As if by Magic

by Angus Wilson

  *

  Thelma, grinding the gears of the old Peugeot and cursing as they rattled along the winding river-road to old Goa, caught the sounds of shouting behind them, and said: “I think there’s trouble in the town.”

  Alexandra said immediately, “They’ve killed Hamo,” then she added, “no, that’s superstitious.”

  Thelma said, “He’s a bit old for you, isn’t he, hon? And he looks as though he’s had a lot of women in his day. Those British officer types. They’re pretty wooden, you know. They were the skunks that made Munich.”

  Alexandra didn’t understand, so she searched for a piece of wood to touch for herself and for Hamo, but there wasn’t a scrap, everything was plastic or chromium in these bloody motor cars. They drove by field after field of young bright yellow-green rice.

  “God, it’s fertile,” Thelma said, looking suddenly young and happy, “And that fucking Senator thinks I’m gonna cash in my chips!”

  But, as they came towards old Goa, the road became more and more choked with pilgrims pouring in towards the Bom Jesus and the Cathedral. Everywhere on the side of the road, gay, pious family parties were making their morning meal like week-end picnickers, before setting off to line the processional route. Everywhere there was the smell of wood smoke and the nose-prickling scent of curry cooking.

  About two miles from the once great, now almost deserted city, they turned off the road by a jungle track, according to Elinor’s vague directions; and now there was no chance of smashing on anything, for the car, under Thelma’s random control, jumped and reared like a steer in a comic Western. Alexandra held on tight to the peeling chromium grab-handle, yet even so she wrenched her arm badly and twice hit her head on the roof hard enough to see stars. And suddenly, there, in a clearing in the scrub, sat the Swami, all alone, cross-legged on a small outcrop of rock. He sat so still that Alexandra could see that the lizards were basking and darting round his bare feet. The expression on his solar face was one of absolute and desperate emptiness. He seemed not to hear their approach.

  “Stop,” she said to Thelma. “I must go and speak to him alone.”

  “Well, for God’s sake! I don’t want to go near the brute.”

  Thelma braked so suddenly that Alexandra, who had opened the door in her eagerness to try out the scheme that had come to her, fell from the car on to a prickly plant and scratched her knees.

  Bleeding she came up to him. “It’s all left you, hasn’t it?” she said, praying that this inspiration should prove the right one.

  For a moment the Swami looked bewildered by her appearance; then he frowned angrily; then, as suddenly, he nodded.

  “The Lemurians have gone beyond our reach,” he said. “No powers, not even mine, can arrive at them. But I am sure that this is only a temporary division. I need more spiritual energy but my reserves are for the present exhausted. Später . . . aber später ist zu spät. The crisis is upon us.”

  Alexandra sat down by his side. “You simply must be patient,” she said. “You must wait until you feel your powers have been renewed, even if it is many weeks. Nothing is ever gained by impulsive action.”

  She thought of Hamo’s words, but she recognized that she was speaking to the Swami in exactly the words and tone she had always intended to use with Oliver when he grew older. Her only fear now, as she had expected then, was that she might spoil all by laughing.

  “But my followers,” the Swami asked, “they are asking for a sign. I gave them a sign, or the good Abbé did so by raising the Brahmin woman from the dead, but now there is no more response from the Lemurian sages. Can it be that I have made false measurements, false computations of their high places? What is the distance from Madagascar to Macao? Perhaps you can help me with this.”

  He seized Alexandra’s arms eagerly. She had difficulty in not shuddering and drawing away at his touch, but controlling herself, she said:

  “These things cannot be done in haste, Swami.” Her brain now appeared to be concocting faster than her tongue could follow. She had a strange sensation that all her life she had been preparing for exactly this situation.

  “Do you want me to say what I believe?”

  Something in the old man’s panic combined with her sudden appearance gave him trust in her.

  “Yes. Yes.”

  “Very well. I believe that you have not sufficiently mastered the Atlantean sciences in their own realms so that you can oppose the true use of Atlantean knowledge against the false uses made by the Himalayan siddhas.”

