The Carnival Trilogy

by Wilson Harris

  The intricacy of all these relationships, their fullness, their abbreviated texture, their half-eclipsed initial capacity in the riddle of the crab at death’s door was not entirely lost upon Sir Thomas. He recalled his desire to sculpt Aunt Alice when she danced for her daylight supper. Curious to think of one destitute old woman, Bartleby’s third wife, as a dancer (the dancer who knighted him), and the other, the well-to-do second wife, as riveted by pride into the Market-place. Was Alice the fleet spirit, Charlotte the chained, despite her fortune and her privileges? Were the spectral voices of caution HE SAYS, SHE SAYS, contours of oblivion sprung from the blind collision of cultures but heard rather than seen in the voice of the mask, the conscience of the mask?

  *

  Sir Thomas fell for the marble woman. Her dark folk-humour, dark folk-conscience, thrilled him. He faintly worshipped her. He was wet not dry puberty. He wished he were ancient, at least one hundred years old, a twenty-first century fully grown knight in saintly, sexual armour. Her intervention in the Market theatre, the applause she received, sprang to his head like wine. In the day’s journey – it seemed a whole day, an age – across New Forest, he had been uneasy at times as they made their way along East Street and Brickdam. But now it was as if she swallowed him. He felt the poignant sweetness that an older woman brings to a young lover who has arrived at the precocious puberty of the twentieth-century colonial age and is suddenly enamoured by the touch of exploited flesh-and-blood that consumes him yet enlivens him unexpectedly.

  He resented the czar. How old was the idiot giant anyway? Old as Carnival? Old as Everyman Masters’ shadow-resemblance falling everywhere? Masters’ shadow-resemblance had been cut from a true mask that must of necessity be cut again and again, hewn again and again into glimmering configurations, false, true, truer still, truest still, less false, less true, voice of the hidden true mask, voice of the hidden true conscience of the mask everywhere in everything, however true, however less than true, however inferior, devilish, apparently untrue everything seems. This (or all these) fell not only upon Masters’ lame kin Flatfoot Johnny but upon lame bureaucrats, lame governors of the estate of New Forest, lame field-marshals who had fought for land in South America, lame clerks and administrators.

  The mask that fell of necessity varied in cut but its gift to Carnival was the hidden voice, the evolving conscience, the hidden contour heard rather than seen in every cruel or other circumstance.

  Indeed that hidden contour, that paradox of a mask, fell upon me as well for I was Everyman Masters’ spirit-clerk (as well as parent-spark) in writing his life. I was the clerk of a master-being, some would say, but in concert with lame plantation bureaucrats that he overshadowed and resembled, I was the clerk of tyranny or of a tyranny of sorts. Not only that. His familiarity – from the time he was seventeen or eighteen – with the women of the plantation with whom he slept (as is the privilege and custom of apprentice-overseers/princes of the estate) signified a tradition of intercourse between high and low that I deplored but profited from myself as a young man, a young clerk with money in his pocket. In writing of all this, am I the clerk of tradition or the clerk of a fallacy of tradition that resembles true tradition?

  All this helps to give luminous masked age or Carnival tradition to Thomas and the marble woman as they make their way – as they guide me – through past, present and future labyrinth from the czar’s Market-place to Crocodile Bridge.

  The bone-littered path they took ran no longer with the wounded ease, the plastered ease, of Brickdam or East Street proprieties. It crackled underfoot with the malady of the caves of the plantation primitive. The tenements or caves were flat and squat. All well and good for missionaries in the Inferno to speak of a good soul or a bad soul, a good meal or a bad meal, or of the devil’s plantation repast, but one was equally held by windows and doors that yawned silently, whose maw seemed capable of swallowing millions, maw or spiked cannon, the uneasy peace in which poverty makes its nest.

  Did tenement caves and spiked cannon glimmer with forgotten battlefields as the inmates of the plantation ghetto moved against windows and doors of the setting sun, or were they the green/rotting nurseries of future wars, future abortive revolutions, future czars?

  The grotesqueries that were beginning to arise in the return of the dead king of Carnival into my dreams, into my book, were becoming manifest, if I may so put it, in their intricate assault upon my complacency.

