The Carnival Trilogy (34 page)

‘Madness,’ I said. ‘Sanity,’ he replied. We were talking within the curious comedy, the curious cross-purpose of incantation and Dream. ‘Let me put it bluntly. We need strange cross-purpose, strange self-contradiction, to open the fabric or prisonhouse of existence. If crime is forever crime, if tautology rules in our dogmas and poetries and statecraft, if violence is the only armour against the violent, then the door is obsolete, the drum is obsolete, the organ engages in nothing but the business of doom. But you know that is not true. The thread of the dance may bring us together again and again, Anselm. But the dance is no absolute enclosure. It is freedom’s re-visionary step, however difficult, into
unimaginable
truth and beauty.’

I was fascinated by the unfashionable word ‘beauty’. What is beauty in an ugly world, I asked myself. Perhaps he had stumbled and I had gained the upper hand over him, over the fury or the god that inhabited him. Beauty was
worthless
! He gave a sudden bark and poked me in the ribs as if his finger were truth’s knife. I recoiled. My complacency appeared to bleed as if I had received a wound. Was I a creature – an unwitting creature no doubt – of the nihilist philosophy of a civilization? Did I deserve to die at the hands of Canaima?

‘Not to die. Not to die. You will recover.
The
thread
never
snaps.
And
yet
sometimes
it
appears
to
snap.
It
snaps,
I
tell
you.
It
never
snaps.
It
snaps,
I
tell
you.
It
never
snaps.
It
snaps,
I
tell
you.
Does
it
ever
snap?
’
His voice had grown terrible, and I suddenly recalled the way he had stared at his victim on the
ground when I came upon them on the riverbank. As though he were shaking him with his glance, shaking him free, yet binding him in a secret net.

‘I want the world to understand,’ he spoke softly now as if his rage were written into the spectre of a river I recalled, ‘how precious he is. How invaluable you are, Anselm. I came close to taking your life. To killing you in the Dream
and
flinging
you
back
into
the
mid-twentieth
century
upon
him.
I want you to know who I am not. I am not a mischief-maker. I am a manifestation of a conflict of values that I nurse within my victims. No ordinary criminal, Anselm. You should know within your childhood heart of hearts! We need to puncture one another’s dramatic misconceptions from the day we were born that feed the theatre of the world. You saved me, yes, when you remained silent. I released you when I could have easily, so easily, killed you when I appeared to mother (or was it to father?) my victim on the ground. We are twins …’

I was stunned by Canaima’s outrageous address, the address of a spiritual tormentor. I had set him free and yet he was my prisoner. He had killed, he had come close to killing me. I still felt his knife in my ribs. The dancer he had killed lay within the net of his (and my) mind and heart. The cap of Alicia – a family badge I associated with childhood – had been stuck on the dead man’s head. So he was part and parcel of a childhood – half-forgotten – theatre as well. The knife and the cap were an incomplete badge and signature I suddenly remembered.

Salvation is the mystery of unfathomable grace yet
torment
, the mystery of the net, of the thread, of the key to a door whose obsolescence or inestimable value I was soon to know within a body of living, sculpted, painted ghosts arising from the past into a Dream of presence.

*

I walked through the door of the dream-unconscious as an honorary ghost in the wake of Canaima’s metaphoric knife in
my ribs. As such, as a living dreamer, I was able to don – in true ancient epic style within the late twentieth century – the cloak of invisibility that I needed in retracing my steps and embarking upon my pilgrimage upon the first bank of the river of space.

I turned in the morning light – wholly unseen by the people in the region who were now astir – and took an intricate path along the riverbank in the direction of the Macusi Waterfall and Rapids.

The river was angry as if it had been stirred by Canaima’s glance which shook the dead bird-man at his feet. Its sudden, passionate foam led me to paint the soil of the place with a degree of coarseness that I instantly regretted. I looked everywhere for monsters as I touched the knife in my ribs. What monsters? The masses of the river (miniature masses, I may add, since the population was small) were made up of ordinary folk, gold and diamond miners, everyday faces one would meet in the footpaths through the forest or on the water-top, Macusis whose children were attending the
Mission
Church and the School, Inspector Robot and his police force, Penelope and Ross George the English missionaries.

