The Carnival Trilogy (42 page)

‘And you have made a beginning. You have glimpsed the marvellous seed of Bread, you are still to pursue your glimpse of the terrifying (however curiously ecstatic) thorn of the Rose.’

She began to fade and I drifted now through a door in the great hall into the scene of one of Proteus’s failed industrial projects. Proteus was a sacred socialist (metamorphoses of socialism was the name of his business) and socialism was destined to harden, grow brittle, and fall. The scene into which I had come may have been an ancient warehouse or a cinematic project of paradoxes and resources linking heaven and earth. I remembered the axeman
I
had filmed into moral imperative, moral proportion, on the first bank of the river of space when we contemplated the prospect of ruin – or one’s capacity to avert the ruin – of great tropical forests. The axeman had felled a tree with a single, lightning blow; now
from within the heart of that tree emerged an unfinished, a ruined, ladder.
Jacob
’
s
ladder
theatre.

The hall was dark as a sacred Bible of epic prophecies and I lit a candle. Its flickering light (there was a faint draught in the huge warehouse) caught the shadow of the lightning stroke of the axe. And as I looked up at the dim, lightning, shadowy stairs of the felled yet arisen tree I was reminded of an escalator in a great city such as London or Paris, of gigantic excavations, of my apprehensions on arriving there, of
venturing
for the first time into the great underground, into a concrete riverbed beneath a fluid riverbed.

That apprehension of woven or cemented spaces within spaces at the heart of a global community gave substance to retraced steps within ancient and modern Dream, crossings, ascendings, descendings, substance to echoing footsteps upon Jacob’s ladder that resembled the hollow passages, the hollow shoes of childhood that one sometimes abandons as one runs barefoot through a whispering tide within
whispering
floorboards, whispering palaces of achievement.

Proteus’s ‘escalator’ had been long abandoned in the body of Alicia’s museum-whispers, museum-voices, fading pageants, vases, banquets. And now in barefoot candlelight I dreamt of a distinction between true bread and trodden bread at the edges of the ladder of space: trodden bread like candle-grease: trodden tears. Barefoot candlelight was an expensive commodity in the making of a film of palaces and cardboard boxes. ‘It burns a hole in space. It burns into a pit at the top of Jacob’s ladder. Barefoot candlelight lights the way to bed in a cardboard box on the pavement of a great city.’

Proteus envisaged an economic leap despite recession in the 1920s and 1930s when money would become so plentiful (one hundred dollars for a loaf of bread) that it would serve as a drunkard’s walkway in space. It would serve as one of the planks he would employ to cross the river or strengthen the ladder on his death. ‘A great film,’ he confided, ‘a funeral pageant.’

I perceived now that at the heart of Proteus’s humour lay the economic necessity to gauge the scaffolding of his business career.

‘Business‚’ he said, ‘is more than business, capital more than capital, labour more than labour. Visualize the innermost heart of a lightning tree, visualize the necessity to scale heights and depths one may otherwise overlook.’

Beyond a shadow of doubt my memories of Proteus’s ‘
warehouse
of civilization’ were the intricate substance that I threaded later into Inspector Robot’s glasses, into the
axeman
’s blade, into the camera that I used on the first bank of the river of space.

It was a forbidden area. Proteus’s religious socialism was dangerous. He had warned me to stay away. Dangerous ladder, he said. A drunkard’s pitfall. When the sacred
business
crashed he blamed no one but himself. He had invested in a joy-ride to the stars that involved expenditures and proportions that had sliced into the core of his genius. He had invested in a waxworks museum that threatened to come overwhelmingly alive, vulnerable, entombed, yet active
spectacle
within the subconscious and unconscious. His intention was to paint the ceiling with stars and galaxies and to build secret corridors in which great, historical, wounded
personages
would stand in an eerie light and point the way to the ladder … or to the plank afloat on the river …

He was suddenly taken ill after a bout of excessive drinking, whisky, rum, wine, champagne. The waxwork figures moved and became his epitaph. The last time I saw him it seemed as if he had been beheaded, his arms and his body from the neck down were so hidden under a sheet. I dreamt his head addressed me now from the top of a mountain. ‘Time to brave the ladder, Anselm‚’ he said. ‘The living dreamer may ascend and descend and return to life. Time to be born again within the Shadow of truths we have little understood about
ourselves
and others.’ He was one of the strangest sculptures I drew forth in the secret corridors that took me to the ladder.

