As if by Magic

by Angus Wilson

  Behind it all was the fear that she had walked by chance into a world which was poisoned at source. It was all childish, of course, their secrets and their magic. It was their techniques that concerned her. But she found herself increasingly frightened of where this childishness would end—this boy’s death, what more? It has absolutely nothing to do with me, she told herself again and again—the obscene, the secret, the furtive were all infantile obsessions that tied the spirit to this illusory world. But still it nagged and nagged. She took to walking by the Mandovi river-bank all night in her long blue-grey chiffon gown with her black hair falling about her spectre-white face. People ran from her as they did from Thelma who in her daily walks in her eccentric clothes was avoided as a powerful witch. She visualized herself all too easily, and with bitter laughter that was all too earthly, as a sort of Beardsley drawing at large, Salome, Medusa, a vampire. Sometimes in her confusion she wondered if indeed she was in some way infected with all this childish evil, destined like Kali only finally to assuage her terrible thirst in blood that ran from the mouths of children. They would finish in Greenwich Village or Tenderloin, she and Thelma, two terrible old Gothic horrors.

  But all the time her thirst and hunger created other images, so simple and absurd, so un-Gothic that she could hardly bear the silly juxtaposition of images. She dreamed hour after hour of sitting down in a Howard Johnson motel, Holiday Inn, or Regency Hyatt, around her the décor would change from Pompadour and mirrors to Hispanesque and leather work to Western and Totem Poles, whispering, haunting muzak would merge from “La Donna è Mobile”, to “Red Roses for a Blue Lady, Mr. Florist take my order please”, unalimonied or widowed waitresses dressed in younger and younger aprons and bobby sox would grow older and older, more tired, more match-stick-legged, more desperately lipsticked, but Elinor Tarbett ate and ate on and on in an ecstasy of hunger relieved—spare ribs would vanish in an instant, tossed salads with archipelagos of thousand-island dressings would be engulfed as by earthquakes, filet mignon could never be so tender, while blue-berry pie crowned with pecan ice-cream was washed down by gallons of coffee. The haunting obsession, so banal, so ludicrously atavistic, was so strong sometimes that she would run along the riverside over sand and stone, through mud, avoiding now hippie sleepers, now outcast camp-fires, now the derelict, now the criminal, now the amorous, until she was so exhausted that she fell down and slept where she lay.

  But one night—not to lie, assuredly, not to sleep. To be held and stretched and stripped by tearing, violent excited forceful hands, to struggle and fight against the pain, the sheer driving, scraping, tearing wounds of these fierce, animal, exploding entries; to die and die again at the biting of her lips, the breaths of every hot nauseating herb that had assailed her since she first landed at Bombay airport. How many of these men there were she did not know, nor who they were; she could only smell their sweat, feel their bristles, their rags, taste their saliva, know the power of strength twisting her arms, forcing her legs apart. Ask no questions and you’ll hear no lies. She had lain for days afterwards in Thelma’s hotel room, preferring not to speak, and authority was glad not to hear. It could have been, as many were to say, devotees of Kali, or enraged untouchables, or lustful youths; it could have been, as many were to say, not she at all who had suffered on those caked, sun-split mud-flats. So much was delirium at the time, as for example the long-remembered, destructive minutes’ joy she had known when, in her hallucination, she had thought she had felt and smelt Ned taking her. But what remained for days was the sheer physical pain. That pain from which at the time she had fainted, which, when she came to alone there on the evil-smelling mud with the roar of the bull-frogs drowning her senses, was so ghastly, so frightening that, twisting her chiffon rags around her, she had crawled on all fours up the embankment, along the street, trailing blood behind her, banishing as she went the shadowy figures of late-night loiterers who feared to be involved.

