Jonestown (5 page)

‘You are my magus, Mr Mageye,’ I said impulsively.

It was a rash statement to make to a teacher in 1939 when School tended to be a rather authoritarian assembly. But not to Mr Mageye. I had not been a grossly favoured pupil by any means. For the records of the School show clearly that Mr Mageye had a reputation for freedom from bias. But there was a subtle
understanding
between us.

He knew of my curiosities with regard to shamans and seers and magi in the Americas. I loved maps of the Yucatán. I pored over legendary trade routes adorned with drawings of
tumultuous
forests and seas upon which dolphins and mermaids sat. South American rubber was used to fashion the ball in ball games played in ancient Mexico. Mr Mageye suggested that a brisk trade
existed in rubber between South America and Mexico before the Spanish Conquest.

I loved charts of the Orinoco that were dated in the year that Raleigh adventured in search of El Dorado in Guiana. I had acquainted myself with books by the geographer Schomburgk and the anthropologist Roth.

Thus when I returned across a chasm of years – a nine-year-old boy (once again) with a bearded chalk-masked chin – my precocity heightened itself into a comradeship with Mr Mageye (unusual in that day and age). It heightened itself into the steepest, imaginary wave that I associated with the seas and rivers and forests that I had once consulted under Mr Mageye’s wry but spirited approval.

In taking the liberty of appointing him my magus I affirmed the birth of consciousness in which one writes and is written into a Dream-book to come abreast by degrees of unsuspected
dimensionalities
in space.

Even as I took the liberty I was affected by the memory of a steep wave that had threatened to overwhelm the Virgin Ship on my crossing from 1978 disaster-ridden Jonestown back to 1939 Albuoystown.

Black and steep as Night over Jonestown, blacker than the blackboard at which Mr Mageye now stood.

He (Mr Mageye) loved to play pranks. He would arouse laughter in his class and then resume his history lesson. He dodged behind blackboard and wave. As the Ship was about to fall through the roof of the world he occupied a crevice in the blackboard and peered through it as if it were a telescope. At that instant I heard the bells of the Sirens ringing. The Ship righted itself.

I heard the voices of the Sirens through the magical bells declaring that Mr Mageye was a rare phenomenon, a genuine and a sacred jester. He stood there in the telescopic wave with the look of a gentle Sphinx. The expression passed from his features, he moved back to the front of the blackboard, and he resumed the history lesson.

‘The Frenchman returned to France in the Napoleonic era but he
was unhappy with the state of his country and he crossed the English Channel and married a rich lady in Sussex.’

I held up my hand to ask a question. I was suddenly angry.

‘Just a moment, Francisco, let me say first of all that the Frenchman left half of his considerable Guiana fortune to be used in the Colony on behalf of orphans. European orphans at first left bereft on the death of a planter or a slave-owner but across the decades all Guianese have benefited. Now Francisco …’

‘A rotten shame,’ I cried. ‘He left my poor mother without a penny. What use such grandiloquent gestures and legacies …’

Even Mr Mageye was taken aback at my outburst.

‘He left your great-great-grandmother without a penny! She was but a slave. He had many slaves, many mistresses.’

At first it seemed that Mr Mageye was dreadfully
unsympathetic
, dreadfully complacent, and then it dawned on me as I looked into his self-mocking eyes that he was testing me, pushing me to perceive the nature of conventional morality, the burden in language to grapple with disturbing factors in a society that takes cruelty for granted within the norms of the day. He saw I was puzzled despite my greybearded mask. And he spoke gently – ‘I understand, Francisco. Synaesthesia!’

‘What do you mean?’ I cried with sudden tears in my
eyes. I remembered that my mother would die that very night! I knew. I had returned to the past on the very day and night that her death would occur.

‘The spontaneous linkage that you make between the organs of the past and the present (your long-dead great-great-grandmother and your poor mother today) is a kind of synaesthesia or stimulation of different moral ages and visions.’ His face was grave, the gravity of a sacred Jester. ‘The Virgin of Albuoystown, your mother,’ he said, ‘reflects synaesthesia – at the heart of the evolving theatre of Carnival – in her bones, her sacred bones: these lay beyond the pale of moral plot or cognizance in the Frenchman’s day; now they offer shelter to beggars in
Albuoystown
.’ He hesitated but I possessed the curious sensation that his hand lay in my hand in writing the Dream-book.

