Jonestown

by Wilson Harris

  He saw the hollowness of such power. It seared the mind in his wings. It seared the wings in my mind. For the shock seemed – in some incalculable way – a part of my own trauma when I narrowly escaped the Grave in Jonestown.

  Did I – when I flew up the wall in Bonampak with winged feet – touch Deacon’s mourning, sorrowing wing perpetually falling?

  Perhaps I had been equipped then to wear Deacon’s terrible brow or Mask in the theatre, the brow of heaven inscribed into Eagles that soar and plunge into the Void.

  The Prisoner knew and when I knelt before him I felt his hands confirming the holes and rivets, flesh-and-blood miraculous rivets to take Deacon’s Mask in my shoulders and neck.

  I would take Deacon’s absent place. I would share his torment and remorse and tenderest grieving love which his ghost had conferred upon me. I knew the pain of laughter in the Body of the Law, the pain that had stricken Deacon when he lóst his way in the black Forest and fell into the ravine beneath the Cave of the Moon.

  Such is the transference of roles that chastening comedy confers when falling heavens converse with diminutive survivors upon Earth.

  *

  I rose from my knees and moved again from the Prisoner to the window of his cell. A wedding – not Marie’s in Port Mourant – was taking place in the street or aisle of a Church in Carnival land.

  It was an absurd affair but I was in no mood to laugh.

  I had witnessed Jonah’s affair with the Animal Goddess or the Virgin of Jonestown. That was a kind of wedding …

  Now I was called upon to witness my mother’s apparitional wedding to the ghost of an eighteenth-century slave-master. She acted the part of her great-great-grandmother who had slept with a French aristocrat and owner of La Pénitence and Le Repentir estates. He had owned her as well.

  It was his money that had paid the fees for my scholarship to the United States. A ghost’s money to endow scholarships for orphans or for disadvantaged poor families with only one parent.

  Were I to meet him in the street he would – despite his largesse – not know me or scarcely wish to know me.

  Yet Money was the heart of morality in any eighteenth-century Portrait of the Family. So my mother reasoned. It was necessary to legitimize the legality of scholarships – bestowed by past slave-masters upon their future progeny – in the Carnival theatre of the Church.

  My mother’s apparitional flesh-and-blood was ripe to play the part of the wife of the Frenchman in the legitimization of Money and Scholarship.

  The Frenchman himself had long vanished and there was no one coming forward on his behalf in the Portrait of the Family.

  Carnival Lord Death however solved the problem. He draped my mother’s arms and breasts with the heirloom or suit or robes of a nobleman that the Frenchman had left in Albuoystown with his favourite slave-mistress.

  What in God’s name, I wondered, was the object of such theatre of the Absurd in the Void of a Colony?

  ‘No theatre of the Absurd‚’ my mother cried. ‘A Portrait of the Moral Family is relevant to your age, Francisco. Is it not time to claim your inheritance on all sides of the blanket?

  ‘Suppose for example that you went to London or Paris or Berlin or New York as a High Commissioner or an Ambassador, it would be morally sound, would it not, to secure a Swiss Bank Account for your family. Suppose a coup occurred in Guyana or Trinidad or Brazil or Nigeria! Where would you be without Money? Money ensures that wars on foreign soils, famines, etc., won’t touch you. You would be as safe as a character in a Jane Austen novel or in Madame Bovary.’

  I was stunned by all this. It seemed out-of-character with the memories I possessed of my mother in Albuoystown. True, she had a passion for Carnival theatre and had read English and French eighteenth-and nineteenth-century novels which she borrowed from the Carnegie Library. She was a Virgin nevertheless – a sacred mother of beggars – not a Madame Bovary. But Virgins are also furies. They embrace the longings of fallen women from all areas of the globe, they embrace poor and rich wives within the glitter of structured romance so unlike the waste land of their own existence. They embrace idyllic churches and manses and middle-class homes in England in which eligible suitors woo ladies and plot with sophisticated strategies of behaviour to advance their prospects in the marriage market. Was Madame Bovary a prisoner-Virgin in such idyllic Portraits of the Moral Family?

