The Last Gift of the Master Artists, page 26
Except also some young women who were touched by his spirit and fell in love with him for the rest of their lives. They passed on the legend of their adoration, in oblique songs, to their children.
82
THE FIERCE RAINS journeyed on to drier destinations. Normality began to return to the tribe. The people began to sort out their lives and make the best of the devastation. Girls sang and laughter was heard among the flowers. This was when the new pupil, unnoticed by the maiden, decided it was time to reveal his love.
One day he began to speak to her in his mind. He spoke to her dreams. He had learnt from the statues, through stillness and unnoticed oddness, how to appear in people’s dreams. Then, within her dreams, he spoke as himself.
At first she did not notice because she did not pay much attention to her dreams. A backlog of unread messages accumulated in her. Then one night, after sitting in silence in the moonlight, listening to inaudible whispers in the wind, she fell asleep and all the messages and dreams came through all at once. They came in a rush and tumble. This alarmed her.
He went on speaking to her tenderly, taking many forms. Once he was a rose that she was twirling in her hands in a dream. His face appeared on the petals of the rose and he spoke to her. Sometimes he spoke to her as the moon. When she was in a canoe on the river, he was the canoe, or he was the river. When she was riding a lion in a dream, or an antelope, or she was playing with a gazelle, he was the lion, the antelope, or the gazelle.
He was a white bird that she dreamt of which returned often and lay still in her lap. Then circling her head three times, it flew away to a distant star, leaving her quite alone. Sometimes he was just a person she knew in her dreams, a familiar person whom she could not quite place, but one for whom she had a great affection.
Through these forms he spoke to her of their ancient love that went back centuries, born on another planet. He spoke of the brevity of time given them here in which to meet and love and be happy. Brief was the time allotted them, he said. It was less than the time between one moon and another. Then they would be separated till the next time they would meet again, in another realm. And they would have to start all over again learning to recognise their ancient and future love, their great love.
He spoke love verses into her dreams.
When the moon is full
It spreads a light
That is round and cool
All over the land that is you.
That moon is like my love.
Even the air knows this is true.
But my love never wanes like the moon –
My love is not there only at night
That like a ghost is gone before noon.
My love has the power of seven.
My love is the light
And the promise of heaven.
83
SOMETIMES, IN HER dreams, he took her hand and journeyed with her through all the happiest places in the universe. He took her to the stars of ecstasy and the planets of delight and to some of their homelands in faraway galaxies. He showed her their palaces of pleasure, their castles of love, their cities of happiness.
84
WHEN HE WAS not speaking to her in dreams, he arranged anonymous surprises for her when she was awake. Children brought her a bouquet of rare feathers. Strange girls brought her rich brocaded cloth.
When she was musing by the river an old man gave her a single flower that no one had ever seen before, or ever saw again, in the same way. He said the flower came from the stars and that he was a messenger of one who could not be named. The maiden accepted the flower hesitantly and inhaled its fragrance. At that moment something happened in her heart. She was not sure what it was. But suddenly she felt things more clearly.
The fragrance altered the wind. She heard the faintest echo of a melody. The river was calm. She looked and saw that the old man had turned into a mild mist of gold fading in the green cloud of the forest.
The flower would never wilt, never die. Sometimes it became invisible and was lost. But it would reappear again, depending on how she was feeling. That flower, along with her only child, was the legacy she passed on to the next generation.
Every now and again, for a decade, or for twenty years, the flower would be invisible. Then on an auspicious day it would appear in the hands of one of her descendants. When it did it always clarified the heart.
85
THERE WERE OTHER gifts that the new pupil caused to come her way. One morning a beautiful young woman brought the maiden a rare ruby. She claimed it came from the heavens and that she was a messenger from one who could not be named. Another lovely girl, with a dazzling smile and a bright countenance, brought her a pure white stone, not of this earth, and repeated the magic words of the other messengers.
A child dressed in gold brought her a white bowl. When the maiden later ate from the bowl she noticed how well she felt, how contented in body and soul. The bowl somehow enriched her food. She ate little and was not only more quickly satisfied but she also had a sense of unusual spiritual nourishment.
These gifts puzzled and frightened her a little. But she kept her puzzlement and fear to herself. She kept her silence. Not even her curiosity diverted her from her chosen course of delay. She awaited the wisdom of the revealed hour.
86
THEN TIME QUICKENED for the new pupil. Time was hurrying towards the great gaps, pulling him towards martyrdom.
In dreams he spoke of love to the maiden. He spoke of how love saves. But time spoke to him as he sat among the raw wood or rough stone changing into art, changing with the ambiguities of the air. Time and an invisible sheen, vital elements in the atmosphere, pressed into the surfaces of the new carved works.
As they changed from wood into wonder-bearing forms, from stone into enchantment, he changed too. He changed from the new pupil into one who, through gaps in time, would find himself in the hold of a ship. He was bleeding, starving, raw with beatings, and crushed with a thousand others. His ankles and wrists were in metal chains.
