The Carnival Trilogy (16 page)

The ecstasies and torments that run parallel through the twentieth-century age made it inevitable that the dead king should descend into the living Inferno the moment Amaryllis and I glimpsed heaven and consummated our secret marriage vows. The Inferno
lives
when the dead retrace their steps around the globe. Our marriage was unique heart and mind but for that reason – unique tranquillity and ecstasy, unique revolution and peace – it was inevitable that a master spirit would return to counsel us and to bear the penalty of the Inferno that runs in parallel with heaven. Masters accepted the penalty. He became my guide and opposite (our guide and opposite) in arriving from the kingdom of the dead to counsel us in the land of the living and to guide my pen across the pages of this biography of spirit.

It started in this instance with property even as Amaryllis and I embraced. The shadow of property fell upon our ageless dream, the ageless dream of love. He had arranged for his properties in New Forest to be sold and for the money from the sale to be transmitted to him in London. He tended, however, to be lax in transmitting instructions to his agents and incessant delays occurred. The two-storeyed house in East Street was sold quite quickly but the money never came to him. It went instead to the New Forest Jane Fisher – Jane Fisher the First – who had stabbed him as they made love. I was angry and impatient with such quixotic generosity. Indeed for a prince of an overseer who could be hard as rock, it seemed a singular discrepancy of passion to give cash he urgently needed to a whore who had grossly attacked him. The truth was he regretted the privileges under which he had used the loose women of the estate, and was possessed by uncanny guilt.

I thought that was the truth in 1958 but I know now in 1982/83 when he wears the mask of the dead king that truth runs far deeper. A discrepancy of passion had haunted him through Waterfall Oracle and the legacy of property to the whore who had killed him was essential within the
sacrament
of a first death.

It was essential also in parallel with my marriage to Amaryllis and with the construction of other paradoxes and parallels such as hope and hopelessness, innocence and guilt, the funeral-horse and the wedding-horse, the Inferno and Paradise. In all these the mind of fiction looks deeper than perverse hope into a dialectical hopelessness that releases us paradoxically from the hope of (the desire for) oblivion as guilt releases us to plumb the creative depths and riddles of innocence, as the funeral-horse releases us to unmask the lie of death in life and to embrace what is dearest in humanity, as the Inferno releases us and sets all parallels into motion so that Paradise may be found again and again within each age despite universal travail.

He told me – when he returned from the grave and became my guide – that the protracted delay in selling his other properties had been forecast by Waterfall Oracle as a symptom of the phantom horse that would crop the
industries
of the world over successive decades and generations. Prices had fallen in New Forest, South America, and he had been advised to descend into the Inferno and unravel a better climate for the stock market or wait until a better climate prevailed. That descent in itself would have appeared, in realistic terms, as nothing but a forecast of bleak economic growth in the late twentieth century but in parallel with the glimpse of Paradise that Amaryllis and I had achieved, it endorsed the mind of fiction again as an irony of forces subsisting upon opposites.

One doorway into the Inferno lay across Crocodile Bridge. In this moment, however, this moment of his return, this moment of suspended climax between heaven and hell, the dead king chose another. He entered the Inferno through a
factory in North London that made Frigidaires and washing machines. I thought it perverse that Masters the Second should take a job as a common labourer and it was not until I saw my marriage to Amaryllis in a new light across the light years – not until the dead king returned into my book to enlighten me – that I perceived how he had glimpsed parallel opposites – parallels composed of apparently opposite tendencies – in Waterfall Oracle and in the golden chain he disclosed to me now as an element in his descent into the dancing human boulders upon whom he installed me as fiction-judge over him and others.

Poor judge I was! I was ignorant of the comedy, the comedy of parallel powers, high and low, upon which he relied to enlighten me as to the pawn I was when I had been elevated to the judgement seat.

