East, West Read online

  Columbus consoles himself with possibilities. Not all possibilities are consoling, however.

  She is an absolute monarch. (Her husband is an absolute zero: a blank, couldn’t be colder. We will not speak further of him.) She is a woman whose ring is often kissed. It means nothing to her. She is no stranger to flatteries. She resists them effortlessly.

  She is a tyrant, who numbers among her possessions a private menagerie of four hundred and nineteen fools, some grotesquely malformed, others as beauteous as the dawn. He, Columbus, is merely her four hundred and twentieth idiot. This, too, is a plausible scenario.

  Either: she understands his dream of a world beyond the world’s end, and is moved by it, so profoundly that it spooks her, and she turns first towards it, then away;

  Or: she doesn’t understand him at all, nor cares to understand.

  ‘Take your pick.’

  What’s certain is that he doesn’t understand her. Only the facts are plain. She is Isabella, all-conquering Queen. He is her invisible (though raucous, multicoloured, wine-bibbing) man.

  ‘Consummation.’

  The sexual appetites of the male decline; those of the female continue, with the advancing years, to grow. Isabella is Columbus’s last hope. He is running out of possible patrons, sales talk, flirtatiousness, hair, steam.

  Time drags by.

  Isabella gallops around, winning battles, expelling Moors from their strongholds, her appetites expanding by the week. The more of the land she swallows, the more warriors she engulfs, the hungrier she gets. Columbus, aware of a slow shrivelling inside him, scolds himself. He should see things as they are. He should come to his senses. What chance does he have here? Some days she makes him clean latrines. On other days he is on body-washing duty, and after a battle the bodies are not clean. Soldiers going to war wear man-sized diapers under their armour because the fear of death will open the bowels, will do it every time. Columbus was not cut out for this sort of work. He tells himself to leave Isabella, once and for all.

  But there are problems: his advancing years, the patron shortage. Once he decamps, he will have to forget the western voyage.

  The body of philosophical opinion which holds that life is absurd has never appealed to him. He is a man of action, revealing himself in deeds. But without the western voyage he will be obliged to accept the meaninglessness of life. This, too, would be a defeat. Invisible in hot tropical colours, unrequited, he remains, dogging her footsteps, hoping for the ecstasy of her glance.

  ‘The search for money and patronage’, Columbus says, ‘is not so different from the quest for love.’

  — She is omnipotent. Castles fall at her feet. The Jews have been expelled. The Moors prepare their last surrender. The Queen is at Granada, riding at her armies’ head.

  = She overwhelms. Nothing she has wanted has ever been refused.

  — All her dreams are prophecies.

  = Acting upon information received while sleeping, she draws up her invincible battle plans, foils the conspiracies of assassins, learns of the infidelities and corruptions for which she blackmails both her loyalists (to ensure their support) and her opponents (to ensure theirs). The dreams help her forecast the weather, negotiate treaties, and invest shrewdly in trade.

  — She eats like a horse and never gains an ounce.

  = The earth adores her footfall. Its shadows flee before the brilliance of her eyes.

  — Her face is a lush peninsula set in a sea of hair.

  = Her treasure chests are inexhaustible.

  — Her ears are soft question-marks, suggesting some uncertainty.

  = Her legs.

  — Her legs are not so great.

  = She is full of discontents.

  — No conquest satisfies her, no peak of ecstasy is high enough.

  = See: there at the gates of the Alhambra is Boabdil the Unlucky, the last Sultan of the last redoubt of all the centuries of Arab Spain. Behold: now, at this very instant, he surrenders the keys to the citadel into her grasp … there! And as the weight of the keys falls from his hand into hers, she … she … yawns.

  Columbus gives up hope.

  While Isabella is entering the Alhambra in listless triumph, he is saddling his mule. While she dawdles in the Court of the Lions, he departs in a flurry of whips elbows hooves, all rapidly obscured by a dust cloud.

  Invisibility claims him. He surrenders to its will. Knowing he is abandoning his destiny, he abandons it. He rides away from Queen Isabella in hopeless anger, rides day and night, and when his mule dies under him he shoulders his ridiculous gypsy-patchwork bags, their rowdy colours muted now by dirt; and walks.

