That is when the name Malasso first sounded on our journey. I told no one at all about the message. But when no one claimed responsibility for having planted it, a voice from out of nowhere suggested that the message might have come from Malasso. There was a peculiar silence after that.
‘Who is Malasso?’ I asked.
No one said anything. Everyone returned immediately to their tasks. For the first time that day my mood changed. I entered a different emotional zone. It was as if an illness had crept into my blood through my ears. My energy levels changed as well. There are certain names, with their inscrutable syllables, or their suppressed and diabolical vowels, that have the power to make you ill, or to lose your memory, or to forget what love is, or to distort your vision, or to send you spiralling, in encoded dread, towards some ambiguous doom.
I took it then, from their silence, that Malasso was not a name to mention at all, if it could be helped. There are certain peoples who invent a character to explain all the inexplicable mishaps and disasters and tragedies that befall them. These characters are responsible for the failures of harvests and for clothes missing from washing lines and manholes being left open and burglaries with no break-ins and road signs facing the wrong way. When a house mysteriously burns down, they say it was Procous that did it (Procous being the name of this imaginary semi-deity of disasters, mischief, local catastrophes, lost things, improbable thefts, and unlikely rumours). In our case, it seemed as if the crew had invented such a figure to explain lifts that wouldn’t open on the fifteenth floor, missing schedules, disasters in the air, money that vanished, stations that never existed, and all the finely calibrated tortures of the adventures ahead. They were all caused by Malasso. That was at first what I took it to mean; and I adjusted my inner being to make space for the presence of this mysterious force in our lives, this malign Prospero figure who would have such dreadful power over our lives as we travelled on towards that illusory goal of Arcadia. I made space for this new fiend, and I asked no further questions for the time being, and didn’t mention his name any more. But I confess that with the receiving of the message something changed in me, something that had always been there.
I sometimes believe that when God wants to turn your life around he puts more of the devil in you. My life was being turned upside-down, and a strange kind of daemon had awoken in me, making more keen the edge of my perceptions. I was, as they say, not myself. There are certain men in Africa who shake hands with you and afterwards you don’t feel well. There are certain people in Africa who give you peculiar objects, and once these objects touch your palm a sleeping paranoia awakens in you, and washing your hands a thousand times with carbolic soap or herbal potions can’t rid you of the sensation of being spooked. These are travellers’ tales which I happen to believe, being intelligent. So it was with the message that was passed on to me. I wasn’t the same afterwards. I was never the same again.