars. I became aware of a body close to me, trying to enter the café, so I stepped aside and extended an arm towards Stefano, who froze and stopped what he was doing; indeed, a lull fell over all his patrons. I turned, and realised why they were all mesmerised, for the girl who walked in was so beautiful I was stunned into silence too. I glimpsed her face as she gave an almost imperceptible nod of thanks. I waved goodbye but no one noticed. And there was no one to notice me now, either, as I walked the first hundred yards into the cave. I noticed some marks made by a mammoth sharpening its tusks, so I knew immediately that this portal was very old. Dimly, in the far distance, I thought I could hear a whisper of water. Bats chittering above me in the darkness made the last noise I heard as I started the long, slow descent into the interior. You may wonder what went through my mind at that point. It was this, for I am in no position to withhold information from you now: a vague plan, a strange formulation had been occupying my mind ever since I had discovered the link between the wells, and a common source of water for them. I knew that in finding that source, and in staying by it for seven nights in total darkness without food or human company, I could put myself to the ultimate test. It would be like dropping a huge weight on myself and seeing if I would survive. I increasingly saw myself as two people: one was a building and the other a scaffold, and either the scaffold had to be dismantled or the building had to be thrown to the ground and then rebuilt. But I had no idea where to start. So my sojourn underground was the equivalent of testing both structures by dropping the whole weight of my life onto them. I hoped that one of them would survive, making it possible for me to start a new life with a True Self. The real me.

  There was another possible outcome, of course, and it sent a frisson of fear through me as I plunged deeper and deeper below ground. The chill of that possibility seeped into my body as I heard the murmur strengthen, as my ears began to respond to the torrent of liquid life below me. And that possibility, of course, was that the house and the scaffold would both be destroyed, and that there would be nothing left. Nothing at all – and that I would be no more…

  As we all know, ap Llwyd did survive. One can only wonder what happened to him during those seven nights. How, for instance, did he keep track of time? Did his mind play tricks with him? Was he frightened? Did he reach a state of enlightenment? Was it his True Self which survived or his False Self – and how could anyone tell them apart? I am told that he felt unable to tell the whole story in Water-Divining in the Foothills of Paradise, but that he intended to reveal all in a sequel. Unfortunately, that sequel has not yet been written. Many years have drifted by. I am told he is too happy now to commit his memories to public record. I’m not sure what he means by that. Can anyone be too happy to remember, or to want to remember?

  But we have to leave him now. He has already taken up valuable time. We have our own little quest to complete, as we wait for the fair Olly to surface again.

  I went in search of an explanation of True Self and False Self. The trail led me to a man called Donald Winnicott, regarded by some as the British Freud.

  ‘We have yet to tackle the question of what life itself is about,’ he wrote late in his career, in 1967.

  He proposed a theory of True Self.

  The experience of aliveneness can’t be taken for granted, he said. People need to feel real. People who experience a severe failure in their early environment often feel as if they never started to exist. And although they have complied with their surroundings their lives feel futile.

  ‘Feeling real is more than existing, it is finding a way to exist as oneself… and to have a self into which to retreat for relaxation,’ said Donald.

  The child who cannot develop a True Self retreats into a false existence, a False Self. The False Self hides and protects the True Self as a nurse looks after a child. It replaces the True Self and acts out the role of the real person.

  The True Self lives a secret subterranean life, waiting for the day when it can thrive again. Only the True Self can be creative and only the True Self can feel real.

  I have a childish analogy for you. Imagine a new house – it hasn’t been built properly. There’s something wrong with the foundations: plenty of sand but no cement. So scaffolding has been erected around the house, and hoardings put up to disguise the problem. To complete the cover-up, a perfect copy of the ailing house has been painted onto the hoardings, so that no one can see the difference at a distance.

  Are you still with me? Because I’m off now. Do you remember our quest? I have summoned four eccentric Welshmen to meet me – and PC 66 – on the summit of Pumlumon Arwystli, smack bang in the centre of Wales. And why?

  To complete some
unfinished business. To kill off, once and for all, the monstrous man known to us all by now as Mr Cassini. There will be seven of us in all, waiting for him, if you include Gelert the dog. Our mountain has three sumptuous cairns on its summit. In short, my friends, I have summoned every source of magic at my disposal to rid us of this tinpot tyrant, so that Olly can sleep safely in her bed again.

