Then I went home because the party was finished. I was given a present and I was very glad with it.
THE VISIT
MR VOGEL’S house on Paternoster Hill looked pretty and inviting when I passed it today. The front door, window-frames and pipes have been painted cornflower blue to counterpoint its glittering new coat of whitewash; mirrored in the windows I saw newly-washed clouds hung out to dry in a Constable sky. The old rose tree, subtly yellow, has been trained neatly around the doorway – in Mr Vogel’s time it waved forlornly, like the arms of a drowning man, and its thorns scraped desolately on the window panes. In the evening these windows gleam and burn in the profound sunsets which roseate the bay. The garden had been a wilderness during his tenure, with celandines and dog’s mercury standing side by side with spring’s other promissory notes, the daffodils and the wood anemones. Now they have all gone, pulled out of the ground to make way for orderly and obedient domestic flowers.
As I passed I thought of Mr Vogel and the day he arrived outside the house with a ‘new’ vehicle for his quest, described beforehand as sumptuous, with a kitchen and a toilet. He went to buy it, did Mr Vogel, sure enough, but that stinginess crept in; he eyed it and wavered about it, hummed and hawed, and put it off until another day. Instead he bought a museum piece belonging to a German traveller going by the name of Julius Rodenberg, who had come to the region in search of adventure and fallen instantly and inextricably in love with a local girl on her wedding day, and still mourned for her, tethered to his yearnings like a newly-sold puppy, a-yowling and a-howling.
‘This’ll do for now,’ said Vogel to Don Quixote after buying it in Rodenberg’s yard, which was clogged with chickens and logs. The van was covered in droppings and sticky black excretions from an overhanging lime tree.
‘It’ll tide us over till I find the right thing. Besides, you’ll be able to repair it – a new one would be so complicated, we’d never be able to mend it if it broke down.’ This was said rather lamely. The Don could fix motors.
The jalopy which arrived on Paternoster Hill was remarkable – a converted ambulance, a battered old hippy bus with moss growing on the insides of the windows, and a tubercular, Doc Holliday cough which boded a quick death. At some stage it had been painted dark green by a young and idealistic free spirit who had added, in gold paint, some runes similar to those found on a standing stone in the upland mountains, a sharp, fussless script brought over the water by marauding warriors many centuries ago, long before the latest conquistadors arrived to slash and maim our culture. The inscription has never been deciphered, and in consequence has become a mystical password among those who go in search of knowledge, healing or salvation. Its unknown message serves as a perfect paradigm for all who venture beyond normal static life, in a search for something which they cannot elucidate.
This is how that old windbag ‘Nosy’ Parker described the vehicle:
Just as Columbus had the Santa Maria and the Pilgrim Fathers had the Mayflower, so Mr Vogel, conversely, had his waxen Icarian wings, an automobile of spectacular inappropriateness for any odyssey; many predicted that its only journey would be the two-mile trip to the scrapyard. On seeing it I remembered, immediately, Hercules. One of his epic labours was to slay the gorgon and take the golden apples from the island of Hesperides. Order was reclaimed; knowledge restored.
Perhaps my sister is right: Mr Vogel might indeed have a great goal in mind on the island, though I think he seeks more than apples. Today, after a trip to examine a gothic church in the countryside outside the town, marred only by a most unpleasant incident in which a rut of pigs chased me through a field – how I hate those creatures! – I returned homewards, and clapped eyes on the strangest of sights as I descended Paternoster Hill. Outside old Vogel's door stood an exceedingly strange chariot. The underlying nature of the craft was, I believe, a wartime field ambulance, which I demonstrated to onlookers by pointing to the faint visual remains of two large crosses on both sides of the vehicle. The wheels had been cannibalised from other extinguished vehicles and one seemed slightly smaller than the others, though this could have been an optical illusion (surely the whole craft was an optical illusion, cried Angelica). The windows were decorated with dehydrated algae, like the rim of a dried-up summer pond, which gave the panes a supernatural tinge. Every available inch of glass was covered with stickers proclaiming which countries had been honoured with a visit from this weird time machine. Inside was no better. The driver’s seat had once belonged to an army landing craft. Bolted next to it was an old double seat from a closed-down cinema, once made of plush red material, now worn and frayed but still capable of giving the comfort and hospitality once prized by courting couples. The rear section had also been modified; one of the stretchers for the wounded had been retained as a bed, whilst the other had been removed. Another double cinema seat and a curious table had been jammed into the available space, with two bolted-down stools. The overhead area had been converted into a series of storage spaces for food and utensils, which meant there were frequent exclamations from people as they banged their heads on the superstructure. The contraption had a distinctive smell, a mix of rice, onions, tomatoes, herbs, incense, cannabis, tobacco smoke, and that distinctive odour which rises in foreign cities early in the morning when the streets are being washed down and fresh coffee is percolating from alleyway cafés. And now, if Angelica was right, it was being asked to realise another dream-quest, for a deformed little man who had nursed his craving in a hillside Chateau d’If for longer than is fit for a man to dream.
