The Carnival Trilogy

by Wilson Harris

  Thomas was about to go, albeit reluctantly, when he and I perceived Flatfoot Johnny approaching the Crocodile Bridge. Johnny had been drinking in the late afternoon and his movements were even more cramped and shuffling than usual. The restraints of the net bit into his soul. He was angry. Thomas and I were possessed by a sinking feeling at the pit of our basket stomach, capsized feeling, sparked feeling, acute foreboding. Flatfoot’s powers, however shackled or netted, were extraordinary. Not only because of his formidable back but because of mutual incapacities between himself and us, between rulers and rebels, mutual Byzantine masquerade in which the net of majesty that Johnny trailed around his limbs was a sieve of longing in ourselves. We knew through porous basket, or sparked tapestry of Night, the frustrations that Johnny endured as Carnival czar of Russia in New Forest.

  Every shilling, every dollar the czar spent on rum matched the capsized basket of eggs Thomas had blindly engineered in involuntary social experiment or collision of cultures. The art of Carnival revolution lay in involuntary match, involuntary equation, matched sovereign and common peoples. One throne makes another footstool visible. The czar’s indulgences matched the gold, wounded El Dorado, Thomas had agreed to pay.

  I sought to read Thomas’s comedy of values in “art of Carnival revolution”. I sought a link between the puberty of the twentieth century – the growing pains of adolescent humanity – and the uncertain desire, the uncertain necessity, to right age-old wrongs everywhere. I sought a link between vulgar relief and comedy, between comedy and tragedy, a link so curious that one blended into the other or lapsed into the other, the serious into the absurd, the absurd into terror or blood or revolution.

  The die was cast when the czar passed Thomas on the Bridge. Johnny was drunk. Thomas smelt danger for the marble woman. He kept pace with the czar along the path where primitives trundled, or lived in, cannon. It was a curious scene, but, in point of fact, Thomas dreamt he was descending a ladder or a bandage of mist into the sky of the canal under the Bridge where he had seen the natives move rockets or crocodile weaponry.

  What astonished us as we descended the ladder was not the awesome power of such weaponry but – because of Johnny’s shuffling netted footsteps – a sense of absurdity as if Thomas and Johnny and I were inside Charlotte’s bag, in the lipstick, in the mirror, in the other items of sacred toiletry within a crocodile’s belly.

  We would have laughed at Jonah in the whale of a crocodile but the idiot giant might have turned upon his unseen companions, seen us in spite of everything, seized us, bled us. Lipstick blood! Eaten us! In the false dawn in which we had paused for a moment of vulgar relief Johnny seemed an ancient woman wiping her falsely reddened lips and seated upon a black chamber-pot with murder in her heart.

  The intimacy of Carnival murder executed in a closet, in Charlotte’s crocodile bag, gave way all at once to blazing coal (as if we had flown around the globe from Iron Age sugar mills in black canals to electronic faeces). Johnny arose. Thomas and I stood now somewhere in the roof or the palate of the crocodile, under its night-sky eyes or stars. The inmates of the caves had ceased to trundle crocodile and were cooking their night-time meal in the open barracks of the plantation.

  Johnny seemed oblivious of their activity, but they called out to him as to a foul emperor they adored.

  “Hey Flatfoot Mask, hey Strong Boy, you drunk or what? You lips stick together or what? Say a damn word. You don’t hear we praying to you night after night as we sit on coal?”

  Flatfoot Mask saw nothing, heard nothing, he was already a dead man, and his progress was so slow that Thomas and I had ample time (like an archaeologist, an anthropologist, excavating the body of space, assessing its cracks, its crevices) to inspect the coal pots on which the natives cooked and in which the lighted eyes of darkness shone to miniaturize far-away storms blown by cosmic winds in the anatomy of god. Strips of iron or some nameless metal rested on each coal pot and these supported a frying pan, in some instances, or a vessel with rice or a saucepan with beans or with meat for those who were phenomenally lucky.

  The strips of iron created the effect of a laced mask. Within each open segment of the mask, the deposit of an animal face glowered at us. The coal sometimes lay lumpy and naked in its concave bed. Tripods were then constructed above it from which the saucepans hung. Where neither tripod stood nor mask lay above the eyes of the crocodile, the long arm of Carnival had fashioned a metal bar or spit.