‘The Virgin of Albuoystown stands at the core of a multi-faceted
wave, however black, that threatens to fall on our heads unless we can break the mould of a complacent morality.

‘A transference of psyche is at the root of all theatres of mothers of humanity, seers and visionaries. Think of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the capital city of Mexico. Pagan and Christian. Yes, your mother – I am inclined to say my mother now – is affected by a variety of masks which slide in the Waterfall of space into singing Sirens (that we
hear
differently from those who have encountered them in the past), warning voices, pleading voices. Thus is it that
you
Franciso and I (your magus-Jester of History) may begin to break the mould of the past and to release a creative/re-creative capacity to right ancient wrongs in the family of Mankind.’

*

I left School when the afternoon sun was still high in the western sky above the Virgin Ship in the harbour. I left with the heavy knowledge of my mother’s coming death at the hand of a mugger. Mugger. Evangelist. Crusader. Carnival masks.

She had asked me to go straight from School to the leather Shop where she worked. There were to be many processions that night in Albuoystown. Some revellers wore newspapers on their heads, others were dressed as skeletons.

I knew of quiet alleyways we could take to avoid the pressure of the processions.

It was a dateless day to me (24th March, 1939) and when the Shop closed at night she would draw her last weekly wage before Death struck at her purse in the street.

Marie felt – my mother’s name was also Marie Antoinette – that she could lean on my child’s tall Lazarus arm as she made her way through the crowds after work. My Lazarus arm I had brought from the future and tacked onto my present/past body. I too was a creature of Carnival’s reconnaissance of the past from a wave of the future …

When I arrived at the Shop there was a queue of shoemakers purchasing choice leather. Each shoemaker would take a sheet of leather, bend it, study its texture, pass his head along the rough edges of the sheet, taste it with tip of his tongue, bring it to his
nostrils and inhale the bouquet of the tanned skin.

It was a studied ritual. Leather was a Carnival ritual, a sacramental alliance with the dead, dead cattle transported from interior savannahs. In due course the leather was fashioned into shoes in which the living danced with the ghosts of cattle or rode on their backs.

With my eyes that had returned in a Nemesis Bag from the future I saw the ghosts of Jonestown purchasing shoes in Albuoystown. My sacramental treaty or alliance lay with them. As Jones’s left-hand man had I not ridden them in my Sleep, in my unconscious? I had wanted to save them on holocaust eve (when flocks of sheep and horses and cattle were groomed to be burnt as a sacrifice to the gods in ancient Greece) but had succeeded in saving only my own skin with the intervention of Deacon, my own soul with the intervention of the Virgin.

The cattle lay in the Jonestown Clearing on the Day of the Dead. Cattle have human faces, tigers that burn in the sun have the faces of gods, horses weep. I could not help noticing the leather on their feet, the boot with which Deacon had kicked Jones onto his face in the Moon-dust until Jones’s eyes drilled holes into a ladder between the Moon and the Earth, between the Moon (the Cave of the Moon) and my Virgin Ship. Deacon’s boot and the shoes on the feet of the Jonestown dead reminded me of the leather in Marie’s Shop.

In certain circumstances my poor mother might have made a Bomb in profit from tourists who came to Carnival by selling relics of Bone shaped as the Cross or saints fashioned from relics of leather. But thank God! she resisted the temptation.

The shoemakers bought the leather in the Shop, took it away, made shoes which they brought back to the very Shop to be exhibited for sale by my mother. It was a transaction that Marie understood and which she exercised with a rare and tender compassion, for I had seen her purchase shoes out of her meagre wages and give them to barefoot beggars. It meant her going without bread for a day at least every week.

I now realized that there were two intermingling queues in the Shop, one purchasing leather, the other buying shoes. Imprinted
on the sole of each boot or shoe was a miniature Ship of Bread within a bubble or a fluid Shop, my mother’s Economy, my mother’s beggars’ dead men’s Shop on which she was sailing now (as each minute passed) to her death in Third World South America.

