Black Marsden

by Wilson Harris

  Jennifer was dressed in another French tunnel. But this one made him realize how wide and shapely her hips were. She had seemed to Goodrich slim even fragile before. He glanced without appearing to look at the upper half of her body and recalled his dream of her breasts into which were set large beautiful coins. She passed him a cup of coffee and their hands touched.

  “When you came into the room, Jennifer,” said Black Marsden, “we were discussing Knife’s role as poor beggar in my global production. It’s high time we review the whole matter from as many sides as possible. Goodrich has been a great help. He is a patron of vision….”

  I looked bewildered. “Oh yes,” he said, “the way you recognized and identified Knife.”

  “Recognized? Identified? Not at all. I made an error.”

  “A very evocative error.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mardie likes you, Clive,” said Jennifer, “for your scarecrow eye. He thinks you are one of us.”

  “One of you? Scarecrow eye?”

  “Yes,” said Marsden, “in raising issues of memory and non-memory….”

  “I confess I am out of my depth.”

  “How marvellous,” said Jennifer, “to swim—to be out of one’s depth.”

  “It’s simple,” said Marsden and his beard bristled at Jennifer and Goodrich. “There are two species of beggar with which Knife must swim into his act. Goodrich has reminded us. First there is the beggar of memory. Here we are in apparently safe waters. Like tying a knot into your beard to remind you of something. If you are a Catholic, for example, you wear the cross as if it’s god’s bank note.”

  Jennifer leaned forward and filled Goodrich’s cup again; her fingernail absentmindedly grazed his knuckles. “Oh I am so sorry. How clumsy of me.”

  “It’s nothing. Nothing at all.”

  Black Marsden laughed. His teeth looked perfect and even. “The beggar of memory resides within an order of solipsis into which we are all securely tied. He represents us and reminds us of ourselves. He is our infallible initiate, our infallible intimate. We are already inside, so to speak, the particular economic dress or religious dress or sexual dress he plays.”

  “I see,” said Goodrich rubbing the red line Jennifer’s nail had left in his skin.

  “But,” said Black Marsden, “we face a different proposition with the beggar of non-memory who represents our most fallible identity kit, vulnerable correspondences, irrational caveats and relationships. Memory …” he pushed aside his coffee and sandwiches—“is a storehouse of initiations. As such it is enormously useful but it may inculcate a hubris of mind or partiality cloaked in scientific determinisms which need to be shattered if we are to come to our senses about those areas of the human sphinx in which millions are eclipsed (beyond economic memory or ritual for all practical purposes) at starvation point; or vanished (beyond sacramental memory or ritual for all sane purposes) in Hiroshima, for example; or shamed (beyond living memory or ritual for all historical purposes) within other theatres of conquest or violation. Thus written into the hubris of self-determined orders or intelligences are contrasting unknowns or self-corrective intuitives we ignore at our peril….”

  “I still do not understand….”

  “You do understand,” said Black Marsden fiercely. “You have seen flies vanish into Knife. Slain or consumed at a stroke.”

  “Who the devil do you think you are?” thought Goodrich but he said nothing, stung into silence by Marsden’s ecology of spirits—flies vanishing into Knife. And Marsden sensing the mood of the hour drew a veil over his brow like a corrugated hand in a rubber glove. “The poor beggar who has lost his memory represents worlds which have been consumed without rhyme or reason. And the very desert of human consciousness cries out that tabula rasa slate is the theatre of the uninitiate. Blind murder is a species of blind love.”

  He dived into his breast-pocket, pulled out a photograph which he passed to Knife. “I want you to study this,” he said.

  “Why?” said Knife taken aback, “it’s nothing … nothing … it’s a desert … is it some sort of joke?”

