Companions of the Day and Night

by Harris, Wilson

  The Fool read the slip of paper in his hand, checked the address at which he had arrived and knocked. Mrs. Black Marsden came to the door and led him into a glittering room, polished brasses, furniture.

  He was astonished to learn that she was a Mrs. Marsden.

  “Marsden? Any relation to Father Marsden?”

  “My husband is Father Marsden’s brother.” She spoke as though she were testing him and testing herself, too, as if to confirm the half-playful, half-sinister unreality of reality.

  “But I thought”, said the Idiot practising his own arts of the game, “that Father Marsden was an old, old man. Of course I didn’t see him the afternoon I was there. I spoke to a porter.”

  The woman laughed. She seemed both natural and supernatural like a fine actress built into her part (capable of living her parts), self-possessed at the same time, curiously sceptical about dates and ages and about names too, names of peace, names of war, place-names, habits, conventions

  “There is a forest of Marsden faces,” she explained, “buried everywhere, cousins and brothers I fear. Father Marsden and my husband Black Marsden are about the same age.”

  “Black Marsden?” the Idiot looked astonished.

  “There are several Black Marsdens,” she confessed with a trace of self-mockery. “It’s a complicated masquerade—complicated descent. It’s the source of many inspirations in the theatre, in poetry, in the novel. I am not sure why I am telling you all this.” She stopped but the Fool said nothing. Buried in his (or her) womb of thought. So that, as happens sometimes in the middle of a conversation, one is reborn to many hidden ties, hidden chains, mixed antecedents, rational/irrational dreams of freedom one glimpses in the faces of others as in oneself, contagious laughter, contagious absurdity, contagious youth, contagious age, contagious divinity. Contagious roles of man, contagious family of ghosts. Contagious theatre of absences and presences.

  “I see,” he said a little awkwardly.

  Mrs. Black Marsden laughed at him as at herself. The Fool laughed at her as at himself. Contagious laughter. Then they were sad for no clear reason at all, contagious sadness.

  “As you may have gathered,” she confessed, “I am an actress. There you see a bundle of my costumes in a pile on that chair.” She pointed to a neat collection of garments and wigs in the room. “My husband is interested, you know, in family biographies. He thinks I should do something on Sister Rose—she is a great-aunt of mine. But I find I need to play the part of Rose before I may begin to write it down. We do have a small drama group which meets in this house. In fact we met this morning before you arrived. That is why I am so excited. I am not sure that I know why I am telling you all this but you seem so sympathetic …”

  “Please tell me everything,” said the Fool. “How do you play the part of Rose . .?”

  “There is a technicality to Rose—as to any person, any life—which I seek to gather about me. But also there is a ghost to Rose which may become visible within that technicality. One does not need always to die to become a ghost. An actress may be, when she plays a part, sheer even marvellous body technicality. But sometimes brilliant as her act is a paradox arises in that her performance (however successful) may have no bearing on the present moment in which she lives. And I feel myself that it is only when the ghost is partially visible through the dress of technicality that the past really connects with the present—with the naked present. I am not sure why I am telling you all this. If my husband were here …”

  “Please go on. Tell me everything.”

  “I am excited today as you see. And I have been talking a great deal since you arrived. I think it’s a discovery I feel I have made about Rose. She’s a dear old soul but she eats up our time, she makes excessive demands on us day after day. It used to be hard before but it’s a hundred times worse since Maria’s death.”

  The Fool was astonished. “Her death? But I thought … I was told they were both …”

  “Alas no. Maria was killed last autumn—a tragic accident. She was out shopping and was standing at a street corner in Manhattan when she was hit by gunfire from a passing car that was being chased by the police.

  “It was a great shock, a terrible shock for Rose who has refused utterly to accept Maria’s death. She writes to her friends as if Maria’s still here. I have had to break the news to people. It’s as if she’s involved in a role that is life and death for her. And all her absurdities, her cannibalisms if you like (she subsists on everybody, devours anything at all she can put her hand on which relates however indirectly to Maria) reflect an intense bottled-up desire that is sheer ghost, sheer prince of a ghost she needs to project into eternity…. I don’t know why I am telling you all this.”

  There was the rumble of a passing lorry like anonymous gunfire and Rose appeared at the door of the drawing-room, a portrait in a frame of exquisite hardened wood. Her thin features, painfully upright body, stood in contrast to the open-minded dress, sceptical and wry humour of Black Marsden’s wife. The Fool took two paces towards her … towards the heap of wigs and costumes Mrs. Black Marsden had assembled and which seemed now to be coming alive.

  “I am sorry”, he began, “to trouble you at this time. I had not heard of Sister Maria’s death…. Mrs. Marsden”, he looked around but she had vanished, “has just explained …” He was pointing into space as if with a single step he had crossed from one stage to another. “If I had known I would not have come.”