I had seen the imprint of trade unmistakably there, trade in bodies and souls across generations and centuries, in which my mother intervened when she fell in the street with a blow to her heart and was lifted shoulder-high by grey-bearded young beggars. Such is the legality of intercourse with violence, such is the trade between complacent life and matter-of-fact death in which mothers of poverty, mothers of humanity, intervene.

I had seen the imprint of trade unmistakably there on horses and cows that Jones had stabled along with the membership of the Mission whom he had provided with bunks and stalls.

Jones kept many horses which I had christened the horses of the Moon because of their glowing mane, their flowing mane, that encircled my brow and my head at times when I mingled with them.

And now as I recovered myself in the Shop to which I had returned from disaster-ridden 1978 to Albuoystown 1939 –
heavy-hearted
at the prospect of my mother’s coming death – I inspected the crew of leather-purchasers and shoe-purchasers. If only I could seize the pendulum of the Clock ticking away
remorselessly
, as if it were a horse’s cosmic phallus, phallic twisted ladder pointing to the Moon, or Venus, or Aphrodite, I might startle my mother’s sobriety with the temperament of pagan goddesses.

‘Don’t leave the Shop tonight, Mother. Stay here until the full Moon drowns in the sky of dawn. The mind’s anxiety-ridden full Moon on the darkest of nights. One lives in two universes at the same time. Apparitional full moon. Concrete Earth. I shall stay with you until tomorrow. Whenever tomorrow is! We shall voyage to the Moon at the bottom of the sky. We shall climb Jones’s ladder. Blast him!’ I spoke through lips shaped in a child’s head upon a child’s body that had nevertheless returned from the age of the future.

As darkness began to fall Marie began to close the windows
and doors of the Shop. It was a meticulous business. There were bars to be placed on the windows. Padlocks on the doors.

‘I shall break through these one day,’ my mother said with a laugh. ‘How could we spend the night here, Francisco? It would be gaol.’

‘Break through and go where?’ I asked.

Marie looked at me sharply. She seemed to know I was testing her when I asked the question. I was seeking to confirm … What was I seeking to confirm? That the invisible Bag over my head was real? I had
seen
her coming death within the hour. But now I was unsure. Why should I not be able to stop her from leaving the Shop? How did one convert the gaol of fate into freedom? I wanted to say: ‘If you stay here you will live.’ But I was confused. Does the gaol of fate mean life or the postponement of death, freedom death or the beginning of unimaginable life?

There was a back door to the Shop that seemed to fall into a pit. An odd kind of sensation when one revisits the past! The door of space itself seems on the edge of falling out of its hinges. It is the knowledge one possesses – or dreams one possesses – that provides an inkling of a chasm in creation across which one voyages.

When one stood at the back door the Shop was tilted upwards, as on a wave, or upon a higher plane to the street below in which faces glimmered like spray in a deceptive sea of moonlight.

Faces glimmered up out of the pit. Black faces seemed white. They had acquired the prize of whiteness. They were white. A desperate whiteness. A desperate illusion of immortality or eternity. White faces glimmered black, a desperate illusion that they were being swamped by immigrants. Brown faces were stained with the salt of blood, neither black nor white. How red is blood, how pale or dark is salt beneath the Ship of the Virgin? Beneath the Shop of Bread?

We left the Shop through the front door that led straight into the silver blood of the Moon. I saw it all through the invisible Bag of Nemesis over my head. I saw my mother’s coming death written into the sacred nerves and the fibre of her body, written into the shoes she wore that the dead woman, with her child beside her in the Jonestown Clearing, had worn.

It was as if I saw her walking above me on a wave as before I had seen black and white and brown faces walking below me in a pit. I saw the soles of her feet dance above me like bone in the mind clad in brown leather, white leather, black leather.

Then in a flash she was beside me again and we were walking in the street that led from the front door into throngs of passersby.

Funny the things one remembers! She had bolted the door securely behind her with a green, spongy-looking padlock and deposited the key in the purse with her weekly wage. The sound of a drum reached our ear with a curious ecstatic sigh and yet a funeral note. It was so muffled, so deep, so disturbing in low range yet ferocity of pitch I tried to seal my ears against it …