The Carnival Trilogy (17 page)

Gloved wretchedness was the driving force, the itch or the climax, of industry. It illumined a cloak of savage or savaged memory that ties the worker’s hands, the worker’s bruised body, to his task with almost religious, fatalistic devotion. The sweat of industry was a phenomenon of darkest
coniunctio
, the marriage of man and material, boulder and boulder upon a chain that stretched from heaven to hell over which he had ruled in Plantation New Forest but as a labourer now himself – tied to Madame Guillotine – the sweat of intercourse infused him with a sensitivity that seemed to split and break every prick, every gloved nail.

His gloves were already cut to tatters – a dead king’s, a dead bridegroom’s, from the grave. He held them up to me, a living bridegroom, a Carnival mask of parallel dream.

Within a fortnight, the mask of the body, darkest
coniunctio
or marriage to industry, had forged a new skin, a new glove, a new letter that seemed to run at the edges of bone into
english letter, french letter, welsh letter, irish letter, west indian letter – and all the other gloved accents, sexual imprecation, blasphemies, curses, one hears on a factory floor.

He was unable to place or identify the West Indian he thought he knew. Perhaps he was deceiving himself. Perhaps he was seeking to create a lapse into fictional memory in order to make game of the night’s/day’s labour. Lapsed night was day. Lapsed day was night. The lapsed unfamiliar was familiar. The lapsed unknown was known.

Each man secretly played his own game of lapses or
doorways
into time with the devil. Religious devil. Religious pay-packet. So much for rent to keep the devil from the door, so much for the motorcycle or the motorcar to outrun the false shaman, so much for the devil’s cigarettes, for lovely beer, so much for vistas of the Round Pond within the pools in which El Doradan millions shone, so much for hire purchase …

There were moments when the devil took a worker by surprise in the game they played. Was it the worker’s mask or the mask of the devil that crumpled a little? Was it the worker or the devil who seemed to lose his grip? The dual mask slipped and another face appeared, slightly ecstatic, slightly depressed, slightly dark, slightly brilliant, vaguely attuned to home thoughts (an Englishman’s home is his castle), home thoughts of wife or mother or child. Then the castle would darken into irrational siege, irrational casualty, injury, the unemployed, the unemployable.

“You’ve never had it so fucking good,” the devil said to me. “Masters has bequeathed you his wages. Why are you moping, making up fictions?”

The roof of the great hollow cave of a factory was littered with arc lights, manufactured suns, some with moon
satellites
but in a particular area of the lofty cave there shone a single star that an educated wag had christened Vega. This was devoid, as far as waggish eye could see, of the rings or planets circling Earth’s sun.

Factory Earth therefore, the wag declared, need fear no
competition from planets around Vega, the nearest sun in space and time to Planet Earth’s sun.

It was light-year comedy and Masters was well acquainted with the importance of such games to preserve morale within the work forces of Factory Earth and Plantation Earth and to humour or lighten anxieties within a fiercely competitive world. In Vega – in the arc-light of Vega within the cave of the factory – lay the narrative seed of a constellation within a twentieth century biography of spirit. It was a seed in parallel, through distances of psyche, with the hunter/huntress Orion and the male/female Crab nebula.

Such seed of necessity, such predilection for games, was a form of telepathy between worker and worker around the globe. Long before mock-constellations or satellites, invented by science, encircled the earth, cultures had invoked their own satellites and images in the stars through which they bridged distances and separations and spoke silently to each other. They saw without proof each other’s masks, they felt without touching each other’s edged tools, they pooled each other’s tears in the ghost of rain and made a sacrament of vision. The telepathy of the soul. They peered into the
night-time
live-coal eyes of the crocodile stars in search of a modern telescope to place in Thomas’s hands long before Thomas dreamt of investigating the wounds in the body of space.

