The Carnival Trilogy (41 page)

Ulysses stared up at me with a plea, a curious plea, in which he confessed that true heroism and a true
Homecoming
was a burden too great to be borne by any single warrior or lover or actor or individual in the theatre of
twentieth-century
history. Alicia and Proteus were aware of this in the early twentieth century within their live fossil museum. So was I in the Imaginary Theatre I was building and in the incorporation of Alicia’s and Proteus’s early plays into my pilgrimage within the long Day of the twentieth century. The truth was that the enormity of lordship that Ulysses implied needed to be borne and shared by several (all partial) performances by different actors within different contexts of fate or freedom. The residue or fall-out from such
performances
implied a quantum reality that slipped forever into the future though it sustained immense pertinence for a Being of true hope within the recurring present moment. Proteus’s Ulysses needed support from Haroldian Ulysses as from
Simon’s Ulysses whatever the inadequacies of each, each one’s sins, each one’s shortcomings. In each lay a door into unexplored realms, unexplored suit of God conducted by intimates as well as strangers whose conscious or
unconscious
role it was to challenge all assumptions of
proprietorship
of soul, proprietorship of flesh and blood. Such was the moral design of epic/allegoric theatre.

Simon’s implicit governorship of an Imaginary Colony in order to haunt Penelope and Ross, Harold’s proprietorship of Imaginary estates and slave-women within the Rose garden, were part and parcel of the enigmatic texture of fate,
freedom
, authority, industry, tyranny, that constituted the
psyche
of twentieth-century civilization.

Proteus’s early twentieth-century Ulysses needed still others, as I would discover, to share the burden of the thorn of the Rose in the gates of Home. I was involved in this and I recalled his prophecy that Harold would tell me something important that I needed to know when we met in the theatre of Jacob’s ladder.

Now – in the curious, abrupt and realistic absurdity of Dream – I realized that a small bag I had been carrying, when I stumbled upon the masked lord and king, had opened and spilt its contents on the ground between us. A shirt, a pair of socks, a hairbrush, a toothbrush, a draughtsboard and two dozen pawns, lay scattered so close to the beggar that they seemed an extension of his rags.

He stretched out his hand: it seemed possessed of a mysterious nail that grows on a tree side by side with Rose’s thorn and Canaima’s knife. Our eyes met. And I felt a moment of shattering peace. As if I saw through him into a future when one would indeed relinquish one’s ridiculous possessions, a future Home, a future Garden. But now they seemed so precious to me that I tried to push him away, to seize my own goods, to seize his rags as well. All of a sudden he held me and drew me close to him. My head lay against his heart. I heard the faint chiming of the bells in the distance
in place of his heart. Curiously hollow yet brimming pulse of music. Had he died, was he still alive? Had I unwittingly helped to kill him? Had I been involved in the killing of the lord and master who returns to a broken, half-ruined fable of a Colony? What was the time and where and what was the Colony? Alicia in her absurdity would have said
global
colony
, global prosperity, global poverty, global secretion within carnival history. Each hour or day one gave (early twentieth-century Day, late twentieth-century Day)
crisscrossed
into a pattern of Dream, Dream-Play within history, the depletions of history, the hungers of history, the
desperations
of history, the great and small wars from which the multi-faceted hero returns again and again and again … And the object of his return? He returns, it is said, to serve God, to make God his absolute beloved in every mission of peace, God the Mother of all men and women … Alicia was famous for such absurdities, absurdity plays, morality plays. Absurdity equals morality …

My innermost speculations were hushed. I was dazzled. He was the same and yet not the same beggar or king. The burden had been lifted. Or was it a reversal of the live, fossil premises of myth? Lifted, reversed! One was unable properly to say. Hints, guesses! Surely humanity was literate enough to read the webbed volume in the rose tree? Here was the key to mythical wealth (I had retrieved my ridiculous
possessions
and
seized the beggar’s rags as I lay against him). Here was the key in the distant bells to the music of mixed royal ancestry, mixed royal parentage, abused kith and kin,
glorified
kith and kin, legitimacy, illegitimacy, jealousies, hatreds, loves. All these were woven into the lifted burden of the dying hero and into the rags I had stolen which left him naked on the stage with the thorn of the Rose in his brow.