We all stood around the contraption – Vogel, the man they call Don Quixote, the boy Luther and myself, commenting favourably on its suitability despite our mutual misapprehensions. Luther then sat himself in one of the front seats and regarded the road ahead silently, as though preparing himself mentally for the flight home to Ithaca. Like Vogel he was crippled – though in a mental sense. Because of his brooding, uncommunicative hostility to all but Vogel, whom he treated as a dog treats a master, looking at him constantly for orders or approbation, it is impossible to assess his powers. He gives the impression of being a surly, malodorous simpleton. His hair is unbrushed, his clothes unkempt and his shoes are shoddy. Despite this he can run uncommonly fast, which is why, I believe, he was engaged in the first place – to serve as Vogel’s ambulatory amanuensis.
Thank you Mr Parker, that will be quite enough for now. It would be nice to report that the next stage of Mr Vogel’s great adventure went according to plan. I had envisaged a pleasant scene, something like this:
The day of Mr Vogel’s first trip dawned bright and clear, without a cloud in the sky. As if to herald a completely successful day, the crew of Mr Vogel’s bus met bright and breezy at seven, as most of the town still slept – Don Quixote at the wheel, silent but proudly composed, like the oarsman who steered Jason and his Argonauts on their epic journey; Mr Vogel next to him, calm, attentive, a map spread on his thin white knees; the intellectually challenged Luther by his side, near the door, ready to spring out of the vehicle like a whippet at Vogel’s slightest whim. All of them sat with their bright faces set like pointer dogs towards their destination, all ready to swap travellers’ tales as they scudded across the bridge to the island, a frisson of expectancy in each heart as they started Mr Vogel’s odyssey
Unfortunately, few things go according to plan, and on this morning, nothing went according to plan. Since it was spring they might, indeed, have expected blue skies but had to settle for a dull, vapid, overcast day with fine seeping rain blanking the bus’s windscreen. It was then that they discovered the wipers were hand-operated, a task allotted to the boy Luther. It took him most of the journey to master this simple job, and the bus had to slow to a crawl when his energy levels dropped.
The boy had risen before his mother and was therefore magnificently dirty, mephitic and dishevelled, and a newly-hatched toe poked out from one of his tattered shoes. During the night his cold had incubated and he snivelled pathetica
lly throughout the trip, his left sleeve acquiring a steady stream of snot which developed into a thick green slick by the evening. There was one advantage: the boy developed, slowly, a left-right rhythm between turning the wipers and wiping his nose.
Mr Vogel was starkly hungover, possibly still a bit drunk from the night before, which he had spent, thick with drink, invoking his past, crying silently, and playing his violin in a maudlin way, rather as Sherlock Holmes might have done before solving another of his celebrated mysteries. Afterwards, as Vogel’s condition deteriorated, he spent an inordinate amount of time cleaning a one-eyed teddy bear he had found in the briars in his front garden, doubtless tossed there by a vindictive child gaining revenge during the regular sibling wars which old Vogel could hear in a slow Doppler shift before and after school every day.
The recovered bear had clearly fanned a smouldering ember from Vogel’s past: a past which most of the townspeople handled as a trawler might treat an old mine drifting at sea – they let it drift onwards, hoping it would eventually sink of its own accord.
Eventually Mr Vogel’s Argonauts were ready.
