The Carnival Trilogy (5 page)

They had soon left the game of cricket behind and were abreast of the Alms House gate. Thomas peered through the bars. They stroked his eyes like gigantic lashes borrowed from the mask of the sun. Some of the inmates were seated on benches in a burnt-earth enclosure beside a straggly garden with a rose and a lily. Aunt Alice had risen from a bench. She moved around the enclosure like an ancient, sailing doll. Her faded dress reached to her ankles to kiss with the faintest whispering sound the cracked leather of her boots. It was the hour of exercise when the players or puppets in this other kind of dance or game limbered up before daylight supper. Who was she to lead the dance? Who was Aunt Alice? Was she Thomas’s real aunt? She was not. Indeed you may recall, gentle reader, my saying earlier in this book that I have no record of Thomas’s relations except that he was young Masters’ cousin. Even that is unreliable since terms like “cousin” were loosely and inaccurately addressed to distant relations or no relations at all in Plantation New Forest.

Alice was everybody’s ancient purgatorial relative. The dustman called her “aunt”, so did the postman and the drivers of delivery vans and nurses and less uniformed, even nondescript, personages of Carnival. Rumour had it that Aunt Alice had been married to a high-ranking civil service star who had lived but a couple of blocks away from the Alms House. That was an age ago. She had been his third wife. The marriage had been contracted in his sixty-first year (she was then fifty-one or fifty-two) when he had been in retirement for four or five years and was in receipt of a pension. (Civil servants retreated at fifty-five or fifty-six as befitted stars within the Carnival sun.)

His first wife had died from tuberculosis. His second wife (one Charlotte I was informed by Masters) had skilfully stripped him of everything in his early middle age – all his property, in the heat of their romance, had been put in her name – and his former assets were to pass to her children by the marriage she made after their divorce. So it was that his pension, a good one by the standards of the day, kept the wolf from Alice’s door until his death when his pension ceased and she received nothing at all in her own right. It seemed grossly unfair in that he had contributed to the Widows and Orphans Fund all his working life. These contributions were deemed ineffectual in that she became his wife
after
his retirement.

I gleaned the uncertain facts from Masters.

How long, I wondered, had Alice been an inmate in the Alms House? Ten years or fifteen or ages? No one knew. I learnt, however, that her surname was Bartleby. No relation, I hasten to say, to Herman Melville’s
Bartleby
,
though
fiction-spirit
, fiction-blood, runs between them. He, Melville’s poor Bartleby, had died a young man, whereas she, like her husband who died in his seventies, sailed into old age; she learnt to dance in the Carnival of the Alms House for her supper.

I checked the New Forest
Argosy
to see whether it may have glimpsed her genius in the early twentieth century and pleaded her cause. Not a line, not a word, not the flimsiest paragraph existed. It seemed remarkable that the widow of a star should have fallen into the oblivion of a dance of spirit in becoming everybody’s purgatorial aunt. Masters intervened – rather peremptorily when we discussed the matter in Holland Park – to declare it was less remarkable than I thought. The gulf between a “star” and the “inmates of a cosmic alms house” was less wide than it seemed; it was as narrow as that between a privileged survivor in space and the gestating wilderness of intergalactic species …

Thomas held fast to the bars of the gate within the mask of the sun he wore. “Aunt Alice,” he cried. She stopped and
looked at him. The elongated eyelashes of the mask, as he peered through the gate, ran down his face and divided it into segments. It was a curious innovation. A human child yet many segments of plantation psyche, many segments of global uncertainty, to which Alice responded out of the strangest, almost old-fashioned, pity of heaven.

Thomas, her purgatorial nephew, could not articulate what he felt. It was too peculiar, too overwhelming, for him, however precocious he was.
But
he
felt
it
deeply
all
the
same.
He felt the museum profit and the museum loss of
bureaucratic
Inferno in Widows and Orphans state, the elusive and untouchable spell of non-pensionable spirit that secretes itself in oblivion. Aunt Alice was nebulously related to him as to young Masters. She was sister to the “mask of the cuckold”. A nebulous relationship in that Carnival possessed no identifiable role for her and had thrust her into limbo’s purgatory, limbo’s heaven, as a consequence. The “mask of the cuckold” was a privileged humiliation, it sheltered the “mother of god” and gave legitimate status to the child, Masters. But Alice, the sister of the mask, had sunken so far beneath conventional contact, beneath pensionable and
non-pensionable
desert, that her universal fictional kinship to humanity expressed itself as nothing more than a sailing dress above lined, wrinkled boots, in the limbo heaven of New Forest Alms House.