Naked and crumpled as he appeared to be now, Proteus had given the part an inimitable and unique seed. As though in descending from the peak of lord and king and master he had acquired the ability of a mountaineer of God. Sheer
paradox! Descent into the realm of the ‘poor in spirit’ was implicit spiritual muscle or extraordinary craft and power to cling to and make his way down the steepest face of the world’s abyss.

I entered the Rose garden and made my way to the palace of the Rose. Aunt Alicia sat at a long table. As a child I had sometimes dined – when money was short – upon a crumb of bread: now in old age I dreamt of her presiding over the long table like an empress and a queen. The table groaned with sumptuous dishes, roast duck, crisp turkey, lamb, pork, fish, boiled and baked meats, shrimp, eggs, cooked-up rice, creamed, sweet potatoes, and other preparations and
varieties
of food. Aunt Alicia invariably cried in the Dream through the curtain of the years as it lifted into a theatre – ‘Eat, Anselm. It’s here for you. All for you.’ I felt she was tempting me in a peculiar way. ‘Not now,’ I told her, ‘not now. Sorry.’

‘But why, Anselm?’

I tried to read her expression before I replied –

‘The face of the beggar! I can’t erase it from my mind! Such a strange face, a strange colour.’ I stared at the dishes on the table.

‘It’s his Macusi blood,’ Aunt Alicia cried. ‘He’s mixed. Like all of us. Like you. And as for his blighted, strange-coloured face – well, Proteus is a master at make-up, racial make-up, animal make-up.’

‘It’s real,’ I protested. ‘Human make-up. I see his face beside me. At the bottom of the abyss.’ I stared around the hall of dreams.

‘Continue, continue,’ Alicia cried. ‘Or everything will vanish. The Dream will vanish …’

‘As a real child I sometimes came upon real Dream-beggars in Camp Street. They never vanish. Always yellowish dark faces, dreadful haunted faces. Couldn’t eat a thing when I got home.’

‘I thought I had prepared a welcoming meal for you,
Anselm,’ Alicia said coldly. ‘Fit for the carnival heir …’ Again I felt she was pushing me, tempting me. Then she continued so softly it was my turn to listen hard – ‘There are times when we have had to do with a crumb, a blessed crumb.’ She seemed to be relishing the flavour or thought of a ‘blessed crumb’ and the sumptuous banquet almost
disappeared
into a hole in the Dream.

The great clock in the colonial mansion was striking twelve. And this pulled me up alive out of the hole into which I had almost slipped. But the danger remained. I felt I must say something. ‘It’s good to fast at times, Aunt Alicia. Good for the sculptor’s interior and the painter’s heart. Spiritual fasting is the seed of creation. In that seed within the earth one breaks bread – one’s fingers are roots to break bread – with living trees and living rocks. If we cease to fast in spirit, God forbid! the seed will lose its magical space, its inner space in the body of the mind …’

I stopped with a gnawing sensation, a gnawing torment, and recalled the hole into which everything had appeared to slip but a moment ago and how it resembled the sculpture within the self (the inner hollow or fast that is the seed of art). Resembled as well the steep face of the abyss upon which the masked king or beggar had clung to illumine the profoundest distinction between the creative hollow of the fast (the ‘poor in spirit’) and the pit or hole of bottomless greed. They resembled each other but were subtly,
complexly
, miraculously different … I would have lost my Dream-footing entirely but for a tall vase on a small table close to where Alicia was sitting. I needed her strength at this time. A river wound its way up the vase through and beyond the hole of greed into which I had almost slipped. It wound its way through pages of etched manuscript upon it that were illustrated with hunting parties, naked game, naked meat. Antique river of blood. Antique pit. Yes, I remembered clearly now. It was one of Alicia’s prized possessions. She used to say to me – ‘It’s my pit, not as deep perhaps as the
one you fear but a way of communicating with divided worlds, a way of crossing the river and still speaking to generations who think me dead. Speaking to
you
, Anselm.

‘My advice now is
concentrate
on
the
banquet
you
have
rejected.
Then perhaps I may be able to help you
read
the crumb of the Word.’

