by Brian Aldiss
All irritations were finally at an end. With an entourage of five, I climbed aboard a jet liner scheduled for Lagos.
It seemed then that the climactic moment of which I was in search could not be far distant, either in time or space. But the unforeseen interposed.
When I arrived at my destination, it was to discover the African capital in an unsettled state, with demonstrations and riots every day and curfews every night. My party was virtually confined to its hotel, and the politicians were far-too involved to bother about a mere film-rnaker!
In such a city, none of the pursuits of man are capable of adequate fulfilment: except one. I well recall being in Trieste when that city was in a similar state of turmoil. I was then undergoing a painful and exquisite love affair with a woman almost twice my age - but my age then was half what it now is! - and the disruptions and dislocations of public life, the mysterious stoppages and equally mysterious pandemoniums that blew in like the bora, gave a delectable contrapuntal quality to the rhythms of private life, and to those unnerving caesuras which are inescapable in matters involving a beautiful married woman. So I made discreet inquiries through my own country's embassy for the whereabouts of Christiania.
The republic was in process of breaking in half, into Christian South and Muslim North. Christiania's husband had been posted to the North and his wife had accompanied him. Because of the unrest, and the demolition of a strategic bridge, there was no chance of my following them for some while.
It may appear as anti-climax if I admit that I now forgot about Christiania, the whole reason for my being in that place and on that continent. Nevertheless, I did forget her; our desires, particularly the desires of creative artists, are peripatetic: they submerge themselves sometimes unexpectedly and we never know where they may appear again. My imp of the perverse descended. For me the demolished bridge was never rebuilt.
Once the Army decided to support the government (which it did as soon as two of its colonels were shot), the riots were quelled. Although the temper of the people was still fractious, some sort of order was restored. I was then escorted about the locality. And the full beauty and horror of the city - and of its desolated hinterland - were rapidly conveyed to me.
I had imagined nothing from West Africa. Nobody had told me of it. And this was precisely what attracted me now, as a director. I saw that here was fresh territory from which a raid on the inarticulate might well be made. The images of beauty-in-despair for which I thirsted were present, if in a foreign idiom. My task was one of translation, of displacement.
So immersed was I in my work, that all the affairs of my own country, and of Europe, and of the western world where my films were acclaimed or jeered, and of the whole globe but this little troubled patch (where, in truth, the preoccupations of all the rest were echoed) were entirely set aside. My sonnet was here; here, I would be able to provide more than a dead gloss on Hardy's sonnet. The relativity of importance was here brought to new parameters!
As the political situation began to improve, so I began to work further afield, as if the relationship between the two events was direct. A reliable Ibo hunter was placed at my disposal.
Although man was my subject and I imagined myself not to be interested in wild life, the bush strangely moved me. I would rise at dawn, ignoring the torment of early-stirring flies, and watch the tremendous light flood back into the world, exulting to feel myself simultaneously the most and least important of creatures. And I would observe - and later film - how the inundating light launched not only flies but whole villages into action.
There was a vibrance in those dawns and those days! I still go cold to think of it.
Suppose - how shall we say it? - suppose that while I was in Africa making Some Eclipses, one side of me was so fully engaged (a side never before exercised in open air and sunlight) that another aspect of myself slumbered? Having never met with any theory of character which satisfied me, I cannot couch the matter in any fashionable jargon. So let me say brutally: the black girls who laid their beauty open to me stored in their dark skins and unusual shapes and amazing tastes enough of the unknown to hold the need for deeper torments at bay. In those transitory alliances, I exorcized also the sari-clad ghost of my second wife.
I became temporarily almost a different person, an explorer of the psyche in a region where before me others of my kind had merely shot animals; and I was able to make a film that was free from my usual flights of perversity.
I know that I created a masterpiece. By the time Some Eclipses was a finished masterpiece, and I was back in Copenhagen arranging details of premiers, the regime that had given me so much assistance had collapsed; the Prime Minister had fled to Great Britain; and Muslim North had cut itself off from Christian South. And I was involved with another woman again, and back in my European self, a little older, a little more tired.
Not until two more years had spent themselves did I again cross the trail of my perverted madonna, Christiania. By then, the lines of the magnet seemed to have disappeared altogether: and, in truth, I was never to lie with her as I so deeply schemed to do: but magnetism goes underground and surfaces in strange places; the invisible suddenly becomes flesh before our eyes; and terror can chill us with more power than beauty knows.
My fortunes had now much improved - a fact not unconnected with the decline of my artistic powers. Conscious that I had for a while said what I needed to say, I was now filming coloured narratives, employing some of my old tricks in simpler form, and, in consequence, was regarded by a wide public as a daring master of effrontery. I lived my part, and was spending the summer sailing in my yacht, The Fantastic Venus, in the Mediterranean,
Drinking in a small French restaurant on a quayside, my party was diverted by the behaviour of a couple at the next table, a youth quarrelling with a woman, fairly obviously his paramour, and very much his senior. Nothing about this youth revived memories in me; but suddenly he grew tired of baiting his companion and marched over to me, introducing himself as Petar and reminding me of our one brief meeting, more than three years ago. He was drunk, and not charming. I saw he secretly disliked me.