  Carnival Lord Death was laughing – Carnival Death sometimes mimics the laughter of the Law – but my mother was grave. A hidden smile on her lips. She held the nobleman’s robes close to her breasts. Music was playing in the aisle of the Carnival church in the street. They were a talented lot: Carnival Lord Death and his crew. They could have easily staged Hollywood on the backs of painted, black, Southern plantation slaves. Hollywood Limbo in black Carnival.

  ‘Imagine, Francisco – God forbid!’ my mother said, ‘a coup in Guyana! Imagine yourself as a High Commissioner or even a President. Imagine that you have been shrewd enough to salt away sweet money in a Swiss Bank Account. Your wife – let us say – for the sake of Carnival argument – is a French woman or a Dutch woman or an English woman. You wash your hands of the wretched politics of your country. And why not? You buy an abandoned country manse in a quiet village in Europe. There are guard dogs. Or perhaps you settle in a villa on the Mediterranean. You send your son or daughter to Yale or Harvard or Princeton or the Sorbonne or Cambridge. Your family is safe. You gamble discreetly on the Stock Exchange. You have a number of discreet affairs. Money is the central moral in your existence. Money banishes tears. Indeed you write books about the horrors of the Third World. They sell well. You are knighted. Not a Maya knighthood. A Birthday Honours knighthood. Money is morality in your villa or converted manse.’

  ‘It’s not true‚’ I cried. ‘It’s not true. What difference would there be – if it were true – between my hypothetical Swiss currency, Money without tears, and Deacon’s immunity to pain?’

  ‘Dread‚’ said my mother. ‘Deacon’s immunity turns into Dread Love at the last moment within perpetually falling heavens, tides of refugees who envy the security of the sick in rich countries (as medicine prolongs the life of wealthy populations). Angels become signals of perpetually falling heavens and their re-visionary spectacle of Love, the pain of Love, a re-visionary spectacle that we scarcely understand though the message is interwoven into every wedding to a sacred Virgin.’

  The aisle in the Church in Carnival street threatre appeared to narrow as my mother walked away from me in Mr Mageye’s Camera.

  I followed my children’s children’s children as they streamed into the future. They loomed but I grew increasingly indistinct to them, remote from them.

  I heard my mother saying: ‘No one knew it but he loved my great-great-grandmother.’ She lifted the suit or heirloom then pulled it back upon her breasts. ‘He loved her with all his heart but he never really knew until it was too late. An ocean and the Grave divided them when he returned to Europe and was killed by a Jacobin who wore his brother’s Mask.’

  Her voice seemed to be fading. I saw myself now at the far end of the aisle within the loom of my descendants. I stood in my great-great-grandfather’s suit, my mother’s gift for my coming honeymoon with Marie. I stood in that suit at the window of the Prisoner’s cell.

  ‘You do see,’ my mother whispered in the midst of the shuffling footsteps of Carnival, ‘that you shelter many ghosts in Memory theatre within your Mask, Francisco. You are my long-lost husband’s son. And he has returned to witness your coming trial though you may not see him as I do. There is pain in the Body of the Law. Your Swiss Bank Account topples. Jonah’s Bank Account toppled. You grow wings. You shall fall. But with a difference. I cannot say more.’

  She touched my lips at last as if to heal them. I recalled the games I played at School. I recalled not only rough-and-tumble soccer but sonship games, fatherhood games in College which seemed now to have happened a century ago in past futures, future pasts.

>   ‘Farewell, fare forward, dearest Francisco.’ She had vanished.

  *

  This was the cue for the footsteps that I had heard earlier to resume their pitch, their curious dark ascent and descent upon the ladders and stairways in the crumbling of the Void. The crumbling of the Void was living Bread. The crumbling of the void was living Wine. The crumbling of the Void was Rice, but a Drought persisted everywhere despite a key that one possesed to the rehabilitation of living landscapes.

  I turned into the cell. The Prisoner had sliced a loaf of Bread. He gave me a thin slice which slid between my Masked lips. I felt a new current of flesh enlivening them as I ate the Bread.

  He gave me a sip of Wine.

  There was a bowl of rice which sweltered under an electric bulb in the cell.

