When he received the silver cups that were the prizes for the high jump and the hundred yards he turned and looked at Rodrigues and Merriman and his body hardened all of a sudden (as if it had received the embalmer’s knife) with the conviction that they had won, he had lost. It was the avid way they stared at the silver in his hands and the fact that he kept it close to his heart (as if that too had been sliced); they stared at him as if he were a thief, as if he had stolen the prize from them, as if his heart were in their breasts and he were the shell of the race, not they.
They could not perceive the distinctions he wished to coin in the realm of the state between false shaman and true shaman, between diseased Ambition and confessional frame. It was their currency, their conquest, that he received in accepting the prize. He had robbed them. It was plain to him now. He could not make them see the springs, the torments, that had given him the edge to outwit their diabolic pressure upon him. What they saw was that he had profited from a native alliance, native savagery, and he was one of them, a king of athletes.
Athletics were supreme on the College curriculum but attention was paid to the humanities and the sciences in the race of scholarship.
Mr Becks, a black Grenadian educated at Oxford and the Sorbonne, was the Latin master; a brilliant scholar and the recipient of many prizes. Unlike the other masters who drove cars or cycled on ancient bikes, he walked to College along Brickdam from his home. He always wore an immaculate white suit and a white cork helmet such as overseers donned when they climbed into the saddle to ride through the sugar-cane estate on the other side of the Crocodile Bridge. He strode at a beautiful pace that Philip would have envied.
A year or two before Masters enrolled, Mr Becks had taught both Latin and Greek, and though Greek had been withdrawn, he referred perfunctorily on occasion to Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus. They had become relics in the cave into which scholarship-masks upon Masters and me ran. In his first year Everyman read Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Caesar’s accounts of his invasions of Gaul and Britain.
“Latin,” Mr Becks said non-committally (or was it perfunctorily?), “is a dead language.” Masters was taken aback. He confided to me an anecdote of a precocious composer who wrote his first symphony at the age of seven but was astonished to learn that the keys of his piano were ivory relics from the cave into which music-masks run. Young Masters – though an adept of the cave of my dreams – was equally ignorant. He stated bluntly that Latin was the language of Philip Rodrigues. Was ignorance bliss in poking unintentional fun at Philip, in visualizing him as an imperial speaker, in attributing to him a sacred tongue, a sacred art, a sacred science within a colonial cave that stifles originality and breeds fear. How sacred is fear, how sacred is hypocrisy? Mr Becks rebuked him. The priests and engineers of Spain, he conceded, still conducted solemn Latin masses for the pagan soul of the New World. Masters was intrigued to learn of a new Latin dictionary that blessed the pagan mysteries of surrealism, jazz, aeroplane and radio.
But a nagging doubt remained. What was a dead language? Did surrealism, aeroplane, jazz, radio become instant dinosaur relics within an embalmed language? He asked Mr Becks.
“Latin helps us with modern tongues,” Mr Becks said evasively. “Think of the many words with a Latin root. Latin is an exercise of logical faculty. Latin has beauty and order.” He saw that Everyman was waiting for a reply to his question. “There are technical reasons, technological revolutions,” he hesitated as if unsure what a “technological revolution” was in the museum of progress, “that may explain the low profile or so-called death of a language. Latin still conquers souls.” He spoke grandly with a hollow flourish.
“And aeroplanes and radios?” Masters asked.
Mr Becks blinked uncomfortably. He spoke up all at once. “Language is, or should be, as much an art as a tool or a medium of tools. We need to question, to say the least, the innermost resources of language through the creative imagination, in the creative conscience. Such questions sometimes evolve into profoundest answers to the plague of robot intelligence. A living language is a medium of imaginative death as well as imaginative rebirth and life. It is a medium of creativity in morality. Fiction as much as language dies otherwise. I myself read nothing but mediocre novels and poetry. It is better to be on the safe side, to assume there is no hope. One is then in line to be promoted to the top of the robot league in entertainment, learning and politics.”