  Around him stretches the rich plain her armies have subdued. Columbus sees none of it, neither the land’s fertility nor the sudden barrenness of the vanquished castles looking down from their pinnacles. The ghosts of defeated civilisations flow unnoticed down the rivers whose names – Guadalthis and Guadalthat – retain an echo of the annihilated past.

  Overhead, the arabesque wheelings of the patient buzzards.

  Jews pass Columbus in long columns, but the tragedy of their expulsion makes no mark on him. Somebody tries to sell him a Toledo sword; he waves the man away. Having lost his own dream of ships, Columbus leaves the Jews to the ships of their exile, waiting in the harbour of Cadiz. Exhaustion strips him of his senses. This old world is too old and the new world is an unfound land.

  ‘The loss of money and patronage’, Columbus says, ‘is as bitter as unrequited love.’

  He walks beyond fatigue, beyond the limits of endurance and the frontiers of self, and somewhere along this path he loses his balance, he falls off the edge of his sanity, and out here beyond his mind’s rim he sees, for the first and only time in his life, a vision.

  It is a dream of a dream.

  He dreams of Isabella, languidly exploring the Alhambra, the great jewel she has seized from Boabdil, last of the Nasrids.

  She is staring into a large stone bowl held aloft by stone lions. The bowl is filled with blood, and in it she sees – that is, Columbus dreams her seeing – a vision of her own.

  The bowl shows her that everything, all the known world, is now hers. Everyone in it is in her hands, to do with as she pleases. And when she understands this – Columbus dreams – the blood at once congeals, becoming a thick and verminous sludge. Whereupon the Isabella of Columbus’s weary, but also vengeful, imaginings is shaken to her very marrow by the realisation that she will never, never, NEVER! be satisfied by the possession of the Known. Only the Unknown, perhaps even the Unknowable, can satisfy her.

  All at once she remembers Columbus (he envisions her remembering him). Columbus, the invisible man who dreams of entering the invisible world, the unknown and perhaps even unknowable world beyond the Edge of Things, beyond the stone bowl of the everyday, beyond the thick blood of the sea. Columbus in this bitter dream makes Isabella see the truth at last, makes her accept that her need for him is as great as his for her. Yes! She knows it now! She must must must give him the money, the ships, anything, and he must must must carry her flag and her favour beyond the end of the end of the earth, into exaltation and immortality, linking her to him for ever with bonds far harder to dissolve than those of any mortal love, the harsh and deifying ties of history.

  ‘Consummation.’

  In Columbus’s savage dream, Isabella tears her hair, runs from the Court of the Lions, screams for her heralds.

  ‘Find him,’ she commands.

  But Columbus in his dream refuses to be found. He wraps around himself the dusty patchwork cloak of his invisibility, and the heralds gallop hither and yon in vain.

  Isabella screeches, beseeches, implores.

  Bitch! Bitch! How do you like it now, Columbus sneers. By absenting himself from her court, by this final and suicidal invisibility, he has denied her her heart’s desire. Serves her right.

  Bitch!

  She murdered his hopes, didn’t she? Well, then. In doing so she has laid herself low as w
ell. Poetic justice. Fair’s fair.

  At the dream’s end he permits her messengers to find him. Their hoofbeats, their waving frantic arms. They plead, cajole, offer bribes. But it’s too late. Only the sweet self-lacerating joy of murdering Possibility remains.

  He answers the heralds: a shake of the head.

  ‘No.’

  He comes to his senses.

  He is on his knees in the fertility of the plains, waiting for death. He hears the hoofbeats approaching and raises his eyes, half expecting to see the Exterminating Angel, riding towards him like a conqueror. Its black wings, the boredom on its face.

  Isabella’s heralds surround him. They offer him food, drink, a horse. They are shouting.

  — Good news! The Queen has summoned you.

  = Your voyage: wonderful news.

  — She saw a vision, and it scared her.

  = All her dreams are prophecies.

  The heralds dismount. They offer bribes, plead, cajole.

  — She ran from the Court of the Lions, shouting out your name.

  = She will send you beyond the stone bowl of the known world, beyond the thick blood of the sea.

  — She’s waiting for you in Santa Fé.

