Orpheus on the Underground and Other Stories, page 15
IX
I Meet the Bridge of Sighs
Right across Italy I stumbled, my anxiety increasing with each unsure step. I was not happy, I was not sad, I was in no single mood, no balanced state of mind, my metaphorical heart was in a turmoil unfathomable to my reason. I regret the entire venture now, but at the time I assumed the promise of love was to blame for everything. I paused before entering Venice proper to wash myself in one of the deeper canals. Hesper had decked my arches with white and red flowers. To this very day I cannot decide whether his efforts in this regard were touching or cruel.
I remember turning a corner and finding myself in the Piazza San Marco, the heart of Venice, or bladder, bearing in mind the watery nature of the city, with the Campanile standing before me and the Palazzo Ducale on my left. I knew from Hesper’s instructions that the Bridge of Sighs was close. Just one more corner. . . . I held my intangible breath the whole way. I shouldered aside citizens and tourists. Then suddenly she was there! My yearned-for darling, a beauty of good age and breeding. . . . Or was she? Something was wrong. But what? I stepped closer and blinked. . . .
She was male! Without doubt.
What a disappointment! What an outrage!
Not only that! The Bridge of Sighs was also an ignorant poltroon, an old sagging servant of the State, a grey dismal length of constriction, the very opposite of a free spirit! I had been tricked by a romantic name. The ‘sighs’ in question had nothing to do with lovers’ moons, kissing, fondling, bliss or wistfulness. No, they were the sighs of condemned men shuffling over the canal between the palace and the prisons. I could hear these unfortunates passing across but I felt no sympathy for them, only for myself, yet I took care to listen to their complaints.
‘I’ll never know the taste of coffee again!’
‘I’ll never say goodbye properly to my favourite cat!’
‘I’ll never ride one of those new inventions lately popular in France that have two wheels and a saddle.’
‘I’ll never smoke weird herbs and dance away the night on beaches again, not that I ever did, but all the same. . . .’
‘Who will polish my vizcaina when I’m gone?’
‘Who will water my plants?’
‘Who will use me now as a character in a novel—apart from in a tiny and nameless cameo role?’
‘I’ll never borrow my best friend’s identity ever again!’
‘I’ll never say I’ll never again!’
‘Yes, you might. Say it now, if you like.’
‘It doesn’t feel right.’
‘Who will bring an end to this list of complaints?’
Not the sort of sighs I was expecting at all. . . . How could I make any sort of overture to this enclosed suspended corridor that had the insolence to call itself a bridge? I felt profoundly ashamed and I wanted to drown myself in the nearest canal, but how can a bridge do that? If I attempted to jump in, I would simply cross over. The only answer would be to ease myself into the oily waters lengthwise, forming an obstruction to every boat in the vicinity, and the memory of the awful shipwreck near Marseille was too fresh and horrid in my mind. I remained alive.
There is a moral in this chapter, if one is detached enough to look. I have too much symbolic humanity to do so… .
X
The Blackness Within Me
I want to remain on good terms with you, dear reader, but I fear I am far too distraught to welcome your continued presence in my novel. I will bring my novel to a conclusion now and you will be forced out of it. I will be alone, less than alone, in the peace of wordless oblivion. No, I am deceiving myself. I have no choice but to continue in some form. That is Hesper’s doing. Is my drunk a devil or a genius? The possibility that he might be both has not yet occurred to me. If it has occurred to you instead, please accept my thanks. But I still want you to depart this story.
And so you shall. At a moment of my choosing. . . . In the meantime, allow me to describe what happened in the aftermath of my discovery that the real Bridge of Sighs was not the structure of my dreams. I wandered in a bitter haze for many hours, not quite the same bitter haze that arises when a lemon is pierced by a sharp thumbnail, for there was no juice involved, but some other kind of bitter haze, not sure which. My heart was broken. Eventually I stopped near the Palazzo Farsetti and I felt able to vocalise my hurt. Hesper licked away my tears as I spoke.
