The Bell-Boy (3 page)

‘Ah,' said Laki, comprehending at last. ‘You mean I should become a guide?'

‘That's a possibility too. Oh, I know what you're thinking, boy – it's only old Raju gassing on, but when's he going to tell me what to do? I shan't, though. I want to give you a kick, that's all.'

‘A kick, uncle?'

‘Certainly. I know how when a man works he gets into a rut. Day after day he does the same old thing. We go on duty and we go off duty, we go to bed and we eat our meals. But all the time, like as not, the way to something better is staring us in the face. Why does the grouper stay in his hole and grow fat? He doesn't waste his energy swimming about looking for food. He simply waits for food to come blundering in and then he grabs it. He seizes the opportunity, doesn't he?

‘The same with you. Look at the guests who come to this hotel. Never mind that if they're richer they may go to the Golden Fortune or the Seven Blessings. Even the poorest hippy is still rich. He's rich enough to travel. He's rich enough to pay for healing sessions or a meditation course or fork out those scandalous ashram fees. We say nothing about his drugs bill, either. What's more, he'll certainly have relatives back home who can lay their hands on real money if things go wrong. You don't need to rip them off, either; you just need to get their confidence.
Never
steal
a
watch
when
y
ou
can
steal
a
heart.
Well, then.'

‘It's difficult knowing how to start these things, uncle.'

‘Nonsense. Muffy tells me we've got some new guests. Who are they?'

‘Some woman and her kids. They're English. Or maybe Italian – but they speak English. She's come for psychic surgery. She says she's got an introduction to
hadlam
Tapranne.'

Raju looked at him triumphantly. ‘There you are. She's rich. Remember that Indian film star? Of course she is. Think of those air tickets. She can even afford to bring her children. Big children? Little children?'

‘A boy of twelve and a girl of fifteen. She's not bad, the girl. Old Muffy was giving her the eye.'

‘Think of going abroad,' said Raju dreamily. ‘Imagine getting a job in – for instance – Europe. Or even America,' he added, this being the golden dream to end all others. How they did shimmer, those mythic lands at the ends of impossibly difficult roads which were essentially a never-ending series of toll gates. Roads beset with bribes, extortion, bent recruitment agencies, visa fixers, corrupt passport officials, travel sharks, queues; doors shut at every turn which would open only for hard cash. ‘Do you know what I'd do if I were young again?'

‘What, uncle?'

‘I'd marry a foreigner,' said Raju wickedly.

High in the Apuan Alps between Lucca and Carrara lay the remote village of Valcognano. In common with thousands of other remote Italian villages, it had been abandoned some time after the Second World War. The young men left to look for work, the girls to look for husbands, and the last of the ancients tottered down the mule path to lie in a cemetery near enough to civilisation for little lights to burn beside their names through the harsh winter nights. For twenty years Valcognano was left open to foxes, wild boar and the weather.

Then one day had come a wise man from the East, Swami Bopi Gul, riding in a Boeing, a rented Maserati and finally on a donkey to set up his Community of Pure Light.
Dismounting stiffly, he performed certain rites and meditations and declared the place ideal. It would be a haven of serenity and bliss. Far removed from the impurities and distractions of modern life, the Community’s members would drink pure mountain water and warm themselves before fires of chestnut wood from the forests, while relying for illumination on wisdom and kerosene. The kerosene arrived on mule back, together with sacks of flour, jars of oil and other provisions. The wisdom would simply grow of its own accord, declared the Swami, being the bountiful harvest of
Presentness.

Among the earliest Pure Lighters were the Hemony family; in those days Tessa’s husband Bruce had still been around. After the first year or so Swami Bopi Gul’s absences became regrettably more protracted as he busied himself with the running of his spiritual empire in places such as Srinagar and Zurich. Consequently the Hemonys and another couple found themselves the elders at Valcognano and newcomers inferred that they had been entrusted by the Swami to carry on the Community’s work – as indeed they had.

It is not often appreciated by those who have never lived the simple life up a mountain how complicated it is, nor how much of each day is taken up by tasks of a more or less drudging nature. Many were the young refugees from art and language courses in Florence or Pisa who found their way there hoping to
bliss
out
on long hours of sunshine and wine and meditation; but few there were prepared to spend a morning hoeing a maize field or coaxing a refractory mule up the eight hundred and ninety-four broad steps through the chill gloom of the forest. They left, mostly within days, to be replaced by others.

