The Carnival Trilogy

by Wilson Harris

  Thomas flew or ran along East Street, came to a corner, failed to see a market woman approaching him from North Road. They collided. She was massive, he was small. Disaster followed less from her than through him. She was carrying a basket on her head. She staggered, tried to clutch it, but it fell with a lush explosion.

  The shell over Thomas’s eyes split for an instant into the splendid yolk and contour of the sun. He was dumbfounded, even paralysed, by the white and orange glare of a miniature pool that reflected the cosmos. He saw everything within a lightning mask but a blind fell over him again. A gross of eggs that the black woman had been taking to New Forest Market lay now smashed and oozing on the ground.

  Two elements or forces in nature had conspired to prove or disprove each other. One element was the economic loss that the market woman had suffered. The broken eggs on the road deprived her of a round sum that would have paid her rent for a month at least in the tenement, plantation range in which she lived.

  It was a minor catastrophe. It was a major catastrophe. It may have seemed minor in cold shillings and pence but it possessed the heat of emotional configuration in the New Forest economy.

  The other element was the sensation of exaggerated disaster Thomas had had in colliding with her, and this seemed to confirm the major content of economic emotion or depression in the 1920s. He could not shake off the feeling that he had exposed, rather than inflicted, an injury. How to probe it, analyse it (text books of Purgatory in the wake of the collision would ask, how to set up schools, universities, political sciences of the Inferno to assess economic emotion in a South American colony)! And blind as he became again after the shell grew once more over his eyes he could still perceive her sagging mouth and the sweat on her brow like tears.

  “Oh god,” the market woman cried, “who is going to pay for this? Gold ain’t enough.” The humour of her remark that “gold” wasn’t enough registered faintly on Thomas.

  “I shall pay. I shall find the money,” he promised.

  “You believe gold is cheap, Boy?” The market woman was laughing but behind her laughter lay not only sweat but the mirror in which El Dorado had seen fire threatening to consume him.

  The market woman seemed closer to black marble than to El Dorado’s memory of a cavity of flesh behind him, glass in front of him, as he lay coiled in his mother. Nevertheless Thomas had seen the fire in black marble as he had seen the pool of the sun before through a shell. Despite his promise to pay he was terrified and desired to run, as Masters had run, but the marble woman held him firmly with a hand that seemed both rough and smooth as if it echoed the mystery of the human egg at which the economic spirits of creation in capital cosmos had laboured in the sun and the moon and the stars from the beginning of time.

  It was noon in New Forest, the orange yolk on the ground shone, and the labour of capital cosmos, fathered by fiction, impressed itself anew upon Thomas. He knew he could not run. The injury, the hand-to-mouth existence he had exposed loomed larger now than ever in the marble woman. But they had come to some sort of understanding, for she had relinquished her grip on his shoulder.

  Thomas had, in the interval, abandoned all responsibility for his royal charge. Indeed he felt that the boy-king had implicated him in another devilish game. And he felt irrational anger, a blaze of irrational fury, but pulled himself up in time, rebuked himself in time. Yet something lingered, something vague, as though in the realm of irrational anger at someone for whom we are held responsible – or were held responsible – we may track down jealousy in its obscure beginnings that increase and multiply to divide those who possess the stigma of the Abortion of an age and those who fear their smooth masks are an inadequate defensive cosmetic.

  I discussed this complicated theatre with Masters in London and he expressed the view that the parallel existences or incarnations of Uncertainty owe the character of jealousy that possesses them to a collision of worlds implicit in “primordial colonial egg” that Carnival dramatizes as the birth of a diversity of fictions and masks.

  Thus “jealousy” is another humiliation that fiction may employ to fathom the human/animal soul, the glass soul, the marble soul, the iron soul, the steel soul, the weight or weightlessness of deprivations of love that masquerade as prudence.

  “The relevance of all this to the fictionalization of a constellation that speaks for the twentieth century is clear,” Masters said to me. “It is as a tormented colonial age that the twentieth century will be remembered and your book should point, I am sure, within its multiple perspectives to an overlapping context of spirit and nature that reveals without dogma the essence of love and love’s imperial malaise, love’s imperial tribulations within the plantation, institution, metropolis, factory, everywhere.”