  Thomas felt himself masked by their vulgar and banal appetite, vulgar and banal spit. So much so that he led me under the eyes of coal, in the crocodile’s grasp yet hidden from it, on the blind inner side of the crocodile’s skull, as if he possessed a cosmic faculty or guideline born of a globe or planet that defecates in space, cooks in space, apparently beneath, apparently above, the light-year stars.

  It was this profound “beneath/above skull and anatomy” of the plantation Inferno that gave him a route through time of which the keepers of the coal pot and the chamber-pot were unaware. And that was just as well. For whatever their complaints, or unanswered prayers, Johnny was president and revolution was taboo. And yet for one moment when we passed by they seemed to look up at unseen Thomas like a dog lipsticking its wounds. Such was their presentiment of the androgynous miracle of Carnival revolution.

  Flatfoot had now gained the lantern moon under the donkey cart and Thomas said to me that his vertical descent into the underworld sky of the canal, upon bandage, through absurd crocodile belly, lipsticked dog, within the shell and the roof of coal, beneath/above the stars, had ceased and revolved into horizontal arm or axis of Carnival. He felt a commotion in his stomach. He felt faint and dizzy. He had scarcely eaten a scrap or a morsel since his flight from the foreshore in search of Masters. And the sight of food had enlivened and sickened him.

  His phallic entrails akin to the Milky Way were turning. Sparked basket of pubertal sex. He had glimpsed the marble woman’s breasts. She stood in her cave. He glimpsed her through the radii of the spokes in the donkey cart wheel. She, unlike the others, was cooking her meal inside as if each spoke that passed through her were a spit to toast meat or milk. Or so it seemed to Thomas with his masked eyes glued to her. In point of fact she was engaged in peeling sweet potatoes. She had shed her dress for a low petticoat. Her statuesque limbs and breasts revolved slowly in the wheel of his eyes like a slow motion legend of storm. She had anticipated Johnny’s flatfooted approach and her humours, her tensions, obscurely matched his. Flatfoot cried through the revolving door, “Where the damn Boy who smash the egg? I see you with he in the Market-place today.” The woman watched him. She tested the strength of the net she had flung over him. Thomas perceived through the wheel that she was unsure. Johnny was so drunk he seemed capable of rending every garment, uprooting every spoke.

  “Who tell you all this?” she asked, playing for time.

  “I hear. I hear. Not from you but I hear. You take the Boy home? You see he parents? You make them pay?”

  “He has no parents,” the marble woman said quietly. “But he promise to come back and pay in gold.” It was a joke. Thomas hoped Johnny would see it and desist from uprooting the wheel.

  “No parents?” Flatfoot exploded. “Is what cock-and-bull story the Boy spin you? He’s a white Boy though he coloured. He got white parents.”

  “I tell you he’s an orphan.”

  “Orphan hell! I know what orphan mean. It mean he cycling with mother in bed. Orphan hell!” Johnny glared around the cave as if he were searching for someone.

  “You filthy, Johnny. You in my bed every night. I pray to you to believe …”

  “I don’t believe. I know. I know what you up to with Boys, golden Boys. A piece of gold for an egg!”

  “Johnny, you dead drunk,” the marble woman said sharply. Her voice was sharp but tired, peculiarly downcast as if Johnny’s “dead drunk” condition matched an area of stalemate in her at the pit of a wheeling imagination. She had changed, she was more vulnerable than eve
r, she was without an audience. It came as a shock to perceive this. In the Market-place with an audience to cheer, to applaud generously, she had been inventive enough and able to net the czar’s fist. With Thomas, she had been versatile enough, perceptive enough of a wheel of creatures he brought with him, the dancer Aunt Alice, the fleet-footed Masters, and me, divine clerk or biographer of spirit, who needed their guidance. But now that she felt she had lost us, on her own with the idiot giant, she fell on her knees, as if the wheel had been uprooted, had indeed fallen flat; she seemed to pray, she seemed to fumble for HE SAYS, SHE SAYS, she seemed unnaturally docile. And the flattened wheel almost made her believe she was the individual solitary whore, the individual rotten whore that the idiot giant said she was. She was the wife and mother of orphans in a polluted, stilled universe.