Yet gradually over the years the Community did build itself up until almost all Valcognano’s houses had been restored and were lived in by people whose lives – apart from mantras and tantras and curious practices at dawn –
differed very little from those of its original inhabitants. They sowed, they reaped, and often at night they sang songs around the fireside. Curiously, the Pure Lighters were largely free of the problems which typically afflict such enterprises and cause dissent and break-up. There were few scandals and jealousies, while the Italian authorities virtually ignored them. From the outset the Swami had made judicious donations to the parish in whose bailiwick Valcognano was, and the
parroco
was firmly on the Community’s side. Every so often he would make the three-hour walk up to the village and satisfy himself that there was no odour of brimstone about the place, no evidence of sorcery, no effigies of horned goats. The inhabitants didn’t strike him as practitioners of the black arts, appearing sober and healthy even if a little scruffy and given to expressions of happiness. They certainly plied him most generously with home-made bread, sheep’s cheese and cold-extracted oil of hyssop for his stones.

It occurred to the priest to enquire as to the children’s education, but he was easily satisfied that they were being well taught since nearly all the adults turned out to have university degrees. Besides, the complications of enrolling them in the state educational system scarcely bore thinking about. The
comune
of which Valcognano was a part would have to send a
scuolabus
to fetch and return them daily, at all seasons and in all weathers. Since it was evident that no
scuolabus
could get up a mule track, the
comune
would have to build a road. Once there was a road there would have to be electricity, telephones, sewage disposal … Who knew where such spending would end? And all for an isolated hamlet of self-sufficient folk who treasured their isolation? It was pointless. Far better let the whole matter drop.

So the Italian state left Valcognano to its eccentric but peaceable foreigners, except that every now and then a police helicopter might hover above the maize field to check that nobody had planted marijuana in the middle. As far as
officialdom was concerned Jason and Zoe and the other children were as unaccountable as gypsies but of no interest to the law, unlike the genuine gypsy children from Yugoslavia who plagued the peripheral wastelands of Milan and Turin with their pickpocketing rackets.

Theirs had been a strange upbringing, reared as they were in a multicultural limbo. Dal they ate, and polenta and porridge; also curry and pasta, poppadoms, pizza and pudding. They were smallholders with wide horizons, too, for they were always travelling. Tessa would suddenly announce that next week they were going on retreat in Kashmir or to a disciple of the Swami’s in Thailand, or merely back to England to dun their capitalist turncoat of a father for more maintenance. Along the way they picked up what they could of formal learning. On the last visit but one Tessa had wangled both children a term’s schooling, but Jason especially had proved peculiar and it was not a success.

As for money, well, the Hemonys paid as little attention to it as people do who have never had to worry. Tessa’s family were rich; she was an only child. It was true she had married a man without a bean, but he turned out to have a future. They had met at an ashram in Agra where Bruce was wrestling with Sanskrit. He had beads and a glossy clean ponytail, a newly-minted doctorate in biochemistry and a charming smile. Each had recognised the other’s spiritual beauty; both were sure the world was best forsaken. Within a year they were married and within two were hurriedly repairing the roof of a tumbledown
casa
colonica
in Valcognano –
bliss!
– before autumn turned to winter. But after a few years Bruce had become sad and restless. He was increasingly susceptible to minor ailments which laid him low despite the most skilled aromatherapy and the most elaborate attempts to harmonise his body with Mother Earth. He took to going off on his own for several weeks.

Then one day in spring he returned looking calm and
decisive. He was going to the world (as the phrase had it). He had applied for and got a job as a biochemist working with ICI. Oh yes, and there was one other thing … he’d sort of met this girl.

It had been a blow, there was no denying it. For some time Tessa had known Bruce’s path had become cloudy, that he was increasingly unable to wipe his spirit clear. But when she told the Swami and he had held her with that wonderful calm gaze of his and smiled his beatific smile, she at once saw it was for the best after all. ‘We must each find our own way through the minefield,’ was his teaching. ‘A seeing person is not always safer than a blind one.’ ‘But I have a family to support,’ said the former public schoolgirl, astonishing herself. ‘Support, support? What is support?’ asked Gul. He was always a little enigmatic about money matters. He lit a stick of incense and they drank camomile tea sitting together in the bare upper room of a house which had belonged to Valcognano’s last midwife. Its walls were now draped with Tibetan prayer flags and Mediterranean sunlight came bounding exuberantly in, bringing with it both excitement and calm. ‘Maybe your own path is changing,’ he said. ‘Who knows?’

‘It knows itself,’ she said.

