Jonestown (22 page)

When one returns to the past from the future, one finds that the theatre of Money in the carpentered or sculpted Prisoner above or in the altar, in the robes upon the back of aisled Lord Death, changes in emotional subtlety and passion and immediacy. The Prisoner's sacrifice cannot be measured in realistic or comedy-
of-manners
coin. Yet a price, involving an enormity of innermost change in all institutions, has to be paid for the gift of freedom, when Gods sentence themselves to death and pray to men to evaluate their gift …

I knew that I stood in the greatest danger, that the Prisoner stood in the greatest danger, that there would be a rush into the cell that we occupied.

Positions occupied by frozen actors and frozen actresses in the
theatres of time move or shift and acquire a different emphasis in Memory theatre.

For instance I had forgotten in my moving to the window of the Prisoner's cell, and on looking down into the street, that I had perceived Carnival Lord Death dressed in a nobleman's robes of a bygone age.

I saw them now afresh as he stirred, discarding robes and replacing them with the suit or heirloom that my mother had given me and which I had lent to Jonah Jones. The grave-digger (who adopted the Mask of Carnival Lord Death in Limbo Land where I had met him) had acquired the suit when he ransacked Jonah's house and sought to push it into the Jonestown river. Yes, these were the robes or the suit that I saw from the window of the cell. A wind blew on Lord Death's back. I thought I heard the dead lace or fabric vibrate enlivened by Dread.

Yes, there was no doubt now that Carnival Lord Death was clothed in rich attire, in my mother's gift. The Prisoner, on the other hand, was in rags.

I glanced back into the cell and dreamt that I saw once again – in Mr Mageye's futuristic Camera – the Prisoner's bones
providing
a shield over mine, over my head, my face. As though God's death were my sacred life. An uncanny, almost savage, sensation! Intrinsic to Communion. Intrinsic to the eating of Bread and Wine.

Within Bread, within Wine, is the mystery of Bone: Bone adorned with Flesh.

I was subject to a dazzling glory and terror that I was unable to translate. Bone is a hieroglyph of sacrificial Phallus, sacramental sex, and contemplation of a honeymoon with the bride of humanity.

Were these signals of the crumbling of the Void? Perhaps they were. But I had a far way to go to insert a key into the many doors within the Prison of the Void, a key – that one could so easily despise – for it had fallen out of the split, laughing side of the Law.

Comedy is chastening therapy when one scans the Void, the intricate theatre of the Void, as one begins to unlock a variety of doors that are relevant to the pact between the Prisoner, absent Deacon and me.

ABSENT DEACON. I had said it before but unthinkingly.

Now the full force of his absence came home to me.
Deacon
had
not
returned
for
his
wedding
day
.
Did I hear the echo of laughter as the Law split its side all over again?

Comedy is chastening therapy. Comedy sometimes portrays consequences born of hubris.

Deacon had died in Jonestown. I had seen his body on a rock under the Waterfall beneath the Cave of the Moon in which I had sheltered on the Night of the Day of the Dead when I had fled into the Forest and narrowly escaped plunging headlong into the sawyers' pit.

Deacon's body lay on the rock beneath the Cave. I saw it distinctly when daylight came.

No laughing matter. Why then the echoing tracery of the laughter of the Law? Such laughter sometimes jars, it seems inappropriate, it seems irrelevant. But then for no graspable reason it becomes a shuddering music, it may break one's heart. Deacon's heart broke in his last moments, broke with
inexhaustible
tenderness, inexhaustible love for Marie, inexhaustible hope of heaven's forgiveness …

He (Deacon) had overcome Jonah when he fought him in the Mask of the Eagle and the Vulture Knight in Maya style.

No one knows what circumstances of remorse brought such a winged career to its apparent close. Had it been a straightforward accident as my death in the sawyers' pit would have been? Had he tripped into the ravine – as I nearly did – under the Cave at dead of Night?

Heroes run in parallel sometimes with the vague footsteps of hapless multitudes murdered on the battlefield, or in
concentration
camps, or in Jonestowns around the globe, and are on occasion the victims of obscure Fate upon ladders and stairways into the Void.