The ladder shot up through the roof of the theatre into the sky. As I climbed I kept my eyes glued on the bright pit of the heavens above, all the brighter for the dark tunnel and walls on either side of me. I tried to touch these. Were they steel or waxwork or cardboard? Could one punch one’s way through them? The thought had scarcely settled in the Dream when I came to a corridor. Perhaps every mental probe into the substance of space begins with visualizations of the familiar, familiar absurdity, familiar structure or shape, living waxwork epitaph, slow-motion joy-ride to the stars in Alicia’s museum.

I had forgotten the candle that I still carried. Its eye of flame was now strong: as strong as the familiar sun in the sky into which the ladder shot far above me and the corridor into which I had come.

The corridor was at blessed room temperature, deceptively comfortable, deceptively relaxing, as I contemplated the business of the sacred above the warehouse of civilization from which I had come.

Haroldian Ulysses was waiting for me here like a ragged merchant-warrior and landowner. As if to emphasize the concept of ruined business career in the scaffolding of the Play, the concept of familiar being, he wore the very rags I had stolen from Proteus’s Ulysses in the gates of Home.

Alicia’s warning rang in my ears. ‘Take nothing for
granted
.’ I listened and thought I heard her voice again on the other side of the river upon her prized vessel or vase, a faint flute or piping voice this time within a chorus of drowned children – ‘Masks of wood or stone or wax or clay appear identical hardware/software at times within a strange
universe
to sustain us in our recovery of a dialogue with the past. It is the music, however faint, of inner spaces that tells of furies and daemons, intimate catastrophe’s, intimate ecstasy’s unpredictable substance and duration, high fever yet saving grace.’

Everything in the corridor was familiar yet everything was incalculably strange.

‘I died when you were eight‚’ Harold said suddenly. ‘I know you hated me, Anselm.’

He was trembling. He was biting his lips fiercely but no blood came. I was taken aback at the accusation. Had I hated him? Feared him, perhaps! I was unsure. ‘I
shrank
from you, Uncle Harold.’ It was the only way I could voice my distress. ‘I wanted to run whenever you struck Aunt Alicia.’

‘I struck her when you came. She was never the same after that. You were the beginning of my downfall.’

‘Me?’ I could not believe my ears even as I was driven to ponder the word ‘downfall’. It echoed in my mind as a focus of ‘destitution’ that resembled though it differed radically from Proteus’s Ulyssean ‘steep face of the abyss’. It was as if a contrasting link between ‘downfall’ and ‘steep face’ had appeared in the overwhelming Ulyssean body shared by two masters of the Dead, dead antecedents, dead but living figurations of Memory, one possessing the instinct of the mountaineer of God, the other (Harold) replete I felt with the anguish and terror of royal and
possessed
,
bought and sold, flesh and blood.

Haroldian Ulysses was staring at me now and somewhere in his familiar/unfamiliar eyes, his buying/selling eyes in the marketplace of a corridor of space, I
knew
that he knew he was tempting me, tempting me to consume not a physical but a mysteriously elusive poison, a dish of hate, the spirit of hate. It was a desperate ploy on his part. ‘Hate sometimes masks love.’ Did he desire me to love him after all this time and felt he must feed me with the entrails of bitter passion, passion to hate, as a prelude to a confession of love, terrifying love, love for one’s enemy?

There had been no gesture of love from him when I arrived in his and Alicia’s house at the age of two on the death of my parents. In fact I had no memory of them, of those parents. It was as if they had never been and I had slipped myself down a precipice or hill into Proteus’s hands
to live with Alicia and Harold and other obscure relations as a privileged slave. Harold resented Alicia’s love for me.

‘She was never the same after you came,’ he said. I saw the grief, the torment, the rage in his expression. It shocked me. He spoke so softly I had to listen hard to understand – ‘I learnt the reason why your arrival changed our lives when it was too late for me to profit from it. I was a dying man then …’

‘And still you were lusting after women‚’ I cried.