He was unable to connect one moment with the other: a life in his own land, a pupil, a prince, free, and then less than an animal, in chains, in a ship bound for hell.
He was snatched more frequently in spirit to that terrible condition. Was it the future or the past? He couldn’t say which it was.
More and more it encroached on him, this martyrdom, the final suffering before his everlasting freedom from the mighty wheel of mortality. More and more he felt the great suffering drawing closer, till he could smell his blood on the chains, smell the stench and the deaths and the agony of the others and their disintegrating flesh all around him in the dark hold of the ship, in a torment that cannot be lived while being lived, and yet cannot be forgotten. Sometimes he wondered if it wouldn’t have been better to have died beforehand, considering what came later.
Among the statues he sent out to the world a message of the heart: ‘Make the most of the happiness in your life; it may be a prelude to something strange.’
In his vision he saw something worse than death, and he lived it. He saw a suffering beyond endurance, but which was endured; the suffering of a people so great that some of its excess had to be endured before and afterwards, in the form of irrepressible happiness.
Then he saw why some peoples had such an extraordinary gift for joy and ecstasies of the spirit: it was the excess left over from the suffering to come and the suffering that has gone. It was the conversion of suffering into moments in paradise while alive, a divine compensation for enduring the unendurable.
87
AMONG THE SHADOWS, the new pupil foresaw the songs in the air and the stones turning into art through time’s alchemy. He foresaw his suffering to come. It was another life; a martyrdom and a crucifixion in time. In that future it occurred to him that man enchained and enslaved and gagged with metal ought to be the symbol of a new religion. Its sacred text ought to reveal how human life was sacrificed to create wealth for others, to the building of civilisations. Its crowning gift the liberation of human beings from all forms of bondage, the exaltation of freedom.
The new pupil found this so, in the dim hold of the ship, with his flesh broken, his bones eaten by the chains, his skin flayed with the lash. The only thing that saved him then, in extreme agony, was the vision that a human being is a vast spirit and a body, a miraculous light surrounding a living mould of flesh and bone.
Enlightenment does not reduce suffering.
88
THE RAINS CAME and went. Time sped on with epic grace; and the contests began. The maiden, in love with one unknown to her, went on delaying. She kept a charming distance from the contests between suitors.
During the rains most of the suitors returned to their homes for the replenishment of their resources and for spiritual fortification. They came back with magic potions and spells and praise-singers and witch-doctors to help them with their campaigns.
The contests were violent and full of wonderful events which the bards elaborated in songs and legends. All over the kingdom these marvels were the stuff of moonlit stories around which children weaved improvisations.
The contests drew great crowds. People came from distant places to witness them. Many forms of fighting and skills of self-defence were displayed. The crowds gazed in awe at the jump-kicks of the Northern suitor, the anaconda wrestling style, sinuous and oily, of the Eastern suitor, the leg-hooking techniques of the suitors from the Southern creeks, and the gyrating swirling style of the Western free-form suitor, who fought to the wild elliptical beat of a sinister and mesmerising talking drum.
There was a suitor who used a curious crab-like stalking technique. There was a thick-set suitor, with a devilishly low centre of gravity, who was as impossible to shift in the wrestling contests as the squat hills around. There was a suitor with legs so baked and dry, master of the art of kick-fighting, that he proved a nightmare to his opponents, whom he kept at a safe distance with the repeated tattoo of peppery kicks to the knees and face. And there was one who crouched like a cougar, who fought like a whirlwind, and moved with the hypnotic rhythm of drumbeats administered by his austere-looking witch-doctor.
The fights were unpredictable, engrossing, and passionate. No one was killed, but many were wounded and bent out of shape and some were disfigured for life.
The contests became legendary, and the Mamba proved the eventual winner.
89
THERE ARE ANCIENT tales where a man is faced with an obstacle that blocks his destiny. He goes into the forest to sleep with the demons of the deep. He wrestles with wild animals and does battle with death. He lives a wild life, alone in the depths of a cave, and then he returns to the world transformed. Sometimes he brings with him fragments of a new religion. Sometimes he returns with a vision. Sometimes he comes back as a witch-doctor, herbalist, or sage.
Something like this had happened to the Mamba.
The Mamba was spooked by the uniqueness of the maiden and the awkward kink in her spirit. He saw that he was being progressively undone as a man. He saw that he was doing it to himself because he was all askew. Finding life impossible in the village, one night he disappeared without a word.
He simply vanished from the life of the tribe. No one knew where he went. No one heard about him for a while. No one speculated about his disappearance either. When he was there he had too much presence. When he wasn’t there he had too much absence. It was a sort of curse. He was not a man that anyone missed.
Then things happened which ought to have been strange but were not seen as such by the wise ones. His father died suddenly one night, after screaming that his heart had been loaned to a shadow.
Not long afterwards his mother died, after wailing that her spirit had been stolen by a shadow. The Mamba did not reappear to bury his parents. He sent no word; he sent no emissaries. His absence at the burial of his parents was not remarked on.
