The Storyteller (13 page)

Hardy Plants
, 1934.

T
he first foreigner who came to us in Ibiza was an Irishman, O'Brien. That was about twenty years ago, and by then the fellow was already in his forties. In the years prior to settling down with us, he had travelled far and wide. As a young man, he had lived as a farmer in East Africa, and was a great hunter and lasso-thrower. But above all he was a misfit, like no one else I've ever known. He kept his distance from the educated circles, clerics, magistrate officials, and even with the natives he maintained only loose contact. Nevertheless his memory lives with the fishermen until this day, primarily because of
his mastery at knot-tying. Moreover, his fear of other people seemed to be only partly a result of his temperament; adverse experiences with those closest to him contributed to the rest.

I was unable to find out much more back in those days, other than that a friend, to whom he entrusted his only valuable possession, had vanished with it. It was a collection of Negro masks, which he had acquired from the natives themselves in his African years. In any case, it didn't bring good luck to he who had acquired it. He had perished in a fire on a ship along with the collection of masks, which had accompanied him on board.

O'Brien sat in his
finca
, high above the cove, but when he wanted to work, the path would always lead him back to the sea. There he busied himself with fishing, casting the fish trap plaited from reeds a hundred metres and deeper down, where the rock lobsters walk on the craggy seabed, or he sailed out on calm afternoons in order to place nets, which were hauled in again twelve hours later. Aside from this, though, the bagging of land animals remained his passion, and he had sufficient relationships with amateurs and scientists in England so as to seldom be without commissions, be they for bird skins, rare species of beetle, geckos or butterflies. Mostly, however, he occupied himself with lizards. One can still recall those terrariums from the olden days, which took up residence in the cactus corner of dressing rooms or winter gardens, in England, first of all. Lizards started to become a fashion item, and our Balearics were soon as well known to the animal traders as they had once been to the leaders of Roman legions on account of their slingshotters. For ‘balea' means slingshot.

O'Brien, as I have said already, was a misfit. From the way he caught lizards to his cooking, sleeping and thinking, it seemed he did nothing in the way others do it. As far as eating was
concerned, he didn't think much of vitamins and calories and suchlike. All food, he used to say, was either a cure or a poison, and nothing existed in between. The eater therefore would have to consider himself continually as a kind of convalescent, if he wanted to properly nourish himself. And one could hear him reel off a long list of foods, of which some would match a sanguine person, the others a choleric person, another again the phlegmatic and still again others for the melancholic – these being beneficial for each, inasmuch as they incorporate the right supplementary and soothing substances.

It was a similar case with sleep; in relation to this, he had his own theory of dreams and claimed to have got to know, through the Pangwe, a Negro tribe in the interior, a fail-safe means to ward off nightmares, those tormenting visions which recur in sleep. One need only to conjure up the terrifying vision in the evening, before one goes to sleep – as Pangwes do during ceremonies – in order to be protected from it by night. He called it dream immunisation.

And thought, finally – how he dealt with thought I was to experience one afternoon, as we lay in a boat on the water in order to pull in nets, which had been thrown out the day before. It was a miserable catch. We had just about brought in a net, which was almost empty, when a few meshes caught on a reef, and, in spite of all our carefulness, tore during the salvaging.

I rolled up my waterproofs, shoved them into my little boat and stretched myself out. The weather was cloudy, the air calm. Soon a few drops fell, and the light, which makes such high demands from the sky on all things here, edged away in order to return them to the earth.

As I raised myself up, my gaze fell upon him. He was still holding his net in his hands, but lay at rest; it was as if the man
was absent. Disconcerted, I looked at him more closely; his face was expressionless and ageless; a smile played around his mouth, which was closed. I snatched up my oars, a few strokes led us over still water.

O'Brien looked up.

‘Now it will hold again', he said and he tested the new knot in the net, tugging vigorously. ‘It is a double Flemish bend too.' Uncomprehendingly I looked at him.

‘A double Flemish bend', he repeated. ‘Take a look, it might be of use to you while fishing, too.' Thereupon he took a piece of cord, threw over one of its ends and wrapped it three, four times around itself until it became the axis of a spiral, whose windings tightened with a jerk into a knot.

‘Actually', he continued, ‘it is only a variation of the double galley knot, preferable, looped or unlooped, to the timber hitch.' He accompanied all this with swift windings and loops. I became dizzy.

‘Whoever ties this knot', he concluded, ‘in one go, has come rather a long way, and may retire in peace. I mean that quite literally: retire in peace, for knotting is a yoga-like art; maybe the most wonderful of all means of relaxation. One learns it only through practice and more practice – not only on the water, but at home, in the calm, in the winter, when it rains. And best of all, when one is grieving and troubled. You would not believe how often I found solutions to questions that burdened me through this.'

In conclusion, he promised to teach me this discipline and to induct me into all its secrets, from carrick bends and reef knots to spider knots and Herculean knots.

But it came to nothing; for soon it was increasingly rare to see him on the water. First he stayed away three, four days, then whole weeks. What he was doing, no one knew. There
were rumours of some mysterious occupation. Undoubtedly he had discovered some new devotion.

Some months passed before we lay beside each other in the boat again. This time the catch was richer, and when we finally found a large sea trout on his rod, O'Brien suggested that I come to his place the next evening for a little dinner.

After the meal, O'Brien said, as he opened a door: ‘My collection, of which you have certainly already heard.'