  “Not at all,” Rose said. “You are welcome. Maria would have told you so herself, will tell you so herself. She is here as you know. And if we—I—we can be of assitance to you it would make us very happy. We—I—have received a letter telling us of your plans. Please do take a seat.” She pointed to a chair by the window, repeating the invitation in a different tone, a different voice that disconcerted him. “Please do sit down.”

  She sat on a sofa facing him. Very thin. Very upright. Almost shadowless he thought. Yet subtly enveloped in an atmosphere that glistened in furniture and brass as the curtains billowed suddenly around him like clouds in a draught as he fell from the pyramid of the sun. He shook his eyes out of a cloud. Pulled his chair back. Too close to the window. Too close to the curtains with their base of a billowing pyramid in his head. Was it royal bone (Maria) … was it royal blood (Rose) he saw there?

  He could see the colour of Rose’s face animated and alive at the base of the pyramid. He could see Maria’s head elongated like bone, upright reflection, fastidious attachment to a structure embodying the past. Rose sat there facing him.

  “Maria never forgave herself”, she said, “for running away. We came to Manhattan about fifty years ago. We were, she said, the aristocracy of the church. And the aristocracy never yields, never yields an inch. That is its glory. You would think, wouldn’t you, to hear her say that that she is a tyrant. But in fact she is all I possess, she is the dearest creature on earth and I love her. I love her.” There was the glimmer of a tear like a splinter of bone on the edge of her lips—transubstantiation of bone into rain.

  “I am a tyrant,” the voice that spoke now was a different voice, inflexible and dry, Sister Maria’s voice on Sister Rose’s lips. “There was a time when princes earned their place in the realm … earned their privileges, bounties the hard way—sometimes with their lives.”

  “Earned their place? What do you mean?”

  “They fought to hold their assets and lived as princes did under the shadow of the axe—as a revolutionary lives today in the shadow of the bullet.” Maria spoke with pride, the perverse pride of a prince of the church. “I have earned my reward even if I seemed at first—half a century ago—to have deserted my post. In the end I was privileged to die….”

  “Now, now Maria,” it was the confused, animated voice of Rose. “Now, now Maria,” shook Rose trembling a little, “you are extreme. To talk of dying as if it is the end of things. Princes of church and state do not die. They live forever. Born of … born of …” she stopped at a
loss, caught herself, continued. “Born of … born of no one and nothing except god.”

  The sun fell from the sky and melted into the heart of the Fool as though a sentence had been enacted upon him in which to be born was to be unmade in the legendary heart of Rose in compensation for Maria’s bone and death, to be born was to be broken in the dream-play of history in compensation for unfulfilled models of sovereign subsistence, to be born was to descend into a depth of frustrated appetite and need arching back across centuries—a rage for lost anchorages, lost securities that made him a vulnerable body of time with a reflected/glimpsed capacity to engross others within roles that were curiously unconscious of self-brutalised, self-cannibalised antecedents and peerages of the depths and the heights.

  MARSDEN’S LETTER TO GOODRICH

  My Dear Goodrich,

  During Easter weekend of the year 197– the body of a man was found at the base of the pyramid of the sun on the ancient urban complex of Teotihuacán. It is thought that he suffered an attack close to the edge and fell. I learnt of this because of a slip of paper on him which gave Sister Rose’s address. The authorities contacted me.

  I was interested in the case because of the extraordinary impression Nameless (that is what he called himself) made on my wife when he visited her in New York a fortnight or so before his death.

  I flew to Mexico City and my interest was further aroused by his papers and the unsigned canvases and sculptures which were in his hotel with a note directing that they should be forwarded to me in the event of anything happening to him.

  I am aware of the formidable difficulties you face in translating these but I feel somehow you would want to do so.

  When I was your guest in Scotland I was aware of your susceptibility to “objects” that symbolized, in various degrees, the “soul” or “glory” of cultures and civilizations past.

  Therefore I felt your curiosity would be aroused in the Nameless collection and in the way his papers relate to “objects” and to an ambiguity in the achievement of civilizations and cultures extending from pre-Columbian times to our own day.

  It is peculiar, I know, to sense how a culture may be trapped in its institutions or achievements and yet may return to those “objects” when it is sensed that these relate beyond/beneath themselves to unfathomable needs of deaf, dumb, blind ages of man that cry for a creation, cry for a tongue …

  I do not wish to dwell on this in detail as it would be impertinent of me to attempt to summarize in a paragraph or two something that occupies such large tracts of the Nameless imagination.

  I mention it because I wonder how large it may come to loom in your appreciation of Nameless theatre as “novel-ghost” that resides within “technical address”.

  The point here as I see it (if I may add a further note) is the subtle and varied connection between past and present that lies in a language of things through historical investitures into the naked life of one’s time: the irony of coming abreast of one’s time.