‘I have no choice but to return to Madrid, to return to my former menial task of spanning the Río Manzanares. Humans want nothing more than to stand on their own two feet, but a bridge must stand for the sake of the feet of others. That is our tragedy.’
Hesper examined the tips of his fingers. ‘You can’t go back.’
I knitted my non-brows. ‘Why not?’
He swallowed more of my tears and replied, ‘The authorities will have erected a new bridge in your place, a bridge identical in appearance to you. You won’t be welcomed there.’
‘Must I stay forever in Venice? Shall I spend the rest of my days arching over a canal filled with gondolas?’
‘You are in no fit state to cross even a stream of melted ice cream in the gutter, not that Venice has gutters. Don’t you realise what has happened? Bridges aren’t designed for walking long distances. During the course of your travels—let me mention only chases, storms, shipwrecks—you have been eroded away to almost nothing. Haven’t you looked at yourself lately? The change is most dramatic.’
I began to feel panic. ‘Show me!’ I wailed.
He reached into his pocket and withdrew a block of smooth stone slightly smaller than the palm of his hand.
‘All that is left?’ I screamed.
He nodded. ‘I’m sorry for you, truly I am, but I have been carrying you like this for weeks. You should have guessed sooner. How do you think a bridge of your original size and weight could fit through the narrow streets of Venice? It just isn’t possible!’
‘Will you abandon me here?’ I blubbered.
Hesper smiled, the first time I ever saw him do so. ‘Of course not! You want to write a novel, don’t you? I will help you! I will polish and grind your last remaining stone and turn you into an inkwell. Then I will dip a quill into you and your story will be told.’
‘Will you really?’ I whispered.
‘I already have. . . . Your readers bear witness to the fact. You may be able to return the favour and read about their concise picaresque adventures one day. But first they have to build up the required experience. So let us leave them alone to do just that, shall we?’
‘Shall we end the novel here?’
‘If you like,’ agreed Hesper.
THE PHANTOM FESTIVAL
I WAS ATTENDING a music festival and my thoughts were far from supernatural matters. I’m willing to bet I’ve never been less troubled by fears than on the first day of the event. Everything was bright: the sunlight, the flags over the tents, the faces in the crowds. I admit I was feeling a little agitated because of an earlier argument with my girlfriend, but that anxiety was confined to the details of how we were going to patch things up. I hadn’t the faintest inkling that an encounter with ghosts was in store, but I’m running ahead of myself. I’ll just stress that I can’t imagine a less eerie place than a music festival of that sort.
My taste in music is eclectic, and I love being exposed to exotic traditions. The melodies and harmonies of distant lands help me to feel that I have a cosmopolitan outlook, which, in my opinion, is the ideal modern attitude. Not that my appreciation isn’t authentic. To name just three styles I adore, I find that Congolese soukous, Algerian rai, and zouk from Martinique do more to elevate my mood than any amount of Western classical or popular music. The trend in recent decades has been one of fusing disparate genres, throwing them into a blender, and this method has created intriguing results. The rigid categories don’t apply so much anymore and it’s fascinating to discover how one musical tradition can be focussed and refreshed through contrast and combination with another.
Anyway, the place for people like me is the annual World of Music, Arts and Dance Festival, known as WOMAD. Many countries host their own versions of this event at different times of the year. I’ve often been to the one in Spain and once travelled to Sicily, but the venue I’m most familiar with is Rivermead in Reading, a site that consists of a few fields next to the Thames at a point where the river is crowded with barges and swans, and is a lot narrower than at London.
I can’t remember the year of the festival that changed my life. I know that sounds odd, but I became something of a recluse after my adventure and lost touch with the ways of the normal world. I could find out easily enough, but I prefer to leave facts as vague as possible to protect my sanity.
