Lost Paradise (3 page)

LOOKING BACK ON IT, I THINK THAT WHAT APPEALED TO us was that they never wrote anything down. There were no written records. All kinds of things were sacred, but nothing had been preserved in a book. Nor had they invented any machines, a fact for which they are often ridiculed, and yet they have survived for tens of thousands of years in a hostile environment, a kind of eternity without numbers, in which they had managed to live off the land without destroying it. There was no point in longing for a return to this way of life, because our world had been the death of theirs. The only visible clue to what they had been thinking during this eternity was their art, and even that was not intended to be permanent: sand drawings, body paintings applied during ritual ceremonies, art that belonged to everyone, except to us, because we did not have the keys to their secrets. All we could hope to do was scratch the surface. We wanted to understand it, but we couldn’t. It was at once an abstraction and a physical reality. How could that be translated into something you could understand? The Dreaming that had nothing to do with dreaming, but was a noun used to express an entire world order, from the origin of the universe to the time before memory began. It was too much for our seventeen-year-old brains to grasp, and to be honest, it still is. The lightning men, the rainbow snake, and all those other beings in human and non-human forms who created everything as they travelled through the chaos of the unformed world and taught people how to deal with the universe – it was all that and more. During the Dreamtime, their mythical ancestors had cast a net of Dreamings over the world. Sometimes a Dreaming belonged only to the people who lived in a certain place, but when they trekked across the desert, that same Dreaming linked them to people in other areas, even though they might speak a different language. This could be seen in the landscape – the spirits and ancestors had left tracks everywhere in the form of stones, water pools or rock form ations, so that future generations could read the stories and thus relive their own history. But that was not all. Not only did the Dreamings make it possible for people to see and recognise the still-active powers of those ancestral beings in the landscape, but each person had his own set of Dreamings that linked him to his ancestors. All of this was expressed by means of what we now call art. You used it to express your own spiritual identity, your totem, which was linked to an animal or a physical feature of the landscape, to songs no one else was allowed to sing, to dances and secret signs – a cosmogony in which there were no written-down rules, but in which everything – literally – had its place, to which you or your group always returned, a world without a written language, but with a permanent encyclopedia of signs, still legible after tens of thousands of years, which would guide you to your rightful place. The more Almut and I read, the less we understood. It was too much and too complex, and yet it was its visibility that drew us back again and again and gradually gave us the feeling that we might be able to leave our own world. This was our secret, which we did not have to share with anyone else. One of our favourite photographs was of an old man painting the side of a cliff. He was sitting with his left leg tucked under him. You could tell by his frizzy white hair that he was old, though his body still looked young. It gleamed – all except his feet, that is, which were ashen and leathery, the feet of a man who had never worn shoes and who would soon walk away and leave his painting behind, someone whose way of thinking was very different from ours, who believed that the Creative Heroes had emerged into an empty world, that they could appear in the shape either of animals or of people, that they could change each other into rocks or trees or hurl each other into the air to create the moon or the planets. We never doubted for a moment that we would go there one day, and even after Almut and I went to Europe – Dresden, Amsterdam and Florence – as part of our art history studies, Australia kept calling and beckoning to us. At the mere mention of the place, we would look at each other with the conspiratorial smile of two people who shared a secret that no one would ever be able to take from us. After what happened in the
favela
, I didn’t leave the house for weeks. I had no wish to see anyone and couldn’t talk to my parents about it. Almut came to the house from time to time and sat by my bed. She knew there was no need for words, until the day she told me she had been looking into cheap flights to Australia. We could fly to Sydney. From there we could go to Arnhem Land and El Shirana, which was not far from Sleisbeck. We could go to the Sickness Dreaming Place. She did not need to elaborate. We both knew what she meant by that.

ALMUT HAS TWO PARENTS OF GERMAN DESCENT. I HAVE a fair amount of Latin blood flowing through my veins. My father is a real Teuton (you could put him in a uniform and he would feel right at home), but at least he had the good sense to marry my mother. If he is Wagner, she is Verdi – with a vengeance. This is never more obvious than when they are having an argument. ‘He only picked me because he was curious,’ my mother always said. ‘He never knew who he was having to deal with – the Portuguese, Jewish, Indian or Italian in me. He wanted to see which one had the upper hand. But he underestimated the Indians.’ They are still a mystery to him. To me too. The shadow, the mood – that’s the Indian in me. My mother has it too. We have learned to stay out of each other’s way when we get it.