I had heard of the collection of Negro masks, but actually only that they had perished. But there they were hanging, twenty to thirty pieces, in an empty room, on whitewashed walls. They were masks with grotesque expressions, which revealed above all an austereness driven into comedy, a totally relentless rejection of everything unfitting. The raised upper lips, the curved ridges made of the eye's lid groove and eyebrows seemed to express something like boundless resistance against anyone approaching, indeed against any approach per se, while the staggered crests of the forehead decoration and the struts of plaited strands of hair bulged like markings that evinced the rights of an alien power over these features. Regardless of which of these masks one looked at, nothing about its mouth seemed designed to let sounds escape; the flaring pouts or tightly closed lips were barriers before or after life, like the lips of embryos or of the dead. O'Brien had stayed back.

‘This one here', he said suddenly behind me and as if to himself, ‘was the first I found again'.

As I turned around, he was standing in front of an elongated, smooth, ebony black head, which featured a smile. It was a smile that, right from the beginning, actually seemed like a regurgitation of the smile behind closed lips. In addition, this mouth was set very deep, as if the whole visage was nothing other than the spawn of the monstrous domed forehead, which
flowed downwards in an unstoppable curve, broken up only by the sublime rings of eyes, which obtruded as from a diving bell.

‘This was the first that I found again. And I could also tell you how.'

I simply looked at him. He leaned his back against the low window, and then he began:

‘If you look out, you will see the cactus hedge in front of you. It is the largest in the whole region. Notice the stem, how it is woody until quite high up. That is how you can tell how old it is, at least 150 years. It was a night like today, except the moon was shining. Full moon. I don't know whether you have ever tried to take account of the impact of the moon in this region, in that its light does not seem to fall on the site of our daily existence, but rather on a counter or parallel earth. I had spent the evenings poring over my sea charts. You should know that a hobby horse of mine is to improve the maps of the British admiralty, and, thereby, gain a cheaply acquired glory, for wherever I occupy a new place with my nets, I take new soundings. So, I had marked out a little hill on the seabed and thought about how lovely it would be if I were to be immortalised deep below by someone giving one of them my name. And then I went to bed. You will have seen earlier that I have curtains in front of my windows; back then I did not have any, and the moon advanced, while I lay sleepless, towards my bed.

‘I had yet again resorted to my favourite game, knot-tying. I think I've mentioned it to you before. It goes like this, I tie a complicated knot in my head, and afterwards put it to one side ostensibly and bring a second one into being, again in my thoughts. Then it is the first one's turn again. Only this time I don't need to knot it, rather I have to undo it. Naturally it all depends on retaining the form of the knot in one's memory quite precisely, above all the first must not merge with the
second. I do these exercises, at which I have managed to attain quite some skill, when I have thoughts in my head, and can find no solution, or I have fatigue in my limbs and cannot get to sleep. In either case, the result is the same: relaxation.

‘But this time, my proven mastery was no help, for the closer I came to the solution, the closer the blinding moonlight moved towards my bed. And I took refuge in another remedy. I thought back over all the sayings, riddles, songs and poems which I had gradually learnt on the island. This went much better. I was feeling my internal cramp subside when my gaze fell on the cactus hedge. A old mocking line came into my mind: “Buenas tardes, chumbas figas.” The peasant boy says “Good evening” to the cactus pear, pulls out his knife and makes a parting, as they say, from the crown to the bottom.

‘But the time of the cactus pears was long over. The hedge stood bare; before long the leaves jabbed askew into the void, before long they remained only staggered, thick shells, waiting for rain.'

‘No fence, but fencesitters', went through my mind.

‘In the meantime a metamorphosis of this hedge seemed to have taken place. It was as if those outside in the brightness, which now surrounded my entire bed, were staring in; as if a shoal were hanging there with bated breath, attached to my glances. A turmoil of raised shields, pistons, and battle axes. And when falling asleep, I realised the means by which the figures outside held me in check. They were masks, which were staring at me!

‘And so slumber overcame me. The next morning, though, it granted me no peace. I took my knife, and then I shut myself in for eight days with the block, out of which arose the mask, which hangs here. The others appeared one after the other, and without me ever having taken my eyes off the cactus hedge. I wouldn't claim that all look similar to my earlier ones; but I
would like to swear that no expert could tell these masks apart from those which took their place years ago.'

That is what O'Brien said. We chatted for a little while longer, and then I left.

A few weeks later I heard that O'Brien had shut himself away again with a mysterious task, and was inaccessible to everyone. I never saw him again, then soon thereafter he died.

I thought no more about him for quite some time, then one day, at an art dealer's on the Rue La Boétie, I discovered to my surprise three Negro masks in a glass case.

‘May I', I addressed to the boss of the house, ‘congratulate you on this incredibly fine acquisition.'

‘I see with pleasure', was the answer, ‘that you are able to appreciate quality. I see you are an expert! The masks here that you rightly admire are but a small sample of a large collection, whose exhibition we are currently preparing.'

‘And I could well imagine, sir, that these masks will inspire our young artists to a few interesting experiments of their own.'

‘That I hope very much! By the way, if you would like to know more I could get you from my office the reports from our leading experts from the Hague and London. You will find that this is a matter of centuries' old objects. In the case of two of them, I would even talk of millennia.'

‘I would be very interested indeed to read these reports! May I enquire as to where this collection comes from?'