  She had fainted again at the foot of the Faria statue, recumbent like the high-born Brahmin lady; she had come to and seen the enormous figure of the Swami bending over her, arms outstretched, endowing her probably with that animal magnetic fluid that the metal figure of the Abbé above them was emitting in the eternal thaumaturgy of art to the prostrate Indian lady. But the Swami had not seemed a healer to her at the time, rather the culmination of a long nightmare. She gathered all her strength to save herself from this last mortal violation, all her rags to cover the poor self-induced meagreness of her naked body, and had run through the empty streets to be admitted by an alarmed porter and to lie all night in Thelma’s thin, bony but loving arms.

  Streets are never quite empty, however; casements never wholly closed. Soon it was known that a woman had been raised from the dead. Some said by the statue itself. Some, by the Abbé returned to life. Most, by the Austrian Swami, who, after all, was the Abbé returned, who after all was Akbar, who after all was St. Francis, who after all was Parasirama the sixth avatar of Vishnu and the founder of Goa, who after all was Vishnu himself. For the followers of the Swami, wanderers, foreigners, Vishnuvites, Hindus of all kinds, Catholics, even Moslems, the miracle had happened.

  But soon other stories gained ground. A high-born Catholic lady of Brahmin descent coupled with a high Portuguese lineage who, in the proper tradition of both her ancestral lines, seldom stirred from home, had been ravished by evil, magical means. More prosaically, a Hindu Brahmin lady in purdah had been assaulted by a low-caste fisherman. A Moslem lady of high birth in harem had been violated by who knew what? Followers of Kali were abroad, Saktas, practisers of terrible rites. The Swami was in league with foreign witches.

  One thing seemed certain to the poor and the hungry, Vishnu had come once more, but this time to bring them succour, and those in power were denying him, as the powerful had also sent away the giant rice god, bearer of fertility, who had come to bring fertility to the dispossessed.

  There was no end to the rumours which the authorities could ignore or refute equally at their peril.

  *

  It was Saturday and the fountains were alight at the Brindavan Garden—up they shot and cascaded down like fireworks without alarms, electric blue, verdigris green, methylated violet, strawberry-ice pink, golden yellow and, above all, blood-red. Behind their dazzling playing could be heard always the background dull roar of the great Krishnaraja Sagar Dam. Along the avenues, between formal beds and the fountain, strolled, in the warm evening air, the wealthy Indian bourgeoisie—the ladies wore saris that equalled, indeed outdared the brilliant colours of the fountains, and their pretty heads of jet-black hair were decorated with hibiscus and frangipani and bobbed a little as they avoided the flying ants lured to the lighted fountains in which they were to burn. The ladies chattered like a flock of birds. The men were in dark suits and club-striped ties, talked gravely of business but with expansive gestures. The little girls in party-dresses of pink and blue satin frilled out with many princess petticoats were like so many jeunes filles en fleurs. The little boys, all white socks, bare knees and white shirt blouses, were like so many Marcels, all making an infernal din with click-clacks. And, overlooking them, on the terrace of the luxurious hotel, the foreign tourists, eager to get back to the real India of the temples and the mosques, of the rice-fields, the bazaars, the city slums or the protected tigers, passed their “free evening” advertised in the package-tour itinerary, an evening of postcard-writing, bargain-comparing, catching up with the Herald Tribune or Le Figaro.

  Into this lounge of tourist parties, at about a quarter past six one evening, came Hamo to drink a pink gin (Mysore State, thank God, was not dry) before his shower and changing for dinner, to rest a little after a day of report-writing; to make the agonizing decision which reports to send, with what emphasis in priorities, and with what accompanying letter to Sir Alec.

  Reclining in a cane chaise-longue—long enough for once to accommodate his legs—he found the scene before him so absurd, so pantomimic, so utterly remote from
all the horrors that had haunted him increasingly since Tokyo, that he felt sure that here he would make a balanced, sane decision, would send a balanced, sane report to Sir Alec and his colleagues which would finally efface the unfortunate hysteria of some of his remarks to the Press in the recent weeks. These Indians that he could see now were like children, children at an endless Victorian children’s party, they gave reassurance that the little crippled match-sellers and the blind flower-girls were the figments only of a “temperature”, of a feverish chill from which he was at last recuperating. Even the tourist voices around him seemed at first reassuring, for idleness and travel had bred in him a curious new habit of listening to what strangers said, of observing people at random.