  “No rotten gold,” the czar said suddenly. “Give me gut-deep money, bloody money, carve me honest money.” He raised his fist to strike but Thomas could stand it no more. He tugged at the wheel, it resisted, he pulled again, it moved, it spun, he felt it turning into a community of mutual spaces, mutual creatures. He jumped miraculously through the wheel from “beneath/above” and seized the knife on the table, raised it so quickly it knitted afresh the net that had been rent, and then with a sensation that her hand was in his, he plunged the dagger into Johnny’s frame.

  As the blood came I wondered if it were true that the wheel was turning. Thomas was dizzy all over again, he stroked it, he stroked the woman’s prayer. The blood was true. The transfigurative wound or revolution came within an ace of realization but in his immaturity, her immaturity, my immaturity – in the way we were locked into self-perpetuating order and primitive habit – the revolution eluded us again. The woman sprang to her feet. She was still, she could scarcely speak, and then she found the voice of terrible oracle. She wrung her hands.

  “O me god, Johnny the czar of Russia, he dead.”

  It was all she could say. She was lost. She seized her savage love, her savage Johnny. She wept to break his heart and hers.

  The czar is dead, long live the czar in the cave of abortive revolution.

  FIVE

  In 1931 at the age of Carnival fourteen Masters became a Boy at the famous College in Brickdam next to Aunt Alice’s dancing school in the Alms House. His cosmic apprenticeship as princeling-overseer of the sugar estate of the globe formally commenced. Above the portals to the College was written an injunction attributed to Heracleitus the Obscure:

  THE AION IS A BOY WHO PLAYS,

  PLACING THE COUNTERS HERE AND THERE.

  TO A CHILD BELONGS THE COSMIC MASTERY.

  A high priority on the curriculum was athletics. And within the first year of his apprenticeship Masters shone at the Athletic Meet in two of the under-fifteen events. He beat Merriman in the hundred yards and Philip of Spain in the high jump.

  After seventy-five yards (in which he kept me at his side and led me in a dream) he and Merriman were ahead of the field and suddenly it seemed to Masters that Merriman would win. The field stretched into a cave at the entrance to which stood two coal-black guardians or referees holding a ribbon or bandage chest high.

  There was a fiendish grin on Merriman’s face. His skull shone through the seed of his hair that had been oiled. Masters and I were on the verge of panic. We saw the merry shadow of the false shaman at our side in the collegiate Inferno. We saw that everything we had gained on the beach could be plucked from us now in the laughter of Merriman. Such are the ruses of diseased Ambition. There is rape and rape. There is the seizure of others, there is conquest. That is one form of rape. There is panic – that is another form – panic in being overtaken by a grin.

  Masters made his last crucial effort and succeeded in breasting the tape at the entrance to the cave ahead of Merriman. He found it impossible to say in the interior darkness that enveloped him to what degree he had outrun diseased and merry Ambition, to what degree he had profited from it. The sudden darkness left me blind in the cave and I returned to the sun dazzled and uncertain of where I had been.

  Philip of Spain was the nickname given to the Boy Rodrigues, whose antecedents were Venezuelan. He was loose-limbed, sorrowful-looking, and his tutors concentrated on making him spell “crocodile tears” on every page of his exercise book until he had accumulated a body of waves he scaled in the mental high jump. He jumped with a priestly cassock on his head over the bar of the world, into other people’s hearts, other people’s Milky Way entrails.

  Each contestant was given three chances to clear the bar or to retire from conquest. Each clearance ran into decades, generations, even centuries, and was a signal for the referees or guardians to take the bar up another inch, another generation. And thus the mouth of the cave heightened into an interior darkness in which a drama of the soul festered or transfigured the elements, the constellations.

  Philip was set to win. He had cleared every vertical extension of the cave in which Masters dreamt he discerned the ghostly donkey cart of Christ and the ghostly wheel of revolution that ran through Christ’s imperial masks. There were other relics as well in the cave. What a distance lay between a donkey ride and an emperor’s Byzantine saddle in heaven. It was this thought that drove Masters to face his opponent when the high jump seemed lost. The bar had been raised still another inch, another generation, and Philip had cleared it but Masters had knocked it flat. He jumped, knocked it flat again. Should he fail in the third attempt, he would have lost.

