As if by Magic

by Angus Wilson

  *

  Alexandra couldn’t pay much attention to what Elinor was saying as they clambered up the slippery sand-bank away from the beach in quest of audience of the Swami. Her mind was with Oliver in the small hotel bedroom in Panaji—without herself, without his totem Ned. As Thelma said, “He just loves peeking through these balcony curlicues. And they are kind of nice and ornamental too. It’s a rococo generation, hon, right upon your heels.”

  But if he fell, or if Thelma’s grasp, shaky despite her fortnight-long Goan bout of sobriety, proved too feeble, he would at best grow up with rococo legs that would make people shudder. Shudder as she found herself shuddering again and again here in India—at limbless trunks that propelled themselves about the streets on wheeled boards, at a man with a vast pendulous lip like an orang-utan, at a woman with empty eye-sockets burning red like Hallowe’en pumpkin eyes, and at a giant, nearly black, naked man daubed with ashes, with ash-filled hair, and eyes all too much there, violent bloodshot eyes seeming to spark with a strange demon flame as he rushed from a temple, shouting, howling and flailing his arms.

  She saw the Divine Idiot as clumsy, yes; but neatly made, well-fashioned. I suppose, she thought, I want my Gothic tamed. And truth to tell, although she believed more and more that to solve all the complex horrors and the desperate boredoms of the world, only a simplicity near to absurdity would suffice—not Roddy’s dandy elegance, nor even Ned’s intuitive mind-body synchronization; she did not want Oliver to be the one to save the world by his idiocy. Dear Thelma, don’t let him come to harm, dear God, because I’m not sure of you and Thelma doesn’t believe in you, don’t let that stop you keeping an eye on Thelma (for you must be everywhere or nowhere) so that she keeps an eye on my baby.

  Elinor said a little more loudly than the deep but nowadays subdued tones of her normal voice, “Don’t fret about the child, Alexandra. Can’t you let all this gentleness, this selflessness, yes, wait for it, this love that you’ve shown in coming with us today be complete? Just let it grow and breathe in you until there’s no place left for the deadening, cramping maternal fears.”

  She talked like that now, and did it so naturally that it was hard to laugh, especially since she seemed more often than not to know in advance what one was thinking. How laugh at a vatic manner if a real seer speaks the words? And she had ceased to bitch; for most of the time she had even ceased to rage after Ned.

  He called it Death, a hateful sort of false spiritualized death, like a Victorian marble tombstone. But it was hard to say whether this wasn’t simply because he was angry that she no longer raged for him and also because for a second time she had misled him about the Community, for the Malabar people had dispersed, and the people on the famous Goan Colva Beach were such a motley collection of self-conscious, worn-out, stoned-out, guru-seeking, old-fashioned hippies that there was no getting even a semblance of mimetic coordination out of them.

  But it wasn’t only Oliver that filled Alexandra’s mind. More immediately there was the toe she had stubbed on a rock last night when putting up the tent, here at the Dona Paula Beach, among palms and cashew-nut trees and the massive roots of banyans, which, sacred or not, proved death-traps for those who had no Hindu faith. It was her left big toe and the nail was half torn away so that the flesh bled and a nerve kept throbbing.

  Once again Elinor had made it hard to complain, for with her new-found inner grace or whatever, she no longer sailed about like a stately schooner or a lovely swan, but was always tripping and falling over, so that, under her long skirt, her calves and knees were a mass of bandages, yet she never complained or even bothered about replacing the hastily knotted, swathed handkerchiefs when they slipped down and hung around her ankles. She had bruised her face, too, her now so thin, so translucent face. And the more she breathed and postured and fasted, the heavier, because the more shapeless, her long body seemed to look. Yet with all that, and with all the silly spiritual-sounding words she used, she looked more beautiful every day, more complete, more detached. And not beautiful idiocy, for, though living this life of positions and breathings that appeared to deny any mind, she could still be, whenever she wished, as practical in an academically exact sort of way, as highly intelligent as she had always been—but she didn’t want any of these things, she said, unless what she called “the outer world of seeming” demanded them.