The class had been listening, yet not listening. And Masters was more fascinated by Mr Becks’ discomfort and uneasiness as he spoke rather than by what he actually said. Was Mr Becks a sick man or a prime white-coated skeleton in the cave into which we had run? He seemed fearful of his innermost thoughts as he uttered them. He seemed to glance over his shoulder at the running false shaman who might take umbrage at what he had said. It was clear that a class of indifferent college boys was the only audience he possessed, the only stage on which to air his heretical views. Were they really heretical – I wondered – or were they a kind of defiance within a cave assembly of young skeletons who did not understand what he was saying? He was safe indeed. He returned to uttering eulogies of Latin, its beauty, its order. Then he sought vulgar relief by launching into an anecdote about a recent holiday in France.
Masters gained confirmative insight into Mr Becks’ skeleton-soul when he learned that P. C. Wren’s Beau Geste was the Latin master’s favourite novel. Or so he broadcast to all and sundry in the masters’ staff-room. Was it the innate aristocratic vulgarity of Beau Geste that appealed to him, the hidden or unconscious satire on princeling-overseers? Was it the romance of the French Foreign Legion, the inefficiency and corruption, the ingredients of adventure? Did all these in their remoteness from the Latin age serve paradoxically to reinforce a resemblance, an immortal resemblance and a mercenary code? I wondered at Mr Becks’ subconscious mind in the cave of Beau Geste.
The English master, Mr Delph, was an Australian educated in England and Italy, a rolling stone with little moss who slipped through and beyond the cave. Or so one dreamt. His lack of moss stood in contrast to Mr Becks’ elaborate masquerade. They shared an understanding. Mr Delph adopted Mr Becks’ theorem of creativity and morality and pursued this seriously and genuinely. As a consequence Mr Becks secured tenure as an important influence in New Forest education. Mr Delph secured the sack as a blackboard rebel. He was caught red-handed not with Beau Geste but with Brave New World. Huxley’s novel had been banned in New Forest though no one knew why. No one had read it.
In 1931, as if he anticipated the sack, Mr Delph gave Masters several As for English composition. His habit was to inscribe a list on the blackboard and to request his students to incorporate it into a story. One such prophetic list, straight from the oracle’s blackboard mouth in the cave, ran as follows: marble woman, burning schooner, crocodile, milk, Magna Carta, Bartleby’s widow.
Mr Delph sometimes struck a match in the cave to light his pipe and comment with some elaboration on each relic. He rhapsodized over “Magna Carta” and “Bartleby’s widow”.
Mr Quabbas was by no means Australian, nor was he Grenadian. He was New Forestian, of mixed blood; his natural caution (he was a born spy) – and his graphic definition of Antipodes – made him kith and kin to Grenadian/English Becks and to Australian/Italian Delph.
“Feet to feet – click,” he said. “That is Anti-po-des.” He would chant to the cosmic Boys and trace the egg of the globe with gesturing hands at the heart of the cave. He indicated there were souls dressed in boots standing diametrically opposite each other. Then as the egg contracted until it disappeared, the Antipodean boot souls of foetal humanity drew together and clicked like a time bomb. Was it, I asked the dead king, a shadow variation of tap-dancing Magna Carta ladies and barons in Aunt Alice’s wonderland?
Mr Quabbas was a teacher who seemed to defy all categories. (He sometimes lectured on mathematics.) His bulky frame dipped and crouched like the incarnation of many a shy and stern creature. He was hard. He
marked his students hard. He was gentle. He taught Masters the geography of Europe, particularly of Great Britain; nothing at all of the Americas, but his silence here was sometimes deafening. He never spoke of the deepening 1920s–1930s depression in New Forest. It was rumoured, however, that he contemplated writing a book for initiated students into the complexities of New Forest sugar and its abortive status in the eighteenth century when it gestated and failed to emerge in radical fictional alignment and twin ship with Boston tea and the birth of the American Revolution.
The book was never finished – perhaps it was never begun – and Mr Quabbas had long vanished from the scene by the late 1940s when the World Bank invested a loan in propping up the archaic economy of New Forest. He knew, though he was no longer there to read the script of economic fiction, that an epitaph has many dimensions, and that the writing on the wall is sometimes the unwritten word, the unwritten book, the unlived revolution.
