Authors: Michal Ajvaz
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.
Now the Europeans were coming to regret the vaingloriousness with which they had paraded their machines to the natives. The islanders turned the handles of the apparatus and machines brought to the island by the foreigners and all the components moved as predetermined, but everything was different. A machine performed the activity for which it had been built, lifting or beating, ejecting or grinding or turning, but suddenly these functions were no more important than all the other movements of the machine that made them possible, while these movements were no more important than the many small, pointless movements with which they were accompanied—the shaking and rattling and grinding of parts, the various vibrations for which there were no names. (Here the Europeans suddenly felt their language to be inadequate.)
Suddenly it was no longer possible to distinguish the purposeful movements from these others, and the unified process towards whose achievement all movements of the machine were joined was not the most important, nor even was it different in kind from the movements and processes going on around but apart from the apparatus, such as branches swaying in the wind or the rustling made by the sand as it recast its shape. All these movements became parts of some kind of cosmic ballet in which every part had an equal share, in which every part was equally important, equally nonsensical and had the same disturbing, bewitching gift for histrionics.
All this gave the Europeans bad migraines, which drove them into the gloom of their rooms and interior courtyards. They were alarmed to realize that they were beginning to look at the world through the eyes of the islanders. They were made nauseous by the world revealing itself to them, a world in which all sounds made a dreamlike music and all movements a monotonous, incomprehensible, melancholy ballet. On the island a great many things occurred which frightened them, but perhaps most frightening of all was the fact that in the depths of their consciousness they understood this singular world and actually liked it. They had grasped the extreme certainties of mathematics and faith but in so doing they had accelerated the catastrophe: to this presumed stronghold they had attracted demons who fell on the new prey with gusto and devoured its world. With the fall of mathematics and faith, the rest of the world, too, would go soundlessly into decline.
The Europeans continued to hold to mathematics, even after they began to perceive mathematical equations and calculations as bizarre dramas, as evidence of the work of the same blind forces as those that cultivated logical deduction and flowed through machines, forces which drove an unceasing, monotonous division and unification. The Europeans were made nauseous by multiplication because now they perceived it as a diseased swelling, a proliferation anterior to any kind of sense and order, a growth which had arisen by the dull repetition of the same numbers and their resigned coalescence in the whole; they dreaded division because in it they saw disintegration, made more horrifying still by the unnatural disintegration of wholes into parts of equal size. Addition was yet worse, as it meant a progressive decline in new units, heralding the destruction of all divided shapes and the enthronement of One that is nothing, the victory of the monster of the Whole. Subtraction was the saddest of all: they saw in it the falling off of sick pieces, a kind of arithmetical leprosy, a crumbling that turned shapes into dust, that led down another path to nothingness. They performed calculations because they sought salvation in exactitude, but at the same time they were horrified to perceive mathematical operations as movements of some monstrous figure; instead of considering the result of a calculation, the Europeans saw the choreography of a loathsome dance, a dance similar to that performed by the treacherous machines.
Having been betrayed by mathematics they turned to the saints of their prayer books, but now they had the impression that the sounds of the prayers were made up of some dark material which was not of their God’s creation and which had so little in common with Him it could not even be said to stand in opposition to Him; indeed, He was indifferent to it. It was just that in His words resided the murmur of the ancient melody, a melody that sounded in the emptiness before the Word, that hummed quietly in the first word and in which the meanings of words are still dissolved today. And pictures of the faces of saints were lost in the labyrinthine pleats of the drapes, became nothing more than pleats in some fabric undulating in the cosmic wind, gathering then opening out as if in a dream, submerged in a spider’s web of fine cracks that absorbed and devoured them, then spewed out the face of an unknown god or devil.
