Neveryóna: Or, the Tale of Signs and Cities Read online

  ‘The girl plays beautifully on several of the stringed instruments they carve so well in the east. When she was a baby, a wise woman, begging from door to door in the city, saw the child, cast bones and wooden coins on the pavement, and read, in the array, of a great and profitable musical talent asleep in the infant’s fingers. The parents accordingly sat the child to study with one of the eastern music masters who had recently located here, as soon as she was old enough. The prophecy seems to be fulfilling itself, and her talent has awakened. Already she has composed several sacred litanies, and several times, now, her mother, presuming upon that old acquaintance with the mistresses for whom she once did washing, has taken the girl to wealthy homes in the suburbs to play. Several times, now, the girl has been requested to entertain at gatherings of the lords in Neveryóna, for which she and her family have been handsomely compensated. Only last week, in fact, she was playing some of her compositions for the discerning and glamorous lunching about a flowered and bestatued pool, when an elderly baronine, moved deeply by the young woman’s song, suggested, so rumor has it, that if the artist would compose something in praise of the Child Empress, an audience might be arranged at the High Court itself. Yes, that is the very girl we are observing now, her pitcher on her thumb, hesitating between sophisticated cider and common beer.

  ‘Certainly, by now, you have your own notions about which direction she will finally turn. Will contagion or sympathy govern her choice? How many of the factors I have outlined will go into the final overbalancing we call decision? All, I suspect—if only because she is a particularly sensitive person. (Some say her voice and fingers were fashioned by our gods for some celestial craft-fair competition!) In her own songs she has praised both the delicacy of the one drink and the heartiness of the other.

  ‘Come, let’s leave her to choose, appreciative of the complexities that play now so silently on her spirit. Only be certain that whichever way she turns, it will be to assuage thirsts far more intricate than those the tongue alone can know. Now take your place in line with me, to drink the water from this gushing, public stone. The underground steam that feeds the fountain here, before brick and pavement encircled it, closed over its tributary, and civilized it, is what first made this a trading spot back when all around was merely a brambly field, with the wide, rocky brook of the Khora running by it to the sea. But remember, as you touch your lips to the water breaking and flashing on your palms, your own movements here will sign, as much as anyone else’s in the market—to the proper reader—aspirations, ideals, and nostalgias that pervade an empire.

  ‘Have you drunk your fill?

  ‘Good.

  ‘Let’s wander on.

  ‘Do you see those yellow and blue birds twittering in their reed cages—loosely woven baskets is what they really are. The mottled objects piled on the counter across from them are the eggs of the same caged creatures, collected in the wild and pickled in vinegar till their shells soften and their insides congeal as though steeped in boiling water. Right above and to the left, on the shelves at the stall’s back, are still the same birds, this time carved in wood or molded of clay, but painted far more gaudily than the colors their live models ever wear, even when they flash in the sun-dapplings between frond and vine in the southern jungle. Note that short, grave man with the shaved head who stops to make a purchase, now at one counter, now at the next. The white collar-cover he wears hides the same iron I carry on my neck. Owned by a wealthy family visiting the city, he is making purchases his master and mistress decided on during a trip here yesterday afternoon. That someone could want all three—live bird, pickled egg, and carved bird—seems to sign a voraciousness in our attitude toward that odd construct of civilization, nature, a voraciousness abroad wherever the conceiving engine that builds villages, towns, and cities is at work, almost as if the central process of civilization itself were to take a “natural” object and possess its every aspect: the thing itself, its material productions, its very image.

  ‘Look down that aisle, and you will see a fragment of the same process without the mediation of middleman and purchase order.

  ‘Those good folk are running with their baskets and bags toward that vendor wheeling his barrow up from the waterfront. A mountain dweller, you have probably never heard of the fare he vends, for until a month ago no one would have considered it fare—except perhaps some of the more primitive shore tribes along those bournes where civilization has not yet inserted its illusory separation of humans from the world which holds them. Till then, what this man now sells at exorbitant prices was part of the slough and garbage that tangled a fisherman’s net: lobster, crab, oyster, shrimp…About a month back, down where the waterfront gives way to the beach, some of our city’s more fashionable young folk were taking an evening stroll, when they saw a madman on the shore devouring the soft, inner flesh of these repulsive, armored sea beasts. Nearly all of the company were properly appalled; but one, however, thought she caught a glint of some mysterious and unnameable pleasure in that madman’s eye. Later, with a hammer and a wooden blade, she contrived to get hold of one of these creatures for herself and taste of its protected innards. Now it has been known for years among primitive fishers that a clam eaten at the wrong time of year can kill; or, indeed, that these beasts fall into noxious decay even faster than fish in general. Yet such is civilization’s appetitive passion that it cannot allow the madman lone access to his skewed, mystical, minuscule pleasure, rare enough in the circling contradictions of his unreason. I say this incident took place a month ago; but really—it has hardly been a full three weeks.

  ‘Look at them!