  10

  THE TIDE COMES IN

  The trial on the mountain:

  Mr Cassini’s nemesis

  I WANT to tell you why I’m on Pumlumon Arwystli, a mountain in the middle of Wales. The day is dawning and I’m in a little world of my own again: I’m indulging in a spot of detail therapy – I’m lying with my chin on the soggy ground, looking into a miniature world of heather stalks lit by fairy lights (shiny little dewdrops) and pretending to be Lemuel Gulliver – tiny, afeared, and lost in a forest in Brobdingnag. I’m a small boy again and I’m taking part in a children’s play: a fairy tale without fairies. Don’t ask me why. Who shouts look behind you loudest at the panto: the child or the parent? It’s something to do with that. We’re at a panto, and the grown-ups can be as childish as they like. Go on, pretend. Boo and hiss when you see Mr Cassini. Shout look behind you when he enters stage left, pursued by bears.

  Gelert the dog is lying by my side, panting his revolting doggy breath into my left ear. It’s cold and it’s dismal – yes, conditions are perfect. We wouldn’t want Mr Cassini to face his nemesis on a nice sunny morning, would we?

  To set the scene: we’re in a region of bogland. Uncertain sponge with black pitchy water, as WF Peacock described it two centuries ago. It hasn’t changed much. Dark herbage thrives and its complexion is just about as ghostly and healthless as you can imagine, he added rather uncharitably. Somewhere on the slopes below me, at Hyddgen, the fabulous Welsh hero Owain Glyndwr rekindled his great rebellion in the summer of 1401 by routing a force of English soldiers and Flemish mercenaries – a great victory and a highpoint in Welsh warfare. Owain is regarded with mixed feelings: to many he is still the ultimate icon of Welsh independence; others see him as an ancient Arthur Scargill who led his men to a final, doom-laden battle against the forces of evil. Like all mythical heroes, from Christ to King Arthur, Owain Glyndwr has never been allowed to die. His death was never recorded: he simply vanished into the mist. Like Arthur, he is expected to return one day to save his country.

  But I have chosen Pumlumon Arwystli for other reasons. It feels right. Two great rivers begin their journey on either side of it: the Severn and the Wye. Perhaps this mountain is given its tinge of gravitas by the massive cairns on its summit; or perhaps the regret I detect in the air around me comes from another sad story from Wales’ past: the story of Hafren. According to legend, Hafren (the Welsh name for the Severn) was a little girl – and a king’s love child – who was bound and thrown into a river, together with her mother, by a vindictive queen.

  ‘The land between the two rivers is known as Fferllys, and is the home of the Tylwyth Teg, the fairyfolk,’ says Richard Sale in Best Walks in Southern Wales. ‘On this land the ferns (of which there are not many) bear a small blue flower on St John’s Eve. If the seeds of the flowers are gathered in white cloth – no hand must touch them – the gatherer will become invisible so that he/she may enter a lover’s room undetected. Alternatively, if you stay at Fferllys, an elf will exchange your seeds for a purse of gold.’ Please, I beg you – no jokes about the national elf service.

  There’s another reason for choosing this tump. We’re at the centre of my homeland. As in Ireland, France, England, Egypt and India, the traditional division of Wales is into North-South rather than East-West. So I stand on a fulcrum. And there is yet another reason, a third motive for being here. As in Ireland, there is evidence that Wales was divided into five realms long ago, and that the realm between the Wye and the Severn was the fifth dominion (the pum in Pumlumon means five). This fifth dominion symbolised the whole. There’s a five-peaked world mountain in Chinese tradition too. So, as I await the arrival of Mr Cassini, I will have invoked all the major magical numbers of the Celtic world:

  Three (cairns)

  Four (eccentrics)

  Five (dominions – North, South, East, West, and Here, or where we’re standing, the navel or omphalos of the world: similarly, the Islamic Kaaba inside the great mosque in Mecca, containing the sacred Black Stone, is the point of communication between God and man, the heart of existence; the seven anticlockwise circuits made by pilgrims symbolise the seven attributes of God)

  Seven (four eccentrics, PC 66, me, and a dog in attendance)

  Nine (following a Welsh tradition, I have lit a small symbolic fire made from nine sticks collected by nine men from nine different types of trees)

  Twenty-seven (the number of seeds from the aforementioned fern with a small blue flower which I’ve eaten to render myself invisible – thus making me feel quite woozy, incidentally).