  His voice faded and I continued to piece together Thomas’s “adventures” in 1926.

  Thomas and the black marble woman made their way along East Street. She was taking him across the Town to the tenement, plantation range in which she lived, so that he would know where to come when he had accumulated twelve shillings (a prodigious sum in 1926) to pay for the basket of eggs he had been instrumental in capsizing when he ran into her.

  The dream-clock in the sky let the sun fall a notch or two deeper than I had previously calculated. Was it noon or afternoon? The mask of the sun shone with brilliance and fury. They turned into Brickdam, an impressive, black-pitched bandage of a road that ran through the middle of the Town. It was distinguished by some of the finest residences in New Forest. East Street had had its fine wooden houses as well, all on stilts in the low-lying township protected by a wall from the sea, but Brickdam with its three-storeyed residences masked the nature of the subsistence (and less than subsistence) economy that controlled a plantation cosmos. Not only overseers resided along the bricked and tarred road (that tended to grow faintly moist in places, to stick to one’s feet) but civil servants of various pigmentation; the dust of gestating ages stuck to their faces in tune with Carnival cosmetic of the unborn.

  Incongruously perhaps (or was it congruously?) two mansions, one a famous College for New Forest youth, the other a great Alms House, rubbed sides or fences in the elegant, wooden parade along Brickdam.

  A game of cricket was in progress as Thomas and the market woman passed the College. As they moved to a faint, moist pressure on the soles of their feet, the striking batsman was hidden from sight less within the shell of the sun over their eyes than within the bamboo and sugar-cane masks at the edge of the field. But soon the ball had risen from the bat, it almost seemed to whistle in the body of space before arching and descending into Thomas’s hands.

  Thomas could scarcely countenance his luck. He wanted to pocket the catch, to take it away and examine its markings for the magic of blood in every game one involuntarily plays, the masked dead with the living, masked bamboo with sugar-cane, the unborn fodder with the born. Was it the redness of the ball that gripped him now or the unexpected metamorphosis of the yolk of an egg? A howl rose from the field. It reached him through every veil, tar and shell and sun, and he tossed the ball back into Carnival spaces.

  They had soon left the game of cricket behind and were abreast of the Alms House gate. Thomas peered through the bars. They stroked his eyes like gigantic lashes borrowed from the mask of the sun. Some of the inmates were seated on benches in a burnt-earth enclosure beside a straggly garden with a rose and a lily. Aunt Alice had risen from a bench. She moved around the enclosure like an ancient, sailing doll. Her faded dress reached to her ankles to kiss with the faintest whispering sound the cracked leather of her boots. It was the hour of exercise when the players or puppets in this other kind of dance or game limbered up before daylight supper. Who was she to lead the dance? Who was Aunt Alice? Was she Thomas’s real aunt? She was not. Indeed you may recall, gentle reader, my saying earlier in this book that I have no record of Thomas’s relations except that he was young Masters’ cousin. Even that is unreliable since terms like “cousin” were loosely and i
naccurately addressed to distant relations or no relations at all in Plantation New Forest.

  Alice was everybody’s ancient purgatorial relative. The dustman called her “aunt”, so did the postman and the drivers of delivery vans and nurses and less uniformed, even nondescript, personages of Carnival. Rumour had it that Aunt Alice had been married to a high-ranking civil service star who had lived but a couple of blocks away from the Alms House. That was an age ago. She had been his third wife. The marriage had been contracted in his sixty-first year (she was then fifty-one or fifty-two) when he had been in retirement for four or five years and was in receipt of a pension. (Civil servants retreated at fifty-five or fifty-six as befitted stars within the Carnival sun.)

  His first wife had died from tuberculosis. His second wife (one Charlotte I was informed by Masters) had skilfully stripped him of everything in his early middle age – all his property, in the heat of their romance, had been put in her name – and his former assets were to pass to her children by the marriage she made after their divorce. So it was that his pension, a good one by the standards of the day, kept the wolf from Alice’s door until his death when his pension ceased and she received nothing at all in her own right. It seemed grossly unfair in that he had contributed to the Widows and Orphans Fund all his working life. These contributions were deemed ineffectual in that she became his wife after his retirement.