  “Study the joke.” Marsden was drunk. “In joking deserts A-Bombs have been tried and explored. The ghost in the Bomb is the soul of the desert. There are human deserts—in our great cities, everywhere—which serve as sociological blackboard to correspond with scientific blackboard or deserts of species. Each desert becomes an invaluable place where peculiar trials are conducted. Thus the function of the desert is written into some of our most sophisticated advances. Without the human desert where would we establish our sociological fetishes? Without the desert of species in which life has become meaningless or extinct where would we research our A-Bomb fetishes?”

  “I haven’t a clue,” said Knife and hummed atrociously off-key “The answer my friend is blowing in the wind”.

  Black Marsden was laughing soundlessly. It was an astonishing volte-face from the implacably serious role he had been playing. Goodrich was astonished by the merriment of blood which popped out in his cheeks. Red cherries of dark laughter. His face a moment ago, as he spoke of the theatre of the uninitiate, was white as chalk above his bristling blackboard beard. Now it were as if Knife, at a single stroke, had cut a hole in the black forest and a young man’s self-mocking lips shone in an old man’s face.

  “I would like to insert a huge cherry into the black-and-white cake of my play,” he said to Knife and Jennifer and Goodrich. “Sort of judgement day cake. How many bites into a monstrously peopled canvas reddened by ageless suns—how many bites into the cherry of the risen soul—will god take? Millions and uncountable millions will stand before him. Will he judge a score of millions at a glance?”

  Knife shrugged his shoulders.

  “Perhaps”, continued Black Marsden, “he will visualize millions at a glance, millions of wasted lives, his eye tunnelling to unravel biases of life. And so you see my dear Goodrich there is nothing so horrifying after all in your scarecrow eye. It means you do have the seed of judgement day scenario in you … look at me and tell me what you see.”

  *

  Black Marsden had risen to his feet. He seemed close now to curious exhaustion and leaned upon Knife for support. The amazing incandescent fertility of expression to invoke chalk, red cherries, coal seemed to come from within him and through him.

  One saw through him into the most diverse filaments of flesh and imagination (stratospheres as well as atmospheres of spirit) in which one’s dreams were intensely real, intensely active and alive. This was the phenomenon of Marsden’s personality. And yet I found myself bound to resist, in some degree, such an order of fascination. Who was Marsden to snap his fingers, as it were, at me? To dip his fingers and features into every wasting or wasted dye or pigment of existence?

  I knew the logic of midnight to noon private confessional diaries, unsung or unheralded doodles and sketches—men of chalk, men of coal, the beggar as king; and my early suspicions returned that Marsden may have stolen into my room and tapped my book of infinity.

  But even as the suspicion strengthened I was filled with a different kind of alarm. Who could be so acquainted with my innermost dreams of criminality, of divinity, love of humanity as well as hatred of humanity except a chimera or projection of myself? Who could unravel so intimately, so quickly, at a stroke and a glance the intricate labyrinth of a diary?

  Thus I found myself riddled and torn by the possibility that Marsden (whether as doctor, thief or judge), Knife (whether as beggar or assassin), Jennifer (whether as Gorgon or open-ended beauty) were wholly unreal, wholly non-existent. Or wholly related to a terrifying trial of indwelling bias and community, a terrifying scrutiny of indwelling truth so unpredictably fierce and real it could likewise expire in a flash, faint or fade into the innocent floorboards one trod. My head was spinning with a fabric of invisibles—the invisibles one endured in one sense (logical empirical unreality), or in the other sense (illogical immanent reality).

  Marsden
was speaking—“Excuse me, Goodrich. I find myself suddenly stricken with exhaustion. I am an older man than you think.” He gave his weird smile. “Much older than you think. I am compelled sometimes to rest a little.”

  I stepped forward wishing to put my hand on his arm (which Knife had relinquished for a moment), assure myself beyond a shadow of doubt that he was both solid as well as visible. But he kept me at arm’s length. “Knife will see to me, Goodrich. It is kind of you nevertheless.” Knife’s deadpan matter-of-factness was unbroken and as he and Marsden left the room I was filled with the curious sensation of fading blood, of the most beautiful and the fiercest phantoms I desired and yet could not reach. I could not stop myself crying out aloud when they were gone: “They are not real. Not real at all.”

