The Carnival Trilogy

by Wilson Harris

  There had been no gesture of love from him when I arrived in his and Alicia’s house at the age of two on the death of my parents. In fact I had no memory of them, of those parents. It was as if they had never been and I had slipped myself down a precipice or hill into Proteus’s hands to live with Alicia and Harold and other obscure relations as a privileged slave. Harold resented Alicia’s love for me.

  ‘She was never the same after you came,’ he said. I saw the grief, the torment, the rage in his expression. It shocked me. He spoke so softly I had to listen hard to understand – ‘I learnt the reason why your arrival changed our lives when it was too late for me to profit from it. I was a dying man then …’

  ‘And still you were lusting after women‚’ I cried.

  ‘She told you so, did she?’

  ‘It’s true, is it not?’

  He hesitated now for a long time: as if he desired to retreat or to fade into nothingness. And then a grain sprang upon his lips, the grain of confessional need. A subtle dam broke in the abyss between us and he cried. – ‘I learnt when it was too late that you were my son, Anselm. No one had told me before. They kept it from me. Your mother did. Alicia did. Proteus did.’

  ‘Your son?’ I recoiled. It was my turn to be filled with terror, to taste as never before the spirit of hate he had offered to me. A dizziness arose. How had one arrived here, by what retraced steps of Dream? A ruined corridor of space, yes, that’s where I now stood. There had been the beggar’s rags in the gate of Home (I remembered that). There had been the subtle river upon Alicia’s vase (I remembered that); and the ladder I had climbed from the warehouse of Proteus’s cinema to gauge a deeper self-knowledge of the theatre and the industry of the great Dead who were my mythical and real (however dangerous) antecedents. Strong meat is the spirit of hate.

  ‘It’s not true. It’s not true. My true parents …’ I stopped. Who were my real parents?

  Harold’s face was much darker now as if the corridor had been overshadowed by the first intimations of a storm. I began to consider how to trip him up, how to lay bare his lie. Alicia had often said he was a ‘good’ liar. ‘He’s a master player.’

  ‘The parents you believe in who died when you were two are a tale that Proteus invented.’

  ‘Why did he not tell me the truth?’

  ‘He and Alicia signed a bond to keep it secret. Had they not your mother would not have given you up. I was not to be told until she elected to do so. I thought I could buy everything. I could buy the beauty of nature, I dreamt of a child I would purchase with the blood of money. Money bleeds, Anselm. Money is a powerful passion in nature’s estate and garden of Roses, Rose-flesh, Rose-limbs, Rose-breasts. Money lies between men and women in bed to give teeth to their offspring. I invested in such teeth and the Rose sisters plucked them from me and left me hollow, drawn. I learnt of you, that you were my son, when it was too late.’

  How much did I now desire to protest but was unable to speak!

  ‘I bought the first Rose sister with potent money, Anselm. I forced her to sleep with me. Please listen!’

  I had blocked my ears with Proteus’s wax but on seeing his face now, his expression of greatest need, knew beyond a shadow of doubt that he needed my listening mind, my responsive – however repelled – spirit.

  Incredible but true. Needed me. Needed to confess to me. Needed me so much that were I to refuse to listen the scaffolding of the great Play, the corridor, the ladder, everything (however apparently fixed and solid) would lose its spark of farflung, interior rehabilitation of the mystery of Conscience within doomed forebears and intimate, self-reflecting creatures. It seemed extraordinary that his need of me, someone as frail as me, was so crucial to the substance of the Play. Need of the living dreamer in the halls, the dimensions, the panoramas of complex, parallel existences of life and death.

  I turned away from him for a moment and looked into the storm that overshadowed the corridor. There was a Presence there. Yes, a presence. A presence far greater, far more mysterious than the ‘living absences’ I had invoked, painted, sculpted. It seemed to embrace us all within the Dream-play. It drew me to recall the ‘shattering peace’ that I had glimpsed in the beggar’s eyes within the gate of Home when the burden upon him lifted for an instant into the uncanny reversal of all expectations and premises of myth one anticipates or entertains. Perhaps that Presence had been there overshadowing every retraced footfall I had made but I had not felt it as truly as I did now.

