The Bell-Boy

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘Oh no, uncle,’ Laki began in confusion.

  ‘You do and you know it. I often wish you were with me on the desk at night when these foreigners turn up. Sometimes I swear I don’t understand a word they say. But I’m too old to start learning languages now. I muddle by and that’s enough. You’re still quick and willing. Ah yes, it’s having the will which is everything in this life. Once you’ve lost that you’ve lost all. But let’s proceed. You want to make your fortune, yes? By tomorrow afternoon at the latest?’

  ‘Next week would be soon enough, uncle.’

  But unaccountably Raju elected to take this as not quite a joke. ‘Maybe you lack ambition after all. I’ve often thought there’s a streak in you of something which might betray you if it gets the better of you.’

  ‘What, uncle?’

  ‘I can’t find the word for it,’ admitted the old man. ‘Luxury, perhaps? Pleasure? Next week. A softness, maybe? You’ll have to watch that, boy. At any rate I’m convinced if you’re to make your fortune you can do it right here in Malomba. You’ve thought about going somewhere larger – to the capital, for example. Of course; everybody does. But why? You’d simply have to start all over again at the bottom in a strange city, knowing no one and without so much as a stairwell in which to spread your mat. You’d be with the rest of the riff-raff who drift in from all over the country to seek their fortunes. No, much better build on the foundations you’ve laid here.’

  The night porter paused for a draught of palm toddy from the pitcher at his side. The liquor was expensive here in town, and seldom good since it had to be brought in from the coconut plantations in the hills. Toddy did not travel well. A few hours’ delay in the hot sun followed by a good sloshing around in a waggon and it turned vinegary and sulphurous. This stuff was fresh and sweet, however, and represented a complicity between them since they tapped it illegally in the Fathers’ garden next door. The Fathers themselves seldom ventured beyond the lawn behind their bungalow and hardly ever into the furthest recesses of their estate. But there, virtually hidden among other trees, a group of palms rose so high that their tops were all but invisible from the ground, screened by lower growth. It was Laki who had first had the idea of putting these trees to good use, and now they took it in turns to slip through the fence and collect it. Raju, who still climbed a palm with touching senescent agility, fetched it in the early morning as he came off duty; Laki at night. Had either been caught it would have been all up with them. The police could be relied on to hand out a good beating even before they threw the book at you for evading the state toddy monopoly. After that they would have to settle with the Fathers, and both Laki and Raju had lived in Malomba long enough to know that the last place to expect charity and forgiveness was in a city of divines. Priests and gurus, imams and rabbis, fakirs, mullahs, bishops, brahmins, healers, satanists and all the rest of them: a shifty, gluttonous bunch. That, at least, was their opinion. But then they were animists.

  Raju was at this moment drinking deeply of the soul of the palm.

  ‘That’s good stuff,’ he said and belched softly. ‘Just like home. Don’t you see, boy? It really makes sense for you to stay in this town because you already know it so well. But there’s a better reason still. Money. People go where the money is, that’s natural. So they head for the cities. Well, there’s money enough in Malomba; there’s no need to take a step outside. What’s more, it’s getting richer. I remember when I first arrived ten years ago this was just another provincial capital – a town which was perfectly ordinary in every way except for having a glut of priests and temples. Nowadays it’s got them fit to fart. They say it’s always been a great religious centre, but once they started calling it a holy city and drumming up the tourist trade it suddenly became a lot holier. We never used to have all these faith healers and psychic surgeons and what-not. The tourists have brought them in.’

  ‘And they’re not doing badly, uncle, are they?’

  ‘They’re pissing gold, boy. I’m not saying it works or it doesn’t work. I can’t say they’re all rascals because I don’t know. You can’t judge a cow by its moo. But I am saying it’s a nice little industry they’ve got going for themselves.’

  ‘Ought I to become a healer then, uncle?’