I came upon a Macusi woodman with an axe on his shoulder. He was – in the circumstances of my invisibility – unable to see me but I possessed the outrageous liberty of scanning his features and inspecting him from top to toe. There was a faint sweat in his eyes like a spider’s web or the distilled breath of the river upon glass. He was sturdy as rock. His employment was to fell several acres of rainforest timber. A mere drop these were on my canvas of space that invoked the mid-twentieth century into which I had come. But one wondered how it would spread in the future. The rainforests were the lungs of the globe. Trees needed to be felled, yes, but the breath of the rivers and the forests was a vital ingredient in space. It was an issue of living contrasts interwoven by the soul of the dance through every
monstrous
desert that lay hidden in the coarse soil of place –
deserts that had not yet happened in South America but which we could inflict on ourselves if we were not watchful and capable of attending to the voices of the dead in our midst.

I – as Government Surveyor, Government Architect, Government Sculptor and Painter of the City of God, an Imaginary City within the fabulous ruins of El Dorado – had submitted a report on the preservation of the rainforests to my employers in Alicia’s museum of fossils in Georgetown.

I said to the woodman – ‘Your people were here before Columbus dreamt he had touched the shores of India. That is why you and your people are called Indians. History is a book of dreams. And it’s time we scanned the pages afresh and woke up to patterns of Sleep in which we stumble upon each other in the masks of many existences. When we fight one another – whom do we fight? When we love or hate one another – whom do we love or hate? Be careful, axeman! Remember the crosses on Calvary’s hill. They were felled trees, carven trees, felled by living, sleep-walking ghosts like you.’

He did not understand a word but stopped and listened, astonished at my voice. It was the trick of an honorary ghost who sighed in the trees. Was it phantom cinema, phantom radio, imported into savage and remote realms? There was a black bead or ritual charm on his lips that he could blow into a curious kind of balloon in which to trap visual spirits. I took advantage of him. I touched the bead and converted it into a television box over his head that was as transparent as his balloon. Its transparency matched the faint sweat or breath of glass arising from the river into his eyes.

Trick of breath in my sculpture of him it may have been but it was authentic comedy or retrace of unimaginable genesis I sought nevertheless to infuse into the arts of life as a moral counterpoint to civilization’s addiction to
technology
. I moved within the Painted Bush and threw the net of an unseen camera around him. Startled all at once in recalling
the way Canaima had thrown his net around his victim on the ground! The correspondence was indeed startling. It gave an extra edge to the film I was suddenly involved in making with the epic media of the gods who had thrust me on to the first bank of the river of space. The Macusi woodman was in process of becoming a bright Shadow on a screen (in a box-balloon) to millions of invisible viewers within a net of the future (invisible to him as I now was) who would feast on him in their sitting-rooms, feast on him and on the
nearextinction
of his savage tribe, feast on him as on a rare bird, exotic fish, butterfly.

In the outrageous liberties I took with him I was their ambassador, the ambassador of invisible millions, invisible to the savage I shot with my camera.

I inscribed on my film the following caution – ‘Read the ironies of technology in the haunted spaces of civilization’s mind, a mind infused with metaphors of the hunt and the kill, the seizure of others within every museum or cinema.’

The door of associations through which I had come had now swung wide. It was so close I saw something I had not seen before. There were subtle etchings of three crosses. I was prompted to ask the Macusi axeman (though he did not understand a word) – ‘Who is the king of thieves? Look! there he is. He’s descending from his cross as if to retrace his steps backwards into previous centuries, forwards into later centuries, into our century. Odd of me to say “retrace”. Retrace one’s steps into the past. But can we retrace our steps in the coarse soil of the future? He is the thief who mocked Christ and turned his face away from paradise’s door. Such a thief lives in us all and in a door that haunts us in every century.’

I saw he was listening and I continued as I touched the knife in my ribs. ‘Perhaps my door is rooted in a subtle abyss between Christ’s cross and that of the king of thieves, the door in the cross, the cross in the door.’

‘He is behind you,’ I said suddenly to the axeman. ‘He
stands between your raised axe and the tree you are about to fell. I am not sure but he reminds me … I think I know. I remember something from childhood when I played in Alicia’s garden theatre with my uncle Proteus who was adept at all sorts of masks and disguises. The sun would glint on his brow like a cord of bright sixpences. Clever devil! I remember once he stole my pocket money. It wasn’t much but it was a fortune to me. Fortunes are made when one astutely delves into the pockets of infants. It was a moral lesson that Proteus intended.