  I recalled the barred mask of the sun upon Thomas’s face (with its spidery, half-abbreviated, half-obliterated segmented features in other Thomases around incarnations of history around the globe) as he peered at Aunt Alice through the gate of the Alms House. Not a barred gate but the blind mouth and deaf eyes and hollow ears of cannon lay upon dead Masters as he prompted me to visualize the neighbourhood through which Thomas and the marble woman walked – not upon Christ’s metaphysical sea where floated the vessel of Night but upon a daemonic (true? untrue?) globe I thought I knew but scarcely knew at all in its parallel incarnations of deed and reflection.

  Masters wanted me to reflect upon a deed or a blow that is enigmatic in substance; it appears spiked or obsolescent, it appears an anachronism, but in inner bombardment or inner strike it is as unexpected as the green lightning of explosive fertility in a rotting garden. Even so I was still unprepared for the dead king’s confession. “As a Boy of seventeen,” he cried with the bone of a woman in the masked aperture of his mouth, a bone that descended into the beam of his body, “I came to this rotting neighbourhood and ate a woman twice my age.” He was laughing soundlessly. “She was – how do the glossy magazines put it? – soul food, soul-sex. It was nothing. I felt … What did I feel? I felt the spring of action that fires itself so reflexively, with such puppet ardour; it is as old as the hills, it is nothing. I was an apprentice-overseer, an apprentice-knight or king or what have you, a mask is a mask is a mask, of the globe. And she was marble one enters like eggshell.”

  “You felt nothing?” I pressed him. I felt guilt. As a Boy of eighteen whose age lapses into many vicarious bodies (all self-made heroes in the 1920s, 1930s, Depression cinema were cosmetic overseers, they were the Boys), I had slept for the first time with a woman twice my age. She was a subtle whore with the eyes of black-blooded, tailored actresses. I had felt something, I had heard the hidden voice (the unseen companion) of Masters’ guilt. Masters had felt nothing, he had blanketed my conscience, my calloused conscience, so woven into the apparent indifference of unseen populations, it had seemed nothing whereas I knew it was something. I had felt perverse guilt and pride at the box-office money I paid her to lie with me in bed under a screen concealing spiked cannon, perverse pride and guilt at traditions of the hunt, half-male hunted, half-female huntress. It was the sense of being torn into two or three or four, into trinities, quaternities, that left me fulfilled but profoundly unhappy, proud but shattered within. Masters looked into my heart and read my mind; he saw the paradoxes of something and nothing, unfelt yet felt, the shadow of divine clerk within me, within parchment biography of spirit. I was the clerk of bone and dagger, inanimate/animate soul. I was the clerk of god. I was possessed by the necessity to endure the mystery of truth, the mystery of hell.

  *

  Thomas and the marble woman had come to the Crocodile Bridge. It had been so named because of the canal that ran from the great Crocodile Swamp into New Forest to provide irrigation and drinking water. The canal was the lifeline of New Forest. It had been designed and built – so legend claimed – by an eighteenth-century antecedent of Everyman Masters. It supplied the Municipal Water Works and the Sugar Estate Reservoir of New Forest. The latter was constructed to hold a special reserve supply for overseers and other top staff in the dry season of the year when water was rationed.

  The occasional crocodile or alligator tended to make its way into the canal and was sometimes seen basking at the edge of the water under the noonday sun.

  When the Boy and the masked woman arrived on the Bridg
e it was past six o’clock. The quick tropical twilight was dying and darkness fell in a flash. But not before Sir Thomas had glimpsed in the black water, black as coal, streaked by a pointed flame from the long arm of the dying Carnival sun, a crocodile that floated like a log of wood. The log moved, it dipped, it rose again, it oscillated slightly, it submerged, emerged afresh, no longer wood but an iron body, a piece of cannon drawn by the denizens of the Inferno. That was the instant when night fell. Everything was still save for the moving shadows of Thomas and the marble woman on the Bridge against the glow of an antiquated street lamp.

  The woman delved into an antiquated Carnival basket, pulled out an antiquated torch, pressed the switch to replicate the long arm of Carnival. A beam shot forth and played upon the canal. Everything was black. And then the play of light caught something. Two miniature fires gleamed suddenly like lit coals or stars in the underworld sky and the darkness under the Bridge. They were the eyes of the crocodile illumined now, luminous now – as never during the day when they seemed opaque – by the long arm of Carnival exercised by the marble woman. They seemed to rise out of the water, a wounded constellation, until they pierced Sir Thomas with astonishment and uncertainty about the animal age, the iron and metallic fossil riddles, in the paradox of a constellation, in the birth of a star within the depths of space.