The Boy imbibed his global education into self-made epitaphs in the 1932 collegiate Inferno. It was a hard lesson. He was privy nevertheless to the genius of love that Quabbas curiously, in Carnival judgements, imparted. Young Masters became hard as the uncut tree or wood on Quabbas’s coming grave but turned that hardness by evolving degrees over long years into complex insight, complex self-knowledge.
“Hardness cracks, when one least suspects it, into the seed of the fruit of god that sets one’s teeth on edge. Hardness becomes King Midas’s, if not El Doradan, gold. It resists consumption. It leaves an unforgettable flavour on royal palates. It evokes an emotion that transcends self-pity in order to foreshadow the arts of self-judgement and rebirth. I am indebted to Quabbas for hardness yet gentleness of heart in the profoundest epitaphs of my age, a hardness and a gentleness I need to perceive before it is too late and the self-made dimension, the unrecorded, unwritten dimension in the wood or marble or stone or naked soil over my grave, is lost.” Thus said the dead king to me in 1982. I was intrigued to learn more of the Quabbas of 1932. And he led me back.
Quabbas lived in Queen Street, a stone’s throw from Brickdam, and the Boy Masters was invited there to a meeting of the Young Men’s Cave Guild theatre. Mr Quabbas was president of the group. The average age of the members of the guild was twenty-four and Masters, barely fifteen, considered it something of an honour to be enrolled as princeling-overseer amongst a body of young lawyers and clerks. In fact he was the youngest ever to attend.
They sat in a large, slightly Victorian drawing room with elegant basket chairs, cushions, other straight-backed chairs, a Persian carpet, wallpaper that did not match the carpet, and a great mahogany piano at which Mr Quabbas’s niece practised her lessons in the middle of the morning. Her name was Alice, young Alice, and rumour had it that she was a distant “great-niece” of Aunt Alice of the daylight supper dancing school. Masters remembered passing one Saturday morning and hearing what seemed to him a passage that young Alice picked from Vivaldi’s La Primavera. She seemed to be echoing a strain of the violin upon the keys of a great cave piano. Mr Quabbas was unmarried, but rumour – a prevailing theme in New Forest society – had it that he adored his young niece and that he paid for her music-masks and music lessons.
She was not around when Masters took his seat in the drawing room within the great dream-cave. The others sat a little stiffly, as if slightly on their guard, under Mr Quabbas’s peculiar, almost saturnine, eye. He spoke to them with that slightly chanting quality of a spy of god who is familiar with every skeleton, every cupboard, of grace. Everything he said carried the resonance of something unsaid. There was a quaint but nonetheless stinging backlash in his jokes and every young man in the cave theatre – whether that cave assumed the proportions of glass or marble or wood or flesh-and-blood or aeroplane – knew he would sooner or later be pierced by Mr Quabbas’s innocent damnations.
This was a very important occasion for the cave theatre and – may I say it – for me. I was – under Masters’ guidance in the realms of the Inferno and Purgatory – to become acquainted with my biological parents for the first time.
It was around four o’clock, the afternoon of 30 August 1932. Mr Quabbas faced the group. His chair was larger than any other in the room in order to accommodate his bulky frame. He was the judge. The drawing room was half-bright. The Venetian blinds were half-drawn. How could the sun so successfully dangle its face from its hand? Was it because it arched across New Forest from Cannon Row Estate where the czar had been killed, through Crocodile Bridge, through the Alms House, through the College buildings and grounds, through the Market-place, and seemed to move upon a wheel or cycle before depositing Thomas’s mask? Thomas was to be put on trial for the assassination of the czar.
