Island (33 page)

Twilight deepened and suddenly, from high overhead, the arc lamps were turned on. Bright and burnished against the rosy copper of oiled skin, the women’s necklaces and rings and bracelets came alive with glittering reflections. Seen in the downward-striking light, every contour became more dramatic, every form seemed to be more substantial, more solidly there. In eye sockets, under nose and chin the shadows deepened. Modeled by light and darkness young breasts grew fuller and the faces of the old were more emphatically lined and hollowed.

Hand in hand they made their way through the crowd.

A middle-aged woman greeted Mary Sarojini, then turned to Will. “Are you that man from the Outside?” she asked.

“Almost infinitely from the outside,” he assured her.

She looked at him for a moment in silence, then smiled encouragingly and patted his cheek.

“We’re all very sorry for you,” she said.

They moved on, and now they were standing on the fringes of a group assembled at the foot of the temple steps to listen to a young man who was playing a long-necked, lute-like instrument and singing in Palanese. Rapid declamation alternated with long-drawn, almost birdlike melismata on a single vowel sound, and then a cheerful and strongly accented tune that ended in a shout. A roar of laugher went up from the crowd. A few more bars, another line or two of recitative, and the singer struck his final chord. There was applause and more laughter and a chorus of incomprehensible commentary.

“What’s it all about?” Will asked.

“It’s about girls and boys sleeping together,” Mary Sarojini answered.

“Oh—I see.” He felt a pang of guilty embarrassment; but, looking down into the child’s untroubled face, he could see that his concern was uncalled for. It was evident that boys and girls sleeping together were as completely to be taken for granted as going to school or eating three meals a day—or dying.

“And the part that made them laugh,” Mary Sarojini went on, “was where he said the Future Buddha won’t have to leave home and sit under the Bodhi Tree. He’ll have his Enlightenment while he’s in bed with the princess.”

“Do you think that’s a good idea?” Will asked.

She nodded emphatically. “It would mean that the princess would be enlightened too.”

“You’re perfectly right,” said Will. “Being a man, I hadn’t thought of the princess.”

The lute player plucked a queer unfamiliar progression of
chords, followed them with a ripple of arpeggios and began to sing, this time in English.

The door of the temple swung open. A smell of incense mingled with the ambient onions and fried fish. An old woman emerged and very cautiously lowered her unsteady weight from stair to stair.

“Who were Paul and Freud?” Mary Sarojini asked as they moved away.

Will began with a brief account of Original Sin and the Scheme of Redemption. The child heard him out with concentrated attention.

“No wonder the song says, Don’t take them seriously,” she concluded.

“After which,” said Will, “we come to Dr. Freud and the Oedipus Complex.”

“Oedipus?” Mary Sarojini repeated. “But that’s the name of a marionette show. I saw it last week, and they’re giving it again tonight. Would you like to see it? It’s nice.”

“Nice?” he repeated. “Nice? Even when the old lady turns out to be his mother and hangs herself? Even when Oedipus puts out his eyes?”

“But he doesn’t put out his eyes,” said Mary Sarojini.

“He does where
I
hail from.”

“Not here. He only says he’s going to put out his eyes, and she only tries to hang herself. They’re talked out of it.”

“Who by?”

“The boy and girl from Pala.”

“How do
they
get into the act?” Will asked.

“I don’t know. They’re just there. ‘
Oedipus in Pala
’—that’s what the play is called. So why shouldn’t they be there?”

“And you say they talk Jocasta out of suicide and Oedipus out of blinding himself?”

“Just in the nick of time. She’s slipped the rope round her neck and he’s got hold of two huge pins. But the boy and girl from Pala tell them not to be silly. After all, it was an accident. He didn’t know that the old man was his father. And anyhow the old man began it, hit him over the head, and that made Oedipus lose his temper—and nobody had ever taught him to dance the Rakshasi Hornpipe. And when they made him a king, he had to marry the old queen. She was really his mother; but neither of them knew it. And of course all they had to do when they did find out was just to stop being married. That stuff about marrying his mother being the reason why everybody had to die of a virus—all that was just nonsense, just made up by a lot of poor stupid people who didn’t know any better.”

“Dr. Freud thought that all little boys really want to marry their mothers and kill their fathers. And the other way round for little girls—
they
want to marry their fathers.”

“Which fathers and mothers?” Mary Sarojini asked. “We have such a lot of them.”

“You mean, in your Mutual Adoption Club?”

“There’s twenty-two of them in our MAC.”

“Safety in numbers!”

“But of course poor old Oedipus never had an MAC. And besides they’d taught him all that horrible stuff about God getting furious with people every time they made a mistake.”

They had pushed their way through the crowd and now found themselves at the entrance to a small roped-off enclosure, in which a hundred or more spectators had already taken their seats. At the further end of the enclosure the gaily painted
proscenium of a puppet theater glowed red and gold in the light of powerful flood lamps. Pulling out a handful of the small change with which Dr. Robert had provided him, Will paid for two tickets. They entered and sat down on a bench.

A gong sounded, the curtain of the little proscenium noiselessly rose and there, white pillars on a pea-green ground, was the façade of the royal palace of Thebes with a much-whiskered divinity sitting in a cloud above the pediment. A priest exactly like the god, except that he was somewhat smaller and less exuberantly draped, entered from the right, bowed to the audience, then turned towards the palace and shouted “Oedipus” in piping tones that seemed comically incongruous with his prophetic beard. To a flourish of trumpets the door swung open and, crowned and heroically buskined, the king appeared. The priest made obeisance, the royal puppet gave him leave to speak.