Was someone actually at home in the pathos of her dress? Was she the prey of phantom nephews and nieces, phantom injustices, phantom diseases, diseased Widows and Orphans state, diseased unemployment in the decade of the 1920s that cast its imprecise, its inexact, parentage of shadow into generations unborn?

Diseased as they were, they sought to toss her pennies to dance. And when they had nothing to toss, they reminded her of the taxes they paid. For without their money, they claimed, there would have been no theatre of the Alms House in which Aunt Alice played the paradoxes of limbo’s
evolution
into other spheres, the paradoxes of the widow of a dead
star and the sister-in-law of the mother of god. Not that they understood such comedy of destitution and non-existent status of wealth. Yet they applauded unwittingly by calling her “aunt”, spirit-aunt, oblivion’s aunt.

Thomas also applauded though he was terrified by “oblivion’s aunt” and by the thought of being swallowed or lost forever in her massive, sailing body. Alice understood. She felt profoundest compassion for him. How close is “oblivion’s aunt” to the seed of heaven that evolves into a family tree of spirit? Her curious dance (Thomas was uncertain whether she were a dream-puppet or sailing
flesh-and
-blood bound for divinity’s shore) mirrored the division between the two realms he had glimpsed through barred gate and segmented mask, namely, the realm of oblivion or absolute limbo and the realm of Carnival evolution into a family of spirit; and as she danced he felt he could trace the division within her, puppet breast/fertile breast, wasted breast/active breast at which he had never sucked but which she gave to him now.

It was a colonial dance that responded to his deprivations; it symbolized hunger for proof, thirst for proof of genuine survival. It seemed to imply that he too, like Masters, had come close to extinction, and Alice’s breast proffered to him now in the dance was a gesture of succour after all that he had forgotten he had received. It matched Masters’ assumption of kingship. It matched that dream-kingship with a
dream-knighthood
for Thomas, a dream-enterprise of the milk of freedom that he (Thomas) so desperately needed to
prove.

Thomas bowed, he knelt to Alice. He was the plantation king’s knight. In the milk of freedom, the breast of freedom, he perceived the obscure Magna Carta of the womb. And of the grave. Thomas reached out through the bars of dream but he could not quite seize her or touch her. He wished to prove her reality by sculpting her to embrace the rose and the lily in the straggly Alms House garden. He wished to sculpt the shadows of great knights, great ladies, great households buried in her eclipsed breast.

“Take the measure of any statue in a formal square or garden,” Masters said to me. “It weeps with bird droppings. If you doubt those tears then you need to poke a finger into a bird’s hindquarters for the tear duct of a stone knight or a stone lady. But Thomas’s comedy and tragedy was that much as he tried, Alice’s eyes defeated him in the sculptures he sought to make of the animal/human kingdom. No material tear rose there, neither faeces nor fire. The shadow of a rose, perhaps, the decrepitude of a lily, that was all.
They
wept
for
mankind.
And
that
Thomas could not prove. She was the one creature, shadow of a dancing rose, he could not touch. And yet she was drawn to him, she pitied him (as my mother pitied me), she loved him,
she
loved
him
,
imagine that! with the kind of love that is incapable of destroying its siblings. Some say she was a fraud that only a colonial, barren age could fabricate. I say she was the catalyst of fame at the heart of families of non-existence. She was the mystery of genius within the most unpropitious economic circumstances, a mystery that ran deeper than proof or parody of the evolution of limbo into heaven.”

*

There were three stages remaining after the Alms House in Sir Thomas’s journey with the market woman: first, the great Market-place of New Forest; second, the Bridge over the Crocodile Canal; third, the tenement plantation range in which the market woman lived with the czar of Carnival, Flatfoot Johnny.