The islanders liked the barely perceptible shapes made by the waves of the sea and the leaves as they moved in the wind, but the geometry of the town the foreigners had built presented them with no problems; the straight lines and right angles seemed to them like the parting of the same forces that draw and then erase white figures of foam on the sea and wake in the treetops a silvery surf. These forces created all shapes and all shapes exhaled them; the forces were the same, whether they played with elusive traces of smoke or drew a straight line and then broke it into a right angle. Through the eyes of the islanders the straight lines of the lower town were transformed into a dreamlike web, whose lines sounded like thin strings in a music of empty, apathetic or liberated time that was heading nowhere. And so a town that was soaked in dreams when it first came into being, now lost its last remnants of substantiality: it transformed from a dream to a dream. For the foreigners it became a tormentuous labyrinth of hot walls from which there was no escape, while the natives were able to settle in, take walks about the squares, and relax in the shade of the great colonnades and on the magnificent granite embankments with their statues of sphinxes and lions.
The native women submitted to the foreigners, but the foreigners acquired the habits and the gestures of the natives and their children spoke the natives’ language better than their own. It seems that by the third generation, the conquerors had merged with the natives: they had forgotten their language, abandoned their books, machines and their god, and were listening to the murmur of the sea and the scratching of the sand, or watching shadows move across walls on hot afternoons. All that remained of the foreigners were certain features in the faces of the islanders—like the letters of a forgotten alphabet, the sense of which has been lost. Of the foreigner’s language, a few roots remained, which the language of the natives absorbed and used in its games; they were good for prefixes and suffixes. The shapes of the instruments the conquerors brought to the island can still be seen today in the adornment of facades—in simplified, distorted and endlessly repeated form. And thus the conquerors disappeared. What remained of them was the lower town—their dream of home that had become a stifling labyrinth, overgrown with reeds and smothered in sand.
I believe that this breakdown in the thinking of the foreigners after years of torment, homesickness and anxiety brought with it a deep, unexpected joy, and that in its final phase the foreigners accelerated the process themselves. To their astonishment and delight, they began to understand that the labyrinth they had built for themselves and that had them in its grasp, was after all the home they had yearned for while at sea, that it was more of a home to them than the distant cities of Europe whose systems had been dissolved for them beyond all reconstruction in the winds of the tropics. Out of the town the foreigners had built as a memorial, the natives had fashioned a new town—a labyrinth-town—in which, so it proved, it was possible to live in contented tranquillity; it was at once Ithaca and the island of the Lotus Eaters. But in the birth of the new town the foreigners also played their part—by how they saw it, by how they responded to it in gesture, by the paths they pursued in it. Now they saw the same town as the natives did. For the foreigners, too, all shapes had the same importance; their feet, too, made of the town’s geometric ground plan an intricate mandala of futility. They came to understand that the force echoed in the motions of machines and the procedures of logic and mathematics could be accepted and delighted in, that the cosmic ballet they had had such an abhorrence of, could be seen as a performance of endless fascination. I imagine them sitting on the patios of their palaces, just watching, filled with a joy growing like the weeds and shrubs produced by scattered seeds, like the sand that blew gently into their living spaces. I think they forgot all about Europe, but the cities of the north were transformed in the joyful dream of the moment, which floated among the hot walls and was just as much a part of this place as the roar of the sea. A golden age began with stains, rustlings and aimless journeys.
I understood them because I, too, got a taste on the island of the lotus of effervescent chaos. Perhaps this was not even chaos, but something beyond chaos, a space of calm, swirling forces from which shapes, images and some sense of order rose up before sinking back without regret or memory. I would say to Karael almost daily how much I was irritated by the indifference and laziness of the islanders, but still I let one ship after another sail away without me, until the time arrived when I realized that my own transformation had progressed so far that in a few weeks or days I would be unable to leave the island, ever. So return home I did, but I will be forever marked by my stay on the island. I feel the island present within me still like an incurable disease a traveller brings back from the tropics in his blood, like a stifled fever that silently marks every gesture and glance. And I know that forever more every shape I see will be lost in the repulsive yet delightful network of mazy, tangled lines; forever more words will be somewhat higher waves on the endless, unbroken surface of the rustlings.