The Golden Age

Assassination attempt

None of the plotters is a member of the king’s inner circle, hence none of them has access to his dining table. But the king’s fussiness about the company he keeps works to the advantage of the admiral’s plan, as it excludes all the plotters from the circle of suspects — although the sudden appearance of a squid may not raise suspicions of treason in any case. The musician who is given the horn has no idea what his playing will bring about. On that fateful evening the admiral is standing in the passage next to the kitchens with the marshal, another of the plotters. They are looking down on the party on the terrace, discussing in whispers the various scenarios that might play themselves out after the squid breaks out of the water. Suddenly they hear a noise behind them; it turns out that in a dark alcove there is a door to the pantry. The cook is in the pantry, and he has surely heard everything they have been saying to each other.

By killing the cook the conspirators would disrupt the smooth progression of the evening, and this would jeopardize their plan. They have to make do with escorting him back to the kitchens, where they keep him under surveillance to make sure he does not try to escape or put something into one of the dishes for the king’s party that would alert them to the possibility of an assassination attempt. The cook racks his brains for a way of warning the king. To write a message on a piece of paper is out of the question: not only would the plotters notice this right away, but anyway there is no paper or pencil in the kitchens. The cook is famed for the figures he models out of marzipan; he puts these into scenes that depict various events in the life of the king and his fiancée. The king likes to guess what each scene is showing; many times he has rewarded the cook for these culinary works of art. It dawns on the cook that he might send the king a message about the danger by depicting in marzipan the awful event planned for him. But on that day there is not a scrap of marzipan in the kitchens or in the pantry. The cook is trying frantically to think of a substitute for the marzipan when his eyes light on a large radish that is lying on the table right in front of him. This is not the ideal material in which to make a miniature statue, but by its inconspicuous nature a radish might have the advantage of escaping the attention of the conspirators. Besides, radishes are a favourite with the king, so the ruler will know that the plate bearing the cook’s creation is intended for him.

So the cook picks up the radish and begins to carve into it the scene so alive in his own soul. He carves a musician blowing a horn, the head of a squid emerging from the deep with its ten awful limbs; he carves figures — which include those of the king and his fiancée — jumping up from the table in horror, turning over their chairs. His work is quite a success, and fortunately the admiral and the marshal have paid no attention to his treatment of the radish. So the radish is conveyed down to the terrace along with several other dishes, and after it has been tried by the court taster it is placed before the king. For a long time the king studies and contemplates the radish. He looks at each of the tiny figures in turn and tries to work out what the whole scene is supposed to mean. Unfortunately this deciphering is made more difficult by the fact that the taster has bitten off two of the tentacles that made it possible to identify the monster as a squid. These tentacles are longer and thinner than the other eight and at their tips become oval-shaped bowls covered with suckers. “What scene has the cook thought up for us today?” says Dru, turning the radish — which is redder still in the light of the sun approaching the horizon — over and over in his hands. In the end he sends a servant to the kitchens to ask what the radish statue is supposed to mean, but as the man reaches the first bend in the staircase, Dru calls him back: he thinks he has grasped the sense of the cook’s work.

Dru recalls that one of the poems he wrote for his fiancée, in which he delighted in the use of various astronomical metaphors, contained the line, “Your song brings from the heavens dreamlike stars and restless comets.” Surely the cook wishes to please the king and his fiancée by giving shape to this image in a radish. “Just look at this!” the king says to his delighted fellow diners. “The cook has made a horn-player to accompany Isili’s song. And here are the charmed listeners. And here—” (he indicates the head of the squid) “—is the comet, lured from the heavens by the song and now plunging itself into the waves.” In mistaking the ten tentacles for the tail of a comet, the king is making a fatal mistake. Although the cook has given the squid enormous round eyes, the king considers this an instance of anthropomorphism, a finishing touch that develops the metaphor; if the comet can hear the song, it must have ears, so there is no reason why it shouldn’t have eyes, too. And everyone at the table sees the radish as a comet that has flown down to listen to the song of Princess Isili; they are surprised they didn’t see this straight away because it really is quite obvious. They applaud the cook’s craftsmanship and his devotion to the king. Isili nestles her body against the king’s, and as the red sun is about to reach the shimmering red line of the horizon, the king signals to the musicians to commence their playing. The musicians reach for their instruments; the horn-player puts his horn to his lips.

The deep, sad tone of the horn sounds. Then, terrifying in its quietness, ghostlike in its slowness, the head of a giant monster with great round eyes emerges from the water right in front of the diners, blocking the red sun from view. With the pink sky as a backdrop, the tentacles ripple. Though it seems there are hundreds of these tentacles, in fact there are only ten. After a moment of silent stupefaction, cries ring out as the men begin to chop at the serpent arms with their swords. The dogs jump on to the table and tear into the ends of tentacles flapping among the bowls of food. One of the two thin feelers shoots out like a lasso and, lightning fast, wraps itself around Isili’s slender body. Dru grabs a bread knife and drives it several times into the deadly liana that is closing around his fiancée, but the tentacle coils itself up and bears Isili away. Then the other tentacles are withdrawn sharply from the table; they give a last slow ripple before dropping beneath the sea’s darkening surface. The last part of the squid to remain above water is the enormous eyes, which for a moment or two observe the dinner guests, who have lapsed back into a state of silent petrifaction. Then the red sun touches its reflection and merges with it.

At the sound of the cries, the admiral and the marshal rush to the window. The cook makes use of this development to slip out of the kitchens and down the stone steps to the king’s aid. But by the time he has reached the twentieth step, the struggle with the monster is over. As the tentacles of the squid were uncoiling themselves over his head, the king realized that his interpretation of the radish statue was wrong. He is condemned to believe ever after that he is the cause of Isili’s death. The cook is rewarded richly for his loyalty and all the conspirators are imprisoned. Then the king hands over his kingdom to his younger brother and sails off to Europe. There he travels through land after land, along highways and across plains; he sits about in empty inns in the country; he walks about the biggest cities, whose streets merge in his dreams and memories into one endless city-labyrinth; he sleeps in cold hotels and inhospitable boarding houses. In the writing of his book, Fo forgets completely about his own past, but it returns to him in pictures that come to him through the dark. The description of the European wanderings of ex-king Dru are surely a result of the despair and disquiet of his own past, even if he remembers these no longer. The only despair he knows now is stirred by the multifarious images that elude his inner eye; the only disquiet that pursues him results from the frantic rush of sentences that propel themselves into the vortex of blurred images waiting for words to describe them while retreating from these very words.