  PC 66 has implemented a cunning ploy of his own; he has instructed one of the rainbow messengers to lodge a couple of possibilities in Mr Cassini’s wicked mind: that The Dexter Propensity will be an international best-seller, and that the men he’s about to meet on the mountain will make excellent mannequins in his front room. PC 66 has been ingenious. I too, have been resourceful: I have found a relevant passage in the Vita Merlini to amuse me while I digest my magical seeds:

  In happened one time while we were hunting in the lofty mountains of Arwystli that we came to an oak which rose in the air with its broad branches. A fountain flowed there, surrounded on all sides by green grass, whose waters were suitable for human consumption; we were all thirsty and we sat down by it and drank greedily of its pure waters. Then we saw some fragrant apples lying on the tender grass. The man who saw them first quickly gathered them up and gave them to me, laughing at the unexpected gift. I distributed the apples to my companions, and I went without any because the pile was not big enough. The others laughed and called me generous, and eagerly attacked and devoured them and complained because there were so few of them. Without any delay a miserable sadness seized them; they quickly lost their reason and like dogs bit and tore each other, and foamed at the mouth and rolled on the ground in a demented state. Finally, they went away like wolves filling the vacant air with howlings.

  All I need, to complete the picture, is a Yanomami shaman by my side to instruct me in the journey of the soul: a journey to a sacred place to discover cosmic intent – an act of mental dissociation, brought on with sacred plants, or fasting, or sensory deprivation accompanied by chanting and beating of drums. We have only to wait now. Everything will fall into place. I’m in control I say to myself over and over again. I’m in control.

  I’m sitting in a little niche within the tumbled rocks of the central cairn on Pumlumon Arwystli. It’s a dank and dismal morning in February. Gelert the dog is sniffing the air and whining. Is there someone approaching? Yes indeed! We have our first visitor of the day. I scramble to the top of the cairn, and the bleached stones make an odd clonking noise as they bang against each other. Down below me I see a head bobbing in the heather, and it belongs to Huw Llwyd of Cynfael. He has kept his tryst.

  He scrambles to the top of the mountain, and he’s talking to himself. He sees Gelert. He approaches him warily, making those appeasing there’s a good boy noises we make when we’re trying to make friends with a donkey-sized wolfhound. Gelert licks his hand, and I say Hullo Huw Llwyd of Cynfael. He nearly jumps out of his skin. He fetches a knife from his belt and crouches aggressively, looking around him warily.

  Silly me. I’ve forgotten I’m invisible on account of the 27 seeds I’ve swallowed. I’m feeling pretty mellow, actually. I have a fit of the giggles.

  ‘Don’t worry Huw,’ I say. ‘It’s me, Duxie. I’m over here, on top of the central cairn, but I’m invisible on account of the 27 seeds I’ve swallowed.’

  Huw growls, puts his knife in its scabbard, and sits down. He holds his head between his hands. Another hangover
, I assume. ‘You’ll find a bottle of grog in the picnic basket,’ I say.

  ‘The what?’ he replies tetchily.

  ‘In that basket over there,’ and I point (uselessly) to the foot of a neighbouring cairn.

  He finds the bottle and jokes with Gelert about the hair of the dog. That’s an old joke, then. Next to arrive – I can see him walking along the path from Glaslyn – is the Reverend Griffiths, and he’s singing Psalm 23 in an unshakeable, unshaking voice:

  The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

  He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters...

  Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

  Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over...

  I wasn’t sure whether to lie down in green pastures and preparest a table constituted the first reference, ever, to a picnic, but I had a present ready for the Rev Griffiths – another bottle of the excellent port we’d enjoyed a few days previously in Llandegla. He sat down next to Huw and swigged it contentedly. ‘This is the life,’ he said.