We were more diverted when Petar's companion came over and introduced herself. She was an international film personality, a star, one might say, whose performances of recent years had been confined more to the bed than the screen. But she was piquant company, and provided a flow of scandal almost unseemly enough to be indistinguishable from wit.
She set her drunken boy firmly in the background. From him, I was able to elicit that his mother was staying near by, at a noted hotel. In that corrupt town, it was easy to follow one's inclinations. I slipped away from the group, called a taxi, and was soon in the presence of an unchanged Christiania, breathing the air that she breathed. Heavy lids shielded my madonna's eyes. She looked at me with a fateful gaze that seemed to have shone on me through many years. She was an echo undoubtedly of something buried, something to resurrect and view as closely as possible.
'If you chased me to Africa, it seems somewhat banal to catch up with me in Cannes,' she said.
'It is Cannes that is banal, not the event. The town is here for our convenience, but we have had to wait on the event.'
She frowned down at the carpet, and then said, 'I am not sure what event you have in mind. I have no events in mind. I am simply here with a friend for a few days before we drive on to somewhere quieter. I find living without events suits me particularly well.'
'Does your husband —'
'I have no husband. I was divorced some while ago - over two years ago. It was scandalous enough: I am surprised you did not hear.'
'No, I didn't know. I must still have been in Africa. Africa is practically soundproof.'
'Your devotion to that continent is very touching. I saw your film about it. I have seen it more than once, I may confess. It is an interesting piece of work - of art, perhaps one should say only —'
'What are your reservations?'
'I also am incomplete. I need you for completion, Christiania - you who have formed a spectral part of me for so long!' I spoke then, burningly, and not at all as obliquely as I had intended.
She was before me, and again the whole pattern of life seemed to direct me towards her mysteries. But she was there with a friend, she protested. Well, he had just had to leave Cannes on a piece of vital business (I gathered he was a minister in a certain government, a man of importance), but he would be back on the morning plane.
So we came gradually round - now my hands were clasping hers - to the idea that she might be entertained to dinner on The Fantastic Venus; and I was careful to mention that next to my cabin was an empty cabin, easily prepared for any female guest who might care to spend the night aboard before returning home well before any morning planes circled above the bay.
And so on, and so on.
There can be few men - women either - who have not experienced that particular mood of controlled ecstasy awakened by the promise of sexual fulfilment, before which obstacles are nothing and the logical objections to which we normally fall victim less than nothing. Our movements at such times are scarcely our own; we are, as we say, possessed: that we later possess.
A curious feature of this possessed state is that afterwards we recall little of what happened in it. I recollect only driving fast through the crowded town and noticing that a small art theatre was showing Some Eclipses. That fragile affair of light and shadow had lasted longer, held more vitality, than the republic about which it centred! I remember thinking how I would like to humble the arrogant young Petar by making him view it -'one in the eye for him', I thought, amused by the English phrase, envious of what else his eyes might have beheld.
Before my obsessional state, all impediments dissolved. My party was easily persuaded to savour the pleasures of an evening ashore; the crew, of course, was happy enough to escape. I sat at last alone in the centre of the yacht, my expectations spreading through it, listening appreciatively to every quiet movement. Music from other vessels in the harbour reached me, seeming to confirm my impregnable isolation.
I was watching as the sun melted across the sea, its vision hazed by cloud before it finally blinked out and the arts of evening commenced. That sun was flinging, like a negative of itself, our shadow far out into space: an eternal blackness trailing after the globe, never vanquished, a blackness parasitic, claiming half of man's nature!
Even while these and other impressions of a not unpleasant kind filtered through my mind, sudden trembling overcame me. Curious unease seized my senses, an indescribable frisson. Clutching the arms of my chair, I had to fight to retain consciousness. The macabre sensation that undermined my being was - this phrase occurred to me at the time - that 7 was being silently inhabited, just as I at that moment silently inhabited the empty ship.
What a moment for ghosts! When my assignation was for the flesh!
Slightly recovering from the first wave of fear, I sat up. Distant music screeched across the slaty water to me. As I passed a hand over my bleared vision, I sat that my palm bore imprinted on it the pattern of the rattan chair arm. This reinforced my sense of being at once the host to a spectral presence and myself insubstantial, a creature of infinite and dislocated space rather than flesh.
That terrible and cursed malaise, so at variance with my mood preceding it! And even as I struggled to free myself from it, my predatorial quarry stepped aboard. The whole yacht subtly yielded to her step, and I heard her call my name.
With great effort, I shook off my eerie mood and moved to greet her. Although my hand was chill as I clutched her warm one, Christiania's imperious power beamed out at me. The heavy lids of Munch's voluptuous madonna opened to me and I saw in that glance that this impressive and notorious woman was also unfolded to my will.
'There is something Venetian about this meeting,' she said, smiling. 'I should have come in a domino!'