  I gleaned the uncertain facts from Masters.

  How long, I wondered, had Alice been an inmate in the Alms House? Ten years or fifteen or ages? No one knew. I learnt, however, that her surname was Bartleby. No relation, I hasten to say, to Herman Melville’s Bartleby, though fiction-spirit, fiction-blood, runs between them. He, Melville’s poor Bartleby, had died a young man, whereas she, like her husband who died in his seventies, sailed into old age; she learnt to dance in the Carnival of the Alms House for her supper.

  I checked the New Forest Argosy to see whether it may have glimpsed her genius in the early twentieth century and pleaded her cause. Not a line, not a word, not the flimsiest paragraph existed. It seemed remarkable that the widow of a star should have fallen into the oblivion of a dance of spirit in becoming everybody’s purgatorial aunt. Masters intervened – rather peremptorily when we discussed the matter in Holland Park – to declare it was less remarkable than I thought. The gulf between a “star” and the “inmates of a cosmic alms house” was less wide than it seemed; it was as narrow as that between a privileged survivor in space and the gestating wilderness of intergalactic species …

  Thomas held fast to the bars of the gate within the mask of the sun he wore. “Aunt Alice,” he cried. She stopped and looked at him. The elongated eyelashes of the mask, as he peered through the gate, ran down his face and divided it into segments. It was a curious innovation. A human child yet many segments of plantation psyche, many segments of global uncertainty, to which Alice responded out of the strangest, almost old-fashioned, pity of heaven.

  Thomas, her purgatorial nephew, could not articulate what he felt. It was too peculiar, too overwhelming, for him, however precocious he was. But he felt it deeply all the same. He felt the museum profit and the museum loss of bureaucratic Inferno in Widows and Orphans state, the elusive and untouchable spell of non-pensionable spirit that secretes itself in oblivion. Aunt Alice was nebulously related to him as to young Masters. She was sister to the “mask of the cuckold”. A nebulous relationship in that Carnival possessed no identifiable role for her and had thrust her into limbo’s purgatory, limbo’s heaven, as a consequence. The “mask of the cuckold” was a privileged humiliation, it sheltered the “mother of god” and gave legitimate status to the child, Masters. But Alice, the sister of the mask, had sunken so far beneath conventional contact, beneath pensionable and non-pensionable desert, that her universal fictional kinship to humanity expressed itself as nothing more than a sailing dress above lined, wrinkled boots, in the limbo heaven of New Forest Alms House.

  Was someone actually at home in the pathos of her dress? Was she the prey of phantom nephews and nieces, phantom injustices, phantom diseases, diseased Widows and Orphans state, diseased unemployment in the decade of the 1920s that cast its imprecise, its inexact, parentage of shadow into generations unborn?

  Diseased as they were, they sought to toss her pennies to dance. And when they had nothing to toss, they reminded her of the taxes they paid. For without their money, they claimed, there would have been no theatre of the Alms House in which Aunt Alice played the paradoxes of limbo’s evolution into other spheres, the paradoxes of the widow of a dead star and the sister-in-law of the mother of god. Not that they understood such comedy of destitution and non-existent status of wealth. Yet they applauded unwittingly by calling her “aunt”, spirit-aunt, oblivion’s aunt.

  Thomas also applauded though he was terrified by “oblivion’s aunt” and by the thought of being swallowed or lost forever in her massive, sailing body. Alice understood. She felt profoundest compassion for him. How close is “oblivion’s aunt” to the seed of heaven that evolves into a family tree of spirit? Her curious dance (Thomas was uncertain whether she were a dream-puppet or sailing flesh-and-blood bound for divinity’s shore) mirrored the division between the two realms he had glimpsed through barred gate and segmented mask, namely, the realm of oblivion or absolute limbo and the realm of Carnival evolution into a family of spirit; and as she danced he felt he could trace the division within her, puppet breast/fertile breast, wasted breast/active breast at which he had never sucked but which she gave to him now.