  Two middle-aged French women were comparing the relative prices of saris in Mysore and in Bangalore. An English lady was telling her uninterested daughter that she felt sure that the rest-house at Trivandrum was the one in which Uncle Derek had killed a cobra all those years ago—“I quite see that it’s very uninteresting,” she said, “and God knows the old boy told the story until one could scream, but it isn’t altogether easy to find subjects that don’t bore you, Angela, you know.” Some Italians in excessive beach-wear and strange little orange jockey-caps were recounting with a great deal of laughter, as far as Hamo could tell from his knowledge of their tongue, how an elephant had screamed when it had been badly wounded in collision with a lorry. A German couple were making earnest note of the delightful package tour that a Swedish couple had taken, a tour which comprised the health-giving proportion of eleven days sun-bathing to three of sight-seeing instead of their own where the proportions were reversed: “Ach, so. That is a real winter tour, to lay up the good sunshine,” the German wife cried in delight. It was the endless rumbling of a stout, dowdy American matron’s voice that finally held him captive. She was holding equally captive a more sophisticated smart-looking couple of her compatriots, or rather the wife only, for as she talked, the husband gave more and more attention to the stock-market columns of the Herald Tribune.

  “Did you ever teach school?” the rumbling voice said. “Well, that’s the way it is with my villagers. You don’t tell them. That way they’re sure to act contrary. No. You question and suggest. I remember about five years ago. The rains came out of season. I’ve known it before in the jungle. As the rain poured down day after day—and it rains some here when it rains—I could see what was going to happen. The bunds would burst their banks, the paddy-fields would be flooded, the crops would be ruined. But my villagers sat there in that damned despair that just holds them. And did nothing. Nothing. Not even the old headman and he’s a pretty good old fellow. So I would throw out a remark here and a remark there—‘Of course, I’m so ignorant, I should start getting scared and start building up that bund against floods. But then I know nothing.’ You know, I played the poor, innocent little ingénue. At my age! But it worked. Three days later the headman and some others came to me. ‘We’re going to build up the bund,’ they said. ‘Why! For Lord’s sakes!’—my mother was raised in Georgia and it comes back when I am excited—‘that sounds a wonderful idea.’ And it was. They worked four nights and days on it and the crop was saved. Yes. Children. That’s what they are.”

  “And you’ve given twenty years of your life to working with those people. They certainly must love you.”

  “They do and they don’t. They’re human.”

  “But the Indian Government . . .”

  “Oh, the Government are very suspicious of all we do. We’re American, you know.”

  The other lady sighed. And they remained silent for a while.

  The silence roused the husband from his newspaper. He made an effort to be polite.

  “You’ve lived here all these years. Can’t you explain to them that they ought to get these beggars off the streets? All around and over the automobiles in the villages. That’s no good for tourism.”

  “But, Harry, it’s just this awful poverty that this lady’s been explaining . . .”

  “No, no, the man’s right. Anyhow we’re not so darned rich, are we? But, you see, to those people you come there with the car and the chauffeur like a Rockefeller fallen out of the sky. Many of them are near starving.”

  The man said, “God! Isn’t it awful? The eyes of these people looking into the window of the automobile. One poor sick kid. And an old guy. Guess I shan’t sleep tonight thinking of those poor God-damned starving folk.”

  It could have been that this volte-face was made to put an end to the conversation; but it could have been a real switch of feeling, a sudden overpowering indulgent sentimentalism. As such, it was to Hamo a terrible parody of his own gradual change of emotions during his stay in Asia. I must scrap the whole idea of Report B, he thought; it’s the product of an hysteric emotionalism which has no place in scientific work. In which case I shall send letter A with Report A.