The trivial pleasantry attached itself to my extended sensibilities with great force. I imagined that it could be interpreted as meaning that she acted out a role; and all my hopes and fears leaped out to conjure just what sort of a role, whether of ultimate triumph or humiliation, I was destined to play in her fantasy!
We talked fervently, even gaily, as we went below and sat in the dim-lit bar in the stern to toast each other in a shallow drink. That she was anxious I could see, and aware that she had taken a fateful step in so compromising herself: but this anxiety seemed part of a deeper delight. By her leaning towards me, I could interpret where her inclinations lay; and so, by an easy gradation, I escorted her to the cabin next to mine.
But now, again, came that awful sense of being occupied by an alien force! This time there was pain in it and, as I switched on the wall-lights, a blinding spasm in my right eye, almost as though I had gazed on some forbidden scene.
I clutched at the wall. Christiania was making some sort of absurd condition upon fulfilment of which her favours would be bestowed; perhaps it was some nonsense about her son, Petar; at the same time, she was gesturing for me to come to her. I made some excuse - I was now certain that I was about to disintegrate
I stammered a word about preparing myself in the next cabin, begged her to make herself comfortable for a moment, stag gered away, shaking like an autumn leaf.
In my cabin - rather, in the bathroom, jetty lights reflected from the surface of the harbour waters projected a confused imprint of a porthole on the top of the door. Wishing for no other illumination, I crossed to the mirror to stare at myself and greet my haggard face with questioning.
What ailed me What sudden illness, what haunting, had taken me - overtaken me - at such a joyful moment?
My face stared back at me. And then: my sight was eclipsed from within....
Nothing can convey the terror of that experience! Something that moved, that moved across my vision as steadily and as irretrievably as the curved shadow in Hardy's sonnet. And, as I managed still to stare at my gold-haloed face in the mirror, I saw the shadow move in my eye, traverse my eyeball, glide slowly -so eternally slowly! - across the iris from north to south.
Exquisite physical and psychological pain were mine. Worse, I was pierced through by the dread of death - by what I imagined a new death: and I saw vividly, with an equally pain-laden inner eye, all my vivid pleasures, carnal and spiritual alike, and all my gifts, brought tumbling into that ultimate chill shadow of the grave.
There at that mirror, as if all my life I had been rooted there, I suffered alone and in terror, spasms coursing through my frame, so far from my normal senses that I could not hear even my own screams. And the terrible thing moved over my eyeball and conquered me!
For some while, I lay on the floor in a sort of swoon, unable either to faint or to move.
When at last I managed to rise, I found I had dragged myself into my cabin. Night was about me. Only phantoms of light, reflections of light, chased themselves across the ceiling and disappeared. Faintly, feebly, I switched on the electric light and once more examined the trespassed area of my sight. The terrible thing was transitory. There was only soreness where it had been, but no pain.
Equally, Christiania had left - fled; I learned later, at my first screams, imagining in guilty dread perhaps that her husband had hired an assassin to watch over her spoiled virtue!
So I too had to leave! The yacht I could not tolerate for a day more! But nothing was tolerable to me, not even my own body; for the sense of being inhabited was still in me. I felt myself a man outside society. Driven by an absolute desperation of soul, I went to a priest of that religion I had left many years ago; he could only offer me platitudes about bowing to God's will. I went to a man in Vienna whose profession was to cure sick minds; he could talk only of guilt-states.
Nothing was tolerable to me in all the places I knew. In a spasm of restlessness, I chartered a plane and flew to that African country where I had once been ha
ppy. Though the republic had broken up, existing now only in my film, the land still remained unaltered.
My old Ibo hunter was still living; I sought him out, offered him good pay, and we disappeared into the bush as we had previously done.
The thing that possessed me went too. Now we were becoming familiar, it and I. I had an occasional glimpse of it, though never again so terrifyingly as when it eclipsed my right eye. It was peripatetic, going for long submerged excursions through my body, suddenly to emerge just under the skin, dark, shadowy, in my arm, or breast or leg, or once - and there again were terror and pain interlocked - in my penis.
I developed also strange tumours, which swelled up very rapidly to the size of a hen's egg, only to disappear in a couple of days. Sometimes these loathsome swellings brought fever, always pain. I was wasted, useless - and used.
These horrible manifestations I tried my best to keep hidden from everyone. But, in a bout of fever, I revealed the swellings to my faithful hunter. He took me - I scarcely knowing where I went - to an American doctor who practised in a village near by.
'No doubt about it!' said the doctor, after an almost cursory examination. 'You have a loiasis infestation. It's a parasitic worm with a long incubation period - three or more years. But you weren't in Africa that long were you?'
I explained that I had visited these parts before.
'It's an open-and-shut case, then! That's when you picked up the infection.'
I could only stare at him. He belonged in a universe far from mine, where every fact has one and only one explanation.
'The loiasis vector is a blood-sucking fly,' he said. 'There are billions of them in this locality. They hit maximum activity at dawn and late afternoon. The larval loiasis enters the bloodstream when the fly bites you. Then there is a three-four year incubation period before the adult stage emerges. It's what you might call a tricky little system!'
'So I'm tenanted by a worm, you say!'