  As now, when she said, “Mother will be sober, Alexandra. No problems there. I just know that. She senses that I am near the end of my disciplines. She is beginning to understand that when I say I’ll go back and teach college—the Metaphysical Milton, even Emblem Books if that’s their thing—I’ll do just that. Only let me do two months of this man’s exercises and I’ll be free to live on my own plane wherever I am. Why! the way I’ll be then, I could teach high school in Dayton, Ohio or Mobile, Alabama or even in lovely California where Mother’s got some atavistic urge to return, and no one will guess that I’m floating way out on my own etheric wave. So if you can’t flood your body with more gentleness and love, please let the so-called facts of the situation stay your fears.”

  Alexandra, as far as she was able to communicate, when seeking not to slide downhill on a mixed surface of sun-glazed sand and time-polished banyan root, and this in the long skirt said to be decreed by the Swami, sought to convey her acceptance of this reassurance of Thelma’s new contented mind. Yet it hardly convinced her, for only yesterday that pathetic old voice had croaked at her, as that trembling old hand crashed down on the dressing-table a glass full of ginger ale, “God blast this lousy liquor! It tastes like sacred cow’s piss! Come to think of it, it probably is. But I’ve got to stay sober, hon, until we’re quit of this God-damned guru. One of these days when these phonies have put Elinor way up into the etheric, she’s gonna get raped in her beautiful trance. I don’t know the law in these parts about rape in the ether, but I know that if it happens, I’m gonna get that guru’s guts. And Elinor’s gonna need me around then too.” It hadn’t sounded like a trusting and contented mind; but, by now, Alexandra had learned that all too often when Elinor said she “just knew”, it was true, she did just know.

  In any case, even if, at this very minute, Oliver was cooing away happily as Thelma, no doubt, fed him on Turkish Delight and Chocolate Corn Flakes and other outrageous foods, that couldn’t really banish all her fears. She couldn’t speak of them, but quite simply she was in dread of what might come by seeing this famous Swami, feared even what he might look like, that he might prove to be one of the “faces” come true. She had felt this absurd fear of him from the first moment that she heard of all these fantastic occult powers that he was said to possess. She had vigorously refused to be drawn into it all. When she accompanied Elinor on the long bus and ferry treks up from Colva Beach to Panaji to stay, in respite from the sand and the ocean, in Thelma’s Portuguese little hotel, she would never go near the Swami’s shrine or hermitage or cell or wherever he hid himself, though Elinor lined up there every day, desperately begging to be admitted to the classes. And now had come this mysterious summons. This Swami, this man with creepy powers, wanted to see her, or so Elinor and Ned insisted; and weakly, to help Elinor, to please Ned, she had agreed.

  Once again, as they at last reached the top of the steep sandy bank and took in the jungle village, or really the sort of suburb among the palms that confronted them, Elinor went straight into her thoughts.

  “I think he only asked to see you to impose another obstacle on me. In part he’s quite right. If his prayanas have half the efficacy, the innerness that I’m sure they do have, he must do all he can to deter idly curious or sloppy-minded people from diluting the classes with their spiritual weakness. In part it’s a bit of his publicity stuff. Making himself scarce, playing hard to get. But I must go to those classes. He knows the techniques; or rather, by now, it’s this Subrindath Rao or one of the other Sadhakas who can do the tricks, not the Austrian Swami himself at all. That’s what makes it such a drag. The disciples won’t allow any
one that hasn’t been accepted by the old man in satsang. But then again that may be just another trial, a sadhana. So one must fulfil what he asks. And thank you for coming.”

  “But how could he possibly know about my existence?”

  “Oh,” Ned, who had joined them, said, “the way he lives and that, he could have knowledge we don’t know of. Like his E.S.P.’s only got to extend into his courtyard to sense my thoughts. And, of course, you’d be in them.”

  He took Alexandra’s hand as rarely these days—and they went, swinging hand in hand, as in the past.