  “Very real. Very real,” said Jennifer. “Ask Mrs. Glenwearie. She knows we are real. She has to feed us like children. Do you know, Clive,”—I sensed she was teasing me—“I want a child. I do.” She came right up to me now and I desired to touch her, hold her. But I was afraid my hands would go through space, pass through her body. “How is your hand?” she asked suddenly. “There is a red line on it.”

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all.”

  “It’s real,” she said. “That thin red line.” And kissed me with lips so pliant and soft I felt the tip of her tongue on mine. She drew back instantly as I sought to put my arms around her.

  “You are a cunning one, Clive. Come now, confess. First a kiss to prove me real. Then something more to prove me even more real. Then more and still more. How permissive is reality? Is there an end to the question of proof? Mardie would say it’s the dance of many veils. Do you know, Clive, I am to play Salome in Mardie’s theatre? He wants me to play a thoroughly virtuous Salome.”

  “Virtuous? But surely that’s a violation of the part….”

  “Quite so,” said Jennifer and she mimicked Marsden. “What is virtue? Virtue is a succession of violations towards the seat of love—towards the possession of head or heart. Virtue is a cruel insistence on a property of reality.”

  As she mimicked him I could indeed hear Marsden’s voice speaking through her, schooling her for Salome through his phenomenon of personality.

  “Are you his mistress?” I cried. The words came from me before I could stop them. Jennifer looked somewhat surprised. “Mardie would be flattered if he could hear you ask me that. Dearly flattered. He may be a wise old man but he has his weaknesses.” The tone of her voice changed subtly, grew a little fierce and helpless and cold. “Mardie couldn’t give me a child, Clive. And I want a child. I want a child I tell you.” She had become quite childish, even outrageous in her insistence on this, but I sensed an exertion of will on her part pitted against Marsden’s personality.

  “Would a child,” I said so softly it was doubtful whether she heard, “turn you into a real woman?”

  Jennifer may have been intrigued by the question for she appeared to fade a little—to lose something of a virtuous crescendo of blood in resisting Marsden’s clutches—his brainchild, his spirit-child in her. It was ironic that she appeared to fade when she should have blossomed in her own right. He (Marsden) was a phenomenal lover, I began dimly to sense, few men could dislodge even when they seemed most prosaically and realistically ascendant.

  5

  Goodrich made his way from the Market Cross towards St. Giles, then past the old Parliament where a statue of Charles II trampled the grave of John Knox. Then along the Royal Mile past the house of Knox, past the site of the ancient Flodden Wall inscribed into the roadway. Many years had gone by since he first came this way—long years that stretched back to around 1950—long years before he won his fortune and settled in Edinburgh. Now it was interesting to look back to that first occasion when passing along this ancient roadway a grim spirit seemed to address him from the jumbled houses overhead and from each narrow wynd or close. And flags of suspicion fluttered it seemed to him then in the washing suspended from windows high overhead.

  The Royal Mile looked now quite different: almost mild, almost relaxed, almost genial. There were shops with wares and items from many parts of the world. An Indian woman passed him in a saree. Then a group of laughing young women, maxi-skirted, mini-skirted. And yet though exotic layers of Spring and Summer were here, and the threatening garb of Winter had been rubbed out, there remained a strange brooding mixture of presentness and pastness embracing all historical seasons inserted into the place.

  He came to the end of the Mile and Holyrood Palace. There was a bath house near the gate associated with Mary, Queen of Scots. Arthur’s Seat—the site of a long extinct volcano he believed—dominated the scene in the background.