  He looked at his priestly opponent. He perceived nothing really “priestly” about him. He was more of an engineer or an architect than a priest. His faculties were primed to structural measures, to siftings, to making adjustments, making divisions, to creating a shield over his interests, an archaic mask, modern adjustments in the archaic shield, partitions, edifices, boundary lines, division of spoils; except that, in an odd way this time, diseased, archaic high jump Ambition was such that it had begun to speculate on diseased frontiers, on a clearance into all or nothing.

  “What do you mean by all or nothing?” Masters wanted to ask the budding twentieth-century Philip of Venezuela in a collegiate Inferno or colony. (“Spain” was a nickname for Venezuela. Venezuela, it was said, contemplated invading New Forest. Indeed Philip Rodrigues was loose-limbed and athletic enough to accommodate many skeletons in the cupboard of America, many invaders, many old and new invasions.)

  Masters gauged the bar for the last time. He ran at it. He leapt into the air like a daemon. He cleared window and gate and bar to come abreast of Rodrigues’ performance that he had endowed with proportions of contradiction and fantasy to drive him to mental and physical victory. He had seen into Philip, as it were, and profited from conscious, subconscious, unconscious, savage motivation beneath cassock and slide rule. He felt almost sorry for Philip now. His opponent’s powers, his drive to rule the roost, to build upon the bones of the defeated, was a necessary moral evil. Was evil sometimes moral, was evil the moral ground of frames that claim to be absolute? Did such absolutes conscript the imagination until alternatives diminished into lesser and greater evils, and the lesser evil became the moral imperative?

  The high jump bar or frame had been raised again. This time Philip faltered. He failed to make the clearance. Masters soared over the cave by an extra inch or two. Philip tried a second time, struck the bar to the ground. He limped as if he were psychically maimed. Perhaps he had been caught off guard – though he was unaware of it – by Masters’ philosophic gymnasium. He ran and jumped again. There was a roar from the spectators. His ankle caught the bar and sent it spinning to the ground. He had lost and yet he had won. He had lost the event but he had secured a premise of “moral evil” that was to haunt Everyman Masters all his life. It was not just that Rodrigues’ high jump – his military, economic or whatever ascendancy – would have proven the greater evil, that his (Masters’) was the lesser. It was the realization that revolution – that the wheel that expands into the door of a problematic cave – required a co
mplex relationship to the tyrant-psyche one overcomes, a complex apprehension of the tyrant’s blood as native to oneself and to the wounds of transfigurative inner/outer being, transfigurative architectures of the Carnival body of space.

  “Can you tell me something about the cave,” I suddenly asked Masters, “into which you ran at the end of the race? It seemed so dark when you led me in. I saw nothing.”

  The dead king stared at me in my dream.

  “It was the cave of the tyrant-psyche,” he said at last. “Do you follow?”

  I did not reply. He continued, “It was the cave of relics, it was the cave of heartfelt competition and divine right. It was also – and this was strange – the cave of abortive revolutions. You were actually in,” he paused, gestured, searched for an image, “a hollow shell symbolizing an embalmed god.” He paused again. “May I qualify what I have just said? Not necessarily a god in strict logic, no, that hollow shell may symbolize a beloved atheist or a beloved despot or an ambiguous saint, each or any of these may be embalmed into a god. Cast your eyes around the world and you will see. It was like running, I repeat, into an embalmed shell, into a comedy of excavations.”

  “Comedy of excavations!” I was struck by the expression.

  “Yes,” said Masters. “Place your ear to the shell and you will hear the echo of an excavated heart, lung, organ. We ran into all these. I tried to make you see but you were hypnotized by the semblance of immortality. Yes, hypnotic semblance of immortal regime.”

  His voice faded and I was left to ponder the implications of what he had said. Indeed it was a confession, a deep-seated, far-reaching confession. Rather than accept the lesser of two evils as the nature of order, Masters sought a confessional frame through which to illumine the counterpoint between tyrant-psyche and age-old deception or semblance of immortality. Such illumination – he appeared to imply – might pave the way for a fiction of grace that led through the restrictions of alternative evils within the parameters of conquistadorial deity, conquistadorial morality; led through to a deeper comprehension and rebuttal of conquest in the creativity of underestimated moral being. It was a goal that lay unfulfilled and far in the distance in the race of humanity, and in the meantime I saw that Masters was depressed, chastened, beaten, even though he had won the two events in the collegiate Athletic Meet.