  “Of course he does,” Elinor said, “but that’s not important. It’s the being that matters, not what you do with it. If you’re a Mutra you’re free to be in any place, in any mind and all minds. As I shall be. Then I can teach college or high school or dance strip-tease but that won’t affect my being. Just the same way with him. He may be the avatar of Vishnu or Francis Xavier or who you like, as some say he claims. He may speak telepathically with Atlantean initiates in Tibet or possess all this rumoured Lemurian wisdom older than Atlantis. It’s probably all charlatan rubbish. Or it may not be. It doesn’t matter. That’s all meaning. Meaning doesn’t matter. Only being. That’s the trouble with your mimes, Ned. You want to make meanings.”

  “I don’t agree. In this unco-ordinated, flabby state we’re in now everywhere, any chance, y’know, of sort of super-consciousness’s important. If he’s not a fake, then what he’s done with these disciples, I mean Atlantis and so on, could be just a symbol for some higher knowledge he’s tapped. And we oughtn’t to turn away from it. I shan’t anyway, if he says anything that seems to mean more than all the usual stuff.”

  “But the being is the knowledge, Ned. The other may be true. It probably is. But it doesn’t matter. If you let it matter, it could just get in the way as much as all this.” Elinor waved her hand towards the world of natural objects before them.

  And certainly, Alexandra thought, the real world before them did appear both very impeding and very improbable. So improbable that it prevented her from questioning either Ned or Elinor, for though it was likely that what each had said was nonsense, or at least so it seemed to her, yet Elinor’s fasting and breathing and postures had changed her soul or whatever, even if they looked like killing her body; and if that could happen, a lot more could, things like these stories about this Austrian Swami’s occult powers of healing and so on; and if that, then the faces and all their horrors might be true. She would rather not know, she would not ask.

  And as a matter of fact she could not, for the natural world, whether real or not, in the shape of a heaving, pushing, swaying crowd of people hoping to have audience of the Swami made keeping her arm linked to Ned’s which in turn was linked to Elinor’s, an overriding, all-absorbing concern. She was frightened. All this mass of flesh and clothing and rags and sweat would smother her. All these feet and knees and thighs, elbows and buttocks that kept pushing against her would keel her over, trample her down, pulp her. It had happened so suddenly—first they were in a queue like at a supermarket exit, and now, from pressure behind and blockage ahead, they were in a tumult. She dug her fingers into Ned’s muscley arm, she bit into her own underlip to stop herself from crying like a frightened child. How could Elinor (however tall) have made those daily importuning visits to this heaving mass, how could Ned (however sinewy) have so often escorted her? Her face was buried in the blinding magenta silk of some plump Indian lady’s back, she was stifled with its patchouli scent. Her free arm kept brushing against some sweaty nakedness that, at last, freeing one eye from the billowy magenta-clad rolls of flesh, she could, squinting for a moment, see in close-up as a yellowy, smooth flesh marked with white patches and a horrible puckered scar. Her buttocks were alternately kneed and then rubbed by what she felt to be a vast tautened distended belly. Someone spat red betel like blood on to her grey linen sleeve. She was not now, as for so many past months, a current, a swell in the calming monotony of the ocean’s rocking, but a trough that might at any moment go down, down into the profoundest horror or that might be thrown high into the air, to dissolve in spume. And that wasn’t figurative, she told herself, fearing that this vague symbolic shaping of her thought might be the result of some awakening mass hypnosis; the trough is my body to be pulped into the dusty ground or thrown high and spun apart bleeding in the air by some uncontrollable movement of this human mass. These are bodies, smelly bodies most of them, including mine, there’s nothing of symbol or spirit here.

  But then, as the swaying crowd came to some halt that held it rocking to and fro on the same spot for what seemed minutes, her absolute fright began to lessen—she could feel once again her throbbing toe, fear for its safety, become aware of the dust that filled the air, filled her ears, her nose, her throat, making her splutter and cough, become aware, at last, with a new fear that this turbulent human ocean was not alone flesh but resounding with strange noises that went up and down and deafened and faded like the pounding roar and soft hissing retreat of the ocean. The crowd was never quite silent. Always a murmur.