  = You must come at once.

  He stands up, like a requited lover, like a groom on his wedding day. He opens his mouth, and what almost spills out is the bitter refusal: no.

  ‘Yes,’ he tells the heralds. Yes. I’ll come.

  East, West

  THE HARMONY OF THE SPHERES

  In the time of the Jubilee the writer Eliot Crane, who had been suffering from what he called ‘brainstorms’ of paranoid schizophrenia, had lunch with his wife, a young photo-journalist called Lucy Evans, in the Welsh town of R., where she was working on the local paper. He looked cheerful, and told her he was feeling fine, but tired, and would go to bed early. It was the paper’s press night, so Lucy was late getting home to their hillside cottage; when she went upstairs Eliot wasn’t in their bedroom. Assuming that he was sleeping in the spare room, so that she wouldn’t disturb him, she went to bed.

  An hour later Lucy woke up with a premonition of disaster and went without getting dressed to the door of the guest bedroom; which, taking a deep breath, she opened. Half a second later, she slammed it shut again, and slumped heavily to the floor. He had been ill for more than two years, and all she could think was It’s over. When she started shivering she went back to bed and slept soundly until morning.

  He had sucked on his shotgun and pulled the trigger. The weapon had belonged to his father, who had put it to the same use. The only suicide note Eliot left after perpetrating this final act of macabre symmetry was a meticulous account of how to clean and care for the gun. He and Lucy had no children. He was thirty-two years old.

  A week earlier, the three of us walked up a beacon hill in the Borders to see the Jubilee bonfires flowering along the spine of the country, garlanding the darkness. ‘It doesn’t mean a “good fire”,’ Eliot said, ‘though I grant there’s an element of that in the word. Originally it was a fire made of bones: the bones of dead animals but also, fee fi fo fum, human remains, the charred skeletons my dears of yuman beans.’

  He had wild red hair and a laugh like an owl’s hoot and was as thin as a witch’s stick. In the firelight’s bright shadow-theatre we all looked insane, so it was easier to discount his hollowed-out cheeks, the pantomime cockings of his eyebrows, the mad-sailor glitter in his eye. We stood close to the flames and Eliot told dread tales of local Sabbats, at which cloaked and urine-drinking sorcerers conjured devils up from Hell. We swigged brandy from his silver hip-flask and recoiled on cue. But he had met a demon once and ever since that day he and Lucy had been on the run. They had sold their haunted home, a tiny house in Portugal Place, Cambridge, and moved to the bleak, sheep-smelly Welsh cottage they named (with gallows humour) Crowley End.

  It hadn’t worked. As we shrieked at Eliot’s ghost stories, we knew that the demon had traced the number on his car licence-plates, that it could call him any time on his unlisted telephone; that it had rediscovered his home address.

  ‘You’d better come,’ Lucy had called to say. ‘They found him going the wrong way on the motorway, doing ninety, with one of those sleep-mask things over his eyes.’ She had given up a lot for him, quitting her job on a London Sunday paper and settling for a hicksville gazette, because he was mad, and she needed to be close.

  ‘Am I approved of at present?’ I’d asked. Eliot had elaborated a conspiracy theory in which most of his friends were revealed to be agents of hostile powers, both Earthly and extra-terrestrial. I was an invader from Mars, one of many such dangerous beings who had sneaked into Britain when certain essential forms of vigilance had been relaxed. Martians had great gifts of mimicry, so they could fool yuman beans into believing they were beans of the same stripe, and of course they bred like fruit-flies on a pile of rotten bananas.

  For more than a year, during my Martian phase, I had been unable to visit. Lucy would phone with bulletins: the drugs were working, the drugs were not working because he refused to take them regularly, he seemed better as long as he did not try to write, he seemed worse because not writing plunged him into such deep depressions, he was passive and inert, he was raging and violent, he was filled with guilt and despair.

  I felt helpless; as one does.