What it had known it communicated one night by waking her with the realisation that a job at ICI would bring in a decent sum in maintenance from Bruce, and therefore she needn’t rely on the tainted capital of her father’s legacy. In a sense she would have earned her alimony; it had all been
meant,
after all. More bliss, except that Zoe had been quite upset by his defection. She had taken valerian for her grief and they had all gone to Sri Lanka for a bit. It had been marvellously restorative, although the poor child had been weepy at first. Jason, perhaps because he was so young, had seemed to accept the whole thing with equanimity. Still, that was all several years ago. Since then Zoe had quite recovered and was rapidly turning into a young woman. Had
turned, very probably, at the time when she somewhat lost her head with a naughty boy from LA.

‘Well,’ thought Tessa with melancholy pride as she leaned on the rotted window-sill of her room in the Hotel Nirvana. She watched the monkeys leaving the sanctuary of the Redemptorist Fathers’ garden for their evening pillage of Malomba’s outskirts. ‘Well, the Hemonys always did have warm hearts. Warm hearts make hot blood, and hot blood makes us
open.
Open to the spirit and new experiences; open to things happening. And that is true freedom – not striving, not grasping. Oh how lucky we are.’ She sang a few notes in a little girl’s voice, while up from the garden drifted the clotted scent of musk-lilies, the sound of bird-song and snarling monkeys. She had almost forgotten the bleak flash at dawn when for a moment in the bus she had wished above all for her life to be still, her back to be cured, for an end to this road.

But then if someone had ever suggested – trying to account for the occasional sadness which might overtake her as a little cloud crossing her inner sun – that she was a woman of forty with two children and no husband who wandered at whim from one place to the next when not living in a commune up an Italian mountain, she would have replied tartly that if it did not quite comply with bourgeois notions of the purposeful life, then all the more reason to rejoice in it. What precisely
was
so fulfilling about good-consumerism? What so purposeful in being led by the nose for threescore years and ten as a servile member of the admass? Or so self-expressing about stifling beneath that dead weight of conventional impiety?

If as a mother she felt open to accusations that, whereas her own life was her own business, her wayward and untutored children might have little future, she could defend herself with equal vigour. For one thing, Zoe and Jason were anything but uneducated. How many of their contemporaries knew how to make sheep’s cheese? Or
could recite The Triple Refuge or the Heart Sutra? Or knew to heal a severe burn with lavender oil? In any case they would soon be old enough to go their own ways and if, like Bruce, they wanted to go to the world, there was nothing to stop them. They were not stupid and would soon pick up anything they needed to learn.

Sometimes Tessa could not prevent such rhetorical exchanges from popping into her mind. Although she had long learned to deal with them and was sure she was not wrong, they did trail a fleeting disquiet. She had never liked arguments; they reminded her of fallings-out with her father. It was perfectly reasonable, then, that such things in bubbling up and evaporating should leave behind their residues. And that was not in itself bad. Such sadnesses as one did feel – and only the greatest guru or half-wit would maintain that spiritual exercise rendered one immune to shadows – were proper and could be
used.
They had energies of their own.

Thus she thought, leaning at the window and suddenly prey to the melancholy which comes of arriving exhausted in a strange tropical town early in the morning and lacking the energy to do more than doze fitfully throughout the day. For all her years of travel, and knowing that it was fatal even to think of going to bed, she had once again found herself at eleven in the morning and at three in the afternoon heavy on damp sheets, watching the strips of light between the shutters blaze with white glare and hearing from a remote outer place the cries of children, the creak of carts, the din of people living their lives. She hovered in her darkened room, disengaged, as it might have been without further purchase on her own life and lacking lien on any other.

At this moment her attention was distracted to the little pagoda in the garden beneath. There seemed to be two children playing just inside its darkened doorway. Well, not playing exactly, so much as … She leaned further out, a chunk of rot breaking from the sill and floating away trailing
dust like cinnamon powder. In this twilight it was hard to see but there really did appear to be two children copulating inside the Fathers’ pavilion. And why not too? she thought with a small pang. Bliss. She suspected these people had very clear minds. With such an uncomplicated attitude towards pleasure, there would be no reason to grow up muddied with taboo. That boy Lucky, for example, who had befriended them this morning. He gave off an unmistakable aura of
cleanliness,
of healthy young human animal. Just then a trumpet sounded from up in the sky somewhere to her left, setting off all kinds of bells and gongs and cries. The sudden noise must have startled the children or else it coincided with the end of their lovemaking, for they came hopping out of the pagoda’s window and loped across the lawn with their tails in the air.

It was her laughter which chased away the last of Tessa’s doldrums and, since she was supporting herself on shaking arms, provoked the final collapse of the entire window-ledge which broke off in a cloud of termite-casts and fell like balsa wood. This made her laugh even more. Malomba was to be playful after all. Suddenly the vibrations were good. It was going to be numinous and playful. After a shower, during which she sang in her cement stall beneath a weak stream of rusty water, she felt ready for anything.