The Secret History - Donna Tartt [185]
The mourning of the hippies, in particular, had an almost anthropological significance. Bunny, in life, had been at almost perpetual war with them: the hippies contaminating the bathtub with tie-dye and playing their stereos loudly to annoy him; Bunny bombarding them with empty soda cans and calling Security whenever he thought they were smoking pot. Now that he was dead, they marked his passage to another plane in impersonal and almost tribal fashion—chanting, weaving mandalas, beating on drums, performing their own inscrutable and mysterious rites. Henry stopped to watch them at a distance, resting the ferrule of his umbrella on the toe of his khaki-gaitered shoe.
“Is ‘mandala’ a Pali word?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “No,” he said. “Sanskrit. Means ‘circle’.”
“So this is some Hindu kind of thing?”
“Not necessarily,” he said, looking the hippies up and down as if they were animals in a zoo. “They have come to be associated with Tantrism—mandalas, that is. Tantrism acted as a kind of corrupting influence upon the Indian Buddhist pantheon, though of course elements of it were assimilated into and restructured by the Buddhist tradition, until, by A.D. 800, say, Tantrism had an academic tradition of its own—a corrupt tradition, to my way of thinking, but a tradition nonetheless.” He paused, watching a girl with a tambourine twirling dizzily on the lawn. “But to answer your question,” he said, “I believe that the mandala actually has quite a respectable place in the history of Theravada, Buddhism proper. One finds their features in reliquary mounds on the Gangetic plain and elsewhere from as early as the first century A.D.”
Reading back over this, I feel that in some respects I’ve done Bunny an injustice. People really did like him. No one had known him all that well but it was a strange feature of his personality that the less one actually knew him, the more one felt one did. Viewed from a distance, his character projected an impression of solidity and wholeness which was in fact as insubstantial as a hologram; up close, he was all motes and light, you could pass your hand right through him. If you stepped back far enough, however, the illusion would click in again and there he would be, bigger than life, squinting at you from behind his little glasses and raking back a dank lock of hair with one hand.
A character like his disintegrates under analysis. It can only be defined by the anecdote, the chance encounter or the sentence overheard. People who had never once spoken to him suddenly remembered, with a pang of affection, having seen him throwing sticks to a dog or stealing tulips from a teacher’s garden. “He touched people’s lives,” said the college president, leaning forward to grip the podium with both his hands; and though he was to repeat the exact phrase, in the exact way, two months later at a memorial service for the freshman girl (who’d fared better with a single-edged razor blade than with the poison berries) it was, in Bunny’s case at least, strangely true. He did touch people’s lives, the lives of strangers, in an entirely unanticipated way. It was they who really mourned him—or what they thought was him—with a grief that was no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.
It was this unreality of character, this cartoonishness if you will, which was the secret of his appeal and what finally made his death so sad. Like any great comedian, he colored his environment wherever he went; in order to marvel at his constancy you wanted to see him in all sorts of alien situations: