Jonestown

by Wilson Harris

  ‘One is born of several ghost-fathers,’ said Mr Mageye, ‘and a mother who wears a variety of masks. She’s burdened with responsibility for a family of beggars, is she not? All sorts of orphans arrive from the street and cling to her skirts. She cries and she laughs, she is pathetic, she is sublime, she is nostalgic, she is practical, she is a saint, she is a siren, she is vulnerable, she is exalted … I sometimes wonder,’ said Mr Mageye, ‘whether this is why the Roman Catholic Church has such a hold on the masses in Central and South America. Within such a Carnival of history women suffer, but at a certain hidden level they are the true educators of a race that needs to judge itself, to breach a pattern of sexual irresponsibility. Such irresponsibility does violence to communities …’

  Mr Mageye was looking at me with a quizzical look, a grave look, a jesting look, a serious look. ‘Your mother, Francisco, serves beggars in her shop, does she not, as if they were her children, and they call her, do they not, the Virgin of Albuoystown?’

  I was stricken to the heart for I suddenly remembered that my mother would die this very night. She would be borne aloft by beggars, she would be mugged and stabbed by a tall Cat of a beggar, an evangelist-beggar, a crusading beggar, in the Carnival of Albuoystown. I had returned not to witness her wedding to a tall Carnival ghost of a Frenchman but her death all over again as I had done as a child on Carnival Night in Albuoystown. I had returned on the day and night of her death. It was the 24th March, 1939.

  ‘Why did the Frenchman give his estates such extraordinary names, La Pénitence and Le Repentir? Does anyone know?’

  I knew but I was too grief-stricken to answer. When one returns to the past from the future everything is the same yet nothing is quite the same.

  ‘His estates became memorials,’ said Mr Mageye, ‘to a tragic duel that he fought with his brother. He was sixteen, his brother was nine. They were playing with wooden swords in a garden on a moonlit night. The younger brother somehow or other dug his sword into the other’s ribs. Not much pain but humiliation. Sword-play was highly prized. It felt like a national disgrace to be out-sworded, out-pointed, bowled for a duck. In a rage the older boy picked up a sharp stone and flung it at the nine-year-old boy. Flung it with venom and greater force than he had intended. The boy took the blow full and straight in the middle of his forehead. It was as sharp as a knife in the hand of a savage priest. He fell like a lamb in a crate or a boxing ring. Never moved again. Stone-dead like a statue that had toppled in the garden onto a bed of roses … The Frenchman never forgave himself. He brought a painter with him from France. Successive portraits portrayed him as he grew older, but his brother remained in each portrait as if frozen in time until by degrees they became not brother and brother but father and son.’

  There was silence. Not absolute silence. I heard a clock ticking at the back of the classroom upon a wall with nothing but the moving fingers of time, my phantom fingers. They extended themselves into tracing a portrait on my mind’s canvas, a portrait of father and son.

  I visualized my mother’s eighteenth-century protector and surrogate husband in the twentieth century. Would she break the mould of conscriptive protection in the end as Virgin animal goddess when she fell?

  I visualized myself as his twentieth-century son. Fathered by my own painted slayer (as I was his painted son) in a game that became a battlefield, economic battlefield, sports arena battlefield …

  Such is the paradox of imperial games and colonial sons, ornamental sonship, statuesque status, devoid of time’s eruptive originality that breaches frame or plot.

  ‘You do see, Francisco,’ said Mr Mageye. ‘Break the mould if you are to live and grow. And remember,’ he added, ‘this is a formidable task. But you can do it! It calls for daring, for profound imaginative truth. You are far older than your years, Francisco. You know that. I do not have to tell you. From the moment you arrived this morning we were enveloped in a fiction. The class melted into shadows on the wall. And you and I are alone …’

  ‘I know. I know,’ I said. ‘It’s as if we are rehearsing a play I know but how do you know?’

  Mr Mageye did not reply to the question but he continued:

  ‘In breaking a mould, you sometimes break your heart, the heart’s addiction to fallacious glories, and you enrich – curiously enough – your ghost-father’s true heritage of Compassion. He was a Catholic, was he not? You lift that heritage out of subservience to another’s style or will, out of base and opportunist compliance with another’s cultural vested interests.’ He paused and considered.

  ‘Yes,’ he said softly, ‘equality between former masters and the genius of the new is only possible when originality is seen to be native as much to the powerless as to the powerful …’

  ‘What is inequality?’ I interrupted. ‘Tell me Mr Mageye!’

  ‘Inequality is habituated to incest, to persecution in the family, murder and incest. Murder in the ruling family projects incest upon colonized others to make all Mankind into a pawn. It is a terrifying lesson as we look around the globe, East, West, North, South. Yes, to teach history today is to entertain a complex vocation …’

  ‘You are my magus, Mr Mageye,’ I said impulsively.

  It was a rash statement to make to a teacher in 1939 when School tended to be a rather authoritarian assembly. But not to Mr Mageye. I had not been a grossly favoured pupil by any means. For the records of the School show clearly that Mr Mageye had a reputation for freedom from bias. But there was a subtle understanding between us.

  He knew of my curiosities with regard to shamans and seers and magi in the Americas. I loved maps of the Yucatán. I pored over legendary trade routes adorned with drawings of tumultuous forests and seas upon which dolphins and mermaids sat. South American rubber was used to fashion the ball in ball games played in ancient Mexico. Mr Mageye suggested that a brisk trade existed in rubber between South America and Mexico before the Spanish Conquest.

  I loved charts of the Orinoco that were dated in the year that Raleigh adventured in search of El Dorado in Guiana. I had acquainted myself with books by the geographer Schomburgk and the anthropologist Roth.

  Thus when I returned across a chasm of years – a nine-year-old boy (once again) with a bearded chalk-masked chin – my precocity heightened itself into a comradeship with Mr Mageye (unusual in that day and age). It heightened itself into the steepest, imaginary wave that I associated with the seas and rivers and forests that I had once consulted under Mr Mageye’s wry but spirited approval.

  In taking the liberty of appointing him my magus I affirmed the birth of consciousness in which one writes and is written into a Dream-book to come abreast by degrees of unsuspected dimensionalities in space.

  Even as I took the liberty I was affected by the memory of a steep wave that had threatened to overwhelm the Virgin Ship on my crossing from 1978 disaster-ridden Jonestown back to 1939 Albuoystown.

  Black and steep as Night over Jonestown, blacker than the blackboard at which Mr Mageye now stood.

  He (Mr Mageye) loved to play pranks. He would arouse laughter in his class and then resume his history lesson. He dodged behind blackboard and wave. As the Ship was about to fall through the roof of the world he occupied a crevice in the blackboard and peered through it as if it were a telescope. At that instant I heard the bells of the Sirens ringing. The Ship righted itself.

  I heard the voices of the Sirens through the magical bells declaring that Mr Mageye was a rare phenomenon, a genuine and a sacred jester. He stood there in the telescopic wave with the look of a gentle Sphinx. The expression passed from his features, he moved back to the front of the blackboard, and he resumed the history lesson.

  ‘The Frenchman returned to France in the Napoleonic era but he was unhappy with the state of his country and he crossed the English Channel and married a rich lady in Sussex.’

  I held up my hand to ask a question. I was suddenly angry.

  ‘Just a moment, Francisco, let me say first of all that the Frenchman l
eft half of his considerable Guiana fortune to be used in the Colony on behalf of orphans. European orphans at first left bereft on the death of a planter or a slave-owner but across the decades all Guianese have benefited. Now Francisco …’

  ‘A rotten shame,’ I cried. ‘He left my poor mother without a penny. What use such grandiloquent gestures and legacies …’

  Even Mr Mageye was taken aback at my outburst.

  ‘He left your great-great-grandmother without a penny! She was but a slave. He had many slaves, many mistresses.’

  At first it seemed that Mr Mageye was dreadfully unsympathetic, dreadfully complacent, and then it dawned on me as I looked into his self-mocking eyes that he was testing me, pushing me to perceive the nature of conventional morality, the burden in language to grapple with disturbing factors in a society that takes cruelty for granted within the norms of the day. He saw I was puzzled despite my greybearded mask. And he spoke gently – ‘I understand, Francisco. Synaesthesia!’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I cried with sudden tears in my eyes. I remembered that my mother would die that very night! I knew. I had returned to the past on the very day and night that her death would occur.

