The Golden Age

Hot walls

As I was first approaching the island, standing on deck looking at the wide, straight streets and the sprawling palaces of the lower town, I was in little doubt that this was the capital city. But when I walked through these streets and saw that they were clogged with sand, that the interiors of the palaces were empty, their patios thick with vegetation and their facades covered over with climbing plants, I had to re-think: I now had the impression I had been washed up in a peopleless, dead town. I was to learn later that the lower town was the seat of the king and as such the island’s metropolis, but the presence of the king, a figure confined to the background, served only to intensify the sense of emptiness in the lower town, making life there all the more dreamlike, making its streets seem all the more desolate. I learned, too, that the town was not as lightly populated as I had believed at first sight, although only a few of the houses were lived in and these were scattered throughout; their occupiers stayed in them only temporarily, for reasons of trade, or the proximity of the sea, or the need to be alone.

No one had his permanent base in the lower town. At any given time almost every house was empty and it was enough to pick one out for oneself and to occupy it. Should anyone wish to settle permanently in one of these dwellings he would meet no resistance, but I do not believe that any of the islanders ever thought of doing so; indeed, for their stays in the lower town they rarely used the same house twice. I, too, in the time before I knew Karael, lived in an empty house, on a square with an equestrian monument at its centre. There I would sit at the window for days on end, watching the stone horseman’s shadow inching across the hot slabs in the manner of a great sundial. Then, out walking one day, I took a fancy to a house right on the edge of town whose windows gave onto the sandy plain; I moved into it straight away. And after I lived at my girlfriend’s I returned to the lower town for a longer stay. All the islanders lived like this. The bonds between man and woman were not particularly strong, and it was a common occurrence that one of the partners would disappear to the lower town for a good long while and then return.

The uniformity and great width of the streets gave one the impression that the lower town was vast, when in fact it was possible to get from one end to the other in a quarter of an hour. The town was built to a regular ground plan shaped like a chessboard. The visitor walked long, straight boulevards, meeting no one. From cracks in the pavement, the kind of prickly stalks grew that are everywhere to be found on the coastal flats; every corner offered up the same monotonous view of straight, empty boulevards, broken at regular intervals by the shadowy mouths of cross-streets. These straight lines appeared to be hurrying into the distance, giving the impression they wished to guide the visitor to an important destination as quickly as possible, but at the end of each street all such a visitor would find was pale, rolling sand or a wall of rock. He would pass colonnades, dry fountains whose metal basins were overgrown with thorny stalks, the flaking facades of houses and palaces with yellow grass and other vegetation growing out of their crumbling eaves and sills. He would walk past hot walls, past series of high, paneless windows; the pleasant smells of empty rooms warmed by the sun would waft towards him. From the plain, the town was penetrated by the belt of high reeds that lined the riverbank. The visitor who chose to step into this thick, damp jungle was soon surprised to find statues of sphinxes and mighty, recumbent lions, coated in a sandy soil, rotting leaves and vegetation; there was a flight of broad steps that reached down to the river and some great metal rings set in granite slabs.

The lower town was not built by the forebears of the islanders: it was established on the site of a village in the port by conquerors who came to the island many years ago. I thought I saw in the decoration of the facades, in architectonic members scoured for centuries by a sand-filled wind, modified elements of Venetian architecture, twisted features of the Roman and the Spanish baroque. From these clues I composed a story for the town. I speculated on what the people were like who all those years ago landed on the island’s shores and built these houses and palaces. I pictured them as sailors with dirty lace collars whose activities at sea were half-piratical, half in the service of their kings; I imagined these figures, each of whom was simultaneously traveller, brigand, engineer, discoverer and geographer, and I fancied that some of them had picked up something of the new philosophy in the salons of Paris or London.

Although they missed their homeland, they would not have been able to live in it any longer; they had become used to the vast expanse of the sea, to the heat which dissolved thoughts like alcohol, to the lure of coastlines that seen from the bow of a ship stretch out like so many marvellous flowers. They discovered new lands and plundered them to the glory of their king, who, being so far away, was easy to venerate, but they were no longer capable of being anyone’s subjects or respecting anyone’s laws. When they landed on the coast of this island, whose population was too mild-mannered to defend itself, when for days on end in the burning sun the colourful gemstones sparkled before their eyes, when the women they encountered were beautiful and submissive, they formed the intention to settle for good, to build their own kingdom here, to build a new home which they would likely call by the name of their own country or king.