  Then, from a distance, a sound would pierce the low hum—some howling, of a single madman surely, or of an agonized ecstatic. Now far away on the other side, a high voice was raised in eunuch note, then joined by others in an eerie singing of a Vedic hymn. Now they were chanting the Swami’s name. And now a hundred voices chattered and lilted in what could have been as many tongues—Conakry, Hindi, perhaps Sanskrit, how should she know?—but all, like birds or monkeys, were another race, unconcerned with her, yet infinitely menacing. Starlings in Trafalgar Square at dusk ready to take over the city like in that nasty Hitchcock thing.

  Here and there in all this alien tossing, storming sea came European voices, ridiculous in their familiarity, and in the total powerlessness of their words to protect her against the darkening hostile mass. English, grand and female: “I suppose it’s the extraordinary inversion of the dead-weight of Western logic that refreshes,” and in answer, male, soldierly, yet giving thought and consideration: “I don’t know so much about that. I suspect the real truth is that it has its own strange logic.” German, earnest, female: “But no, Ursula. You are quite mistaken. It is the chatras below the navel with which these asanas are concerned.” American, mid-West, formidably defiant and female: “He says he sees us as so many fountains in a lake. Now where does the petty self lie in that, huh? It’s neat.” And, at last, absurdly, French, and feminine: “Mais non, il m’a demandé dix millions. C’est ridicule. Non, non, Ernestine. Écoute. Je ne m’y mêlerai plus. Entendu?” Alexandra thought of a phrase she had read somewhere which it seemed people had used a lot at some time. “Same here,” she said aloud. And blushed as though she had been detected in folly by the whole vast gathering.

  But embroiled she must be, for suddenly the swaying sea before her began to part. She wondered if, as with the Red Sea, the magenta lady would be cleft in two, but her fatty mass lurched to one side, wobbling. A cream-skinned, handsome, black-moustached, pale young man, in long loose grey linen tunic buttoned from neck to shoe and a black fur-trimmed cap, was bowing before her. They—she and Ned and Elinor—were the Children of Israel and all this neat, miraculous parting of the waters was to make a passage for their entry into the Swami’s presence. “How had this man known where to find them in this dense crowd? His eyes were soft, large and romantically dewy, but his thin pencil-line moustache above his pale thin lips was cruel. What was the special power of knowing that the Swami possessed, and did his handsome disciple share that strange knowledge, since he had been able to find them so exactly?” Well, Alexandra thought, trying to cool it by mockery as much as she could, there’s nothing for it but to “read on”—next episode: “Inside the Sinister Swami’s Cave”. But she couldn’t stop her fast heart-beats and the disturbance in her stomach.

  Her fears were not lessened as they all three passed through the crowd to the low-walled edge of the Swami’s compound. It was magical to her that a great raging se
a of people should stop short, as this one, in an orderly line before a mud brick barrier that came no higher than knee-level, if to that. Yet so it was. Not one wave, not one spray had spilled over into holy ground. “Invisible fuzz,” she whispered. And to her comfort, Ned joined in, “If this gets to Scotland Yard, it’s the end of sit-ins.”

  Their guide voiced that kind of intuitive, tangential answer that so scared her. “The welcome only approach. The unwelcome are as a still ocean. Their stillness also pleases the Swami.” Yet, as he added, “You are welcome,” he did not look as though he had heard, let alone understood, their facetious whispers.

  It was all absurd. Here they were in a suburban garden of the most hideous kind—the cushiony coarse sort of lawn they seemed to have in these hot places a vivid green under the sprinkler’s spray, bright orange marigolds, some other flowers, with cactusy sort of leaves, every rotten colour, but mostly magenta like the fat lady’s dress, and bushes of those bright scarlet and pink and apricot flowers with the long spikes coming so rudely out of the trumpets—all this garish mass against the most awful suburban villa—red brick, set with diamond shapes and things in a kind of bruised purple. She ought surely to feel reassured, particularly when the handsome guide in a voice no longer gnomic but like any casual host said, pointing at the magenta flowers: “The Swami loves all flowers, but especially the Portulaca.”

  She ventured to stimulate her emerging ease by whispering again to Ned, “There ought to be those stone mushrooms that you hear about but never see.”

  And he answered aloud, “He’s certainly achieved a powerful state of unbeauty.”