Deacon's flying, falling ghost was alive I was sure within the crumbling of the Void, exposure in the Void, but he (or it) had not returned to Port Mourant to celebrate a replay of the wedding to Marie in Memory theatre. And yet in choosing an actor to play the part the Prisoner knew how compelling was the life of the ghost in
the actor's revisitation of truth. In choosing an actor to play the part – an actor such as myself – the Prisoner knew the turmoil of his or my emotions, my jealousy of Deacon, my love for Marie, my insight into his last moments when he slipped through space onto the rock. However apparently fictional those insights were they could make all the difference within imaginative truth to the motivation of the life of the ghost in me. I was to play absent Deacon in Memory theatre. I knew the ghost was alive in me, with me. I was alive, it was alive, in a strange concert of understanding to be sparked by the Prisoner and a multitude of shuffling footsteps around the globe.

I suspected that though Deacon had not returned his ghost in me was also in Mr Mageye's Camera …

Absent Deacon – played by me as Present Deacon – would prove a formidable engagement with humanity, re-visionary specialities of humanity in heaven and upon earth in myself …

He (Deacon) had dreamt of immunity to pain. No wonder he got along well with the Doctor and turned his back on the Prisoner on the day when a bonfire flared and the Prisoner was consumed and broken on a Wheel of revolving arms and legs set in motion by Deacon's constituency.

Immunity, Deacon declared, should be a factor in godhead when humanity turns violent. Immunity was consistent with the humour of falling angels, perpetually falling, but immune to pain, because of inoculation with the political and economic venom of the Scorpion Constellation.

No wonder Deacon possessed the ear of the very constituency he had buried in a Coffin but which arose from the Nether World to lift him shoulder-high on his wedding day.

I did not believe a word of such immunity but it was a joke of sorts that raised a laugh in a gathering of tricksters who tricked Scorpions into play, biting play, with no ill effects. It was akin to walking with bare feet upon coals of fire. It was akin to feats of conquest upon earth and in heaven. Above all it was a foretaste of the Sleep of the Virgin on honeymoon day and night, a Virgin inevitably surrounded by tricksters of every culture and
pigmentation
, by furies real and deceptive, true and false, that climb into
her arms and the arms of her bridegroom when she lies with him.

Deacon's investment in such humours of immunity empowered him, he declared, to go anywhere, to do anything. He was committed to climbing Roraima (which is infested with Scorpions) in order to unearth a great treasure for Marie's first-born child and for his constituency. This was his boast in 1954. My mind was a furious, tormented blank about Marie's first-born, my mind was tricked into lapses of Memory in playing the role of absent Deacon. But of one thing I was sure within the information that I received from Deacon's ghost.

Deacon, in his last moments, had experienced the
pain
of laughter in the body of the Law. And this filled him with Dread, filled him as well with an immensity of love for the child Marie had borne and whom he had equated with a great fortune or treasure to be secured by strategies of venom within his veins.

He saw the hollowness of such power. It seared the mind in his wings. It seared the wings in my mind. For the shock seemed – in some incalculable way – a part of my own trauma when I narrowly escaped the Grave in Jonestown.

Did I – when I flew up the wall in Bonampak with winged feet – touch Deacon's mourning, sorrowing wing perpetually falling?

Perhaps I had been equipped then to wear Deacon's terrible brow or Mask in the theatre, the brow of heaven inscribed into Eagles that soar and plunge into the Void.

The Prisoner knew and when I knelt before him I felt his hands confirming the holes and rivets, flesh-and-blood miraculous rivets to take Deacon's Mask in my shoulders and neck.

I would take Deacon's absent place. I would share his torment and remorse and tenderest grieving love which his ghost had conferred upon me. I knew the pain of laughter in the Body of the Law, the pain that had stricken Deacon when he lóst his way in the black Forest and fell into the ravine beneath the Cave of the Moon.

Such is the transference of roles that chastening comedy confers when falling heavens converse with diminutive survivors upon Earth.

*

I rose from my knees and moved again from the Prisoner to the window of his cell. A wedding – not Marie's in Port Mourant – was taking place in the street or aisle of a Church in Carnival land.

