Seven Days in New Crete (Penguin Modern Classics) (5 page)

‘I think so,’ I said. ‘Five is woman; four is less than woman; six is woman-monster. I learned that from a poet named Donne.’

‘That’s well put. When my mother saw what he’d done, she didn’t say anything either, but replaced the flower with another five-petalled one, but red; and that night he composed a melody called “The Five Red Petals”, which proved that he knew how deeply she loved him. (When he died, two days after my mother, the melody was recorded on gold, which happens very rarely indeed.) Then they parted for as long as they had been together, which is the custom: meanwhile they wrote to each other. The magicians’ letter test is very severe. Each lover writes a message above a tablet, not touching it with the pen, so that it seems a mere blank: but the other can read it by pressing it against his or her breastbone.’

‘If the letter were intercepted, could another magician read it?’

‘No.’

‘How very odd! But you haven’t explained the white rabbits.’

‘He meant that she had apricot-yellow hair and very white teeth – thirty-two is a full set of teeth, you know – and that he would love her until her hair turned white like apricot blossom.’

‘I see. Well, what happened then?’

‘Bearskin came to live with my mother for a year, and they began to share their dreams and go for long journeys together in them. And finally they dreamed of a daughter. So after the usual proclamation, she gave Bearskin the right of fatherhood, and I was born the next year.’

‘A very pretty story,’ I said; adding under my breath, ‘but a little too pretty to be true.’ And indeed, I found out later that the New Cretans told many stories that, though not exactly lies, were true only in a manner of speaking. As for the ‘floating’, they certainly believed in it as a common sexual phenomenon, and pairs of lovers may well have created the joint illusion by the literalness of their belief; but I never had any subjective experience of it myself during my stay. They also seriously believed in the letter test, but the messages sent must have been very simple if they were really read: telepathy is an uncertain means of communication even in the most favourable circumstances.

‘When I was born,’ Sapphire went on, ‘they gave me the name I had in their dream, and I’ll always keep that name. A man, you see, is given a new name when he becomes a father, but a woman never changes hers, though she may change her nickname as often as she pleases.’

‘Sapphire, what
is
your real name? You haven’t yet told me.’

In her confusion she upset the coffee-cup.

The Interpreter, forgetting his part of studious impersonality, gave a shrill cry: ‘Sir, pray remember yourself! You are no longer in your own age. You could not have asked a more offensive question.’

‘I’m very, very sorry, though it’s your fault for not warning me. But why? What’s the reason?’

‘All names are secret,’ said Fig-bread earnestly. ‘Until I die only my parents, the Goddess, and the mother of my children will know what name I bear.’

‘In that case I can’t see the point of having one. Surely, the whole object of a name is to identify a person?’

‘We use a nickname for that purpose.’

‘But the name?’

‘That is the person himself, his private being which is publicly revealed only after death. We speak openly, for instance, of Cleopatra, but in her life time she had a nickname, or two or three even, now long forgotten. My name is kept secret so that no one can injure me by its use.’

‘Nonsense! If I said: “Fig-bread is a – is a –” well, if I said something unpleasant about you, everyone would know that it was you I meant, not your brother Starfish.’

‘If that were to happen, as I’m sure it won’t, I could at once change my nickname, and your arrows, as we say, would be left sticking in my sloughed skin. But if you knew my real name they would enter my heart and I should die of shame.’

‘How childish!’ I thought. ‘I might be back in the Bronze Age, or between the covers of Grimm’s
Fairy Tales.
I wonder whether these magicians have a racket of guessing people’s names and blackmailing them. Not Sapphire, of course, but I wouldn’t put it past Sally.’ I could not help laughing. Starfish asked me gravely what caused me so much pleasure.

‘Nothing much,’ I said, a little guiltily perhaps. ‘I was only – er – thinking of a fairy-tale character named Rumpelstiltskin, who challenged a princess to guess his name and then gave it away by mistake and stamped his foot so hard in rage that he broke through the floor and fell down into the cellar and killed himself.’ I added hastily: ‘A mythical character, you know, and it’s not really funny, of course, when a person falls through the floor into the cellar and breaks his neck, but you must excuse me: Rumpelstiltskin was a very unpleasant person in the story.’