  There was a newspaper on the floor of the cell with the following headlines:

  DROUGHT HITS VILLAGES UNDER THE SIERRA MADRE

  MEXICO

  AN EAGLE’S FLIGHT FROM BONAMPAK

  MOON LANDSCAPE

  DECADES WITHOUT RAIN

  CALL FOR A SAVIOUR

  I translated SIERRA MADRE as ancient mother of the Americas and consort in bygone ages of the Prisoner-God of Devil’s Isle. The expression MOON brought my heart into my mouth. Heart of Bread. Was not MOON an arena of duels between Eagle-knights and Tiger-knights? Had not Deacon lassoed the Moon Horses and their riders (giants of chaos) and lodged them in a Coffin in the river dam of Crabwood Creek?

  My Dream-book – I perceived now – was a net of associations of ‘pasts’ and ‘presents’ and ‘futures’ in which one could trace an immense and subtle transference of Masks such as I had glimpsed in the Nether World, in Limbo Land, in the Cave of the Moon, and elsewhere, in the aisle or street beneath the window of the cell. Its ramifications could never be absolutely seized but it brought into play a wholly different epic fiction from conventional European fiction, an epic net which embraced Europe as well – an epic net conversant with the European Conquest of the ancient Americas but antecedent to European models. Thus one could sense uncharted equations between the Prisoner-God of Devil’s Isle and a vanished Prisoner or husband of the Mother of the Americas whose body lay in mountains and valleys and rivers even as it reappeared in peasant Virgins and Animal Goddesses …

  My heart was filled with sadness. ‘I speak with a sorrowing, inner tongue,’ I said to the Prisoner, ‘born of the coming wedding feast and a Drought of Spirit that hangs over the occasion. Deacon first met Marie at the end of a drought in the Courantyne savannahs when the rains came as if to ward off the perennial sickness of the globe that would erupt again and again in the elements. A Drought of Spirit affects the ancient peoples in the Americas: a Drought as well in the elements, a Drought in space.

  ‘Memory theatre fictionality is the life of the Mind to create “pasts” and “futures” into an uncanny cellular net in Body and Womb and Brain to ignite self-recognition in the recognition of a saviour amongst us. For if one is spiritually blind one cannot see. Mind entertains the creation and re-creation of a saviour … And Drought cannot be taken lightly – wherever it occurs – in Memory theatre. Drought is a bonfire – if not Bone Fire – to illumine skeletons of Dread, to illumine other bonfires of genius and grace, that flare in the cells within us and around us. We are on fire with grace sometimes, with dread sometimes. We are fever and drought. We are sick. We are well. We are the genius of the Rain God when we respond to interventions of fire, and differentiations in the fabric of fire, in the keys to rain, the harvesting of rain, that we may possess in the body of the Law of heaven.’

  I had seen the Pagan Body in the Nether World. Now I sensed – in the comedy of the Law – differentiations in the Body of heaven.

  Where was the Inspector, the laughing Inspector? Did he not hear the shuffling footsteps that had begun again and were swarming into the Prisoner’s cell? Had I unwittingly inserted my key into the lock of the cell with the crumbling of the Void? I was unsure. I was uncertain of my own responsibilities in this moment.

  Had I brought them (those echoing footsteps) with me from the Orchestra of the Nether World? Were they solid ghosts clad in familiar leather? Were they agents of sacrifice in ancient art and modern science summoned by me and by the Prisoner in the cellular chemistry of life-in-death, death-in-life?

  The half-shuffling, half-dancing footsteps ceased. The pause gave me a chance to attempt to scan the crowded room around me which seemed hollow yet full. The cell had become a seminal bubble and the ghost of Einstein was reflected in it. He rubbed shoulders with the newspaper headlines that had blown up from the floor of the cell into a ballooning SIERRA MADRE or mother of the ancient Americas in the Shadow of a bonfire lit by ghosts.

  I thought of concentration camps in Europe – during World War Two – which Einstein had escaped in coming to America. But the ember of flame in the cell was the first signal of the coming death of the Prisoner. What a differentiation between murder in Nazi cells and a sentence that a surrogate God or Prisoner passes on himself to justify the genius of fire, the genius of the Atom, to which Einsteinian mathematics had been an invaluable key.

  It was over at a stroke.

  Einstein had vanished, the Prisoner consumed. His bones overshadowed me as though they were the architecture of ancient mothers and fathers, young brides and bridegrooms.

  The crowds were upon me now. Would they tear me limb from limb? They knew me. No, they did not. They saw me as the tyrant-angel Deacon. They lifted me shoulder-high and bore me out of the room through the fire.