Pawn and judgement seat! Here was another parallel of opposites I had missed. I had chalked up “hope and hopelessness” upon Mr Delph’s blackboard in Waterfall Oracle but “pawn and judgement seat” struck me as new, though upon reflection I saw it had subtly appeared in Mr Quabbas’s cave when he had elevated my father to wear the mask of Thomas. I reflected again and saw that “pawn and judgement seat” placed a special emphasis upon “freedom and unfreedom”. I drew Amaryllis into my arms. I was free to declare my love to her, free to marry her, free to live with her – a freedom that did not exist in other countries, in South Africa for example – and I suddenly saw with a shock that our two selves ran in parallel with unfree selves (unfree lives) in many spheres of hell, not only political hells but moral hells, the moral hell that Quabbas and unsuspecting Alice lived in in New Forest. He could not declare his sensuous love for her there, however intrinsically profound or poetic it was, but the depth of his affection, his unfreedom, in cosmic space nourished my insight into precious, invaluable freedom to love, freedom of spirit and mind and body in Amaryllis and me.

“Such,” he said to me, “is the law of initiations and the
price of freedom in the vows you consecrate with Amaryllis. Freedom is partial and as such your private freedoms, the sacred inner vows you take for granted, relate you to – interlink you with – others who are in chains and whose vows are mute.

“Take the golden chain, my dear Weyl, upon which I descend again and again into hell.”

I held Amaryllis close to me.

“I hid it from you in Waterfall Oracle, Weyl, and had I attempted to explain my behaviour in 1958 it would have been premature. But now the two occasions may blend and move us anew through the lapses of dream, the lapsed dream of reality that is the theme of your book, the capacity to
revisit
occasions, to return again and again to vacancies of memory and to first things and last things that are neither last nor first in the kingdom of spirit.”

He suddenly broke off and spoke rather harshly.

“I was an overseer on a
rich
plantation, Weyl. Do I have to tell you that? You know it already. Yes, I do have to tell you, if only to endorse the obvious. The plantation is the
corner-stone
of the economy of the poor world. The factory is the cornerstone of the economy of the rich world.”

“Is it obvious?” I murmured as much to myself as to him. “You said
rich
plantation.”

“Rich, yes. Rich plantation, rich world, poor world.
Rich
sets up a dense echo or connection between the plantation and the sophisticated industrial inferno or factory. A connecting doorway. Follow me Weyl. It’s for your sake and Amaryllis’s that I descend. I bequeath you my wages.”

“What wages?”

“The wages of descent. They are my gift to you and to Amaryllis.”

“Gift!”

“Wedding gift,” he emphasized. I mouthed the words after him as if it was my turn to be dumb, as dumb as Quabbas. Laughter hit me, laughter and sorrow. It was unusual, to say the least, to bring a wedding gift to a man and his wife close
on twenty-five years after the wedding. Unless the deed of coition, however marvellous and apparently complete, remains suspended in the parallels of royalty within servant and master, parallel losses and gains. Was the dead king our master guide, were we his servants who stood indebted to him? To see such losses and gains, such a debt, in a new light alerted us to the wages of freedom and unfreedom in every chain of being that ran through ourselves and others. Unbearable as all this was I began to link together three concepts in Masters’ chain – the law of initiations, private marriage or freedom to be with whom one wished, the intolerance of hell or unfreedom to be with whom one wished.

What price did freedom pay to maintain its heart and mind? Amaryllis and I had purchased a legal certification of marriage a year or so after we consummated our private vows.

Purchased! What wages did freedom need to earn in the purchase of privacy and the sacrament of body and mind?

I saw in a flash within the golden chain of spirit upon which Masters seemed to dangle how necessary it was for him to descend into the Inferno. He sought to open new links in that chain, new equations and links and parallels beween the sweat of love and the sweat of industry, between the fires of hell and the fires of purification. Without master spirits who descend into hell the wages that make freedom possible would burn so fiercely that we would lose all distinction between grace and fury; we would become the prey of meaningless consumption, meaningless fire.

*

October was closing in when he led me down a hill to catch his first bus to the factory. He led me into an industrial labyrinth even before he came to the workplace. It was his mood. The labyrinth commenced the moment he boarded the bus. It would have been different, I dreamt, if he had been on his way to a great palace to receive the Order of Merit. The
bus would have been overshadowed then by a kingdom or a throne. All doors, all stages, all buses, are multi-faceted, reversible frames of emotion in the chain that runs through parallels of humanity.

Thus, that October evening, I sensed a frame of emotion upon him that was already draped by the huge cave of a factory at which he arrived an hour or so later.

