How to Disappear (12 page)

Nothing else was clear about that arrangement. Who was this artist from somewhere in Germany who had paid four million marks to become the new Laird of Eigg? Why did he call himself Maruma when his real name, according to newspaper clippings, was Marlin Eckhard? If that
was
his real name. Maybe it was Martin or Merlin or Mertin. These things do get garbled. And where had the money come from and what were Marlin's plans? The sixty-five or so inhabitants of the island were especially keen to have a response to the last question, since their personal futures depended on it: they were his tenants. Reportedly he had purchased the island – and them – after flying over it in a helicopter, a case of love at first sight. Whereupon Maruma came down to earth and introduced himself and his girlfriend to the locals and conducted himself, apparently, in a charming manner, before getting back into the helicopter, rising into the air, and vanishing over the horizon. Since when – nothing. The islanders had heard and seen absolutely nothing more. Total silence. Utter paralysis. On the other hand the previous laird had been hated. His name was Keith Schellenberg, an Englishman of Liechtenstein descent, and his period of sway had made the islanders welcome any change of ownership whatsoever. They were trying hard to be optimistic.

According to the press reports, Maruma described himself as an artist of fire energy. Well – perhaps he was a Zoroastrian. It would be a good thing if he were, since the Parsis, as we know, are an enterprising bunch. But somehow I doubted he would be. The man operated from an establishment called the Maruma Centre in Stuttgart. I have a number of friends dotted about Germany. None of them knew anything about a Maruma Centre. One tried to contact it and discovered that the Centre was not open to the public. Maruma himself, until the Eigg purchase, was unknown in the art world, and the purchase of Eigg had been his only notable act to date – but was it art? When in doubt, call it an installation. Or a performance. The original and perhaps dangerous aspect of this installation was that it was inhabited by real people of non-submissive character who might well have performance ideas of their own.

It was Luca who first heard about the purchase. I'd met Luca through the editor of
Tages-Anzeiger
who told me to root him out in the East End of London where Luca was living on a photography scholarship. He wore spectacles with heavy frames like Peter Sellers's and I took to him immediately when he said he was learning English from
Blackadder
on television (he was fluent in a couple of months but would sometimes address others as ‘My liege'). He told me that the Swiss had loads of scholarships – and that I too could probably get one if I put in the right proposal. His financing was always very glossy, rather mysterious, and quite plentiful. He also asked me if I'd try to get Maruma on the phone and chat him up for a rendezvous on his island.

So I'd rung the Maruma Centre in Stuttgart. Every day Maruma was not there, and I never in fact worked out who was there. Or Maruma was in a meeting. Or Maruma was abroad. Or he couldn't be disturbed – meditating on fire presumably, or even in front of a fire (which is something I very much like doing myself). Then one day the girl said ‘Who's calling?' and I, yet again, said who I was, and to my astonishment she said ‘Hold on a second' and trans-ferred the call.

‘Oh…this is a surprise.' I was wrong-footed and my thoughts were elsewhere.

‘Yes.'

‘Is that Maruma?'

‘Yes.'

‘Ah – so – right – well, can you tell me what the Maruma Centre is?'

‘It is the place where we are.'

‘And your art. Can you tell me about your art?'

‘My art?'

‘Yes.'

‘It is better not on the telephone.'

‘What is this fire energy you talk of?'

‘You don't know what fire is?'

‘Well, can you mail me something about your art?'

‘What sort of thing?'

‘Some printed stuff perhaps. I haven't the faintest idea what you do.'

‘There is no mystery.'

‘Oh good. Do you set things on fire?'

‘Perhaps there is a mystery. It is better you visit us on Eigg and we discuss it face to face. I am fed up with journalists writing stupid things.'

‘I'm a writer. I write books.'

‘That is better. Maybe we could write a book about Eigg. Something together. Something poetic.'

Maruma's tone wasn't in the least unfriendly and there was a touch of sadness in his voice which was very appealing. I liked him immediately and cast one eye at the photo of him cut from a German newspaper: chubby gentle face with untidy black hair hanging in long swatches from beneath a black beret worn on one side, and a fluffy black jumper of indecipherable design. Only German artists ever look like this. Which is proof – of sorts – that something was authentic somewhere.