Everyone was looking very glum indeed, except Sally. Did I detect a slight twitch of her lip, a momentary gleam in her eye, which distinguished her from her solemn friends? I could not be quite sure.

I saw I must skate rapidly over the broken ice. I turned to See-a-Bird, with whom I found it easiest to make conversation: ‘May I ask how you came by your nickname?’

He was ready enough to tell me. ‘It happened like this. A woman named Bee-flight once sat on a porch with several young men, myself among them, teaching us the principles of counterpoint, when a servant happened to pass by with a child in her arms. Bee-flight put up her finger for silence, and asked: “Who sees a bird?” I waited, but when I found that no one else had understood, I answered quietly: “I see a bird.” “Off with you at once,” she said, “meanwhile we’ll have a break; I’ll finish when you return.” So I hurried after the woman, took the child from her and prescribed a cure. Then I returned and she continued her lesson.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘Since no birds were to be seen from where we were sitting, she must have meant the death-scenting vultures that hover in the stratosphere out of sight. I looked at the child’s face as it bobbed on its mother’s shoulders and saw a premonitory cloud of sickness centred between nostril and ear. I turned to Bee-flight and met her eyes, and we wordlessly agreed on the treatment. The child recovered. That same night Bee-flight invited me to her house and a year later gave me the right of fatherhood. She had two sons by me, both of whom have remained in our estate; one’s a physician, the other’s a poet. But she’s left the Magic House now and become an elder.’

Truth or half-truth? I could not be sure. So I asked Sapphire: ‘Tell me, does it never happen among magicians that children are begotten as the result of a sudden impulse without the usual formal preliminaries?’

‘Yes, occasionally children are conceived at their parents’ first meeting. They’re regarded as very lucky. They announce themselves by knocking three times on the bedroom door, which their parents must open at once and say “welcome!” and then come together. Door-knockers, as we call children that are unusually anxious to be born, always become famous for one thing or another.’

After this it seemed unnecessary to ask whether abortion was practised. But I asked: ‘How do bad people get born, people of the sort that Sally has to destroy?’

‘None is ever born to magicians; but other estates are less careful in their unions and if prospective parents disregard a failure of sympathy between themselves, the child may be born bad. The whole village is then disgraced, because it should have discountenanced the match. That happened two years ago a few miles away. The sequel was a war: the neighbouring village felt obliged to protest on moral grounds.’

‘I should have liked to watch the fighting.’

‘There’s talk of another war being fought next week not far from here. If that happens, we’ll take you to see it, if you like.’

‘How kind you are! May the best village win!’

‘Thank you. That’s our formula too.’

Then the servants came in and with quick deft movements began clearing away the breakfast things. They pretended not to take any particular notice of me, but I could see that they were very much interested, though there was nothing noticeable about my clothes. I had been evoked naked, and immediately dressed in pyjamas and dressing-gown, but was now wearing an outfit that See-a-Bird had lent me: an open-necked shirt, baggy linen trousers, embroidered waistcoat and a short frieze jacket. He had also given me a black bearskin cap. The effect was slightly Kurdish.

It was gradually borne in on me that I had been brought here for some special purpose. These New Cretans were not an inquisitive people and would hardly have risked shocking their finely-balanced sensibilities, by the evocation of such a barbarous monster as myself, merely to ask me routine questions about my epoch. And why should they take the trouble to show me around their country? Could this be mere hospitality? But what hospitality did they owe me? Why had they not dismissed me as soon as I told them what they wanted to know? Sapphire loved me, or so it seemed; but was it true love in the New Cretan style? I could not hope to live up to her exalted moral standards. Nor – if that was what she expected – could I make a nightly exchange of farfetched poetic riddles with her. I am a poet only on occasion, as I think is the case with all poets, always; we are seldom on the crest of the wave and no amount of rhetoric or hard swimming can keep us there for more than a brief moment. But she had not only accepted me with all my shortcomings: if that laugh was hers that I had heard in the middle of the night, she had intuitively impersonated Antonia so as to gain my confidence. Why? Had she a secret motive – a public, rather than a private one?