As I studied the volutes with their exaggerated twists furling into one another, the luxuriance of the stone acanthi on the capitals of columns and the bizarre shell-like curves, it came to me that these monuments had been constructed in fits of homesickness, even though their builders — after years spent roaming the seas — had forgotten the order and dimensions of home. The breath of the South stretched and warped shapes into a dreamlike, joyless, ghostly, tropical rococo. Even today the walls of the palaces exhale pride, nostalgia, evil, daydreams and pain. The interior gardens of the palaces, their arcaded galleries overgrown with reeds, give away how much the foreigners hated the land of which they had become the lords, how they tried to conceal their memories inside their homes.

The wide, straight boulevards and right-angled crossroads were intended as expressions of the triumph of order. The Europeans wanted the inhabitants of the rocky dens of the upper town, whom they mocked as savages of the labyrinth, to be amazed by the sight of the regular chessboard of the town on the plain; they wanted the natives to feel humble whenever they walked its magnificent streets. But in the burning, blinding sun, all the geometry and symmetry acquired a hallucinatory character, investing the town with a dreamlike air; it was the same with the illusory interior gardens and the over-adorned facades, which betrayed their creators by befriending the shapes of the aborigine rocks and trees.

The islanders did nothing to resist the invaders. During my stay on the island I was forever bewildered by their placidity. When their property and lives were in danger this could manifest itself as an almost heroic calm, but at other times it could come across as a dull indolence and want of courage (though the islanders were no cowards). No one could take from them their treasures, which were embedded in the present, and they knew this very well; hence there was nothing for them to fear. The murmurs to which they listened, the tangled shapes whose script they read, these things they could find anywhere; I believe that they even imagined death to be some kind of murmur, and for this reason they had no fear of it. Yet their complaisance made me uncomfortable. One should bear in mind that in the end they triumphed over their conquerors; I believe that they knew from the very beginning of the magnificent victory to come. If their submissiveness was part of a highly successful strategy, I’m not sure this makes their attitude any more estimable or easier to bear.

As I got to understand the character of the islanders better, I was able to imagine what this secret war must have been like: evidently it was so inconspicuous that for a long time the conquerors had no notion that any kind of struggle was going on, let alone that their inglorious defeat was foretold from the beginning. I see the foreigners as they condescend to describe to the islanders the stories and dogmas of their religion, as they tell them of the latest advances in knowledge in Europe, as they speak of the natural sciences, the laws of mechanics and new teachings in logic and distinct ideas, as they demonstrate to the islanders the machines they use in their building and war-making. I imagine the islanders listening to them, repeating their concepts and theories, reciting their prayers. The foreigners sense that something is happening to their ideas and their faith, that they are undergoing some uncanny transformation, but they have no notion of what this transformation might consist in; after all, all the islanders are doing is repeating their utterances verbatim. As the Europeans see no place at which to strike, as they do not know what to forbid and what to eradicate, what to polemicize about and what to refute, they have no means of self-defence. The natives do not even have a god one could take from them. The islanders always repeat what they are told and are never silent; whenever the Europeans retreat to their patios with their fountains, the voices of the natives, buzzing like insects and repeating the words of the Europeans, seem to reach them through the thick walls.

When the islanders repeated the theories of the Europeans, they did not change in them a single word or concept; no article of proof was missing, nor were any laws of logic violated. Yet it seemed to the foreigners that in the act of repetition the logic they had used to this point was revealed to be a dreamlike game, its logical structures to be labyrinthine. Although the methodical approach was disturbed in none of its aspects, it was transformed into a ritual that hinted at sorcery. It remained the case that if man is mortal and Socrates is a man, then Socrates, too, is mortal, but suddenly it seemed that the mechanism that transmits to the conclusion by means of a central article the predicate of the upper premiss, was started up by a unknown force, a force that the Europeans had never before been aware of; now it seemed that behind the figures of their judgments they were seeing the outlines of mechanisms wholly different, driven by this force with the same willingness and perseverance; they also thought they glimpsed the contours of fantastic syllogisms in whose judgments the place of Socrates was taken by scaly, malodorous monsters and in whose conclusions were revealed flashes of venomous light and muted cries which, by some strange irresistible method, flowed out of the colours of sounds and the rhythm of premisses. It would have been bad enough if this transformation was just a sickness that afflicted logic in the tropics; but the Europeans felt an ever-growing anxiety that something worse was going on, that in this accursed place they had got themselves into a trap from which there was no escape, that logic had taken off its mask and with a grimace of irony exposed the true nature it had hitherto kept hidden.