‘Look axeman! The thief turns in your Shadow within the futuristic television box I have infused into a bead that you wear. Some say he stole the atom from the thorn of a Rose on Christ’s brow. He turns, axeman! he turns in your box and faces millions. Look! how they cheer, how they applaud.’

But the axeman was blind to the past and the future. And yet I was not sure. There was a glint to the blade of his axe that half-blinded my sight as well. Perhaps he was on the brink of disclosing himself in another light. I did my best to keep my eyes fastened upon him. I followed the are that he drew with his blade: slow yet lightning poise of a blade in the darkness of my own mind. The axe stood high in space. He gave a sudden ringing cry. ‘TIMBER, HUMAN TIMBER.’ Then struck. It was a miraculous blow. With one stroke he felled the tree. I scarcely believed what I saw. It was as if his blindness was now – in a flashing instant – a mask that he wore even as my invisibility was a cloak. I was a different person in retracing my steps. He was a different person in striking a blow that was so unusual, so
immaculate
, it made me abnormally sensitive to the responsibilities that are implicit in every cross one bears, every door one builds. Human timber!

I touched the blade. I marvelled at its subtlety and complex force. I remembered the knife, Canaima’s knife, that had metaphorically killed me yet had pierced me to the core of the body’s waking instrument – as if the knife were an
extension of the human hand – so pierced me that I became an heir of civilizations (carnival heir) and was imbued with living dream or inner space to pass through the door of the unconscious, to become sensitive to the abuse of others, to the perils that encompass the globe.

The high stump of the felled tree began to move in the soil of the earth. It drew itself up. It was human timber. It arose from the roots of the cross. My eyes cleared. I remembered. Someone I knew yet did not know.
It
was
the
king
of
thieves.
He – unlike the other thief on Calvary’s hill – had rejected paradise. I had glimpsed him on the first bank of the river of space at the heart of the long Day of the twentieth century between the raised axe and the tree. I had glimpsed him in childhood theatre. I had glimpsed him in the protean body of my own family. Such parallels or alternative existences had come into sharpest focus now, quantum axe, quantum camera, quantum knife.

They were the sharpest extension of breath-in-
sculpted-body
-senses. But simultaneously they made me acutely aware of the king of thieves as burdened with prizes and punishments. The Macusi axeman – whose blade seemed now a lightning extension of my own hand in the sudden darkness that falls over one’s mind in the wake of a
staggering
event – had vanished. I was left to reflect upon a thief, upon the punishments inflicted upon him, a thief whom I knew or thought I knew. I should have recognized him in the mid-twentieth century when I worked in the Potaro River and he was a miner there but I was blind then, I was deaf then. He was a miner-pork-knocker (in the idiom of the region). Pork-knockers live by the skin of their teeth when the payload, the paydirt, declines. They beat a drum in the Bush for comfort, they scrape the last morsels from every drum or barrel of pork. It was a punishment with which many a great adventurer was familiar in the age of Homer or Virgil or Defoe. And on such scraps I perceived a possibility for – the meditative genesis of – a symphony and a film on the incarnations of the king of thieves.

His nickname in 1948 was ‘Black Pizarro’. It was a tribute to his obsession with gold and to his great namesake, the Spanish conquistador of the sixteenth century, who
ransacked
the treasuries of the Incas. He was the living mascot of his crew. They hated him yet he was indispensable to them. None was as gifted as he in concealing a stone in the crevices of his flesh or gold under his tongue. He told tales of rich widows and he boasted that he had rubbed shoulders in Georgetown or Rio or Paris or Greece with many a suitor in carnival palaces who waited on queens and wasted their substance. The ruins of El Dorado – whose location tended to shift from region to region, continent to continent, from the present into the remote past, even as it hovered over the future – encompassed he declared the proportions of
formidable
live fossil (cross-cultural) theatre: ancient Ithaca (with its suitors or millionaire-thieves and its queen Penelope) and modern doors, the door of the modern unconscious uplifted into consciousness, the door of lost paradises, stolen
paradises
. As a consequence, in sculpting him back from the high stump of a felled tree as multi-existential fabric, as an actor or creature of many incarnations, I placed a stolen diamond in his flesh and a stolen nugget of gold over his heart.