It was an absurd affair but I was in no mood to laugh.

I had witnessed Jonah's affair with the Animal Goddess or the Virgin of Jonestown. That was a kind of wedding …

Now I was called upon to witness my mother's apparitional wedding to the ghost of an eighteenth-century slave-master. She acted the part of her great-great-grandmother who had slept with a French aristocrat and owner of
La
Pénitence
and
Le
Repentir
estates. He had owned her as well.

It was his money that had paid the fees for my scholarship to the United States. A ghost's money to endow scholarships for orphans or for disadvantaged poor families with only one parent.

Were I to meet him in the street he would – despite his largesse – not know me or scarcely wish to know me.

Yet Money was the heart of morality in any eighteenth-century
Portrait
of
the
Family
.
So my mother reasoned. It was necessary to legitimize the legality of scholarships – bestowed by past
slave-masters
upon their future progeny – in the Carnival theatre of the Church.

My mother's apparitional flesh-and-blood was ripe to play the part of the wife of the Frenchman in the legitimization of Money and Scholarship.

The Frenchman himself had long vanished and there was no one coming forward on his behalf in the
Portrait
of
the
Family
.

Carnival Lord Death however solved the problem. He draped my mother's arms and breasts with the heirloom or suit or robes of a nobleman that the Frenchman had left in Albuoystown with his favourite slave-mistress.

What in God's name, I wondered, was the object of such theatre of the Absurd in the Void of a Colony?

‘No theatre of the Absurd‚' my mother cried. ‘
A Portrait of the Moral Family
is relevant to your age, Francisco. Is it not time to claim your inheritance on all sides of the blanket?

‘Suppose for example that you went to London or Paris or Berlin or New York as a High Commissioner or an Ambassador, it
would be morally sound, would it not, to secure a Swiss Bank Account for your family. Suppose a coup occurred in Guyana or Trinidad or Brazil or Nigeria! Where would you be without Money? Money ensures that wars on foreign soils, famines, etc., won't touch you. You would be as safe as a character in a Jane Austen novel or in
Madame
Bovary
.'

I was stunned by all this. It seemed out-of-character with the memories I possessed of my mother in Albuoystown. True, she had a passion for Carnival theatre and had read English and French eighteenth-and nineteenth-century novels which she borrowed from the Carnegie Library. She was a Virgin
nevertheless
– a sacred mother of beggars – not a Madame Bovary. But Virgins are also furies. They embrace the longings of fallen women from all areas of the globe, they embrace poor and rich wives within the glitter of structured romance so unlike the waste land of their own existence. They embrace idyllic churches and manses and middle-class homes in England in which eligible suitors woo ladies and plot with sophisticated strategies of behaviour to advance their prospects in the marriage market. Was Madame Bovary a prisoner-Virgin in such idyllic Portraits of the Moral Family?

Carnival Lord Death was laughing – Carnival Death sometimes mimics the laughter of the Law – but my mother was grave. A hidden smile on her lips. She held the nobleman's robes close to her breasts. Music was playing in the aisle of the Carnival church in the street. They were a talented lot: Carnival Lord Death and his crew. They could have easily staged Hollywood on the backs of painted, black, Southern plantation slaves. Hollywood Limbo in black Carnival.

‘Imagine, Francisco – God forbid!' my mother said, ‘a coup in Guyana! Imagine yourself as a High Commissioner or even a President. Imagine that you have been shrewd enough to salt away sweet money in a Swiss Bank Account. Your wife – let us say – for the sake of Carnival argument – is a French woman or a Dutch woman or an English woman. You wash your hands of the wretched politics of your country. And why not? You buy an abandoned country manse in a quiet village in Europe. There are
guard dogs. Or perhaps you settle in a villa on the Mediterranean. You send your son or daughter to Yale or Harvard or Princeton or the Sorbonne or Cambridge. Your family is safe. You gamble discreetly on the Stock Exchange. You have a number of discreet affairs. Money is the central moral in your existence. Money banishes tears. Indeed you write books about the horrors of the Third World. They sell well. You are knighted. Not a Maya knighthood. A Birthday Honours knighthood. Money is morality in your villa or converted manse.'