Almut has banished chaos from her life. She is Germanic and has a feeling for order. She is the one who, years ago, came up with our Australia piggy bank. And she is also the one who said, also years ago, that we should acquire a skill that would enable us to earn money when we were travelling, so we would not forever end up washing dishes in restaurants or bars, or babysitting, or worse. As a result, we took a course in physical therapy: exercises for people with back problems, massage, that kind of thing.

‘It’ll be useful all over the world,’ Almut said.

‘In sex joints, you mean.’

‘Why not? As long as they keep their filthy hands off me!’

‘I’M ONLY LENDING HIM TO YOU,’ THE GALLERY OWNER in Adelaide had said, as if he were talking about a book or a painting. An object. The artist either had not heard it or had pretended not to – the latter, I think.

There was an exhibition of Aboriginal painters from all over Australia. His painting was black – a night sky studded with infinitesimally small white dots, though even the word ‘dot’ makes them sound too big. Your first thought, of course, was that they were stars, but that would have been too easy. At first you saw only a monochrome black canvas. Only later did you notice the thousands of minuscule points that may or may not have been stars. Through the intricate net of dots you could vaguely make out an even darker shape: the Dreaming of a totem animal, which in turn represented the flow of a tiny stream – so abstract that eyes such as ours cannot even see it. Of course it has nothing to do with our eyes. The problem is that we keep encountering a different mindset. He tried to explain it to me, but had little success. He did not look at me the whole time he was talking to me. Every word seemed to require a tremendous effort. Although Almut and I had read up on the subject earlier, it now appeared that we had simply been reading stories that could never be as real to us, as natural, as that painting was to him. The painting itself was not the problem. You could find the same kind of thing in any museum in the United States or Brazil,
Desert Lizard
Dreaming at Night
. Why not? Nor was it the fact that I could not make out a desert lizard. Dreaming – there was that word again. You could not avoid it and you could not get around it. It was a word you kept tripping over, again and again. It seemed to make sense in English, but try saying it in another language and have it mean the same thing: a religion, a sacred era, the time of the mythical ancestors, as well as laws, ritual, ceremony, the state of mind in which the paintings had been made, because in this case he had inherited his Dreaming – that of the desert lizard – from his father and grandfather. How could you inherit something that wasn’t a physical object? Somewhere inside him, in his genealogical make-up, his inner being, there was an invisible lizard that was not in fact a lizard and would never be visible to me in his paintings, and yet it was one of his ancestors, in the guise of an animal, who had come to him out of unmeasured time and had kept its sacred meaning even after the arrival of the others, who knew nothing of their traditions and way of life and did their best to undermine and overpower it. Dreaming. I liked to say the word to myself, as if that might enable me to participate in their spiritual kingdom, in the spirit-filled realm of these paintings, which otherwise seemed to survive only on reserves, far away in the merciless desert that some of them could still read like a book or a song. Everyone had his own Dreaming, which came with a set of totems and songs that made up his own personal lineage and were a legacy from the still continuing act of creation performed by his ancestors, which is also known as the Dreaming. None of this could be seen in the cities any more. Most white Australians seemed to struggle with these metaphysical concepts, if only because the Aborigines they came into contact with were like human driftwood – people who had lost their ancestral ties and therefore no longer belonged anywhere. Australians like these had little use for the concept of sacred sites, of ground that no human being should be allowed to tread, especially when gold or silver or other coveted commodities lay beneath that ground.