These stages constituted, Masters said, a descent into the modulated Inferno, modulated Purgatory, of
twentieth-century
colonial limbo. I have no technologic recording of Sir Thomas’s progression as Child of the Carnival year,
precocious
human child of 1926. All I have are my conversations with Masters and a profusion of notes I shall endeavour to paraphrase. I hear his voice as if it were yesterday. I remember the hot summer day in the 1970s when he invited me to visualize the three remaining stages as further evidence
of what he called a “twentieth-century divine comedy of existence”.

It was indeed a hot June day in London. I drank lemonade and orange; Masters drank beer and spoke with staccato bursts of energy in reply to my questions. I sensed his depression. He suffered often from acute depression, the lineaments of which drove him to compose the paradoxical masks of Carnival that he inwardly wore or perceived upon others arising from the depths into the heights and vice versa. Towards evening our discourse became more even, more resigned (if that is the word), yet deep and
many-layered
. The day had cooled and the sky was tender, frail with quintessential smoke. There were brush-strokes across that aerial smoke suggesting a curious moderation of fire. The air was still and as the evening deepened, that strange
moderation
drew Masters’ attention. His inwardly masked face looked eager now, crest-fallen yet ecstatic. (The sensation of many series of inward masks, as if his naked face were dressed inwardly, never outwardly, was something I could never shake off when I met him.)

He was pointing to the trees along Holland Villas Road. “Sponges of shadow,” he declared, “porous with a darkening rain of light that breathes stillness.” It all intimated a quality of fire that we needed to translate, he said. “Take the irregular line of the dark bunched trees over there against the evening sky. Follow that line with your eyes. Look! it shoots up here and there into points resembling the edges of flame still and black. In such apparent immobility, such tone, I detect a version of moderation and fire.” As he spoke I remembered the sponge and its mysterious ingredient of “light-rain”. Was rain too a translation of liquid fire that stabs and blackens the earth as the trees blacken the sky?

I saw and felt inwardly what he meant by “moderation”. I saw the cosmos of my age as an inward series of gradations of flame resembling fire, yet other than fire, as the cloth of night upon the evening sky differs from ultimate night.

“Fire consumes but when veiled or rendered apparently
opaque in substance and action, it imbues the bursting seed, the veined leaf, the arteried wood, with fertility and
regenerative
being. Each seed is the flaming birth of a star across light years that are rendered opaque in the veils of a tree. That tree comes from within the spaces of a seed replete with invisible light years. We need to sense the veils within veils within us and around us to see how everything burns so intricately, so imperceptibly, that it seems utterly still, utterly solid, rather than the phoenix of judgement day spirit aroused in the ash of space.”

“What about the seasons,” I asked him, “how do these gradations vary from season to season?”

“There is an opaque fire or veil of spring, another opacity or veil of winter, another of summer, another of autumn. Each is an intricate torch into seasonal and non-seasonal forces that resemble each other but differ from each other. The fire that consumes the dead beast resembles the fire that
regenerates
or fertilizes the life of the imagination, but they are not the same. That was Thomas’s difficulty in sculpting Alice, in weighing each tear that fell from her eyes to water the rose garden of paradise.”

As he spoke I thought of winter, how the boles of the trees along Holland Villas Road and Addison Road turn
black
in the winter raining light, a blackness or tone that contributes to a wonderful transparency in contrasting flesh-and-blood. Indeed what is blackness, what is whiteness, what is opacity, what is transparency, but variations of intricate fire within the heart of memory and emotion?

I thought of autumn and its fossil burning nest in which the phoenix of the year lays its eggs. I thought of spring and the nest of snow from which the sun arises. Masters intervened in the midst of the silence that had descended upon us.

“There is light and light,” he said. “Noonday under the Northern sky is closer to twilight in the Tropics than to the identical hour to which it corresponds under the Equatorial sky. If the blaze of noon at the Equator were to fall in a flash on the Northern world our eyes of dream would scorch. Noon
in the Northern hemisphere falling equally suddenly at the Equator would be a signal of coming night … And if we are to travel back in time, as we speak, you and I, and meet Sir Thomas and the marble woman in the Market-place, then we need to mix light with light, noon with coming night, fire with winter, spring with summer and spring with autumn. We need to sense in paradoxes of light the extended and
multi-layered
luminosities of the cosmos.” As he spoke to me he seemed to reach with the long arm of Carnival and seize the pointed stillness of flame in the sky before us. He plucked that stillness like a subtle torch and waved it in my eyes …