‘I could visit you in Stuttgart,' I said, ‘but I don't want to.'

‘No – I understand – you understand – the fire energy is on Eigg,' he replied.

I was thankful for that. Looking for fire energy in Stuttgart was probably doomed to failure. ‘When are you next

going to Eigg?'

‘I think soon,' he replied.

‘Soon? Seriously soon?'

‘Yes. We have plans to go there maybe end of the month. Or beginning next month.'

‘So we could meet there?'

‘Of course.'

He did sound genuine. Therefore Luca and I, on the strength of this, had decided to travel up to Eigg, find somewhere to stay, tuck ourselves in, and wait for him to arrive.

And wait we certainly did.

The island's only hostelry was at Kildonan, a farm belonging to a family called the Carrs. It has a fine stone house facing the broad channel which separates Eigg from the mainland, and entry to it is reached along a gulley filled with ferns and rowan trees. In England the rowan is considered a protection against witchcraft – up here, I'm not so sure. But laden with orange berries at this time of year, the rowans warmed us as we approached Kildonan's front door.

Luca and I spent the first couple of days exploring the island by mountain-bike and eating Mrs Carr's delicious dinners. There were two churches to be visited, one Protestant and the other Catholic, and people – if they went to church at all – usually went to both. There was in addition a grey corrugated iron hut which served the community as a shop and a post-office. It was open on most days and Luca told me that when he first went to the post office he found two women in there, drunk on the floor gurgling like babies. Drinking is the most visible of the island's recreations. Outside the post office a giant litter bin made from wire was piled to the brim and overflowing around its base with the empty scarlet tins of McEwen's Export Beer. The bin stood out like a sentinel among the greens and browns of its setting. But empty scarlet beer tins and empty whisky bottles might be encountered anywhere – in caves, in fields, in the churchyards. Quite a popular idea was to place an empty whisky bottle defiantly upright on an exposed rock.

There was generally a fair number of things lying about. One field in particular had become a cemetery for rusting artefacts. Abandoned cars, ploughs and tractors, ovens and fridges were cast about on the turf as though objects in a sculpture park, and through them a herd of rusty brown cows would usually be shuffling and grazing. Perhaps the sculptor Anthony Gormley had contrived it, since he specialises in violating wild empty spaces. On enquiry however we learned that the islanders had often requested help in carting this stuff away, but the local authority always said that without a deep-water pier it would be too expensive a task. The construction of a deep-water pier had been under discussion for more than thirty years. When more urgent conversation slackened on Eigg, this topic was a regular stand-by.

Of Eigg's seven thousand farmed acres, about half belonged to the Laird's farm; another two thousand acres, mostly sheep and cattle, were managed by the Carrs of Kildonan; the remainder belonged to various crofters centred on the straggling village of Cleadale which hunkers beneath a spectacular ridge of rock several miles long. The first sight of Cleadale reminded me of the opening of Peake's
Titus Groan
wherein is described the village beneath the huge walls of Gormenghast Castle, its mean dwellings granted, by ancient law, a ‘chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them'. Peake goes on to describe the black tower at the centre of the castle ‘which arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven,' and one cannot help being reminded of the natural rock tower which does something very like that at the centre of Eigg.

The Cleadale crofters did have security according to ancient rights. But the Carrs perversely did not. Their farm was subject to a different, murkier arrangement. Such are the knotted anomalies of old, lonely places. And what of Maruma who had stumbled into this faraway bog of hope and tradition? Rumours had started to hot up. The end of the month was in sight and Maruma the Deliverer was said to be arriving at the week-end. That evening at Kildonan I asked Colin Carr if he'd heard anything more specific concerning the Laird's visit. He was nervous and said he'd heard nothing. Dinner was quiet – there was one other couple staying and they were tired from a day's hike-about.