  The impact the palace made on him was one of private and public spaces so rooted in history he was filled with a sensation of intense apparitions—naked apparitions in search of density and cover. How could one defend privacy at the heart of a crowded court or world or city except within enigmatic patterns of identity—scandal, intrigue—tabula rasa theatre? As though the very ground of besieged personality asserted itself under certain pressures in forms of intrigue and counter-intrigue. It was this assertion perhaps of secret resistances, secret alliances that compensated over-burdens and grew into the heart’s blood of desperate romance.

  He recalled now as he stood in the courtyard how on his way to the palace he had idled into a bookshop, opened a book by Flora Grierson on Edinburgh and read:

  “Here was a city swarming with life like a bee-hive, wherein class distinctions must emphasize themselves boldly, or completely disappear; where criminals could lie undetected, even outside the sanctuary provided by the Abbey, and men like Deacon Brodie carry on for years their double lives of respectability and crime without fear of discovery. Here every type of person lived cheek by jowl, using the same dark staircase for every kind of illicit purpose, coming and going by the same front door. Private houses had grown so rare that Mackenzie, looking back on his earlier years from the greater seclusion of the nineteenth century, felt justified in giving them a paragraph to themselves.”

  He flipped the pages and came to:

  “Twisted and tangled was medieval Edinburgh: modern Edinburgh should be straight and tidy. The old town had adapted itself to its site: the new town conquered or ignored its site, forcing it to accept the laws of town-planning. And just as the old city derives much of its charm from its peculiar fitness to the landscape out of which it seems to have sprung, so the new gains in beauty from its sheer contradiction to the place on which it is imposed. But for that resolute disregard of all natural advantages and disadvantages, we would not have today those straight steep streets that rise from the valley of Princes Street, as it were, sheer into the sky, then fall again headlong into Leith and the Firth of Forth. The new town of Edinburgh is an exquisite paradox that satisfies because of its rational unreason.”

  As he turned all this over in his mind the palace before him—framed in lines of steel by workmen repairing the façade—seemed to symbolize that bee-hive of the old and new: it was the reality and unreality of both commoner and king—a blackboard of premises upon which the goal of long-lost privacy and darkest freedoms of action and initiative were robed by contrary generations until with each fall-out of pattern and design an ancient spectre drew one closer to the enigma of modern times….

  Goodrich was already busily sketching and writing his impressions upon the invisible book he hoarded within covers of body and mind. Everything became grist for his mill. “I am a miser of infinity,” he said to himself at last and then listened for the voices of accusing or commiserating phantoms at his elbow—left elbow and right elbow, bar sinister and bar profound.

  *

  As I made my way back along the Royal Mile I stopped for a moment at the site of the old Tolbooth and the following lines ran through my head:

  O waly waly up the bank,

  And waly waly down the brae,

  And waly waly yon burn-side

 
Where I and my Love wont to gae.

  Now Arthur’s Seat sall be my bed;

  The sheets sall ne’er be pressed by me:

  Saint Anton’s well sall be my drink

  Since my true love has forsaken me.

  Marti’mas wind, when wilt thou blaw

  And shake the green leaves aff the tree?

  O gentle Death, when wilt thou come?

  For of my life I am wearie.

  A famished sleeve or cowl brushed against mine. I suddenly glanced up (no one was there) and across the street in the way one’s eyes are drawn sometimes to a stranger’s in a kind of blaze or bond or intuitive relationship. But, in fact, there were no eyes I could observe upon mine. Rather Jennifer Gorgon and a young man, hands twined together, were approaching on the opposite pavement—so intent on each other in conversation I was invisible to them.

  I felt a stab of jealousy before I could properly suppress it and was astonished by the appearance of the young man which seemed wholly inconsistent with the kind of male companion I would have drawn for her. Her present companion was very pale as if he lived indoors all the time. He wore dark glasses. His hair hung in a kind of half-glossy, half-lifeless fashion upon his neck. Beside Jennifer’s dramatic symmetry, decorous but wide hips, breasts with their inimitable coins to match the severed eyes of John the Baptist—the pale unsunned but sun-guarded dark-glassed young man seemed wholly inadequate and inappropriate.