  ‘The Rose twin-sisters‚’ Harold confessed, ‘both became pregnant by me.’

  My first reaction to this was a sense of curious anticlimax. It seemed banal, nothing new, just plain sexual business in a nihilistic age. How does sexual licence, sexual freedom of expression, that an age takes for granted matter, bear upon, or fit into, the moral business of sacred theatre?

  ‘It fits into the business,’ Harold said, ‘it fits because it bruises our iron-clad scars and opens an abyss between exploited nature and the ground of reconciliation between ourselves and those we have abused.’

  He spoke with deceptive clarity and ease but within it I sensed a rhythm that troubled me deeply. It was as if he were cloaking one voice in another (antiphon or discourse of ancestral tongues), speaking deceptively through me, within me, with a shadow-tongue or incantatory rhythm that reminded me of myself (the way I spoke) even as it seemed to breach all complacency in the given self. Was this incalculable rhythm the art of confession between priest and supplicant? Did its origins – the origins of the confessional – lie in such theatre overshadowed by a Presence?

  Of one thing I was sure. This was no enchantment, no spell. It was intensely human, intensely real. It possessed its humour. The emphasis on ‘business’ for instance reminded me of Haroldian and Protean comedy as they aped the marketplace of God! Harold was, I perceived – in gratitude to me for listening, for playing the part of divine ape or priest to whom he confessed – seeking to give his utterance both luminous self-mockery and practical detail. It was my listening ear imbued with the mystery of the singing ape I was (and he was) that encouraged him to speak the intimate poetry of his fate – and of matters he had long suppressed and hidden in himself – within a context that revealed his need of me, of the living dreamer, his need through me, my frail imaginative quest for the City of God, of redemption by the overshadowing Presence I had glimpsed as intricately woven into ‘living absences’, into the arts, into the sciences, into architectures, Waterfall, rainfall, riverfall.

  ‘They were twins‚’ he said at last, ‘women of the estate, the estate of nature, in which one buys or plunders the beauty of the world. The slave-Roses. Believe me! I saw it all when it seemed so late, too late. Perhaps it’s never too late, Anselm. That’s why we need one another. But it seemed desperately late for me when I learnt you were the child of … my child …’ He stopped. Unable to speak. Then continued – ‘The first Rose I bought … She left me. She said I was a mean bastard. And then some seven or eight years later when I was dying (I had less than a couple of months to live though I did not know it) the other Rose came. She slept with me. No word of meanness. She said I was generous. I paid her handsomely. And then she turned on me. Six weeks to the first night we slept together she knew she was pregnant. She turned on me. What is meanness, what is generosity, when one buys or sells souls? I did not listen for I was transported by the news that she was pregnant, that at last I had hunted and cornered the wild beauty of the world, that she was mine, a pregnant vessel, pregnant with my child, my first child. Rose said: your first child? Not your first child. Your first child has lived in your house for eight years and you have been blind to it. Your first child was my sister’s child. Remember her? You bought her too. She was staring at me. She knew, I swear, my days were numbered. Less than two weeks to live. You cannot seize, or buy, or conquer, the wild beauty of nature, Harold. I have been waiting to tell you this for a long time. My twin-sister has been waiting for eight years. You were blind to your
first child. You shall never see your last. They have inherited the thorn and the knife.’

  It was then with deadly certainty and sensitivity that I knew he was speaking the truth. His confession was true, heartrendingly true. And I remembered the gate of Home and the masked king in it upon whom I had come, the leaf that had bruised my brow: I saw it flutter again in the corridor of space. I saw the flight of the thorn into Proteus’s brow in the gate, I saw its shadow all over again upon Harold’s in the corridor. I had secured Rose’s line of sight in the gate. I had helped her instinctively, involuntarily: as though she (Rose) symbolized a palatial twin-body, twinleaf, twin-petal, twin-flesh, twin-thorn, in which lay my involuntary shadow, the involuntary shadow of the carnival heir in his suit, masked suitor, unconscious suitor.