  On one hand history would say that they had liberated me. On the other hand I knew my escape was the result of the Prisoner’s deed or will or legacy in electing me to play the role of Deacon.

  I did not trust the swarming members of my constituency whom Deacon had once locked in a Coffin. They had seized their freedom. Or had it bestowed upon them by a reluctant Prisoner-God whose ashes were now the celebrated robe of the furnace. How strange! I wore the heirloom or suit my mother had given me: the robe of august slavery.

  I knew they saw me as the one to bring a fortune to the land when Marie conceived. But still I was out in the open air and the ashes glittered like stars in broad daylight, stars from which I had fallen.

  I saw the Doctor waving at me in the Shadow of the bonfire as though he stood on the Constellation of the Scorpion.

  I saw Mr Mageye waving a banner of Prometheus. It was one of the props that he intended using in the showing of a film he had shot of Deacon and Jonah and tricksters associated with Virgins and with august slavery and with wars in heaven.

  Supreme entertainment!

  He would show this in the Banqueting Hall that the Doctor had provided.

  *

  Marie was painted black as she lay in bed. But when I touched her black became the feathers of heaven. Deacon had fallen upon her with the outstretched wings of a Vulture. Each feather was the imprint of their original embrace. As though the Vulture was the primordial Scavenger of the flesh of burnt Gods and Deacon knew – beyond a Shadow of doubt – that she was the Prisoner’s daughter. Not burnt flesh was hers but sculpted thighs, born of fire, to match a beak of lightning that brings rain upon the parched earth. She conceived Deacon’s child in that instant.

  I was in a quandary now. Yes, I was playing a part, a mere peasant role or part in Memory theatre. But it had become real. Not that I was possessed by a ghost. No, I was driven by the prayers of a ghost in my Dream-book. A mere book! Does it matter? Do fallen angels matter which pray to survivors of holocausts?

  A curious transference of ghostly – sometimes aggressive, abusive – prayer had begun on the lips of Deacon far back in boyhood and childhood. It insinuated itself even into my jealous passion, my jealousy of him when he and Marie got married in 1954.

  The events of that year were so stark I had suffered from lapses of memory. But on the Night of the Day of the Dead in Jonestown – when Deacon fell to his death under the Cave of the Moon –
that prayer to me in him (in all its ribaldry and tragedy) had revived.

  I was required by him to write a book in which Memory theatre would take me back across the years to revisit the scene of his wedding, to embrace Marie in Dreams, that were more real than broad daylight dream, to see through his blindness when he had forfeited a true intercourse between heaven and earth.

  The Prisoner knew. The Prisoner knew how terrible freedom is when one is at liberty to re-imagine the past, to enter changed spatialities in the past that were more real than the real world; to do so with the permission of surrogate Gods and fallen angels and yet to suffer the inmost bite of moral conscience. Was it adultery – or sacramentalized adultery – to sleep with Marie when her dead husband in my Dream-book was still alive? I was reliving the year 1954 – however changed in shape and spatiality – and Deacon was alive then! I had taken his place in bed with her. I slept with her on the honeymoon night.

  It was a Play of Fire, a Play of the oldest authority. It had happened in the Cave of the Moon and upon remote mountaintops where figures of ancient tradition sought to arrive in the future – even as I sought to re-enter the past – to bring news of a cellular chemistry of love (threading together re-visionary weddings of heaven and earth) which humanity had long forfeited until a Drought of Spirit presided. Fire had become an enemy. Rain was becoming an enemy. The elements were becoming enemies.

  All this Deacon had seen – at the last moment – when he found himself perpetually falling to his death yet suspended above his death in a net that permitted him to communicate with me as if his voice, his multi-faceted shapes as bird and soul, had been salvaged to hang in space.

  Deacon fell upon her with the wings of an Eagle. Each feather was silver-ash when I held her in my arms in his place. The silver fell away yet curled simultaneously into mutual passion within our bodies and flesh and skin. It was the ash and silver of Moon landscapes upon the Earth, scorched landscapes that glow against a black, winged sky. It was silver and gold feathers of the Eagle as he dipped his beak in fire. Marie strengthened the original seed of conception that the fallen, falling angel had planted.