After dinner Luca and I sat either side of the dying fire in the sitting-room, sinking into cushioned easy chairs, and we gradually finished the remains of the claret. The rest of the house fell silent. Strong winds moaned beyond the walls, and the cold and sullen seas heaved blackly all round the island. For the first time we felt far away, on this exposed, northern tip of Europe. Luca lit another cigarette and said ‘I've had an offer of a job in Venice after this. Would you like to come too?'

‘Thanks. But I don't think I would.'

‘You don't want to go to Venice?'

‘No, I don't.'

‘Did you have a bad experience there?'

‘No, I've never been to Venice. There's lots of places I don't want to visit and Venice is one of them.'

‘Oooo – why not?'

Luca was amazed. His glass had come to a halt in midair. People say ‘You must go to Venice, you'll love it', but they said the same about that other vision on water, New York, and when I did go to New York I found what struck me as giant sculpture, curiously inert. Not that I have a problem with cities-and-water per se. Those other water-mounted extravaganzas, Istanbul and St Petersburg, have meant much to me in the past, but they were cities animated by the warmth of poverty. Are rich cities necessarily cold to the heart? Venice, of velvet and marble, was always a rich town and is now immobilised beneath cling-film: the most expensive, most useless city in Italy. Simply to breathe its air is to drain one's credit card.

Of course Venice circulates in the bloodstream of world culture. It is international, that is to say nowhere, and everyone has a chip of it in their brain. It is city as exhibit, as inauthentic experience. Do you think the search for authentic experience is doomed in our modern world? I don't. But one must be mindful of having everything wrapped up for you by others. When did you last buy vegetables to which the earth still clung? Exactly. This is Venice: vegetables rinsed and trimmed in a see-through container. You see, we are afraid of authenticity – and yet we hunger for it. We are afraid of it because it involves loss of control. We hunger for it because we have so little, in the developed world at least. We have civility instead of authenticity, because lots of authenticity means a life close to violence. I'm looking forward to ocean-wonder Rio de Janeiro, mugging capital of the world, which illustrates the surprising truth that authenticity is the crucible of dreams.

When did Venice stop being real? And therefore, paradoxically, lose its magic? After John Addington Symonds and Baron Corvo? It began earlier, not long after the death of Byron I guess. In 1851 John Ruskin, outraged, reported that the arcades of the Doge's palace were in use by tourists as a latrine; but the city had already been ruined for him by the arrival of the railway several years before. Mind you, travelling writers are always like this. I loved Penang before the airport was built. Pre-airport Penang will always remain my dream of the Orient; and its capital, Georgetown, my ideal of a maritime oriental town: all the charms of the East in a pocket edition (as I wrote to my friend Justin Wintle – who preserved the postcard!). On reflection I'd say that Venice experienced the kiss of death the day Wagner stepped into the foyer of the Danieli.

Luca laughed and clapped his hands. ‘More wine, vicar?' he asked –
Blackadder
again. ‘I don't like Wagner either.'

I said that I didn't mind Wagner and that Wagner wasn't exactly the point. Vampirism was the point; Wagner's vampirism on Venice; which Wagner later emphasised by travelling there to die, confirming that this was no longer a city but a stage-set available for the greatest death-scene of his career. The Wagners had rented fifteen rooms in the gloomy and sumptuous Palazzo Vendramin where the composer would sit in the windows of the salone overlooking the Grand Canal, illuminated by the winter sun and dressed for death in a black jacket of quilted satin. As his heart gave out, Wagner struck extravagant, almost meaningless attitudes, declaring for example that the best which could happen to anyone in life was to be exiled to Ceylon. The arrival of Liszt at the palazzo did not thin the atmosphere. In Max Ophuls's film
Lola Montes,
Lola says to Liszt that for her life is
movement,
but it was even truer of Liszt than of his mistress. He was probably the most peripatetic man of his time. He was also Wagner's father-in-law and only challenger; indeed musically he had moved way beyond Wagner, who found Liszt's spare late style incomprehensible and dissonant. In these last compositions of Liszt the Modern Movement has already arrived, while Wagner at the end had become obsessed with a popular song,
Harlequin, thou must perish…