I perceived the wisdom in what she was saying and
concentrated
upon the duck on its plate of gold. The broken wings suddenly began to stir. The naked bird flew towards the guarded pit of my stomach. Then on realizing I had no intention of eating it it flew up into the ceiling of the great hall. It hesitated just beneath the smoky timbers then settled there and imprinted its wings in gold. In that instant of Dream in which I was a child I yet remembered Canaima’s lightning knife which I flung as a man in early middle age into the sky when Inspector Robot and I ascended god-rock. I remembered the future. The strangest epic licence of Dream … ‘Is memory a medium of epic slaughter, epic hunt, through which to sculpt or paint golden futures one has already made extinct or is it the seed of past, mutilated being, hunted being, one recalls, which acquires new branches, new wings, new life?’

The duck had settled on the ceiling of the hall and I turned the focus of my concentration upon the other dishes on the table but the faintness within me now was such that I knew I needed sustenance.

‘Fasten your mind, your intelligence, your soul, upon the crumb of the Word.’

‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘a crumb or a crust of bread will suffice.’

And so across the intervening, criss-crossing years in the tapestry of Memory within the long Day of the twentieth century I was back where I began with a mere crust, a mere crumb. The entire hall, the entire scene, began to glow: well-dressed crumb, well-dressed Word at the heart of bread through which ran the antique river of blood upon Aunt Alicia’s vase; antique river of the hunt that one needed to cross from death to life, from death to death.

‘Never take the pit for granted, Anselm,’ Alicia was saying, ‘it takes many forms. Never take life for granted, or heaven, or hell, or death. Hell has its pitiful game one pursues forever and forever until one is gorged by extinction, heaven but bread, and death … Death can become the tautology of the hunted soul, death is death is death, whereas life is the breaking of a mould into divinity’s morsel.

‘When I died in 1929, Anselm, I broke the mould, I broke through a crust, a crumb. Bread and water from the river of the hunt was my diet. And I crossed the pit. I floated upon a crumb into the strangest library in which I was a portion in the Word of Bread. I read myself there in others who hunted with Cleopatra and were hunted by Caesar, hunted with Dido of ruined Carthage and were hunted by Aeneas of ruined Troy, still others seduced by brute desire, brute game, nameless El Dorados. Well-dressed queens and kings at the heart of sacred ruin, re-awakening souls upon their plate of gold.’ She turned all at once and spoke with almost irrational absurdity, irrational humour. ‘You know how I love royal pageants, grand clothes, Anselm.’ She was laughing now. Her voice was music.

I caught a glimpse of marvellous books within the heart of bread through and beyond the meat of brute desire;
marvellous
dresses spun from a crumb of delicate craft and labour evolving across the river through and beyond all ruined, sacred fabric, ruined industrial fabric (ghost towns, the colonization of a civilization by ghosts), the ruined fabric of War (the governorship of a civilization by field marshalls), ruined fabric of passion (proprietorship of flesh and blood) …

Alicia stood on the other bank of the river or pit that ran through the banqueting hall. ‘I am glad you broke your fast and drew me back from nothingness, Anselm. A gulf stands between us. But still we can converse. Such a pity if your book of dreams had hardened into a blind banquet, if you had succumbed to temptation and a welcoming feast that
was poison. No chance then to continue retracing your steps. No chance to meet Harold. I know you
detested
him as a child. I know you loved Proteus. But you cannot go forward and back without them both. Harold has a confession to make. Proteus gave you a glimpse of the mountaineer of God, Harold (I know it’s difficult to believe) will bring you a glimpse of the priest of God. He and Proteus understood each other when they were alive.’ She stopped for she saw the incredulity on my face. She was laughing now with a grain of sadness upon her lips. ‘I know, Anselm. I know how you feel. Proteus (you forgave him as a child because you loved him even when you dreamt of killing him) was a drunkard, a bit of a wastrel. He could have made life so much easier for you and for all of us. He made a small fortune in the diamond fields but spent it all. Harold was a womaniser. I know. I was his wife.
Write
it
all
down,
Anselm
.
The seed of true bread, true mountaineer, true priest, lies in the apparent ruin of many a career once we accept the grace we are given to see it, grace to climb, grace to ascend and descend the ruined scaffolding of our lives.