  ‘The spontaneous linkage that you make between the organs of the past and the present (your long-dead great-great-grandmother and your poor mother today) is a kind of synaesthesia or stimulation of different moral ages and visions.’ His face was grave, the gravity of a sacred Jester. ‘The Virgin of Albuoystown, your mother,’ he said, ‘reflects synaesthesia – at the heart of the evolving theatre of Carnival – in her bones, her sacred bones: these lay beyond the pale of moral plot or cognizance in the Frenchman’s day; now they offer shelter to beggars in Albuoystown.’ He hesitated but I possessed the curious sensation that his hand lay in my hand in writing the Dream-book.

  ‘The Virgin of Albuoystown stands at the core of a multi-faceted wave, however black, that threatens to fall on our heads unless we can break the mould of a complacent morality.

  ‘A transference of psyche is at the root of all theatres of mothers of humanity, seers and visionaries. Think of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the capital city of Mexico. Pagan and Christian. Yes, your mother – I am inclined to say my mother now – is affected by a variety of masks which slide in the Waterfall of space into singing Sirens (that we hear differently from those who have encountered them in the past), warning voices, pleading voices. Thus is it that you Franciso and I (your magus-Jester of History) may begin to break the mould of the past and to release a creative/re-creative capacity to right ancient wrongs in the family of Mankind.’

  *

  I left School when the afternoon sun was still high in the western sky above the Virgin Ship in the harbour. I left with the heavy knowledge of my mother’s coming death at the hand of a mugger. Mugger. Evangelist. Crusader. Carnival masks.

  She had asked me to go straight from School to the leather Shop where she worked. There were to be many processions that night in Albuoystown. Some revellers wore newspapers on their heads, others were dressed as skeletons.

  I knew of quiet alleyways we could take to avoid the pressure of the processions.

  It was a dateless day to me (24th March, 1939) and when the Shop closed at night she would draw her last weekly wage before Death struck at her purse in the street.

  Marie felt – my mother’s name was also Marie Antoinette – that she could lean on my child’s tall Lazarus arm as she made her way through the crowds after work. My Lazarus arm I had brought from the future and tacked onto my present/past body. I too was a creature of Carnival’s reconnaissance of the past from a wave of the future …

  When I arrived at the Shop there was a queue of shoemakers purchasing choice leather. Each shoemaker would take a sheet of leather, bend it, study its texture, pass his head along the rough edges of the sheet, taste it with tip of his tongue, bring it to his nostrils and inhale the bouquet of the tanned skin.

  It was a studied ritual. Leather was a Carnival ritual, a sacramental alliance with the dead, dead cattle transported from interior savannahs. In due course the leather was fashioned into shoes in which the living danced with the ghosts of cattle or rode on their backs.

  With my eyes that had returned in a Nemesis Bag from the future I saw the ghosts of Jonestown purchasing shoes in Albuoystown. My sacramental treaty or alliance lay with them. As Jones’s left-hand man had I not ridden them in my Sleep, in my unconscious? I had wanted to save them on holocaust eve (when flocks of sheep and horses and cattle were groomed to be burnt as a sacrifice to the gods in ancient Greece) but had succeeded in saving only my own skin with the intervention of Deacon, my own soul with the intervention of the Virgin.

  The cattle lay in the Jonestown Clearing on the Day of the Dead. Cattle have human faces, tigers that burn in the sun have the faces of gods, horses weep. I could not help noticing the leather on their feet, the boot with which Deacon had kicked Jones onto his face in the Moon-dust until Jones’s eyes drilled holes into a ladder between the Moon and the Earth, between the Moon (the Cave of the Moon) and my Virgin Ship. Deacon’s boot and the shoes on the feet of the Jonestown dead reminded me of the leather in Marie’s Shop.

  In certain circumstances my poor mother might have made a Bomb in profit from tourists who came to Carnival by selling relics of Bone shaped as the Cross or saints fashioned from relics of leather. But thank God! she resisted the temptation.