  “Quite on the contrary. I have studied the Atlantean sciences for many years.”

  She followed her own desperation, wondering how soon she would blunder. “But you have never made your own measurements. You have never described for yourself the conjunctions at Avebury.”

  She had tripped up here, for, looking at her cunningly, he said, “You know nothing of it all, do you?”

  “No, but something is speaking through me. Something that frightens me. First you must go to Avebury and Glastonbury.”

  For a moment both his panic and his dignified belief in himself seemed to disappear. He was all cheap cunning. “And you will urge Sir James Langmuir to give me his assistance?”

  She said, “I’ll consider it very closely. I’ll talk to my godfather, his great-nephew. He’s here in Goa.”

  The Swami laughed scornfully. “I know that. He can do nothing. Anyway he will be dead soon. They will kill him.” Alexandra was seized with such a shivering that her teeth chattered, but luckily the Swami was preoccupied with allowing his belief and his dignity to flow into him again.

  “Meanwhile,” he said with a tragic air, “I must allow this deathful peace of the vile Himalayans to continue? No, I can’t do that. It will be to betray my trust. I must try to force these Lemurian rays through myself . . .”

  “And if you fail?”

  “Then when my followers open the magus Francis’s coffin, there will be nothing but dust. But if my powers are replenished, the body will be there miraculously intact, as it was for two centuries, until the Himalayan siddhas acting through the Jesuits brought it to corruption.”

  “But even so, the Jesuits, the Catholic faithful will never forgive you for violating the tomb. They will have you arrested.”

  “Have me arrested?” The Swami laughed. “My dear foolish little person, if I have the Lemurian powers, all the forces of the Roman Catholic Church, all the Moslems, and all the followers of Vishnu, all the soldiers and all the police can seek to destroy me—and they will—but they can do nothing, nothing.”

  “And if, as you suspect, your powers fail and there is nothing but dust?”

  “Ah, then! Then I am afraid, for my own followers will turn on me. And you know, most of them are crazy people. Oh, not the little redbeard. Do you know that he is teaching them dances while we wait for the procession? Dances! these crazy people! And some few others are all right. There are young Indian men in the other group waiting on the other side of the old city who are sane. They believe in my powers but with the humour and scepticism that are necessary in all occult matters. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes, I think I do. Well, we must rely on them.”

  “But they are so few. And the rest—Indian, European, American, all alike are absolutely mad. They will tear me in pieces if their hopes are lost—can you say that in English—‘hopes are lost’? And in a very cruel way.”

  The Swami began to cry hysterically. At the same time Thelma hooted from the Peugeot impatiently. Alexandra made a decision.

  She walked over to Thelma whom she found drinking out of a whisky-bottle. “I’ve got to get that Swami away,” she said, “But I must see Ned first. Will you look after the Swami while I do that?”

  “Will I do what? I’m not sitting with any fucking guru.” Looking at the bottle, Alexandra saw that Thelma had drunk nearly three-quarters in the short time they had been there. After so many weeks’ abstinence, the effect was nearly lethal. Thelma was both confus
ed and quarrelsome. “Phooey to you and your guru! This civil war’s a load of crap. How in the hell you dare to bring me into it, I don’t know. I was in the Barcelona thing, real stuff.” She began to cry. “I’m going home to my little baby Elinor.”

  Manœuvring the car with explosive noises and roller-coaster jerks she almost ran over Alexandra, smashed the left headlamp on a tree, and took off at high speed in full rodeo form for the main road.

  Alexandra went back to the Swami. Taking out of her air-line bag her old beige felt hat with the mauve streamers, and stretching the crown to tearing point, she forced it onto his bald head.

  “Stay there until I come back.”

  Astonishment seemed likely to cause him to obey. He looked so funny, but she stopped herself from laughing. She knew then that she had brought the right clothes.