  There was a faint mist over the water. The pencil of light falling from the Bridge, and igniting the crocodile’s eyes, gave to the atmosphere a faint turbulence, an uneven sensation of fabric vibrating almost imperceptibly. Imperceptible as this was, Sir Thomas perceived it. It reminded him of the ragged cloth or bandage with which he had staunched the cut that Masters had received that day on the foreshore when as Carnival Boy-King he crawled in the mask of a crab. Thomas too had crawled in the king’s shadow – a shadow himself – as they played at El Doradan age within the pencil of light years that illumined not only the crab but also the atomic button or eye of a stranded fish upon the gallows of god.

  No ostensible gallows arose before him now save that standing on the Bridge, Thomas could trace the shadowy cannon of the crocodile in the water, the coals for eyes, as another investiture or mask of god, another game that Masters was playing in the wake of the Crab nebula. The god of Carnival had slipped off the crab and the fish to don a dinosaur rocket resembling cannon as much as crocodile. It stirred Sir Thomas deeply, it stirred layers of insubstantial and sculpted emotion within him; it stirred the seed of unconscious jealousy within him of the masks of god. It was the greenness and fertility of god in concert with the apparent obsolescence one reads into the ancient shell of a crab, or the dinosaur hide of a crocodile, or the hoary metal of cannon, that troubled Thomas most deeply.

  I was troubled as I followed my Carnival guides.

  Did the greenness of god mask a terrible age or was it a terrible age that had built into itself the reflexes of fertility? Did the wound or cut, I wondered, that Thomas had seen earlier in the day on the child-deity El Dorado fester incorrigibly into fortress money or obliterate itself within hardened ages of ingrained ferocity aping spirit and the death of spirit?

  I was troubled and jealous of such terrible powers within apparently obsolescent institution and privilege. Above all I was deeply troubled by the wound Thomas had touched in the body of his master but scarcely proven because of its vanishing proportions: a wound that not only festered in a rotting garden but whose transfigurative potential was eclipsed in the reflexes of a puppet, the reflexes of fertility.

  I tried to grasp a parallel between wounded constellation and ferocity that apes spirit or the death of spirit. For example, Masters’ ferocity was such that it led him to expose the cut he received, to adventure on with a flag or a bandage; it equipped him equally to run or escape from the false shaman. Such Carnival good fortune, such Carnival fierce capacity to encounter evil, profit from it, learn from it, yet fly from it, exacted a formidable price upon all species, all arts, all being. For the psychology of flight floated a scar that resembled the wound others less fortunate than child-Masters or green god, less equipped to run, received. That scar was the foundation of a series of Carnival callouses across generations or evolutions into the obsolescence and festering disease of territorial imperatives that the armoured crab or crocodile sustained.

  I felt that Thomas’s uncertainty sprang from a wound that lay so deeply buried in the armour of a civilization that he almost doubted his original perception and wondered whether it had existed at all. So poignant and heart-rending is Doubt when Faith congeals into a fortress that blocks our vision of the starving and the emaciated in every corner of the globe.

  Jealousy – on the other hand – was no fortress. It was the cancerous adoration and envy of establishment heroes or masters whose ransacking of species and cultures Sir Thomas found himself unable to achieve under any banner, Christian or Marxist, except as Everyman’s unwitting shadow. If, for instance, Masters instead of himself had collided with the marble/market woman that noon, he (Masters) – I am sure – would have had no compunction in running even more deeply into her, in accusing her of being as blind as he. And so in accompanying her across the Town and the Plantation, he would have clung, I perceived, to their mutual blindness as the foetus in the female body of humanity clings to blind fate, and the female – whose body it is, after all, that the flying or clinging foetus inhabits – is blind to the accumulating scars of aborted antecedents in a fragmented humanity, a humanity that will turn upon itself at some despairing, later, phallic stage of civilization and penetrate itself as if nothing had happened in the past, as if the deed of coitus between man and woman – as if the intercourse of trade between cultures – is totally functional, totally without sensuous imagination or guilt.