A lapse or disjunction of time marks every important appointment with fate. Had he been on his way to a palace – I saw again as he dangled on his golden chain above the Inferno – that timeless lapse, rooted in anticipation, would have embodied a degree of awe perhaps, a degree of pride or privilege perhaps interwoven with other curious emotions. No such luck. He was on his way to the factory and the timeless lapse encompassing him, as he drove to a place where he already was, embodied a degree of bleak present and presence.

He blended the dying light of the evening sky into the faint arc of the new moon and into the chain by which he pulled me or led me to descend into the Inferno.

The din in the factory was tremendous. And yet through it all I could hear the rush, the clamour, of phantom El Doradan rapids. It was drought, a drought that ignited a torrent etching its premises into rock utensils, smooth stripped
half-bodied
ice boxes, agitated washing machine souls, skeleton birthday funeral stream and dance. Each half-bodied boulder subsisted upon rhythmic cradle-in-epitaph, processional epitaph-in-cradle of industry, yet was a doorway into lapses of time. The dead king was on the threshold of despair in the intense racket but succeeded in slipping through a lapse and found himself walking at the edge of the still Round Pond in Kensington Gardens.

It was as if he had lengthened the chain forwards into tomorrow’s noon and though lapsed time had taken us there I felt we were still in the factory and the noonday sun remained an arc-light in the roof of the cave. Masters was a new factory recruit but already he felt that he had worked in the cave of
boulder-machines for years. I saw that his body was imbued with the rhythm of the factory floor as a sailor who comes ashore from his ship moves still upon an involuntary wave. Masters led me within lapsed time to gaze almost sightlessly across the beautiful parkland of Kensington Gardens, through the beautiful trees, across the beautiful water.

Beautiful water! Sightless eyes. Deaf ears. Yes, sightless, deaf. But listen all the same to the distant roar of the traffic running toward and from Marble Arch. A sounding waterfall! Listen! Listen to the friction of wheels in the waterfall, listen to the gallop of horses in the waterfall, listen to the brakes and gears of engines in the waterfall.

There was a crash in the distant waterfall, a muted explosion, a back-firing engine, water on rock. A collision! Was it a bus, was it a car, was it a cyclist, was it a dray-cart in a parade of ancient vehicles? Carnival gait of redressed machines, bus into masked cyclist, car into masked dray-cart, led me to ponder whether I saw or did not see someone crawling out from under a wheel …

“Hey you, give me a hand here. Stop dreaming.”

Masters was back upon his chain from Waterfall Oracle. We stood in the factory, lapsed noon had fallen back into the brilliantly lit night of the cave. A stack of guillotined sections of metal had slipped, half-crashed, onto the floor and needed to be shored up again.

Two West Indians who had come to England in the 1940s and worked with the ground staff of the RAF, operated Madame Guillotine. They were, Masters surmised, around forty, his own age (or two or three years younger perhaps). It was a responsible job. He had been assigned to them. Not as an operator. He was unskilled in the slicing and the execution of metal. His job was to collect the sliced sections and transport them by degrees across the factory to a corridor where they were treated, passed on, treated and fashioned again, before being passed on once more to the assembly line.

There had been an acute shortage of labour and that was how it happened that a great stack of guillotined material had
accumulated over the past week. It was this that had partially crashed on the floor to jolt him back from the Round Pond. His first task was to deplete the pile. Though it had been restored it seemed on the verge of slipping again.

“Go easy‚” he was told. “Tricky beast. Use them fucking gloves over there. It’s a night’s job to get it half-way down.”

The night (the factory day) wore on under its manufactured stars and suns. It was during the midnight (the midday) lunch break that he was conscious of peering through another lapse into the faces of his two companions as if day sliced night night day. He knew them in that light. One of them. He had seen him somewhere ages ago. Carnival time. It
heightened
and sharpened an inner profile, an inner memory, of redressed faculties. It was the edge of blood, the inner sweat of the sun, in an unfamiliar yet familiar shadow of light, that made him know he knew one of them though he could not remember where or when it was that they had met. Perhaps it was the ordeal of unaccustomed labour in transporting the metal with gloved yet wretched hands that evoked some placeless connection between them. He could not say.