“Give ear to our afflictions,” the old man piped.

The king cocked his head and listened.

“I hear the groans of dying men,” he said. “I hear the shriek of widows, the sobbing of the motherless, the mutterings of prayer and supplication.”

“Supplication!” said the deity in the clouds. “That’s the spirit.” He patted himself on the chest.

“They had some kind of a virus,” Mary Sarojini explained in a whisper. “Like Asian flu, only a lot worse.”

“We repeat the appropriate litanies,” the old priest querulously piped, “we offer the most expensive sacrifices, we have the whole population living in chastity and flagellating itself every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. But the flood of death spreads ever more widely, rises higher and ever higher. So help us, King Oedipus, help us.”

“Only a god can help.”

“Hear, hear!” shouted the presiding deity.

“But by what means?”

“Only a god can say.”

“Correct,” said the god in his
basso profundo
, “absolutely correct.”

“Creon, my wife’s brother, has gone to consult the oracle. When he returns—as very soon he must—we shall know what heaven advises.”

“What heaven bloody well commands!” the
basso profoundo
emended.

“Were people
really
so silly?” Mary Sarojini asked, as the audience laughed.

“Really and truly,” Will assured her.

A phonograph started to play the Dead March in
Saul
.

From left to right a black-robed procession of mourners carrying sheeted biers passed slowly across the front of the stage. Puppet after puppet—and as soon as the group had disappeared on the right it would be brought in again from the left. The procession seemed endless, the corpses innumerable.

“Dead,” said Oedipus as he watched them pass. “And another dead. And yet another, another.”

“That’ll teach them!” the
basso profundo
broke in. “I’ll learn you to be a toad!”

Oedipus continued:

While he was speaking, two new puppets, a boy and a girl in the gayest of Palanese finery, entered from the right and, moving
in the opposite direction to the black-robed mourners, took their stand, arm in arm, downstage and a little left of center.

“But we, meanwhile,” said the boy when Oedipus had finished:

“What about Me?” the
basso profundo
rumbled from the welkin. “You seem to forget that I’m Wholly Other.”

Endlessly the black procession to the cemetery still shuffled on. But now the Dead March was interrupted in mid-phrase. Music gave place to a single deep note—tuba and double bass—prolonged interminably. The boy in the foreground held up his hand.

“Listen! The drone, the everlasting burden.”

In unison with the unseen instruments the mourners began to chant. “Death, death, death, death…”

“But life knows more than one note,” said the boy.

“Life,” the girl chimed in, “can sing both high and low.”

“And your unceasing drone of death serves only to make a richer music.”

“A richer music,” the girl repeated.

And with that, tenor and treble, they started to vocalize a wandering arabesque of sound wreathed, as it were, about the long rigid shaft of the ground bass.

The drone and the singing diminished gradually into silence; the last of the mourners disappeared and the boy and girl in the foreground retired to a corner where they could go on with their kissing undisturbed.

There was another flourish of trumpets and, obese in a purple tunic, in came Creon, fresh from Delphi and primed with ora
cles. For the next few minutes the dialogue was all in Palanese, and Mary Sarojini had to act as interpreter.

“Oedipus asks him what God said; and the other one says that what God said was that it was all because of some man having killed the old king, the one before Oedipus. Nobody had ever caught him, and the man was still living in Thebes, and this virus that was killing everybody had been sent by God—that’s what Creon says he was told—as a punishment. I don’t know why all these people who hadn’t done anything to anybody had to be punished; but that’s what he says God said. And the virus won’t stop till they catch the man that killed the old king and send him away from Thebes. And of course Oedipus says he’s going to do everything he can to find the man and get rid of him.”

From his downstage corner the boy began to declaim, this time in English:

While the audience was still laughing, another group of mourners emerged from the wings and slowly crossed the stage.

“
Karuna
,” said the girl in the foreground, “compassion. The suffering of the stupid is as real as any other suffering.”

Feeling a touch on his arm, Will turned and found himself looking into the beautiful sulky face of young Murugan.

“I’ve been hunting for you everywhere,” he said angrily, as though Will had concealed himself on purpose just to annoy him. He spoke so loudly that many heads were turned and there were calls for quiet.

“You weren’t at Dr. Robert’s, you weren’t at Susila’s,” the boy nagged on, regardless of the protests.

“Quiet, quiet…”

“Quiet!” came a tremendous shout from Basso Profundo in the clouds. “Things have come to a pretty pass,” the voice added grumblingly, “when God simply can’t hear Himself speak.”

“Hear, hear,” said Will, joining in the general laughter. He rose and, followed by Murugan and Mary Sarojini, hobbled towards the exit.

“Didn’t you want to see the end?” Mary Sarojini asked, and turning to Murugan, “You really might have waited,” she said in a tone of reproof.

“Mind your own business!” Murugan snapped.

Will laid a hand on the child’s shoulder. “Luckily,” he said, “your account of the end was so vivid that I don’t have to see it with my own eyes. And of course,” he added ironically, “His Highness must always come first.”

Murugan pulled an envelope out of the pocket of those white silk pajamas which had so bedazzled the little nurse and handed it to Will. “From my mother.” And he added, “It’s urgent.”

“How good it smells!” Mary Sarojini commented, sniffing at the rich arua of sandalwood that surrounded the Rani’s missive.

Will unfolded three sheets of heaven-blue notepaper embossed with five golden lotuses under a princely crown. How many underlinings, what a profusion of capital letters! He started to read.