Then his parents’ compound began to be haunted by dark forms that whispered like bats, shadows that stood up straight and walked like real beings and danced in the moonlight.
The rains came and the Mamba’s abode was completely unaffected, but no one remarked on this as strange either. The rains passed and one day, in the middle of the contests, people saw that the Mamba was one of the contestants.
He had returned. It was then that people began to speculate. It was said that he had gone hunting a rare animal with which to amaze the woman who would be his bride, that he had gone seeking unusual powers in the deep dark places of the world. It was whispered that he had traded the lives of his loved ones for invincibility against known and unknown forces, power over the innocence that had spooked him, and that he had gone to acquire magic that would bend the hearts and minds of all people to his will. It was rumoured that he sought mastery over women, and power over that which mysteriously perplexed his desires. It was also said he had gone mad with love and lust and guilt, and had been taken to a deformed herbalist in the hinterland to restore his sanity.
90
WHEN HE REAPPEARED he was darker, fiercer, and more menacing than ever. He was also more silent. He wore black. His eyes had changed. They saw deep things. He had stared into the depths of his own madness and had seen things and was initiated into the new art of the deep and the dark.
Upon his return he was feared more than ever before. The very mention of his name sowed dread and made grown men quake. His very presence made some tremble, made some flee. When they didn’t flee they were rooted to the spot, mesmerised by a terror they couldn’t explain.
When he spoke, people’s minds went blank. He had become truly fearsome, like those spirits who, when they show themselves in war, make armies abandon their weapons and scatter across the plains.
The Mamba reappeared, dressed in black, in the middle of a fight. Before anyone could register the profound change that had come over him, he had beaten up all the contestants in a manner so cruel that the crowds were appalled and fascinated in equal measure.
He had broken the neck of one suitor, cracked the spine of another, and dumped the swirling dervish suitor on his head so roughly that the crowd was stunned by the sound of his head crunching into his body. The Mamba was simply the most brutal contestant among all the suitors.
Oddly enough, many women gasped in admiration whenever he appeared. They secretly wanted him to win. When he did win husbands were dismayed, but some of the women rejoiced. It was said that he had mastered the secret of women’s hearts, their deepest desires.
When he won the contest people wondered what would happen next. They wondered what the maiden would do.
91
IT WAS SIMPLE. She refused to recognise the validity of the contests. She decreed that whoever told her the best story and the finest dream and solved the riddle of the shadow would win her hand.
Time was quickening for some but slowing down for others. Time was running out in the land.
The new pupil continued speaking to the maiden in her dreams. The dreams made her happy. She looked forward to sleep and its fragrance of wild roses. She lingered by the river, turning over in her mind the delightful elusiveness of her dreams. If only she could grasp them clearly and understand them, she thought, she would know what she needed to know and would be happy.
She spent her keenest hours by the river, gazing into the blue of sky and the gold of heaven. Puzzling out those fragments of verse, those images, gave her a strange sense of contentment.
In all this self-absorption she still didn’t notice the new pupil. Sometimes an invisible hand would deliver a sign to her, in the form of a carving. It prompted odd thoughts in her mind. Sometimes she would catch the glimpse of a face – familiar, frail, and beautiful, a gladdening image in a dream. She would blink and the face would be lost in a crowd. Sometimes a voice would reach her heart and she’d jump. Then she would wonder whether she was awake or whether she was by the river, where a god had once spoken to her. Then she would ponder the injustice she had done by forgetting.
Sometimes, in a reverie, a voice tender with great understanding, and light as a feather, would whisper odd words into her soul. The words pierced her with sweet fire.
Time is not with youth;
Time is with truth.
And she would fall headlong into a waking dream, where carvings spoke and statues danced and a white horse, of dazzling beauty, beckoned her with mischievous eyes to take a ride to paradise.
92
MAYBE SHE WAS too young to notice what she saw. She only noticed much later, in another land, in the burning heat of the difficult years. Then, looking back, she saw what she should have seen, what was obvious to see, but which she hadn’t seen.
93
SHE WAS TOO young to realise how fortunate she was. She was loved and lucky and blessed and watched over. She didn’t know that brief was her hour of glory, her blessedness, living in beauty in the land of art.
She was too young to notice things. She saw only dreams and ideals and hopes. She lived in a vapour of time. She didn’t see evils looming. She didn’t see the contests. She didn’t notice the Mamba. She loved her parents more than she noticed them. She loved her land more than she noticed it. She loved its skies, its hills, the women, the mass of faces, the smells. She loved her father’s workshop, the shrine, the forest, the farms. She loved the river where she dreamt and played. She loved them more than she noticed them.
It was only later that they became so real. It was only later when she had irredeemably lost them all. Only later did she learn to see that which she had loved in the blur of her being.
94
SHE WAS TOO young to notice that when the new pupil smiled the sun lingered in his smile long after he had left the person he was greeting. She was too young to notice how quickly the smile vacated the faces of most people who had just left off talking to her.