THIS IS NOT GOING TO HELP ME AT ALL. THE SILENCE of the great outdoors here is like nothing else on earth, as are the starry skies. A desert stillness, a desert sky. In the faint light of a carbide lamp I can see his skin, which is of the same matt blackness as his painting and has the same white luminosity, as though an infinitely far-off Milky Way is hidden beneath the black. He can breathe without making a sound. Nothing makes a sound here. If only I myself could be more quiet, I am sure I would be able to hear the shifting grains of sand, the slithering of the desert lizard and the wind in the spinifex and the balgas – the grass trees. Assuming there is a bit of wind, which tonight there isn’t. I have travelled a long way and have arrived here. I am trying to put my thoughts into words, but I cannot. I am getting nowhere. I would like to say something about my body, about how I have realised, more than ever, that it will be there only once, that it coincides with what I call ‘me’, but I reach a point where things can no longer be described in words. One cannot talk about ecstasy. And yet that is what I mean. I have never existed as much. It has nothing to do with him. Or rather, he is only part of it. He belongs to all of those things out there, in a way in which I have never belonged to my surroundings, though everything is different: I am the equal of all of those things. I can’t think of a better way to express it. I wouldn’t dare say that to anyone but Almut, and I am not even ready to do that. I know she wouldn’t laugh at me – I have always been able to tell her everything – but now is not the right time. ‘I am the equal of the stillness, the sand, the starry sky.’ You can’t tell anyone that. Nor can you say, ‘I’m just one small person, but for the first time in my life I finally know where my place is. Nothing else can happen to me.’ No, you definitely can’t say that. It’s another one of those things you would rather not say, even though it is how you feel. I am not hysterical, I know what I am saying. I also know that Almut understands me. Though our relationship will be short, this man has helped me catch up with my shadow, and that is good. We are one now; I am both dark and light. If I were to get up and go outside, I know I would not see a light anywhere. I stood out there last night, and there were only two things in the universe – me, and all of those other things, in which case it no longer matters that I will disappear from it one day, because I have seen and understood everything. I have become inaccessible, I feel above it all. If I were an instrument, I would produce the most beautiful music. I know you can’t say any of this to another living soul, but it is true. For the first time in my life I understand what they meant in the Middle Ages by the ‘harmony of the spheres’. When I stand outside here, I do not just
see
the stars, I
hear
them.

Who banned angels from our thoughts? I can feel them all around me. My Master’s thesis was on the portrayal of musical angels: Hieronymus Bosch, Matteo di Giovanni, and especially one particular illustration in a fourteenth-century illuminated manuscript. It shows St Denis at his writing desk, working on his book about the hierarchy of the angels. Arrayed in nine arcs above his mitred head are angels carrying medieval musical instruments. They fly towards each other with their violins and horns, their psalteries and tambourines, their organs and cymbals. As I lie here in the desert, I listen to their music: an incredible jubilation amid the silence. Angels, desert lizard, rainbow snake, the heroes of creation – everything at last comes together. I have arrived. And when I leave, I will not need to take anything with me. I have everything.

I THINK ABOUT WHAT I HAVE BEEN SAYING. NONE OF those words – psalteries, mitred, angels, cymbals – are part of his vocabulary. At least that’s what I thought, but he laughed at me.

No, that’s not the right expression. He laughed me off, pushing me back with a faraway look in his eyes. This will be the shortest affair I have ever had, and I will remember every moment as if it lasted an eternity. He is spoiling me for every other man, but I don’t care. He came into my life at just the right time. There is a lot I don’t understand. You can see right through our faces, but not through his. His face might as well be made of onyx – it reveals nothing. Where does he come from? He showed me a map of Australia. It had the same familiar shape – a kind of sleeping ox without a head – but instead of the usual boundaries, there were coloured areas with the names of indigenous peoples – Ngaanyatjarra, Wawula, Pitjantjatjara – who have become extinct or might even still be alive, for all I know. Each name represents a language, living or dead. ‘They ought to abolish the word “Aboriginals”,’ he said, but he didn’t tell me where he came from. He doesn’t want to talk about any of the concepts that brought me here: the myths, the Dreamtime, the dream creatures, his own ancestry. In the gallery’s prospectus on his work, there was a story about his totem, the desert lizard, but when I asked him about it, he shrugged.

‘Don’t you believe in any of that any more?’ I asked.

‘If I still believed in it, I wouldn’t be allowed to talk about it.’

‘So you don’t believe in it any more?’

‘It’s not that simple.’

End of conversation.

I try to achieve a cool objectivity, to see it all through someone else’s eyes: who I am, my personal story, how I came to be here, my dreams of an Australia that has turned out to be so very different from what I had expected, the months I have spent in this country. I wonder if I have been lying to myself, but I haven’t. I’m not crazy – if this is ecstasy, it is of the highest order, something I have longed for, something that does not necessarily have to last. On the contrary, the fact that it will not last is a prerequisite. Maybe it’s against some kind of law for someone to look at you, put his hands on your shoulders, tell you he can stay for just one week, then up and leave. It is as if you are forced to cram a whole life into one week. Inconceivable.