Late in November Masters found himself staggering under Vega with a satellite bride of metal from Madame Guillotine in his arms. He was suddenly visited by a revelation that was to be confirmed by science. His mind lapsed into fiction
and he saw that there were foetal rings and planets around Vega and that these constituted not just a competitive threat to Factory/Plantation Earth but a new wheel or foothold for life should the golden chain to which he clung be so apparently severed or blasted it flung him
– it flung him –
through
one
of
its
links
on
to
that
wheel.
HE COLLAPSED AND FAINTED.

This was his first minor heart attack and it was to bring him face to face with the devil. It was time to say goodbye to the factory. He fell through the floor upon his golden chain
(or was it up into the roof of the cave?) and lay at the edge of a great fire within a chain of reversible gravities, ups/downs, downs/ups, in Waterfall Oracle. He raised himself
nevertheless
to his feet to confront a gentleman with a smooth, polished mask.

“What the devil?” said Masters. “Where in god’s name am I? Who are you?”

The devil chuckled. “You called me first,” he said, “so here I am. A mask – the self-same mask – can be worn by parallel angels and monsters.”

“Did I call you? I have forgotten.”

“It’s a game of lapses of memory,” the devil said. “Read the newspapers around the globe. See how they put gory morale into their customers’ breasts – the spy games, the war games, the sex games, the power games. But sometimes a foul, a hideous lapse, is declared and the game almost ceases to exist.”

Masters was stricken with the masquerade of the devil as something or someone he had summoned to play death and life and rebirth. In calling him, in saying “What the devil?” – albeit in the way one cries, “Oh god” or “To hell with you” – had he indeed, however involuntarily, invoked a fiery response in the cosmos, fiery death threatening him here on Earth, on one hand, fiery rebirth, foetal circulation of life around Vega, on the other? If the game stopped with a dreadful foul here on Plantation and Factory Earth would it start all over again somewhere else upon the wheeled chain of mutated spaces, mutated fires?

Masters felt an undoubted attachment to, a longing for, the great beautiful fire beside which he stood with the devil. That longing stemmed from a curious hollowness and depression within him, a desire not just to be purified in hackneyed senses but to be rendered therapeutically impure,
therapeutically
mixed game (water and fire), so that the measure of his cosmic disease would match the sacrament, or miracle, of a cure. It was a formidable equation between “impurity of the game” and “sacrament or cure” (as if one were integral to the
mystery of the other), and it made him see fire as a wonderful bride, a wonderful game, to be embraced, to be courted, to be loved. He lapsed through holed time. It was 1945 in New Forest. He had just donated blood to the Brickdam Alms House and to the State Hospital. The doctor (attired in calendrical mask 1945) who had drawn the blood resembled the devil of Vega’s fire (calendrical mask 1958). Reversible memory, the future in the past, the past in the future.
Waterfall
Oracle. Delph’s blackboard/white chalk. They were both polished, courteous plantation gentlemen. Except that the plantation doctor in New Forest was Carnival black, the devil (or daemon of souls on Vega) Carnival white.

The doctor in the State Hospital rubbed the dead king’s arm with a piece of cotton wool, offered him a drink, and then, seeing how little affected he was by the blood-letting ritual, ventured to ask him whether he (as a prince of the estate) would take the lead in signing a petition.

“What petition?” asked Masters.

“I need cadavers,” said the doctor bluntly. “Freely donated. Sign please!”

Masters was not sure that he had heard aright. “Whose cadaver?” he asked. He was drawn to the devil’s fire, he was drawn by a lust for purification and yet he shrank away now within a confusion of place and mind, heart and soul, science and religion.

“Whose cadaver?” the doctor repeated. “Why yours, of course. Sign here and I will give you a card marked
Atonement.
Keep it in your pocket as your good deed to the State. I shall then be able to claim your royal frame in collective
instalments
, the State’s kidneys, the State’s lungs, the State’s blood bank, the State’s everything.” He shook Masters’ chain.

“No, no, I’m sorry,” the dead king cried quickly. “NO!”

“What, what? Don’t you see that if you – a prince of the State – gave your frame, it would inspire millions?”

“They would give their souls,” the devil confessed.