Perhaps there was some information that my new friends wanted from me, not about my epoch, but about their own. I had only the vaguest idea what it could be, but I was pretty sure that they had a question to ask and that they would attach as much importance to my answer as when they had first asked me: ‘Do you like us?’ Well, I would not press them to frame the question prematurely: that would surely be the last thing they did before returning me to my own context in time. Meanwhile, I would look carefully about me. I was enjoying my holiday and, in a sense at least, I had Antonia with me: an improved model, a New Cretan Antonia, younger, brighter-eyed, less sharp-tongued, more energetic, more eloquent, more beautiful even, with a closer resemblance to the ideal Antonia of my love than Antonia herself. But… And I knew that this ‘but’ was somehow closely related to the mystery of my poignant but unpractical affection for her.

What was wrong with me, anyway? Was I getting senile before my time? I remembered that ridiculous old M. Charretier, the retired silk-merchant, who had conceived a strange passion for one of our Sainte Véronique girls and wanted to adopt her. He explained to her mother, who kept the sweet shop, that he did not intend to make her his mistress: all he asked was the privilege of providing her with beautiful clothes, kissing her occasionally on the brow, and combing her long blonde tresses. ‘
Mais non, monsieur
,’ the indignant mother had told him. ‘
Ça ce n’est pas convenable du tout. Être maitresse attitrèe, c’est toujours une chose certaine, mais être poupèe platonique, qu’est que c’est que ça? J’en aurais grande honte, M. Charretier, je vous assure.
’

Meanwhile the problem of why I had been evoked grew on me, and I decided to find out by what historical process the New Cretans had arrived at their present pseudo-archaic system of civilization. I told the magicians that I had changed my mind and would like to know, in the broadest terms, what had happened in the world since my epoch. And this is what I learned.

After a series of revolutions and minor wars, the close of the Late Christian epoch was marked by an unusually savage struggle between the so-called Roman Bloc, consisting of the communist and semi-communist states of Western Europe and North America, and the so-called Orthodox Bloc consisting of neo-communist Eastern Europe and the Far East, both Blocs being nominally Christians. This war which, as usual, lasted far longer than had been expected, laid most of Western Europe waste and was so tenaciously fought on the battlefields of China and Northern India, that the Romanist leaders became alarmed by the strong neo-communist trend among their own workers. At the crisis of the struggle, when Orthodox armies had overrun the whole of India and the Malay Peninsula, a meeting of Roman presidents and premiers was held in the Falkland Islands and, in the resulting ‘Falkland Declaration’, a distinction was agreed upon between what they called Pantisocracy, or primitive Roman communism based on truth and love, and false Sino-Slav neo-communism, based on lies and hate. The Romanists won the war a few months later, and made a third of the world uninhabitable by the timely introduction of a new weapon referred to in the
Brief History
as ‘bright AIRAR from Heaven’. (My guess is ‘artificially induced radio-active rain’, but I may be wrong.) They beggared themselves in the process, and as a result a thoroughly crooked form of Pantisocracy, hardly distinguishable from Orthodox neo-communism, held the field for a while. This was in turn succeeded by what was called Logicalism – pantisocratic economics divorced from any religious or nationalistic theory.

Logicalism, hinged on international science, ushered in a gloomy and anti-poetic age. It lasted only a generation or two and ended with a grand defeatism, a sense of perfect futility, that slowly crept over the directors and managers of the regime. The common man had triumphed over his spiritual betters at last, but what was to follow? To what could he look forward with either hope or fear? By the abolition of sovereign states and the disarming of even the police forces, war had become impossible. No one who cherished any religious beliefs whatever, or was interested in sport, poetry or the arts was allowed to hold a position of public responsibility: ‘ice-cold logic’ was the most valued civic quality, and those who could not pretend to it were held of no account. Science continued laboriously to expand its overlarge corpus of information, and the subjects of research grew more and more beautifully remote and abstract; yet the scientific obsession, so strong at the beginning of the third millennium
A.D
., was on the wane. Logicalist officials who were neither defeatist nor secretly religious and who kept their noses to the grindstone from a sense of duty, fell a prey to colabromania, a mental disturbance which sent them dancing like dervishes down the corridors of their all-glass laboratories, foaming at the mouth and tearing in pieces any dog, cat or child that crossed their path. They all suffered from the same hallucination: of a white-faced, hawk-nosed, golden-haired woman who whipped them round and round as if they were tops and urged them to acts of insane violence. No cure could be found by the psychiatrists, who were themselves peculiarly subject to this new form of insanity: all who caught it had to be ‘lethalized’.