Having said that, for the sake of this story I ought to make an effort to report everything accurately, and I do remember the acts that were scheduled to perform on the first day. When I arrived at Rivermead I produced my ticket and it was exchanged for a plastic wristband that allowed me to leave and re-enter the site at will. It was early in the morning, but already the place was packed. I needed to find a plot of land to pitch my tent, but soon discovered that the locations nearest the action were already taken. As I passed through the makeshift fairground and across several tracts crowded with tents of varying size and quality, I berated myself for not arriving the evening before. People sat around chatting or they played drums and flutes, and the distinctive aroma of marijuana greeted my nostrils.
I finally found a plot in a corner of the so-called ‘blue field’, the most remote part of the designated campsite, and I quickly set up my modest tent. I was near a patch of woodland through which gurgled a brook, and the grass was green and lush, more comfortable than the stony ground of the larger fields. Even better, my neighbours proved to be friendly. A girl with dreadlocks offered me a cup of tea and I relaxed and began enjoying myself. So far as I was concerned, a three-day period of gentle hedonism awaited me, a chance to indulge in a few vices I still consider mild, as well as an opportunity to sample some of the best music in creation. My girlfriend had arrived separately with her cousin and we had arranged to rendezvous by the stall selling mulled wine. In the meantime, we communicated warily with text messages on our mobile phones.
Stretching on the grass, I rested and distilled the latent energy in my limbs into a potency that would fuel me for the duration of the festival. It was a sort of meditation exercise, but my mind wandered. Falling into philosophical reveries is one of my habits and I found myself pondering the nature of the thing I had come to experience. Music is such a human phenomenon that it can be argued it is what makes us the species we are. Not science, not religion, not wars, but music. It’s a common enough assumption, and possibly one you share, even if you haven’t yet expressed it to yourself.
In the afternoon, I wandered back to the main site and found myself standing at the rear of the enormous Siam Tent watching and listening to the renowned Drummers of Burundi. The stage was so distant the performers seemed to belong in another dimension, perhaps a premonition of what lay in wait for me. It wasn’t entirely satisfying, so I made a vow to be early for The Dhol Foundation, to ensure I was at the front of the crowd when they started playing on the Open Air Stage after the Drummers had finished. One of the frustrations of festivals is the amount of choice, for there are simultaneous events on many stages. But I had already finalised my itinerary. Of the twenty or more acts booked to appear on this first day, the Algerian singer Souad Massi was the one I was most eager to catch. If all went to plan, my girlfriend would accompany me to that performance to seal our reconciliation.
So I left the Siam Tent before the Drummers reached their climax and I made my way towards the Open Air Stage. However, something strange happened to me halfway there. I must have taken a wrong turning, which sounds absurd considering how close one venue is from the other, but perhaps the layout of the stalls confused me. I found myself descending a steep slope while the backs of those stalls formed walls on either side. It grew darker and I peered up at menacing clouds that had appeared in the sky from nowhere.
I stopped to consult the rudimentary map in my souvenir programme, and decided to enter a nearby tent in order to get my bearings. The larger tents have individual names and I could use this to pinpoint my position, but when I entered I became even more disoriented than before. It didn’t help that the activity inside wasn’t listed in the programme. I found myself intruding on a xylophone class attended by students with utterly drained expressions and eyes that seemed entirely black . . .
They were astonished by my arrival and regarded me with blinks and squints, muttering to each other in whispers and fidgeting the bony fingers of their pale hands. Their empty expressions didn’t alter and I knew I was more lost than logic would deem possible. Standing there as the main object of their attention was unbearable and to break the tension I strolled towards a steward standing near the middle of the tent. He studied my approach with unease, but quickly assumed an air of professional nonchalance and managed a false but welcome smile. I held up my hands in the universal sign that asks for assistance and he signalled to the other occupants of the tent to resume their business, which they did reluctantly. Then he directed his full attention at me.
‘I appear to be lost,’ I announced.
‘You certainly do,’ he responded in a voice that was formal but not unfriendly. ‘Your arrival isn’t unprecedented, but nothing like it has happened for a long time. No matter, nobody is to blame. It’s vital you have a guide from now on and destiny has clearly chosen me for that role. I don’t know how long you’ll be permitted to stay, but I’ll accompany you during your allotted time.’