  The next step proved more difficult. Edging her way through the mangrove swamp she came upon the extraordinary sight of a large body—fifty or so—of the Swami’s followers—of every kind from Shivites, American ladies in saris, learned occultists from France and Germany, Indians of various eccentric beliefs in their special eccentric religious get-up, some old-fashioned hippies, an English retired major, an academic maiden lady or two, some red-faced central-European gentlemen of middle age in boy-scout dress—all intent under Ned’s leadership in dancing “Batteries”. Scratch, scratch, crow, crow, strain, strain, they went. Ned was clearly in seventh heaven, and it was not easy to bring him down to earth, especially to detach him without breaking up the dance. When she achieved this, the others danced on hypnotically.

  Persuading him was less difficult.

  “Well, I’m not, like, surprised, y’know. But it seemed worth following. I mean you know like the Seekers in the seventeenth century. I mean we’re looking for a sign, aren’t we? And who’s to know, the Swami might have been the vessel. But I’m not surprised that he isn’t. Well, are you? Anyway, does it matter if there are riots? I mean about this deathful peace, that he is right about. That we’ve always agreed about.”

  “Yes, but this time, really, truly, lots of people, ordinary, not bad people will be killed. Elinor would say it too. I mean if she could be here.”

  “Ordinary people! Then they’ve asked for it. I mind more about you. All right. I’ll keep them dancing.” He smiled suddenly. “Don’t know that I could stop them actually. They’re sort of hypnotized, I think.”

  She loved him so for this that she kissed him. Then she ran back to the Swami.

  Getting her old fox and lamb coat on to him was more difficult. There would be no point in splitting it. At last she simply put it round his shoulders, and taking the long mauve chiffon ribbon from the hat she used it as a sash to tie round his waist. He looked something of a bundle. But after all, Toad had had to escape as an old woman, and what was good enough for Toad . . . She powdered his face and painted it with Thelma’s bright scarlet lipstick until he looked like some semblance of Thelma herself swollen to bursting point in a distorting mirror. Below the coat his white gown hung down, and, below that, his dainty feet were bare. Into his hand she put a forgotten old pair of shoes with diamanté high heels that she had found in Thelma’s cupboard.

  “There now, you’ll do,” she said, “I’m sure no one’s ever worn fox and lamb who was more suited to the combination. Ned’s keeping that lot dancing. What about the other group? When will they move in on the procession?”

  But there was no answer from the Swami. He just goggled at her through all his paint and powder from under his Ascot hat.

  It was all she could do to keep him moving; he was a barrel-like old woman, the kind that rolls when she walks because her thighs are so fat. When they reached the high road there was such a pressure of happy pilgrims that they could not go against the stream back into Panaji, but must flow towards the ruined city.

  And there it was: the churches, the towers, the domes, the cool stone, the symmetries and the fantasies of the West still defying, after centuries, the natural disorder, the vegetable greed of the tropical jungle. It was so incredibly beautiful that Alexandra felt ashamed—ashamed that she had never in all these weeks thought to come here, ashamed that she knew so little of the visual arts that for the life of her she could only say that it was all probably baroque, no, that doorway was certainly older—Renaissance, could it be, here in the Indian jungle?—and a tower looked Byzantine which was obviously nonsense. She knew nothing, nothing, had cultivated no visual sense, none of the knowledge that could give what she saw, as she could what she read, a fuller dimension. And for what she read, how much for all her two one in English, did she care? Ten, twenty books, and those all in the English tradition. Her life was running away, being in absurd plots like this Swami’s one, and in Oliver. But there must be some centre more than the chance muddle of people.

  She tried to be practical. She said aloud, “I shall have to do publisher’s reading. You see I must be at home to work for the next year or two because of Oliver. I don’t believe in these crèches.”

  The Swami goggled at her.

  They must have come to a halt among a band of the most pious of Panaji, for women in bright rainbow saris appeared to recognize the eccentric old American woman. They peered at her with curiosity, some even showed pleasure at seeing her there, but most looked away from her with superstitious fear. A smartly dressed Indian gentleman in European clothes even addressed the supposed Thelma.