  We became friends in my last year at Cambridge, while I was involved in an exhausting on-off love affair with a graduate student named Laura. Her thesis was on James Joyce and the French nouveau roman, and to please her I ploughed my way through Finnegans Wake twice, and most of Sarraute, Butor and Robbe-Grillet too. One night, seized by romance, I climbed out of the window of her flat in Chesterton Road, balanced precariously on the window-sill and refused to come back inside until she agreed to marry me. The next morning she rang her mother to break the news. After a long silence, Mummy said, ‘I’m sure he’s very nice, dear, but couldn’t you find someone of, you know, your own kind?’

  Laura was humiliated by the question. ‘What do you mean, my own kind?’ she yelled down the phone. ‘A Joyce specialist? A person five feet and three inches tall? A woman?’

  That summer, however, she got stoned at a wedding, snatched the glasses off my face and snapped them in two, grabbed the wedding-cake knife to the consternation of the bride and groom, and told me that if I ever came near her again she’d slice me up and pass me round at parties. I blundered myopically away from her and more or less fell over another woman, a grey-eyed fellow-alien in granny glasses named Mala, who with a straight face offered to drive me home, ‘since your optical capability is presently reduced’. I didn’t discover until after we married that serious, serene Mala, nonsmoking, non-drinking, vegetarian, drug-free, lonely Mala from Mauritius, the medical student with the Gioconda smile, had been propelled in my direction by Eliot Crane.

  ‘He’d like to see you,’ Lucy said on the phone. ‘He seems less worried about Martians now.’

  Eliot sat by an open fire with a red rug over his knees. ‘Ahoo! The space fiend boyo!’ he cried, smiling broadly and raising both arms above his head, half in welcome, half in pretend surrender. ‘Will you sit down, old bug-eyed bach, and take a glass before you have your evil way with us?’

  Lucy left us to ourselves and he spoke soberly and with apparent objectivity about the schizophrenia. It seemed hard to believe that he had just driven blind-folded down a motorway against the traffic. When the madness came, he explained, he was ‘barking’, and capable of the wildest excesses. But in between attacks, he was ‘perfectly normal’. He said he’d finally come to see that there was no stigma in accepting that one was mad: it was an illness like any other, voilà tout.

  ‘I’m on the mend,’ he said, confidently. ‘I’ve started work again, the Owen Glendower book. Work’s fine as long as I keep off the occult stuff.’ (He was the author of a scholarly two-volume study of overt and covert occultist groups in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, entitled
The Harmony of the Spheres.)

  He lowered his voice. ‘Between ourselves, Khan, I’m also working on a simple cure for paranoid schizophrenia. I’m in correspondence with the best men in the country. You’ve no idea how impressed they are. They agree I’ve hit on something absolutely new, and it’s just a matter of time before we come up with the goods.’

  I felt suddenly sad. ‘Look out for Lucy, by the way,’ he whispered. ‘She lies like a whore. And she listens in on me, you know. They give her the latest machines. There are microphones in the fridge. She hides them in the butter.’

  Eliot introduced me to Lucy in a kebab house on Charlotte Street in 1971, and though I hadn’t seen her for ten years I recognised at once that we had kissed on the beach at Juhu when I was fourteen and she was twelve; and that I was anxious to repeat the experience. Miss Lucy Evans, the honey-blonde, precocious daughter of the boss of the famous Bombay Company. She made no mention of kisses; I thought she had probably forgotten them, and said nothing either. But then she reminisced about our camel-races on Juhu beach, and fresh coconut-milk, straight from the tree. She hadn’t forgotten.

  Lucy was the proud owner of a small cabin cruiser, an ancient craft that had once been a naval longboat. It was pointed at both ends, had a makeshift cabin in the middle and a Thorneycroft Handybilly engine of improbable antiquity which would respond to nobody’s coaxings except hers. It had been to Dunkirk. She named it Bougainvillaea in memory of her childhood in Bombay.

  I joined Eliot and Lucy aboard Bougainvillaea several times, the first time with Mala, but subsequently without her. Mala, now Doctor Mala, Doctor (Mrs) Khan, no less, the Mona Lisa of the Harrow Road Medical Centre, was repelled by that bohemian existence in which we did without baths and pissed over the side and huddled together for warmth at night, zipped into our quilted sacks. ‘For me, hygiene-comfort are Priority A,’ said Mala. ‘Let sleeping bags lie. I-tho will stay home with my Dunlopillo and WC.’