The bear was pushed into a sitting position between the windscreen and the dashboard. Its newly-washed ears rose slowly during the trip as they dried out, and Mr Vogel decided he would wet them before they set off on future voyages so that they would have a rough idea of the time as they travelled.
The Don turned the key, and after a volley of exhaust shots and a spasm of smoke, a hopeless grinding of gears and a few shudders they set off, watched dispassionately by a chatter of rooks and a passing mongrel. And so started Mr Vogel’s quest in his latest chariot of fire. There are many apocryphal versions of this journey: I quote from the version in this year’s Chronicle of the Hours:
Eventually they arrived at a cove and Don Quixote stopped the van by a cluster of unkempt fishermen’s cottages dotted along the shore. Mr Vogel’s party saw a group of men, some of them blind, mending their nets by a shoal of upturned boats. Sickly, undernourished children and dogs played among them. Mr Vogel wanted information about this cove and he sent his boy to reconnoitre whilst he quizzed the men about the coastline. At first they were very wary, asking him where he came from and what he wanted. Eventually they told him about a great calamity which had befallen them. They were being troubled by a band of witches who had landed there some years previously. These witches had been expelled from their own country for practising black magic, and set adrift in a boat without rudder or oars – they had been left to the mercy of the sea like Captain Bligh after the mutiny on the Bounty. When they landed the fishermen had tried, unsuccessfully, to drive them back into the sea. They had been constrained to a small island connected to the land by a causeway at low tide. Almost dead from thirst when they landed, they had conjured up a spring of pure water which had burst from the sands. The women lived by begging and necromancy, their menfolk by smuggling. They all wore a neckerchief, which they undid swiftly if attacked, unleashing a demon which blinded anyone harrying them. Their powers passed from mother to daughter and they had a fearsome reputation throughout the region – the women visited farms and homes with dishevelled hair and bared breasts to beg aggressively, and no-one dared refuse them. If they were turned away they chanted a terrible curse:
You will wander evermore, and with every step you will meet a stile, and at every stile you will fall, and with every fall you will break a bone.
If any of them wanted to buy animals or poultry at a fair no-one would bid against them. Each of the women was disfigured – the thumb and first finger on the right hand ended at the first joint, so they had only half a digit. This malformation was caused when the Devil slammed a door on their hands when they sneaked into his house to steal his great book of curses.
This is the boy Luther’s version:
When we got there, where Mr Vogel said there were cliffs with a cave in them, I ran along the shore to look for the cave but I did not find it, I found a little island with women on it in rags who begged me with a very sad look to give them money and when I said I did not have any they looked inside my pockets. Mr Vogel said it was the wrong place and we had gone on a fool’s errand that day so we got in the bus which is not so nice as he said and I have to turn the handle to stop the rain, but Mr Vogel said we would try again soon and we went back to the town and he gave me money for my mother and some more for new shoes, he said it was because of my toes.
There’s more bad news. I’m afraid to say that the van died suddenly in a fearsome clatter as they came down Paternoster Hill, and that was the end of that. It’s still there now. Old Vogel wobbled in, got ferociously drunk, and told me that the whole damn fool mission had been a waste of time.
‘I’ll never find it,’ he said. ‘Never.’
It was the only time I saw him cry – sitting on the stool in his corner, after everyone had gone home. He was talking to himself, and I could see big pearly tears bounce onto the bar-top. By the time I had washed the glasses and cleaned the ashtrays he had disappeared.
When he wobbled in the next day Mr Vogel was subdued. He had all the tics of a man who’d had a heavy night – tired red eyes, shaky hands, irritability. Strangely for him, he sat down by the table in the bay window, rather than his usual spot. It was Sunday morning, and soon the praetorian guard were in – Don Quixote with his bloated belly and his big hairy dog, followed by Sancho Panza, so hung-over he was unable to talk. As usual I had to hold his glass for him as he quivered through his first drink, since he shook so violently that he was unable to hold it himself. It was one of his jokes to say ‘I don’t drink much, I spill most of it.’
Don Quixote and Sancho played dominoes on Sundays, ritualistically, in the bay window, first quietly, then raucously, with great clatterings and shouts as the drink soothed their nerves. Today they eyed Mr Vogel suspiciously, since he had wandered from his usual territory, and as all topers know, every drinker has a regular spot at the bar, which places him in precise relation to his peers. We need no anthropologists in this neck of the woods; alcohol is a great examiner.