  ‘Have you seen a more animated and enthusiastic group about any vendor here? Already woodcarvers and metalworkers have begun to fashion special mallets, picks, pliers, and prongs to assist in extracting the delicate, sweet flesh. No doubt the jeweler will shortly cast the same implements in gold, set about with agates and tourmalines—for these new flavors will reach the imperial palate before the songs of our young musician reach the imperial ear, despite the baronine’s entreaty. News of these flavors, these pleasures will penetrate the walls of the palace; news of this fashion in food will work its way throughout the land. And I tell you this: if one could map the progress of this news—fascinating, outrageous, appalling, marvelous—moving north, south, east, west of us, one would have a guide to the most trustworthy communications network we possess, putting to shame the Empress’s highways and winded couriers, jogging along with messages from merchant, bandit, politician, and pleasure-seeking prattler alike in their hide sacks.

  ‘But I see you staring down that aisle there, at the end of which the people gather. Above them, the old woman in the young boy’s mask is helping to set up the platform for the performance. Those mummers cast another sort of reflection of our country; as you can see, it’s one that many are anxious to watch. The actor there in the mask of a girl, with bits of glass in his hair, supposed to be diamonds, and the white dress down to the ground, no doubt represents our beloved Child Empress Ynelgo, whose reign is personable and practical. It is an image our nation holds of her from her ascension—back, indeed, when I was about your age now. The other one there, in the mask of a man with a scar down his cheek and who wears a wooden version of the iron collar, would seem to be the Liberator, Gorgik, of whom you spoke. So, we are to have a political satire. The populace will see an amusing distortion of its own preconceptions of these figures; as the audience recognizes the skewly familiar, it will laugh. Had the Liberator or the Empress the patience, no doubt each might learn something of the way he or she is publicly perceived. But I certainly do not. And the Empress is not the sort to come wandering, veiled and obscured by time and inaccessibility, into the publicity of her realm. But from the props and painted pieces coming out of the wagon, I suspect the scene is to be Kolhari. The young actor there, dressed as an old woman vendor? The little girl playing a potato-selling boy? I wouldn’t be surprised if they had chosen to lay their fictional en
counter here in the Old Market itself, just where we have been walking. Come away, girl. The truth is that both our Empress’s conservative supporters and our Liberator’s radical adherents will soon lose patience with the liberal distortions the mummers will impose upon the real that, finally, both agonists share. Which side, given its head, would shut them down the faster is as moot as the decision between cider and beer. Both parties I know would rather opt for a more realistic portrayal of, say, a simple encounter, in a market place such as this, between a real young girl who might, indeed, have really dreamed of being a queen and a real slave who might well have had some real thoughts on the desirability of freedom: what these two saw, what they said, their points of human contact, their inevitable moments of distrust and hostility—that, certainly, is the performance the radicals would applaud. Of course an equally realistic encounter, say, between an aging woman who must bear not only the idiotic title Child but also the real weight and responsibilities of state with, say, a real slave who, indeed, had really dreamed of becoming a political leader and a savior of his class, an encounter in which we might observe the real ignorances of such a slave and the queen’s real sympathy and wisdom about the very real political matters the slave would correct by overweening will and inefficient magic—that is the performance the conservatives would applaud. Either would be preferable to the shenanigans shortly to be abroad. But as we make our demands in the name of that meeting point between ethics and art, we overlook that both radical and conservative versions are no less concoctions than the concoction we would have them replace: one has a real queen and an unreal liberator, the other has a real slave and an unreal queen. And it is the notions of reality and unreality themselves which finally become suspect when either one is mirrored in art, much less when both are mirrored together. The liberal audience, claiming to be equally tolerant, or intolerant, of both sides (and one suspects, alas, they really comprehend neither), no doubt reads, as we have been reading, for the final sign of the mummers’ value: they may be equally offensive to both sides. And it is only some perception of that reading—and not the fact or referent of the performance which is read—that allows the agonists to suffer their antics. I can only Humph and walk off in silence, because I am the man I am…a slave to all the forces whose flow and form we have been trying here to mark. You are a free woman, which, from my position, means you are probably ignorant of what forces compel you.

  ‘I would not be one of them.

  ‘Stay here, if you like, chained by their lies and illusions no less magical than the coins and calipers on the counter behind. But, I see, you are following me…Is it inertia, fear, or merely politeness that makes you abandon their enthralling spectacle of variety and unity, singly expressed by the best-intentioned misdirection, for my monotone drone, picking at awkward distinctions?

  ‘Myself, I can find the toys for sale at this counter amusing, at least for a while. The clay dolls for young boys and girls; these rubber balls for older children; the gaming boards for young men and women—like material tools, each seems to proclaim its intelligible task: how to erase boredom, in some useful way, from the leisure civilization imposes. The answers these toys suggest at first seem innocent enough: “We shall initiate amusing rehearsals of future tasks without the goad of responsibility,” they declare. “We shall exercise the body, while it is free of the paralyzing knowledge of real dangers that hang on the outcome of necessary action. We shall stimulate the mind without the mind-numbing political constraints a truly meaningful decision imposes.” Considered not in terms of their ends but of their origins, however, they become more ominous.

  ‘The doll? Who decided that the young should rehearse the physical care of infants, so that they know them as objects to be bounced, cuddled, or abandoned when boring before they know their own, real infants as living beings full of the responsiveness anterior to language that is the basis of all expressed reason?