His dramatic words, and the neutral tone in which they were delivered, bemused me and I swallowed a laugh. I decided to talk to him for as long as possible, not only to help unravel the mystery I had blundered into, but to distract my mind from my fears. I gazed at him more intently. His skin was pale and his eyes black, but he wasn’t especially ghastly in appearance. His movements were languid but decisive enough, and when he took a step closer his stride was huge. We were now almost face to face, but this sudden unwanted intimacy didn’t add to my trepidation. Rather, it was something in the atmosphere of my environment that caused my deeply rooted foreboding.
‘Why is it so unusual?’ I asked. ‘I come to WOMAD every year, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends. As for leaving, I shall do that in the conventional manner when the three full days have passed.’
He sighed tolerantly. ‘You have wandered by mistake into a different festival. This isn’t WOMAD, but our three days of musical indulgence. Both festivals take place in the same location but are separated by a gulf more profound than that of distance. Your festival is superimposed upon ours.’
I accepted this answer with only minimal protest. ‘A festival within a festival. And it’s a secret?’
‘Yes. To your kind, at any rate.’
‘Are you anarchists?’
This made him guffaw and I relaxed because his mirth was carefree and not at all sinister. He finally calmed down and said, ‘You have a choice. You can go back the way you came and return to your own festival or you can entrust yourself to me and enjoy a tour of our extravaganza.’
I surprised myself at this point by choosing the latter option. I realised that the quarrel with my girlfriend had affected me more deeply than I’d assumed, that I was still full of bitterness and desired some minor form of revenge. Not to turn up at our meeting place would constitute a satisfying retribution. Then I grew angry at the idea that perhaps she wouldn’t be worried at all. To disguise my annoyance I adopted a false air of jollity and bellowed:
‘Lead on, my friend! I can hardly wait!’
He scrutinised me for a moment, then turned and walked to a flap on the far side of the tent. Here he paused and beckoned to me, and I followed him through a gap opposite that which had served me for an entrance. The entire tent now stood between us and the slope and I realised that this fabric structure was an accidental gateway between his realm and mine. I couldn’t guess what kind of scene awaited me. I was naïve enough to still believe my guide was a living human being, a visitor from a country I didn’t know, and that his festival was little more than one of those illegal free events I had often heard about. And yet, had I suspected the truth, I would still have followed him into the most extraordinary adventure.
We had not gone far when something about the sky made me stop and regard it more carefully. ‘Those aren’t clouds but a roof of solid rock! Are we inside a gigantic cavern?’
He smiled. ‘Our festival is taking place directly below yours. Space is at a premium, so we don’t like to waste any. While your people dance on the grass and breathe the fumes of the surface world, we perform our dances under their very feet!’
‘What if the roof collapses? I can’t believe this structure is completely safe. Don’t you worry about dying?’
This question delighted him and I saw how he fought to suppress his laughter. I wanted to share the joke, whatever it was, but could force no convincing chuckle from my throat. His shoulders shook in silent mirth and I waited for him to finish. Finally, he wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and resumed walking. I followed him towards an open space among a complex arrangement of tents and stalls. I misinterpreted his muffled laughter as indicating he had overwhelming confidence in the engineering that had created this incredible cave. As a result, I relaxed, for I was reassured that no substantial minerals would fall on my head during the proceedings. I had a brief vision of my girlfriend plunging down a fissure and landing in my outstretched arms. Then I growled at myself and dispelled that nonsense.
I realised that a small stage existed in the open space before us and musicians were performing on it. Every atom of doubt in my mind vanished as I responded to the sublime beauty of the sound. It was a modified form of Sufi qawwali music and the song had already entered the ‘call and response’ phase, where the musicians enhance the percussion by clapping their hands. The main singer was possessed of astounding charisma and his audience was captivated by the force of his personality. His voice swooped between the tabla and dholak like a formation of fireflies, forming chords with the harmonium that resembled glowing embers. I know this sounds corny, but that’s how fine it was, and as he wiped sweat from his brow I was convinced he was full of divine fire.