  The only eye-witness account I possess of Nameless is the one my wife gives of him when they met in New York City. I shall come to this in a moment or two but first of all I would like to comment on the scene (Two Paces to Rose and Maria)—the last thing he wrote before his death.

  The temptation exists, I am sure, to see this as a prophecy of his coming death but such an interpretation is false.

  Nameless was ill and the people he met, houses, places he visited which appear in his narratives become stages written into the very base of his experience—a base that resists being identified with any idea of a total structure of the past; that resistance opened out proportions of continuously “dying structure” into continuously “living present” upon which to resume ever further advances into a territory of ceaseless compassion as well as descent into projected/unfulfilled ghosts of time as these bear upon the naked terror of our time.

  It is inevitable therefore that the advance of “dying structure” into “living present” (in a body of work created by any one man) would appear, in one or other of its facets, to coincide with his actual death and would lend itself therefore to be interpreted as prophecy.

  This would be quite wrong. Nameless was not a prophet nor an animist. I hope I have made this clear. He was something of a poet, perhaps, something of an ironist in the deepest sense, perhaps. And it is against a background of “dying structure” into “living present”, implicit in his work, that one needs to see the objects in my wife’s house (the curtains, for example, with their painted design of the base of the pyramid of the sun that seems prophetic of his fall) that he draws upon in his last piece of writing to evoke the dream-play of Rose as projected ghost or prince built into an ageing woman’s womb of a past childhood or return to the implacable fantasies of her youth.

  In fact this is a consistent thread to weave into the play Christ and the Firing Squad that occupies various strands within the Nameless imagination’s sacrificed bodies or cloaks worn by others as inner face to outer face.

  Nameless arrived at the house (which he describes in his scene) on the outskirts of Greenwich Village not long after my wife had had a busy and exciting morning discussing plans with her drama group in New York.

  She told me when she first saw him at the door how immensely frail he looked; and worn as if (a vivid impression flashed upon her) he had literally ascended from a hollow place that left its mark on him. So much so he seemed to her eloquent with the silences of an inner face; eloquent mosaic character composed of inner stains and dyes …

  I find this a peculiarly sensitive and appropriate description in the light of what I afterwards learnt of the Nameless expeditions.

  There was another aspect to this Nameless frailty that absorbed her. It was something elemental like the sun on earth—non-solid energy so to speak—as if he gave himself to others and others subsisted upon him (as he subsisted upon them).

  All this combined to create a very deep vibration of sympathy between them and, coming on top of the morning’s excitement, led to an animated conversation (traces of which appear in the Rose scene written by Nameless).

  My wife describes it all as a “confession” she made to him —a strange phrase to use for a sudden heightening and deepening of her responsibilities as an actress both to the past and the present in the roles she hoped to play.

  I wonder, my dear Goodrich, is “confession” to a daemon that visits one the very foundation stone of all inspiration? What do you think?

  So far it was a blissful and enjoyable encounter but something happened at the last minute which left my wife with a feeling of deep disturbance, of having laid bare certain secrets prematurely perhaps.

  Again an odd phrase to use. (I myself despise secrets as you know.) And yet the implications are enormous. It is as if Nameless were inviting her to reflect on varieties of the self-exposure of the past, varieties of deep-seated preparation required for growth into a living present, a living encounter with a living present. To reflect therefore deeply with an eye of vision on the enormous tragedy of the late twentieth century, the enormous tragedy of a premature ripeness that we find everywhere, a premature nakedness that sells itself everywhere bound up with a kind of immature projection of stasis as art of prophecy.

  All this came to a head when he was about to leave. For it was then that he delivered his bombshell.

  “Would it be possible for me to stay, to be with you for a day, and for a night?”

  His words had an instantaneous effect upon her. It conjured up the feeling in her that he was trying to pick her up in her own house, on her very doorstep, that this man who seemed to her—yes she actually said the word—that this man who seemed to her Christ (if anyone could be Christ in the late twentieth century) was making a naked proposal to her.

  And yet, woman of the world as she is, all her instincts of respectability were up in arms. She was confused and said the first thing that came into her head: “My husband would not like it.”

  He looked at he
r then. And his eyes were alone. Not lonely. Unfathomably alone. Wholly compassionate, wholly seeing.

  “I am sorry.” That was all he said. He turned away and as he stepped into the road looked back for the last time.

  Had she really rejected him? Did it mean that a tide of history would flow now not towards the Absent Door of the Virgin but towards the Absent Door of a Prince?

  She felt a kind of rage at herself and she slammed the door fast in his face. The sound echoed through the house like the fall of a heavy mask to the floor, an uncommon mask generations would invest with rage and begin to seek, as threshold to inner faces, inner encounters.

  Ah, my dear Goodrich … who knows . .? Who knows . .?

  Copyright

  This ebook edition first published in 2012

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  All rights reserved

  © Wilson Harris, 1975

  The right of Wilson Harris to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–29823–5