  The shoemakers bought the leather in the Shop, took it away, made shoes which they brought back to the very Shop to be exhibited for sale by my mother. It was a transaction that Marie understood and which she exercised with a rare and tender compassion, for I had seen her purchase shoes out of her meagre wages and give them to barefoot beggars. It meant her going without bread for a day at least every week.

  I now realized that there were two intermingling queues in the Shop, one purchasing leather, the other buying shoes. Imprinted on the sole of each boot or shoe was a miniature Ship of Bread within a bubble or a fluid Shop, my mother’s Economy, my mother’s beggars’ dead men’s Shop on which she was sailing now (as each minute passed) to her death in Third World South America.

  I had seen the imprint of trade unmistakably there, trade in bodies and souls across generations and centuries, in which my mother intervened when she fell in the street with a blow to her heart and was lifted shoulder-high by grey-bearded young beggars. Such is the legality of intercourse with violence, such is the trade between complacent life and matter-of-fact death in which mothers of poverty, mothers of humanity, intervene.

  I had seen the imprint of trade unmistakably there on horses and cows that Jones had stabled along with the membership of the Mission whom he had provided with bunks and stalls.

  Jones kept many horses which I had christened the horses of the Moon because of their glowing mane, their flowing mane, that encircled my brow and my head at times when I mingled with them.

  And now as I recovered myself in the Shop to which I had returned from disaster-ridden 1978 to Albuoystown 1939 – heavy-hearted at the prospect of my mother’s coming death – I inspected the crew of leather-purchasers and shoe-purchasers. If only I could seize the pendulum of the Clock ticking away remorselessly, as if it were a horse’s cosmic phallus, phallic twisted ladder pointing to the Moon, or Venus, or Aphrodite, I might startle my mother’s sobriety with the temperament of pagan goddesses.

  ‘Don’t leave the Shop tonight, Mother. Stay here until the full Moon drowns in the sky of dawn. The mind’s anxiety-ridden full Moon on the darkest of nights. One lives in two universes at the same time. Apparitional full moon. Concrete Earth. I shall stay with you until tomorrow. Whenever tomorrow is! We shall voyage to the Moon at the bottom of the sky. We shall climb Jones’s ladder. Blast him!’ I spoke through lips shaped in a child’s head upon a child’s body that had nevertheless returned from the age of the future.

  As darkness began to fall Marie began to close the windows and doors of the Shop. It was a meticulous busines
s. There were bars to be placed on the windows. Padlocks on the doors.

  ‘I shall break through these one day,’ my mother said with a laugh. ‘How could we spend the night here, Francisco? It would be gaol.’

  ‘Break through and go where?’ I asked.

  Marie looked at me sharply. She seemed to know I was testing her when I asked the question. I was seeking to confirm … What was I seeking to confirm? That the invisible Bag over my head was real? I had seen her coming death within the hour. But now I was unsure. Why should I not be able to stop her from leaving the Shop? How did one convert the gaol of fate into freedom? I wanted to say: ‘If you stay here you will live.’ But I was confused. Does the gaol of fate mean life or the postponement of death, freedom death or the beginning of unimaginable life?

  There was a back door to the Shop that seemed to fall into a pit. An odd kind of sensation when one revisits the past! The door of space itself seems on the edge of falling out of its hinges. It is the knowledge one possesses – or dreams one possesses – that provides an inkling of a chasm in creation across which one voyages.

  When one stood at the back door the Shop was tilted upwards, as on a wave, or upon a higher plane to the street below in which faces glimmered like spray in a deceptive sea of moonlight.

  Faces glimmered up out of the pit. Black faces seemed white. They had acquired the prize of whiteness. They were white. A desperate whiteness. A desperate illusion of immortality or eternity. White faces glimmered black, a desperate illusion that they were being swamped by immigrants. Brown faces were stained with the salt of blood, neither black nor white. How red is blood, how pale or dark is salt beneath the Ship of the Virgin? Beneath the Shop of Bread?

  We left the Shop through the front door that led straight into the silver blood of the Moon. I saw it all through the invisible Bag of Nemesis over my head. I saw my mother’s coming death written into the sacred nerves and the fibre of her body, written into the shoes she wore that the dead woman, with her child beside her in the Jonestown Clearing, had worn.