  ‘The ball? Who decided that youths should develop speed, agility, and rhythm before they have become comfortable with the physical realities of endurance, perseverance, and steadfastness that alone can make any play, political or artistic, yield true satisfaction?

  ‘The game board? Who decided that the women and men of our nation must stimulate the faculties of strategy and count before they have learned to note, analyze, and synthesize—the knowledge that alone can direct such skill toward responsible employment?

  ‘And here we have become entrapped in our own gaming, faced with the unpredicated and unpredicted consequences of our lightest notion. Such oppressive threats are precisely what we fall to the moment we try to free ourselves from the oppressions of the game of art. But where have we wandered to?

  ‘I do not recognize these aisles and counters. Do they sell the newest wares that I have not the experience to read? Do they sell the oldest, whose secrets I have never before been able to penetrate? Lost in unfamiliar lands, we are merely creatures uninformed, foundering, asking, and finding. Lost in the map of those lands that is the city among them and the market within it, we become one with the map, cartographer and cartograph, reader and read; the separating line can only be scribed with the magic rule and measured with magic calipers, its position and direction only obtainable with an astrolabe set to unknown constellations in an imaginary sky, the distinction in the value of the respective sides calculable only in unmarked coins—a division which vanishes as we stare at it, which, as it vanishes, erases with it all freedom, all power and possibility of choice.

  ‘Thus lost, the only image we are left is that of ourselves as one of those great, nameless craftsfolk, intently playing at a game equally nameless, whose end is the creation of precisely that reality—and unreality—so obviously bogus when it is politically decreed or imaginatively modeled: that image is, I fear, the final concoction worshiped as freedom by the totally enslaved. But—be thankful, girl!—we have reached the market’s edge and are almost loose from this insidious commercial pollution!’

  Pryn had listened to much of this, but from time to time she had let her mind, if not her feet, wander down alleys entirely different from the ones down which her companion would have led her. She forced open the ripe fig a woman a stall behind had handed her and bit the sweet purple, flecked with white seeds, turning her own thoughts, which had gone their own ways as she had strolled between awning and awning.

  Occasionally the huge slave’s monologue had seemed to coincide with the real market they walked through; more times than not, however, it seemed to exist on quite another level. One man with a green-painted tray, for example, had grinned at Pryn and handed her a succulent peach, which Pryn had eaten to its red, runneled pit—then thrown that pit down on to the brick. It had all occurred without a mention from the giant extemporizing beside her. Another example? The musician whom the slave had described was certainly as sweet and attractive and docile a creature as might have existed. The young woman Pryn had actually seen, however, hesitating between beer barrel and cider keg, was rather shabbily dressed in what may once have been an elegant bit of fabric; now it was quite frayed and stained and bunched about her, every which way. Her hair was wild, her hips were wide, her shoulders narrow, and she blinked and turned, from booth to booth, one finger hooked through her jug handle, swinging it as if to some clanging inner rhythm. The moment the slave had turned toward the fountain, Pryn had seen the young woman suddenly fling the jar down—so that red clay shattered on red brick! Then she stalked off between the stalls. Four or five times more Pryn saw her, now at the end of this aisle, now crossing another, arms folded, staring ahead, making her headlong way around this stall or that. Was she thinking of some great musical composition, Pryn had wondered; or perhaps she was contemplating her own explanation for the array of tools and produce about them. Once, coming around a stand of flowers, the musician actually brushed against the slave (it was between mummers and toys); she stepped back, unfolded her arms, and blinked up at him with baffled but distinctly approving surprise that clea
rly held recognition. Then she folded her arms once more and marched off. But as she had already had her place in the narration, none of this registered on the low voice winding on and on among the vendors and porters. Seconds later another vendor had suddenly held out two blood-black plums. Pryn had taken one and sunk her teeth in it, nodding her gratitude. The giant, however, had not even noticed—nor had he halted his peroration. The vendor, smiling and shaking his head, had put the other plum back. This slave and I? thought Pryn. It is as if we are walking through different markets, in different cities. But the fig, offered her by a woman behind a counter piled high with them, had brought Pryn’s thinking to its turn. Vendors were not handing free fruit to everyone among these stalls and aisles, she realized.

  Is it something about me?

  But the only thing about me, she went on to herself logically, is that I’m walking with him. Could it be that she was walking through his city, his market, in some way she did not yet know?

  The giant, who had been quiet a while, spoke again: ‘You said your companions were looking for Gorgik the Liberator?’ For the first time since they had left the bridge, he looked at Pryn directly. ‘Would you like me to take you to him?’ He smiled for the first time since they had left the Bridge of Lost Desire.

  Is the Liberator your master?’ Pryn asked

  Again his scarred face became grave. ‘You ask very simple questions that are almost impossible to answer.’

  Pryn started to speak, but a notion overtook her that no doubt overtook you several pages ago—indeed, if it took Pryn longer to realize than it took you, it was not because Pryn was the stupider; it was simply because for her this was life, not a tale; and it was all a very long time ago, so that the many tales that have nudged you to such a reading had not yet been written.