  (Thus it was that Masters at the age of seventeen as an apprentice-overseer had visited the neighbourhood in which the marble women lived. He had slept with one of them, a compliant marble prostitute, twice his age. Her flesh may as well have been egg or juicy fashion plate or glass. He had penetrated her with scarcely a thought for unseen companions, the echoes of shared human mask, the reverberations of hidden conscience his action provoked in Thomas – the cousinly shadow that he trailed behind him in history – and in me, his clerk or biographer of spirit.)

  *

  Thomas envied Masters; he envied him his capacity to run, to fly, to act, and it almost seemed as if such regression into the body of the glass-mother, or the marble-mistress, were substantial with Faith. Whereas he (Thomas), I felt, remained at the mercy of profoundest misgiving. If it were possible I would sculpt his arrival upon the Crocodile Bridge with the liquid tool I had seen that afternoon upon the crest of a wave. It was 1926. A common-or-garden year. Why should I wish to sculpt a passing moment into the Bridge? Precocious as Thomas was, biographer of spirit that I was, we could not say why each and every common-or-garden year or moment cries out to be sculpted in paradoxical contradiction to insane eternity, as if each sculpted fragile year is kin to a spirit one may ape or misconceive but whose innovative reality, whose foreshadowings, naïvetés, whose warnings, cannot be entirely suppressed by the logic of a uniform infinity.

  Perhaps it was the sculpture of coming events that Carnival felt in 1926, the economic depression of the 1930s, the war that would follow that depression. Perhaps it was the gestation of a nuclear age to be sculpted in the atom that Carnival felt in 1926. Perhaps it was a nameless foreboding that Carnival felt about independence for the colonies of the Inferno, an independence that would lay bare a variety of stigmata that would bleed in the 1950s and 1960s, but succumb to a brute hardening of the flame of blood, to tribal institutions that made all the more ironclad every ritual grievance of the 1970s and 1980s. In 1982 when Everyman Masters died, Carnival’s premonitions in the mask of Sir Thomas had come to a head, I felt, around the globe, and the writing on the Bridge I had nebulously sculpted in backward dream in the labyrinth of time turned into a climate of fear.

  *

  Thomas was
now alone on the Bridge with the faint prophetic sculpture, the bandaged year, falling everywhere into the mist. The Bridge was the naive yet overshadowed vessel of Night, he was the rebel saint, rebel lover, rebel captain of humanity. The mist was ragged sail and bandage, the coal-black waters were timbered with the burnt schooner that had stood beside the Market-place. Crocodile bags were sold to tourists and well-to-do people for six shillings apiece, half the cost of the capsized basket of eggs.

  “Charlotte Bartleby,” the marble woman said to Thomas before she vanished, “fond of crocodile to store her lipstick in, her sacred nail varnish, mirror, kerchief, and other items and wisps of paper. You can go home now, Boy. No use to come another step with me. My cave is at the bottom of the lane.” She pointed along the false dawn of the dimly lit path with its antiquated road lamp. “You see that lantern like a half-moon down there?” Thomas barely saw the flash of her teeth. She was laughing in the misty darkness. “It hanging by a wire under the belly of a donkey cart that Flatfoot Johnny inscribe ‘Orion chariot’. When you come next time with a piece of gold for each egg,” she was laughing again, “remember, whether it’s in the day-sky or the night-sky the donkey cart’ll be there by the parapet where I be. You understand, Boy? I easy to find once you pass the Crocodile Bridge constellation.” Before he could protest she was gone. He made an attempt to follow but she waved him back.

  Within an afternoon resembling an age he dreamt of defending her against all sovereign powers that sought to ride her, or run into her, all overbearing masters.

  Perhaps he had been moved more deeply and dangerously than he understood by the net of counterpoint (HE SAYS, SHE SAYS) that the market woman had flung over Flatfoot Johnny when he raised his fist to crush Charlotte in the Carnival Market-place. Perhaps from that moment he became a dangerous rebel. Perhaps rebellion upheld the invisible net in which Flatfoot was caught, upheld it and converted it into the sparked basket of incipient sexuality or pubertal age interwoven with mist and sail and bandage. Sparked basket! Capsized basket!