Masters felt guilt. He had given royal blood. The royal sweat of industry. The royal guilt of industry. He had given
all these. But his compulsive desire to marry or to wed fire created a terrible beauty in parallel with a terrible danger and as he resisted the devil’s temptation the fire retreated a little into an organ of mystery that overruled all blind gift of body or soul before or after death in the name of pure science or in the name of pure religion.

“I am a rude king,” he said at last to the doctor, “a king who descends and who labours.”

“I know. I know. That’s why I ask you, of all persons.”

“You do not understand,” Masters said.

“Understand what?”

“A king is reborn for humanity’s impure sake …”

“What the devil does that mean?” the doctor cried.

“Let’s put it like this.” Masters was fencing with the devil. “A king sharpens the sword of religion and science in fire to test how
incorrigible
is his suit of hate or love, his longing, his insane longing, to wed the bride of heaven. Does he give his earthly body to science because he loathes it, hates it, or adores it for selfish, cynical heaven’s sake, cynical
rejuvenation
of worn out, obsolete, royal organs in a manufactured Paradise where lust is both eternal and incorrigible?”

The doctor did not know whether to express approval or alarm or disdain. One word stuck in his throat. “You said
incorrigible.
Why incorrigible?”

“If the fire of religion or science becomes incorrigible lust, incorrigible lust for purity or purity’s goods, if the beauty of art becomes so absolute that it cancels the marriage of the impure body to the impure body, impure ages to impure ages, impure cultures to impure cultures, then it means that the prospect of rebirth, therapeutic rebirth, falls into the void and in that case what use is it, doctor, for you to patch up a wretched soul in the name of wretched eternity, to patch up a wretched society in the name of wretched purity, by cannibalizing the constitution of a dead king?”

The devil was so outraged he could scarcely speak. Purity that masks the extermination of others, pure religion that masks fanaticism, pure science that masks its military
consequences, unfreedom and terror, absolute mechanics that mask exploitation, were his bastions and they had been stormed, it seemed to me as I hung upon Masters’ chain, at a heart’s blow.

“The values of a civilization,” said Masters a little
pontifically
, as if to rile the devil, “need to rest on something much deeper than the mechanics of a frame to prolong the semblance of sovereign life.”

The doctor found his tongue at last. “Is it impure science then, impure art or religion, impure societies, that you favour?”

“I favour the saving desolation of spirit that differs from, though it resembles, despair; I favour the mystery of shocking truth or starkest spirit penetrating and
reassembling
evolutions, and
then
it is possible for a king to confess to native evil as inseparable from change – inseparable ingredient in the conscience of wisdom or maturity and change – to confess also to native bias and partiality as bitter travail, and
to
yield
himself
in
ailing
person
and
deed,
through
prayer
and
through
necessity,
to
transfigurative
dismemberment/
rememberment
and
rebirth
in
community
and
of
community.
”

The devil vanished as if he had been ousted but the riddling frames of temptation and revelation had not ceased and Masters found himself at the foot of a great palace that rose out of the hollow depression of a half-breathing,
half-breathless
organ or heart that plagued him still with parallel fires, the fire of the healer, the fire of the destroyer. He placed a tentative foot on a rung in the palatial ladder and recalled, in that instant, Thomas’s animated mask of curiosity glued to the bars and segments of the Alms House gate in New Forest through which he observed Aunt Alice dancing for her supper with faltering yet inimitably courageous steps.

Like Thomas’s, Masters’ eyes were glued to the ladder. Ladder or giant wheel, giant heartbeat within deceptive hollows, deceptive heavens, and with hope beyond hope and hopelessness of true heaven. As he stared through the gate he saw the shadow of Alice gesticulating, warning him, but much more unexpectedly and oddly vivid was the face of the
West Indian operator in the factory whom he thought he knew but had been unable to place. He shook the ladder or gate now, and it dawned on him then, as a sudden wheel rattled, who the operator was. A faded newspaper floated down the rungs of the ladder and settled on a cyclist’s brow.
That
was
it.
That was the man! Here was the young cyclist who had collided with Martin Weyl in Carnival year 1939. A College Boy then, seventeen years of age.