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education and breeding. It was a miracle that he had managed to keep it up for fifty years. He was what the Australians refer to as a ‘Pom’. His tropical uniform hung in such loose folds that he must have been almost a skeleton, but the voice gave the opposite impression. There was a signet ring on the little finger of his left hand. He too had his totem.
    ‘My eyes are still good. I recognised the book you’re reading. It was written a long time ago, and they say it’s a masterpiece, but it won’t help you. I recognised it the moment I saw those abstract drawings, those numbered and lettered lines that are supposed to explain the secret world of the indigenous peoples. Most admirable, and also accurate. It will tell you who is allowed to marry whom, who is allowed to take part in the ceremony in which a body is smoked before a burial, who is not allowed to sing when the bones are reburied, who is descended from the maternal line and who from the paternal line, going back God knows how many generations . . . and at the end you’ll know everything there is to know and promptly forget it. You’re not an anthropologist, are you?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘I thought not. Even if you read that book from cover to cover, you would still look at their society and know nothing. I’m not trying to make it sound even more mysterious than it already is, but it is mysterious, as well as being beautiful. Well, perhaps that doesn’t apply to the people. Praxiteles would not have taken any one of them for a model . . . or us, for that matter. Apparently they do not correspond to our ideal of beauty, though I stopped looking at it that way long ago. I find them beautiful. The antiquity of their world is what makes them beautiful. For me at least. Along with the things they produce: their songs, their art. They live their art – there is no difference between the way they live, the way they think and the things they make. It’s a bit like our own Middle Ages, before everything fell apart. It’s easier to live in a closed world. That’s what attracts you people, if you don’t mind my saying so. “You people” doesn’t sound very polite, but I have lived for years out here in the back of beyond, where I have watched you people come in search of answers. It’s everything all rolled into one, poetry, a total way of life. For people coming from a place of chaos and confusion, it’s quite tempting. Especially since it has been destroyed, or almost. That is what everyone has always been looking for, isn’t it? A lost paradise?
    ‘They dreamed an endless dream, an eternity in which they continued to live forever and in which nothing would have had to change. Once upon a time creatures who had dreamed the world had come and now they themselves were allowed to go on dreaming in a world ruled by spirits and filled with enchanted places – a magical system in which we do not have a place, even if we wanted to be a part of it.’
    I said nothing. From the hall on the other side of the porch came the erratic stutter of old-fashioned ceiling fans. I already knew what he was telling me, but I wanted to go on listening to that voice for as long as I could. He spoke in a strange sing-song, a kind of lament, though oddly enough it did not make you feel sad. And maybe he was telling me something I wanted to hear – that I could do without all of this, without the erudition and the explanations, that I could simply let it all wash over me without my understanding it, the way we used to do back in our room in Jardins, when we let ourselves be seduced by the images. Surely the dancing women in the museum had nothing to do with those diagrams, graphs and abstractions; at any rate they would not help me solve the puzzle, and perhaps I should not expect them to. What I had to remember were the rock paintings, the landscapes, the hoarse whisper of a person who, during our first night together, had lifted me out of my life by uttering words I had not