  ‘No,’ admitted Raju, ‘I wasn’t going that far. Although I suppose we could claim that you’re a poor ignorant village boy whose miraculous powers were discovered when he was eight, say. But in practice it wouldn’t be as simple as that. First we’d have to find you an agent or protector. I’d guess that the healer market is about saturated at the moment. Tourism’s already levelled off and if this guerrilla problem gets any worse it’ll drop still further. So that means you’d be competing with all the other healers in town and you know what they’re like. They’d smash your elbows with mallets. No, what I was thinking of is more of a way of getting you to make the most of the advantages you have without needing to fake others. Here you are with good health, good English and a good knowledge of town. Now who in Malomba – apart from the Indians and the Chinese, of course – have the real money? Why, the tourists themselves.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Laki, comprehending at last. ‘You mean I should become a guide?’

  ‘That’s a possibility too. Oh, I know what you’re thinking, boy – it’s only old Raju gassing on, but when’s he going to tell me what to do? I shan’t, though. I want to give you a kick, that’s all.’

  ‘A kick, uncle?’

  ‘Certainly. I know how when a man works he gets into a rut. Day after day he does the same old thing. We go on duty and we go off duty, we go to bed and we eat our meals. But all the time, like as not, the way to something better is staring us in the face. Why does the grouper stay in his hole and grow fat? He doesn’t waste his energy swimming about looking for food. He simply waits for food to come blundering in and then he grabs it. He seizes the opportunity, doesn’t he?

  ‘The same with you. Look at the guests who come to this hotel. Never mind that if they’re richer they may go to the Golden Fortune or the Seven Blessings. Even the poorest hippy is still rich. He’s rich enough to travel. He’s rich enough to pay for healing sessions or a meditation course or fork out those scandalous ashram fees. We say nothing about his drugs bill, either. What’s more, he’ll certainly have relatives back home who can lay their hands on real money if things go wrong. You don’t need to rip them off, either; you just need to get their confidence. Never steal a watch when you can steal a heart. Well, then.’

  ‘It’s difficult knowing how to start these things, uncle.’

  ‘Nonsense. Muffy tells me we’ve got some new guests. Who are they?’

  ‘Some woman and her kids. They’re English. Or maybe Italian – but they speak English. She’s come for psychic surgery. She says she’s got an introduction to hadlam Tapranne.’

  Raju looked at him triumphantly. ‘There you are. She’s rich. Remember that Indian film star? Of course she is. Think of those air tickets. She can even afford to bring her children. Big children? Little children?’

  ‘A boy of twelve and a girl of fifteen. She’s not bad, the girl. Old Muffy was giving her the eye.’

  ‘Think of going abroad,’ said Raju dreamily. ‘Imagine getting a job in – for instance – Europe. Or even America,’ he added, this being the golden dream to end all others. How they did shimmer, those mythic lands at the ends of impossibly difficult roads which were essentially a never-ending series of toll gates. Roads beset with bribes, extortion, bent recruitment agencies, visa fixers, corrupt passport officials, travel sharks, queues; doors shut at every turn which would open only for hard cash. ‘Do you know what I’d do if I were young again?’

  ‘What, uncle?’

  ‘I’d marry a foreigner,’ said Raju wickedly.

  High in the Apuan Alps between Lucca and Carrara lay the remote village of Valcognano. In common with thousands of other remote Italian villages, it had been abandoned some time after the Second World War. The young men left to
look for work, the girls to look for husbands, and the last of the ancients tottered down the mule path to lie in a cemetery near enough to civilisation for little lights to burn beside their names through the harsh winter nights. For twenty years Valcognano was left open to foxes, wild boar and the weather.

  Then one day had come a wise man from the East, Swami Bopi Gul, riding in a Boeing, a rented Maserati and finally on a donkey to set up his Community of Pure Light. Dismounting stiffly, he performed certain rites and meditations and declared the place ideal. It would be a haven of serenity and bliss. Far removed from the impurities and distractions of modern life, the Community’s members would drink pure mountain water and warm themselves before fires of chestnut wood from the forests, while relying for illumination on wisdom and kerosene. The kerosene arrived on mule back, together with sacks of flour, jars of oil and other provisions. The wisdom would simply grow of its own accord, declared the Swami, being the bountiful harvest of Presentness.