So Don Quixote and Sancho were soon at it, and old Vogel watched. He wasn’t being communicative, but something about him indicated that he had something to say when the time was right.
Eventually, towards the end of a game, when the hair of the dog had done its work and everyone was in high spirits again, Vogel said:
‘I’m not going to bother with this island lark any longer.’
‘Oh really, what a terrible calamity,’ answered Sancho, getting six-pints cheeky.
‘Yes, packing it in. Don’t see the point of wandering about in that crate.’
‘None of us saw any point in it,’ said Sancho. ‘Total waste of time. In fact we thought your Dick Barton impressions were bloody ludicrous anyway.’
Old Vogel smarted. ‘Well at least I tried – I didn’t sit around drinking gut rot and taking gibberish to the geraniums,’ he replied testily.
‘What you don’t know,’ said Sancho, tapping his nose knowingly, ‘is that those geraniums clap their leaves in sheer delight when I talk gibberish. Sheer bloody poetry to them, see.’
Don Quixote slammed his last domino on the table and rubbed his belly.
‘Sheer poetry,’ he said triumphantly, sweeping all the money into his pockets.
Their drinks shone in the sunshine, and the pleasing amber of the bitter swirled in a miasma of blue cigarette smoke which reminded Mr Vogel of the foothills of the mountain range above them. All was well with the world. Hangovers and shakes tiptoed out through the door, bliss seeped in through the warming windows.
‘Actually, I’ve decided to go on a great trek,’ said Mr Vogel artlessly. ‘I’m going to find a cure, might even go to America and go all the way out west.’
The response was entirely predictable; Sancho choked and spat out his beer, Don Quixote shouted ‘what, mister?’ and a stillborn silence was broken by raucous laughter, guffaws, jibes – the usual bar-room response when anyon
e makes a foolish remark.
‘No, really, I mean it,’ said Vogel, stuttering.
‘Oh he really means it,’ mimicked Sancho. ‘I’ve got a better idea – why don’t you bounce all the way there, like those monks you were going on about yesterday?’
Here more laughter and ribaldry.
Sancho was referring to the lung-gom-pa runners of Tibet, who complete phenomenally long journeys with amazing speed.
This is hardly the time to interrupt Mr Vogel’s story, but I must tell you about a French explorer who disguised herself as a Tibetan beggar-woman and became the first European woman to enter Llasa. Riding across a wide tableland in Northern Tibet, she noticed, far away, a moving dot which her binoculars showed to be a man.
‘I felt astonished,’ she wrote:
Meetings are not frequent in that region – for the last ten days we had not seen a human being. Moreover, men on foot and alone do not, as a rule, wander in these immense solitudes. Who could this strange traveller be? As I continued to observe him through the glasses, I noticed that the man proceeded at an unusual gait and, especially, with an extraordinary swiftness. The man continued to advance towards us and his curious speed became more and more evident. What was to be done if he really was a lung-gom-pa? I wanted to observe him at close quarters, I also wished to have a talk with him, to put him some questions, to photograph him... I wanted many things. But at the very first words I said about it, the man who had recognised him as a lama lung-gom-pa exclaimed:
“Your Reverence will not stop the lama, nor speak to him. This would certainly kill him. These lamas when travelling must not break their meditation. The god who is in them escapes if they cease to repeat the ngags, and when thus leaving them before the proper time, he shakes them so hard that they die.”
By that time he had nearly reached us; I could clearly see his perfectly calm impassive face and wide-open eyes with their gaze fixed on some invisible far-distant object situated somewhere high up in space. The man did not run. He seemed to lift himself from the ground, proceeding by leaps. It looked as if he had been endowed with the elasticity of a ball and rebounded each time his feet touched the ground. His steps had the regularity of a pendulum. He wore the usual monastic robe and toga, both rather ragged. His left hand gripped a fold of the toga and the right hand held a phurba (magic dagger). My servants dismounted and bowed their heads to the ground as the lama passed before us, but he went his way apparently unaware of our presence.