The Carnival Trilogy
Page 45
‘Impossible,’ said Penelope. ‘It’s a trick. They took my child and replaced it with the Macusi fossil of a prince.’ And then she gave a faint scream that clothed itself in the echo of a drum. There was a silence. She was pointing to another adornment we had failed to see. Medals on the young king’s chest! They glittered like marvellous coins in the constellations of the Night. And before she spoke I knew. I had seen those medals on a warrior-ghost, on the Governor of a Colony, as he came over a hill on the first bank of the river of space. Simon’s medals!
‘Simon was not black,’ she cried, ‘except on one occasion …’ She stopped. Ross had withdrawn his arm from around her. ‘Let me descend on to the stage,’ he cried, ‘and I’ll show you, Penelope, that there’s nothing there. No medals. It’s the deceptive light. Look how it shines. As if someone is playing with a candle.’ But Penelope was eager to resume the thread of her tale in the Dream. She restrained him. She held him back from the stage.
‘I should have told you long ago,’ she said to him.
‘Told me what?’
‘Simon’s family and mine were neighbours in Dartford, Kent.’
‘I know that,’ said Ross.
‘Did you know that Simon was the victim of an accident when he was nine or ten?’
Ross did not reply. It was news to him.
‘He was struck by a car, a runaway driver. On the face of it he was lucky. A broken rib, a sprained arm, a bruise on his forehead. The car struck him a glancing blow. I thought it was nothing until I visited him in hospital. He asked me whether the runaway driver had been caught and I said No. A change came over him then. His face grew black. The bruise on his forehead turned into a fire. Look! there it is! on the stage now! The fire! It’s burning him up. He’s stopped breathing.’
‘Impossible,’ said Ross.
‘I tell you, Simon died,’ said Penelope. ‘I was convinced he would never come back.’ She was possessed by the gravity of the starlit Night with its constellation of warring kings and imperial crusades. The starlit cloak of Night parted. The ancient, royal body of the child-king in the pit, or on the stage, floated up to our eyes. We were possessed by the starlit Night. I heard Penelope’s voice as if it came from far away. ‘I was a child, a bit highly-strung perhaps. But that look! You see it now, don’t you? I shouted for a nurse. “Simon’s died,” I cried. They all came running. My mother took me away. She was amazed and horrified at the way I looked. I had become the ghost. “Whatever came over you, Penelope,” she said. “Such a scene.” I tried to say, “Simon died. I know he did. It’s the runaway driver. Simon was so angry he fled into becoming a corpse. Angry that the runaway driver had escaped.” That’s all I wanted to say. But I couldn’t. I didn’t. Until now. It’s a relief. When he came out of hospital I couldn’t shake off the feeling that he owned me. Yes, women – even queens – have long been the property of the realm. Owned me. But I hid it in myself. It became an unspoken legend that blended into respectable ideal, respectable convention, respectable freedom. We grew up together. Childhood sweethearts (whatever that means) became adolescent lovers. He went to public school and university. We fell deeper in love, we got married. He became a hero. He never forgot the runaway driver. He saw him on every battlefield. He grew nerves of steel and a jealous fury and rage.
‘Before the accident he was a marvellous child. After the accident, though I hid it from myself, he became another person. I married that other person. I married a hero. I felt his fist on my arm. You know the rest.’
A veil came over the Night. When it lifted the medals had disappeared from the boy-king’s chest. He lay on the stage. He seemed as old as Time. A fossil pre-Columbian king. A king of ancient Greece. Penelope’s expression had acquired a wonderful calm. She looked closely at the child she had pulled up from the river of space. It had floated up to our eyes but now it lay once again on the stage. Its two hands were open to the sky. One hand was tense and drawn, the other relaxed, so relaxed it seemed to weigh in its spirit the link of a broken chain. Penelope’s inner Dream-courage had made it possible for her to retrace her steps and to confront a spectre that had dominated her life. She was free. A numinous, starlit freedom that travellers may find at the heart of a desert. She had surrendered herself to the frail, magical king in the pit. The chain she had long hidden from herself was broken at last.
Ross was shaken but he preserved his steady and fateful aplomb. He had no hesitation now in surrendering in his turn the child he had brought from the river of the dead. ‘My child I am sure is simplicity itself,’ he said. ‘Nothing like Penelope’s.’ But was it? Canaima had vanished, Penelope’s king had vanished. And in their place lay Ross’s child. Simplicity itself he had said. I was glad for my Dream-narrative was simplicity itself. So Ross and I had much in common. We knew the face at once and the slender body of the child robed in the evanescent cloak of the Waterfall. Here at last was one of the drowned children who had danced with the eel. We knew her immediately. She had been one of the finest young voices in the Mission House. Clear as the laughter of a bell. Sometimes soft as a flute. Ross’s expression changed. He had seen her dancing in school. He remembered her black, lustrous hair, her grave child’s face. She had danced in his class a day or two before she drowned. Was this the body of a uniform race? Were these the eyes to mirror a long primitive queue awaiting its turn to ride the globe? Were these the eyes of the new conquistadores?
Ross was humane. His vocation was that of a teacher, his temperament that of a sceptic, an agnostic, despite his religious calling. I saw from his expression – the expression of a complex suitor – that he was on the verge of surrendering himself to … To what? To whom? Not to conquest. To the miracle of hope in a child-queen who might still breach an epic formula.
It was a question of personal relationships, personal involvements. Ross surrendered himself to the child-queen who had danced in his class on the eve of descending into the sky of the Waterfall with its pooled stars under the guardian rocks and clouds.
Our captors (were they perhaps our guardians now?) began to beat the drums of Home, the drums of the turning world. Not frenziedly but with a haunting rhythmic pulse, like rain that seemed to encompass us all and as the music widened and flew we were caught up in its embrace.
This rain of Night seemed to glimmer in the stars. Captors and captives began to loom in the new darkness of the Dream, the new guardian rocks, the new guardianship of sky and cloud at the heart of the Waterfall of space, a theatre of interchangeable masks and fates and elements upon savages and civilizations. The rain that fell upon us was so fine-spun and delicate that it seemed an impossibility when within it we discerned the burden and mystery of the rising sun.
Copyright
This ebook edition first published in 2013
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
All rights reserved
This collection © Wilson Harris, 1993
Carnival © 1985
The Infinite Rehearsal © 1987
The Four Banks of the River of Space © 1990
The right of Wilson Harris to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–30037–2
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