Bags under my eyes, I thought: those words exactly. Oh, shit.
I stayed at the mirror and, a bit hesitantly, moved the index finger of my right hand closer to one of those… things. There it was. I could touch it, as well as see it.
With my finger, I tried pulling down the skin. It didn’t seem like mine. It wasn’t elastic, but had the slack texture of a slightly worn fabric. At least that’s what I thought at that moment.
Then I started to study my face closely in the mirror. I noticed I had lines at the corners of my mouth, near the eyes, and especially on my forehead. Long, deep lines, like trenches. How long had I had them? How come I had never noticed them before?
I pinched my skin, in different parts of my face, to see how long it took to fall back into place. As I did this experiment, I remembered when I was a child and my great-grandmother used to hold me on her knees and I’d pinch her cheeks. I’d pull them down and then watch as the skin fell back into place. Very slowly.
That reminded me of my great-grandmother’s neck, all lines and creases. So I checked my own neck. Which of course was the kind of neck you’d expect to see on a forty-year-old man in good health and reasonable physical condition. My great-grandmother, as I didn’t stop to think at the time, had been at least eighty-five, if not older.
I was about to start an anxious search for other marks of time – which had obviously passed without my realizing it – when the doorbell rang. I looked at my watch and realized, in this order (a) that Margherita was ready, was knocking at my door, and was probably thinking I was ready too, (b) that I wasn’t ready at all, and (c) that maybe I was starting to lose it.
I went and opened the door, didn’t mention point (c) to Margherita (and to avoid her noticing it for herself, I also avoided asking her if she thought I had lines or bags under my eyes), finished getting ready in a hurry, and a quarter of an hour later we were in the street. For the rest of the evening, I stopped worrying about time passing and its dermatological ramifications.
You could hear music even before you got inside the villa. Wind and string instruments, remote, mystical sounds, a few strokes of the gong. The best of Vietnamese New Wave, someone explained to me some time later. The kind of music I love so much I can even listen to it for five minutes at a stretch.
The house was full of incense smoke, and people. Some of them were almost normal.
Margherita disappeared almost immediately into the crowd and the fog. Soon after, I glimpsed her chatting to a tall, thin, bearded guy, about fifty. He was dressed in an impeccable two-button Prince of Wales suit and looked quite surreal in the middle of this gathering. I knew hardly anybody and didn’t much feel like talking to the few people I did know. So, almost immediately, I applied myself to the food, which was copiously laid out on a long table.
There was something like a kind of goulash, but it wasn’t Hungarian, it was Indonesian, and it was called beef rendang. Then there was something that looked like paella, but wasn’t Spanish but Indonesian too, called nasi goreng. And then there was something that looked like an innocuous Italian mixed salad. It wasn’t Italian – it too was Indonesian – and it certainly wasn’t innocuous. When I tasted it, I felt as if I’d put an oxyacetylene torch in my mouth. I don’t remember the exact name in Indonesian, but the translation was something like this: green salad with very spicy sauce.
But I ate everything, including mango crepes in coconut sauce and a banana and cinnamon dessert. Both of these were Vietnamese, I think, but they were good.
I went for a little walk around the house. I exchanged pointless chatter with various weird people. Every now and again I saw Margherita, still chatting to the bearded guy. I was starting to get a bit pissed off, and I looked around to see if I could cadge a cigarette off someone. Then I remembered I’d quit, and besides, no one was smoking. Smoking isn’t very New Age.
I was sitting on a sofa, drinking my third or maybe fourth glass of organically grown red wine. It tasted a bit like old Folonari, but I wasn’t much in the mood for being fussy.
A girl sat down next to me, dressed in Cultural Revolution style. Sky-blue canvas trousers and a jacket/ shirt of the same material, with a Korean-type collar.
She was very pretty, a bit plump, nose pierced with a small diamond, long black hair, blue eyes. There was something vaguely dreamy about her, I thought – or vaguely stupid. She started talking without any preamble.
“I don’t think much of this Vietnamese music.”
So you’re not as stupid as you look, I thought. I’m glad. I don’t think much of it either, to me it sounds like a serenade for nail and blackboard. I was about to say something like that, when she went on:
“I like Tibetan music a lot. I think it’s more suitable for real meditation.”
Oh, right. Tibetan music. Perfect.
“Have you ever listened to Tibetan music?”
She wasn’t looking at me. She was sitting calmly, almost on the edge of the sofa, looking in front of her. Straight in front of her at some vague spot, like a crazy woman. As I was about to reply, I realized I was assuming the same position.
“Tibetan music? I’m not really sure. Maybe…”
“You should. It’s the best thing for unblocking the chakras and letting the energy flow. I have the sense, sitting next to you, that you have an intense aura, a great deal of potential energy, but you’re not able to let it flow.”
I drank a little more of the organic Folonari and decided to let my potential energy flow. It seemed to me, then and there, that she’d asked for it.
“It’s strange. They told me something similar, though not in quite the same words, when I started getting interested in Druid astrology.”
She turned to me, and from her eyes it was clear I’d really grabbed her attention. “Druid astrology?”
“Yes, it’s a system of astrology based on esoteric principles, developed by the high priests of Stonehenge.”
“Oh, yes, Stonehenge. That’s that ancient city in Scotland, with those strange stone buildings.”
Dummy. Stonehenge wasn’t in Scotland, but in England, and as everyone knows, it isn’t a city.
I didn’t say that. I complimented her on the fact that she’d heard of Stonehenge, we introduced ourselves – her name was Silvia – and then I explained the principles of druid astrology. A discipline invented by me, in her honour, that night. I told her about the astrological rituals performed on the nights of the summer solstice, the astral intersections, the sidereal affinities. Whatever all that might mean.
Silvia was really interested now. It was rare, she said, to find a man so passionate, so knowledgeable, so sensitive.
As she said the word sensitive, she gave me a deep, meaningful look. I went to get a fresh supply of organic wine.
“You drink wine?” she said, with a slight touch of disapproval. New Age girls drink carrot juice and nettle tea. By now I was feeling decidedly merry.
“Oh, yes. Red wine is a Druid drink. It’s a ritual medium, useful for inducing Dionysian states.” I wasn’t lying. I was simply saying that wine is useful for getting drunk. Which is what I was doing now. Then it occurred to me to tell her about a remarkable method of divination. Again, of my own invention. It was the reading of the elbow, as practised by the ancient, mystical Chaldean people. As it happened, it was something I knew as much about as I did about the Stonehenge horoscope.
So I explained how, according to ancient Chaldean wisdom, it was possible to read the trajectories of a person’s crossed destinies in his or her left elbow. To me, the whole thing was totally meaningless, but she didn’t notice.
In fact, she asked me if we could try an elbow reading. I said yes, that was fine. I knocked back the last gulp of wine from the half-empty glass and told her to uncover her left arm.