  It was a colonial dance that responded to his deprivations; it symbolized hunger for proof, thirst for proof of genuine survival. It seemed to imply that he too, like Masters, had come close to extinction, and Alice’s breast proffered to him now in the dance was a gesture of succour after all that he had forgotten he had received. It matched Masters’ assumption of kingship. It matched that dream-kingship with a dream-knighthood for Thomas, a dream-enterprise of the milk of freedom that he (Thomas) so desperately needed to prove.

  Thomas bowed, he knelt to Alice. He was the plantation king’s knight. In the milk of freedom, the breast of freedom, he perceived the obscure Magna Carta of the womb. And of the grave. Thomas reached out through the bars of dream but he could not quite seize her or touch her. He wished to prove her reality by sculpting her to embrace the rose and the lily in the straggly Alms House garden. He wished to sculpt the shadows of great knights, great ladies, great households buried in her eclipsed breast.

  “Take the measure of any statue in a formal square or garden,” Masters said to me. “It weeps with bird droppings. If you doubt those tears then you need to poke a finger into a bird’s hindquarters for the tear duct of a stone knight or a stone lady. But Thomas’s comedy and tragedy was that much as he tried, Alice’s eyes defeated him in the sculptures he sought to make of the animal/human kingdom. No material tear rose there, neither faeces nor fire. The shadow of a rose, perhaps, the decrepitude of a lily, that was all. They wept for mankind. And that Thomas could not prove. She was the one creature, shadow of a dancing rose, he could not touch. And yet she was drawn to him, she pitied him (as my mother pitied me), she loved him, she loved him, imagine that! with the kind of love that is incapable of destroying its siblings. Some say she was a fraud that only a colonial, barren age could fabricate. I say she was the catalyst of fame at the heart of families of non-existence. She was the mystery of genius within the most unpropitious economic circumstances, a mystery that ran deeper than proof or parody of the evolution of limbo into heaven.”

  *

  There were three stages remaining after the Alms House in Sir Thomas’s journey with the market woman: first, the great Market-place of New Forest; second, the Bridge over the Crocodile Canal; third, the tenement plantation range in which the market woman lived with the czar of Carnival, Flatfoot Johnny.

  These stages constituted, Masters said, a descent into the modulated Inferno, modulated Purgatory, of twentieth-century colonial
limbo. I have no technologic recording of Sir Thomas’s progression as Child of the Carnival year, precocious human child of 1926. All I have are my conversations with Masters and a profusion of notes I shall endeavour to paraphrase. I hear his voice as if it were yesterday. I remember the hot summer day in the 1970s when he invited me to visualize the three remaining stages as further evidence of what he called a “twentieth-century divine comedy of existence”.

  It was indeed a hot June day in London. I drank lemonade and orange; Masters drank beer and spoke with staccato bursts of energy in reply to my questions. I sensed his depression. He suffered often from acute depression, the lineaments of which drove him to compose the paradoxical masks of Carnival that he inwardly wore or perceived upon others arising from the depths into the heights and vice versa. Towards evening our discourse became more even, more resigned (if that is the word), yet deep and many-layered. The day had cooled and the sky was tender, frail with quintessential smoke. There were brush-strokes across that aerial smoke suggesting a curious moderation of fire. The air was still and as the evening deepened, that strange moderation drew Masters’ attention. His inwardly masked face looked eager now, crest-fallen yet ecstatic. (The sensation of many series of inward masks, as if his naked face were dressed inwardly, never outwardly, was something I could never shake off when I met him.)

  He was pointing to the trees along Holland Villas Road. “Sponges of shadow,” he declared, “porous with a darkening rain of light that breathes stillness.” It all intimated a quality of fire that we needed to translate, he said. “Take the irregular line of the dark bunched trees over there against the evening sky. Follow that line with your eyes. Look! it shoots up here and there into points resembling the edges of flame still and black. In such apparent immobility, such tone, I detect a version of moderation and fire.” As he spoke I remembered the sponge and its mysterious ingredient of “light-rain”. Was rain too a translation of liquid fire that stabs and blackens the earth as the trees blacken the sky?