  His suit rather than mine as if I were other than an incestuous lodger in Nature and lover of mother Rose, as if I were another newborn, confessional medium (however prone still to conflict), unborn, newborn, gestating stranger in her and myself.

  As much as to say that his suit was both an unfinished garment upon all species in the body of nature and a spiritual contest, a spiritual repudiation of the abuse of mother nature that I sustained in others, shared with others through and beyond myself.

  Thus it was I had instinctively, unconsciously, raised my hand against the beggar in the gate of Home, against Proteus’s masked king and all over again once more against Harold this time, Harold the masked proprietor of flesh and blood.

  Raised my hand within a train of habit, involuntary, apparently incestuous habit; raised my hand within involuntary apparently stranger compulsion. Raised my twin-hand within a medium of passion, a medium of animus, the biting animus of mother nature ingrained into one’s blood that one directs against every abuser and exploiter.

  Raised my hand to strike and kill: not so: not to kill: to bless my returned father, returned to me from the kingdom of the Dead.

  How had it happened, when had it started, such unconscious arbitration and change within the suit of tradition, mysterious suit, mysterious Presence overshadowing the corridor of space? I could not say but I knew that in the twin-scales of nature lay a complex balance I would need to ravel/unravel/ravel between creation and violence, art and revenge. A difficult task but a true however precarious beginning had been made with others, through others …

  What was remarkable about all this, I dreamt, was that in my sudden apprehension of an unconscious alteration within the hand of nature and spirit I felt pain, great pain, knew the terrifying pain in the desire to kill another, knew this now as I had never felt it before; yet in that very instant was held by a dialectic of confessional spirit that addressed me as the Presence appeared to speak –

  ‘Nature breaks into mysterious selfhood, breaks into what is itself yet other than itself. The twin-blow that Nature delivers through you, Anselm, may turn into art, into self-confessional art. May illumine afresh Penelope’s garment or tapestry of tradition. May illumine afresh your relationship to Ross. Ross is another suitor whom South American/English Penelope has named her “good angel” in seeking a key to repudiate the charisma of Simon’s ascendancy over them.’ The voice ceased.

  Harold had now begun to fade within the corridor of space. I cried to him before he vanished – ‘The other child.’ I cried, ‘the other Rose’s child, twin-Rose’s child, your last child – my half-brother, my cousin – can you tell me of him? Who is he? Where is he? Born long after me yet he seems now my twin, my hand in his, his in mine

  Harold was half-visible now, half-invisible now. I saw his remorse. He knelt at my feet. ‘Proteus will tell you or show you. I cannot. I cannot.’ He held his head in his hands then looked up into the Presence overshadowing us both. He had confessed. I had confessed. Had I confessed to Presence or Priest? The candle flickered and the flame went out. But a new match flared, the sudden lease of a new day upon the third bank of the river of space.

  THE THIRD BANK

  (The Trial)

  For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.

  Matthew 5:18

  The task of perceiving the other in his (or her) authenticity, or of identifying the essential ‘configuration’ of a given culture, is more difficult in the twentieth century than it was in earlier epochs‚… the most obvious reason being the interpenetration of multiple modes of thought and discourse that has attended the swift expansion and intensification of international relations on every level of human activity throughout the world. To know… just which vocabulary supplies the governing value references…; to discern which grafts are likely to be rejected and which, by contrast, are fit to be accommodated in some form or another – these and the like are questions of major significance …

  from The Future of the Law in a Multicultural World,

  Adda B. Bozeman (Princeton University Press, 1971)

  The sun was rising now: a new sobering lease of light, a new sobering homecoming day of the law conferred I dreamt by invisible Priest or Presence (invisible paradox because glimmeringly perceived) within the corridor of the third bank of the river of space.