‘She told you so, did she?’

‘It’s true, is it not?’

He hesitated now for a long time: as if he desired to retreat or to fade into nothingness. And then a grain sprang upon his lips, the grain of confessional need. A subtle dam broke in the abyss between us and he cried. – ‘I learnt when it was too late
that
you
were
my
son,
Anselm
.
No one had told me before. They kept it from me. Your mother did. Alicia did. Proteus did.’

‘Your
son
?’ I recoiled. It was my turn to be filled with terror, to taste as never before the spirit of hate he had offered to me. A dizziness arose. How had one arrived here, by what retraced steps of Dream? A ruined corridor of space, yes, that’s where I now stood. There had been the beggar’s rags in the gate of Home (I remembered that). There had been the subtle river upon Alicia’s vase (I remembered that); and the ladder I had climbed from the warehouse of Proteus’s cinema to gauge a deeper self-knowledge of the theatre and the industry of the great Dead who were my mythical and real (however
dangerous
) antecedents. Strong meat is the spirit of hate.

‘It’s not true. It’s not true. My true parents …’ I stopped. Who were my real parents?

Harold’s face was much darker now as if the corridor had been overshadowed by the first intimations of a storm. I began to consider how to trip him up, how to lay bare his lie. Alicia had often said he was a ‘good’ liar. ‘He’s a master player.’

‘The parents you believe in who died when you were two are a tale that Proteus invented.’

‘Why did he not tell me the truth?’

‘He and Alicia signed a bond to keep it secret. Had they not your mother would not have given you up. I was not to be told until she elected to do so. I thought I could buy everything. I could buy the beauty of nature, I dreamt of a child I would purchase with the blood of money. Money bleeds, Anselm. Money is a powerful passion in nature’s estate and garden of Roses, Rose-flesh, Rose-limbs,
Rose-breasts
. Money lies between men and women in bed to give teeth to their offspring. I invested in such teeth and the Rose sisters plucked them from me and left me hollow, drawn. I learnt of you, that you were my son, when it was too late.’

How much did I now desire to protest but was unable to speak!

‘I bought the first Rose sister with potent money, Anselm. I forced her to sleep with me.
Please listen
!’

I had blocked my ears with Proteus’s wax but on seeing his face now, his expression of greatest need,
knew
beyond a shadow of doubt that he needed my listening mind, my responsive – however repelled – spirit.

Incredible but true. Needed me.
Needed
to
confess
to
me.
Needed me so much that were I to refuse to listen the scaffolding of the great Play, the corridor, the ladder,
everything
(however apparently fixed and solid) would lose its spark of farflung, interior
rehabilitation
of the mystery of Conscience within doomed forebears and intimate,
self-reflecting
creatures. It seemed extraordinary that his need of me, someone as frail as me, was so crucial to the substance of the Play. Need of the living dreamer in the halls, the dimensions, the panoramas of complex, parallel existences of life and death.

I turned away from him for a moment and looked into the storm that overshadowed the corridor.
There
was
a
Presence
there
. Yes, a presence. A presence far greater, far more mysterious than the ‘living absences’ I had invoked, painted, sculpted. It seemed to embrace us all within the Dream-play.
It drew me to recall the ‘shattering peace’ that I had glimpsed in the beggar’s eyes within the gate of Home when the burden upon him lifted for an instant into the uncanny reversal of all expectations and premises of myth one anticipates or
entertains
. Perhaps that Presence had been there overshadowing every retraced footfall I had made but I had not felt it as truly as I did now.

‘The Rose twin-sisters‚’ Harold confessed, ‘both became pregnant by me.’

My first reaction to this was a sense of curious anticlimax. It seemed banal, nothing new, just plain sexual business in a nihilistic age. How does sexual licence, sexual freedom of expression, that an age takes for granted matter, bear upon, or fit into, the moral business of sacred theatre?

‘It fits into the business,’ Harold said, ‘it fits because it bruises our iron-clad scars and opens an abyss between exploited nature and the ground of reconciliation between ourselves and those we have abused.’