  Among the earliest Pure Lighters were the Hemony family; in those days Tessa’s husband Bruce had still been around. After the first year or so Swami Bopi Gul’s absences became regrettably more protracted as he busied himself with the running of his spiritual empire in places such as Srinagar and Zurich. Consequently the Hemonys and another couple found themselves the elders at Valcognano and newcomers inferred that they had been entrusted by the Swami to carry on the Community’s work – as indeed they had.

  It is not often appreciated by those who have never lived the simple life up a mountain how complicated it is, nor how much of each day is taken up by tasks of a more or less drudging nature. Many were the young refugees from art and language courses in Florence or Pisa who found their way there hoping to bliss out on long hours of sunshine and wine and meditation; but few there were prepared to spend a morning hoeing a maize field or coaxing a refractory mule up the eight hundred and ninety-four broad steps through the chill gloom of the forest. They left, mostly within days, to be replaced by others.

  Yet gradually over the years the Community did build itself up until almost all Valcognano’s houses had been restored and were lived in by people whose lives – apart from mantras and tantras and curious practices at dawn – differed very little from those of its original inhabitants. They sowed, they reaped, and often at night they sang songs around the fireside. Curiously, the Pure Lighters were largely free of the problems which typically afflict such enterprises and cause dissent and break-up. There were few scandals and jealousies, while the Italian authorities virtually ignored them. From the outset the Swami had made judicious donations to the parish in whose bailiwick Valcognano was, and the parroco was firmly on the Community’s side. Every so often he would make the three-hour walk up to the village and satisfy himself that there was no odour of brimstone about the place, no evidence of sorcery, no effigies of horned goats. The inhabitants didn’t strike him as practitioners of the black arts, appearing sober and healthy even if a little scruffy and given to expressions of happiness. They certainly plied him most generously with home-made bread, sheep’s cheese and cold-extracted oil of hyssop for his stones.

  It occurred to the priest to enquire as to the children’s education, but he was easily satisfied that they were being well taught since nearly all the adults turned out to have university degrees. Besides, the complications of enrolling them in the state educational system scarcely bore thinking about. The comune of which Valcognano was a part would have to send a scuolabus to fetch and return them daily, at all seasons and in all weathers. Since it was evident that no scuolabus could get up a mule track, the comune would have to build a road. Once there was a road there would have to be electricity, telephones, sewage disposal … Who knew where such spending would end? And all for an isolated hamlet of self-sufficient folk who treasured their isolation? It was pointless. Far better let the whole matter drop.

  So the Italian state left Valcognano to its eccentric but peaceable foreigners, except that every now and then a police helicopter might hover above the maize field to check that nobody had planted marijuana in the middle. As far as officialdom was concerned Jason and Zoe and the other children were as unaccountable as gypsies but of no interest to the law, unlike the genuine gypsy children from Yugoslavia who plagued the peripheral wastelands of Milan and Turin with their pickpocketing rackets.

  Theirs had been a strange upbringing, reared as they were in a multicultural limbo. Dal they ate, and polenta and porridge; also curry and pasta, poppadoms, pizza and pudding. They were smallholders with wide horizons, too, for they were always travelling. Tessa would suddenly announce that next week they were going on retreat in Kashmir or to a disciple of the Swami’s in Thailand, or merely back to England to dun their capitalist turncoat of a father for more maintenance. Along the way they picked up what they could of formal learning. On the last visit but one Tessa had wangled both children a term’s schooling, but Jason especially had proved peculiar and it was not a success.

  As for money, well, the Hemonys paid as little attention to it as people do who have never had to worry. Tessa’s family were rich; she was an only child. It was true she had married a man without a bean, but he turned out to have a future. They had met at an ashram in Agra where Bruce was wrestling with Sanskrit. He had beads and a glossy clean ponytail, a newly-minted doctorate in biochemistry and a charming smile. Each had recognised the other’s spiritual beauty; both were sure the world was best forsaken. Within a year they were married and within two were hurriedly repairing the roof of a tumbledown casa colonica in Valcognano – bliss! – before autumn turned to winter. But after a few years Bruce had become sad and restless. He was increasingly susceptible to minor ailments which laid him low despite the most skilled aromatherapy and the most elaborate attempts to harmonise his body with Mother Earth. He took to going off on his own for several weeks.