Despite the heat of the afternoon, the faintest shudder ran through the masked actors in the room. Each mask was felt both inwardly and outwardly as if one dangled it into oneself with a ghostly dazzling hand. The epidermis of the soul also dazzled in crying to be stroked as primary mask. Stroked by ecstasies, rages, humiliations. The ghostly fingers had skilfully woven a shell to be placed on every person who ran into the cave. It was Quabbas’s design, as he drew us in (the dead, the living, the newborn), to awaken us so peculiarly that the mask of time slipped a little, remained but loosened a little into a sensation of curved face or curved facelessness. And as such face and facelessness became sudden dimensions of soul.
It was the task of Judge Quabbas not only to try Sir Thomas but to choose someone to wear the mask. He glanced rapidly, appeared to be spying through his telescope of soul, from face into face, facelessness into facelessness, loosened shell into loosening mask, and pointed quickly at a young lawyer, Martin Weyl, who sat hidden at the back of the room.
Weyl was around twenty-five and it was clear that the summons to don the mask of Thomas distressed him. There was a murmur of sympathy from the others. The facts were that just over or under six months ago (a month or a day may easily be misread when one converses with one’s guides in Purgatory), Weyl had married “a young lady whom he had gotten into trouble”. She was three months pregnant. It had been a scandal in the small society of New Forest and they were driven to marry by an outraged middle-class establishment. Those were the bald facts – they seemed of little importance in a world in depression, a world of common law wives in the Market-place labouring folk – but they had accumulated into a complex epidermis of the soul upon Weyl’s body, and the birth of the child, compact, male, had accentuated the inner bruise, the inner wound, that the establishment had inflicted. His wife’s labour became his and it left him with a sense of unreality. He had given birth …
The truth was, lawyer Weyl had contracted the prevailing malaise of curved face and curved facelessness, Ambition’s hero, Ambition’s anti-hero, that afflicted New Forest. His friends perceived the birth of his son as the catalyst of the disease. But he knew differently. He knew his distress ran much more curiously. He felt he may have given birth to a pawn. He felt he and his wife Jennifer were pawns. If that were true, would not pawns breed pawns?
It had all started when a plantation society stood at their backs and peered over their shoulders into their private lives, at their shadowy bodies in intercourse. Shadows! Who actually lay with whom? Who had made love to whom? It was almost as if his love for the woman he was forced to marry was immaterial. They must marry; they must marry or else … He had a name to preserve and she was the daughter of a well-to-do merchant. Any attempt to live in sin, as the saying goes, any attempt to evade marriage would breed disaster. His briefs would melt away. Clients would vanish. Weyl knew that left to their own devices they would have got married anyway. He knew yet did not know. He had become unsure of everything. Were they pawns, were they really pawns? For if they were, he could be sure of nothing except coercion. To tell themselves that they had not been pressured by business, by convention, since they would have married anyway, in their own time, was cosmetic upon the bruises of an internal body; bruises that evoked in him the sensation of bearing a pawn a
nd giving birth to a pawn. Or if not a pawn – Weyl confided to me – then surely a child of questioning spirit, a child of questioning conscience.
“Which are you likely to be,” he said to me as he rose from his chair to advance to the front of the room, “pawn or child of conscience?” I was their child, his and Jennifer’s. I was born on 2 August 1932. I was scarcely a month old when my father donned the mask of Thomas and the trial took place. In asking me such a question, he leaned upon me for support in the midst of his distress.
Judge Quabbas may have perceived it all. He never lived to write the play or the book he had contemplated, but my guide Masters unearthed the unwritten pages from his grave. He proffered them to me to swallow and consume and to bring forth progeny of mutual spirit.
The trial turned upon the reality of the pawn. Was humanity a pawn of fate, or conditioned responses, of existent or non-existent establishments? How interlinked are fate and freedom within an assembly of overlapping bodies and masks?
My father leaned upon me for support. I was a mere straw of flesh-and-blood. He needed to garner his innermost resources to play Thomas. He needed the wisp of the newborn as innately relevant to bruised insides, bruised psyche, bruised labour. In giving birth to me within the cave of bruised humanity, he (as pawn of circumstance) was subtly undergoing a translation of conscience. Though it was very painful at the time it was an initiation into a task that lay ahead of him in his short, controversial but brilliant career.
The Carnival Trilogy Page 9