  The early morning radio was playing in the corridor: a marvellous invention. Conversation floated in space and time, present space and time, past space and time, re-voiced spaces, retraced echoes, within the archives of Alicia’s live fossil museum.

  ‘Confessional fabric of a universal homecoming when everybody talks to everybody on the airwaves,’ Proteus’s echoing radio voice was saying as I listened, criss-crossing stations, antiphonal voices within voices (rooted in or mimicking the Voice of Presence) beneath the crucifixion, the resurrection of the sun.

  ‘Let me warn you of the trial you shall face further along this airwave corridor when you shall be called to answer for the deeds of your brother

  ‘Who is my brother?’

  There was no immediate answer. Proteus’s radio voice appeared to fade, to crackle into muffled gunfire, then to resume its ancient pitch within the corridor of space, the corridor of Home – ‘It’s a new, old newsgathering day, newsgathering confessional day of the homecoming of a carnival king (of whom everyone dreams) and the private and public anguish this occasions, the private and public business it brings, the daemons and furies we need to grasp, analyse, within a procession of events, natural events, man-made events. All this will emerge in the trial. A trial that started within Alicia on the day of your father’s death. To put a rough date on it! When does one’s trial truly commence? The day your father died a black Syrian magus, a ghostly merchant, appeared on the doorstep of the palace of the Rose. This was 1920. He offered Alicia a piece of sculpture which now stands, Anselm, in the corridor beside you. She paid him in tea, myrrh, gold and Demerara sugar. He bowed and accepted the precious gifts in return for a work of art that gave its purchaser a taste of ancient Greece in the modern world – in modern Palestine from whence he came – modern India, modern Asia, the modern United States, everywhere, the rebirth of refugee art seeking a home in the City of God, refugee kings seeking a new post-colonial home in the wake of the fall of many regimes, refugee family of Man. The sculpture was painted black, and when she asked its name or title he said black Agamemnon. She was startled. She took it inside, touched it, kissed it. Impulse, pure impulse! Alicia was a creature of immense practicality yet unpredictable impulse. Would you believe it? She hid it away after that, she locked it away from the sun in a dusty cupboard. I transported it into the corridor …’

  ‘I had forgotten but I remember as you speak,’ I said. ‘I always wondered

  ‘She bought it and hid it away the day your father died.’

  ‘But why?’

  I was startled to hear my voice played back, playing back in the Dream. A child’s ageing voice. Or was it an ageing cradled echo of the stranger, the everlasting stranger one is despite every homecoming?

  I scanned the sculpture of black Agamemnon. It appeared to recline
in space as in a Waterfall, Waterfall river or bath of space, with Canaima’s knife in its ribs. It wore the Alicia cap. It was a member of Canaima’s team. No sign of a thorn this time. Just the knife! It was a private and startling piece, naked yet reticent.

  ‘Why did she hide it away?’

  ‘She touched the knife and felt that her hand, Rose’s hand, was in yours, in Canaima’s. It was the reverse of what had happened before when your hand had been an involuntary extension of Rose’s. So you see it belonged in the self-reversible parallels, the ravelled/unravelled tapestry of a multi-faceted king in dual suitors and triple queens that we have been playing. Every unconscious suitor who repudiates our expectation of the safe return of the carnival king, who kills in the name of the law, the law of love (did not Harold purchase hate instead of love?) is involved in a pattern of unconscious sacrifice in a violent and a terrorist age. Not unconscious suit or suitor this time who raises his hand in involuntary but protective love for abused mother nature but unconscious sacrifice that becomes an instinctive, redemptive base in a conflict-ridden age, a base upon which the family of the Alician state resurrects the slain king (saddled with charges of the abuse of the world) – a slain king who is akin to a slain God – resurrects him through daemons and furies of poetic justice, poetic dynasty, poetic law.’

  As he spoke I felt a glimmering understanding … a glimmering apprehension of the trial to come and its bearing on ‘daemons and furies’. Had not Canaima warned me in his complex dance on the first bank of the river of space that I would need to grasp and reinterpret the nature of the ‘furies’?