  Then one day in spring he returned looking calm and decisive. He was going to the world (as the phrase had it). He had applied for and got a job as a biochemist working with ICI. Oh yes, and there was one other thing … he’d sort of met this girl.

  It had been a blow, there was no denying it. For some time Tessa had known Bruce’s path had become cloudy, that he was increasingly unable to wipe his spirit clear. But when she told the Swami and he had held her with that wonderful calm gaze of his and smiled his beatific smile, she at once saw it was for the best after all. ‘We must each find our own way through the minefield,’ was his teaching. ‘A seeing person is not always safer than a blind one.’ ‘But I have a family to support,’ said the former public schoolgirl, astonishing herself. ‘Support, support? What is support?’ asked Gul. He was always a little enigmatic about money matters. He lit a stick of incense and they drank camomile tea sitting together in the bare upper room of a house which had belonged to Valcognano’s last midwife. Its walls were now draped with Tibetan prayer flags and Mediterranean sunlight came bounding exuberantly in, bringing with it both excitement and calm. ‘Maybe your own path is changing,’ he said. ‘Who knows?’

  ‘It knows itself,’ she said.

  What it had known it communicated one night by waking her with the realisation that a job at ICI would bring in a decent sum in maintenance from Bruce, and therefore she needn’t rely on the tainted capital of her father’s legacy. In a sense she would have earned her alimony; it had all been meant, after all. More bliss, except that Zoe had been quite upset by his defection. She had taken valerian for her grief and they had all gone to Sri Lanka for a bit. It had been marvellously restorative, although the poor child had been weepy at first. Jason, perhaps because he was so young, had seemed to accept the whole thing with equanimity. Still, that was all several years ago. Since then Zoe had quite recovered and was rapidly turning into a young woman. Had turned, very probably, at the time when she somewhat lost her head with a naughty boy from LA.

  ‘Well,’ thought Tessa with melancholy pride as she leaned on the rotted window-sill of her room in the Hotel Nirvana. She w
atched the monkeys leaving the sanctuary of the Redemptorist Fathers’ garden for their evening pillage of Malomba’s outskirts. ‘Well, the Hemonys always did have warm hearts. Warm hearts make hot blood, and hot blood makes us open. Open to the spirit and new experiences; open to things happening. And that is true freedom – not striving, not grasping. Oh how lucky we are.’ She sang a few notes in a little girl’s voice, while up from the garden drifted the clotted scent of musk-lilies, the sound of bird-song and snarling monkeys. She had almost forgotten the bleak flash at dawn when for a moment in the bus she had wished above all for her life to be still, her back to be cured, for an end to this road.

  But then if someone had ever suggested – trying to account for the occasional sadness which might overtake her as a little cloud crossing her inner sun – that she was a woman of forty with two children and no husband who wandered at whim from one place to the next when not living in a commune up an Italian mountain, she would have replied tartly that if it did not quite comply with bourgeois notions of the purposeful life, then all the more reason to rejoice in it. What precisely was so fulfilling about good-consumerism? What so purposeful in being led by the nose for threescore years and ten as a servile member of the admass? Or so self-expressing about stifling beneath that dead weight of conventional impiety?

  If as a mother she felt open to accusations that, whereas her own life was her own business, her wayward and untutored children might have little future, she could defend herself with equal vigour. For one thing, Zoe and Jason were anything but uneducated. How many of their contemporaries knew how to make sheep’s cheese? Or could recite The Triple Refuge or the Heart Sutra? Or knew to heal a severe burn with lavender oil? In any case they would soon be old enough to go their own ways and if, like Bruce, they wanted to go to the world, there was nothing to stop them. They were not stupid and would soon pick up anything they needed to learn.