  “Madam, you are welcome. We had no knowledge that you were a Catholic. You should have been here in 1952. Then the papal legate came here and three archbishops and seventeen bishops. Today I fear there will only be one archbishop and four bishops.”

  But Thelma‒Swami still only goggled.

  “Ah,” said the man, “they are coming. You hear the Te Deum. My little grandson Paolo is among the two hundred choristers.”

  The chanting made Alexandra want to cry. And the beauty of the procession. The white surplices and the white of the priests’ robes against the gaily coloured crowd. The monks, brown, black, white—she didn’t even know one from another—Dominicans, Franciscans, Benedictines, and what were Capuchins like? Of black, brown and white races she knew nothing. And all the gold in the banners and in the great mitres and the silver croziers of the two or three, were they bishops or archbishops? And all those in purple, who could they be? Cardinals, perhaps, but then the man would have told of such grandees. Monsignori? But surely they only had purple stockings. Many of the priests had long white beards, and others were so young that they seemed like girls. The older choristers were swinging great silver things from which incense filled the air, joining the savoury smells of the pilgrims’ cooking. And all the time singing—high high trebles, and then the deepest bass. Suddenly everyone was on their knees, the Swami, too, and his hand was on her shoulder forcing her down. He was crossing himself and muttering or chanting—it was hard to tell which.

  “Es ist das heilige Sakrament,” he whispered. “Wissen sie, ich bin in Salzburg geboren. Ich bin katholisch getauft.”

  And now the procession was reaching its end with more choristers and a long, long line of nuns.

  At once from far beyond the crowd on the other side there came shouting and a chant of another kind, a monotone, to Alexandra an eerie note. To Swami‒Thelma’s ear electric in its effect.

  “Shiva,” he whispered, “and Durga. But they have no power. There will be no renewal as I hoped, only destruction. Now it will only be a foolish blasphemy.”

  Once again inspiration engulfed Alexandra. I’m wasting my life, she thought, but I am good at plotting, and she spoke loudly to the well-dressed Indian gentleman.

  “The American lady must have air, please. She is fainting. Please help me.”

  He seemed to enjoy the officious action of clearing a path and when the people saw the vast bizarre, tottering figure that Alexandra with the greatest difficulty supported on her arm, they made a clearing, partly out of natural submission to an authoritative voice, partly from
superstitious fear of the witch. As they made their way through, men, women and children alike earnestly crossed themselves.

  When they reached the procession, the nuns who were passing at that moment held up their march to let them through. There was more difficulty in making a path through the crowd on the other side, where some alarm had already broken out at the distant Shivite chanting. They were jostled, bruised and scratched. But at last they were free of the crowd. The Swami strode hastily away, past the back of the Cathedral, past an enormous splendid palace. Clambering through scrub and over ruins of vast mansions, they passed under a great arch, and there, by the river-bank, was drawn up the Swami’s other group.

  At first when the Swami spoke, there was such astonishment at his costume that he was greeted with silence, but, as he continued, there was an increasing, swelling, angry roar. The naked yellow-barred Shivites, true and false, began a menacing, swaying movement towards them. A long, thin-faced tow-bearded Scandinavian in pince-nez and white linen gown cried: “This is not our Swami, this is not Sant Sarada. It is some evil emanation, some elemental raised by the magic of the Himalayans. Let us say our spells.”

  All, Indian and European, began to advance on the Swami, chanting.

  Alexandra could feel already the agonies of her coming death—she thought of Oliver, she thought of Hamo. Then suddenly a memory of Little Dorrit, of Mr. Pancks exposing the old fraud Casby to the tenants of Bleeding Heart Yard by cutting off his patriarchal locks, came back to her. She pulled the beige hat from off the Swami’s head, trusting that the absurdity of his appearance would make her laugh and that her laughter would prove infectious. After all, he had said that among the young Indian followers were men with humour.

  With his great goggling face and bald head, the rouge and lipstick running with sweat, he seemed to her like the pumpkin man. It worked. She began to laugh hysterically.