  He read through the two alternative letters to Sir Alec that he had written to accompany whichever report he finally sent in. The letter A he would now post read:

  Dear Sir Alec,

  As you will see from the accompanying report, I have covered in my travels the rice research institutes of Louisiana and California (unfortunately I was not able to visit the rice-fields of Arkansas), of Japan, of Northern Australia, and of Los Baños, Philippines. I have noted (Appendix A) a number of techniques in hybridization that I think we might study seriously; I have also outlined some of the techniques in plant physiology and biochemistry that appeared to my unspecialized eye to offer new lines of approach.

  I have also inspected in much greater detail the work being done in the South-East Asian and Indian peninsular countries, where the hybrid Magic dominates rice culture. There have been deficiencies in understanding and application which I trust that I have been able to put right (Appendix B). There are also certain local problems, many incidentally with a wider scientific interest, where I think we should offer assistance (Appendix C). I have ventured to list (Appendix D) a number of individuals, mostly assistants or postgraduates, who struck me as having exceptional ability and I have suggested that they could profitably be invited to work for a year or so with our staff. I have also (Appendix E) made recommendations for the providing of certain expensive equipment to laboratories in those areas where I believe that it would materially further the work in hand, and, perhaps more important, where, with Watton’s expert advice, I estimate that there is a technical staff capable of employing such equipment profitably. My real work, I feel, now lies ahead of me, in Pakistan and Africa where I shall try to assess exactly what is required for the “crash programme” (I use your expression) that we are to carry out on the adaptability to varying soil conditions and the potential improvement of yield and nutritive qualities of sorghum.

  I hope that Lady Jardine is in good health and that you had the usual “lucky” weather for your family summer holiday on Mull.

  Yes, it would do. But he could not bring himself to destroy letter B. Even among these happy childish lights and colours, these tourist trivialities, wan, peaked, beautiful faces pleaded not to be thrown on to the rubbish-heap of the hopeless.

  The American, looking up from his paper, said, “Well, that’s Goa out of our schedule. See this headline story in the British Times? I’m not taking you where there’s danger of riot.”

  “I should think not. Anyway, what in heaven is Goa?”

  The rumbler explained, “It’s a famous ex-Portuguese colony. They were worse than the British. It’s all this heritage of colonialism that makes our work here so difficult. There’s no trust. I certainly shouldn’t go there. Well, for heaven’s sake, what are they rioting about in Goa?”

  “Oh, some crap about a rice god. A giant that was going to bring fertility or something to the crops, who turns out to be, would you believe it, some tall British scientist And now he’s disappeared and the poor bastards think he’s being kept from them.”

  “Oh, that’s so typical. But all the same, I don
’t think you should go there.”

  “Why, make sure of that! Don’t take any notice of him—he’s just kidding. This Goa thing never was on our itinerary, I’m sure.”

  Hamo, in a few short strides, had reached the reception desk. At least, if by his unconsidered, self-indulgent blabbing to the Press he had misled these poor men into believing that he could help, he must have the courage to go there and show them the god that had failed.

  As he arranged his air passage to Dabolim for the next morning, a reception clerk handed him a parcel with Indian stamps. Taking it back to the table, he unpacked, to his great surprise, his binoculars in their case. He read, with apprehension, the accompanying letter from that very efficient young Indo-Portuguese lady receptionist at the Panaji Hotel:

  Dear Sir,

  These binoculars stamped with your name were found by the police in the possession of a youth who was murdered here last Tuesday night. It is presumed that they were stolen from you. If you can inform the police here of any circumstances connected with their loss, your information will be gratefully received since investigation into the murder is proceeding.

  There followed a sentence that appeared to come from a shocked heart:

  I fear that the murdered boy stole these glasses from you for the purposes of lewd viewing.

  We have at all times the pleasure to be your obedient servants . . .

  Hamo went up to his room. He took out Reports A and B. He destroyed with some difficulty the bulky copies of Report A. He took downstairs the two copies of Report B and attached to one, with a paper clip, letter B, which read: