The Carnival Trilogy (52 page)

So it was with Ross and Penelope within the great Night of the savage encroachment of space in which the very texture of the universe had begun to change and the stuff of reality drew us back into reconsiderations of our private selves and of the past and the present we had never entertained. They had been seized but their resistance was such that they could not part, or give, any portion of themselves that could provide them with a new threshold into a testing and hazardous community. Freedom, their ideal freedom, became a curious obstacle.

Ross knew what I was implying and he turned upon me with a dry, almost angry, smile.

‘You
capitulated, Anselm, as soon as you saw the savages of space erupting
not
from the heart of darkness but from the heart of the unconscious.
You
are no Conradian idealist! Idealists always make the best pessimists. You are something different. Closer to a saint perhaps? I wonder. God knows who the devil you are. Penelope thinks you are half in love with her. El Dorado is a fitting place for a queen and her suitors and revelations of ancient kingship through which to revive a concept of sainthood. It starts with your
capitulation
! Your capitulation to the savages is such that your brother’s evil deeds may well become yours in the history books of another age.

‘You need to be careful, Anselm! Soon it may be said that Canaima never existed at all. What potent non-existence! So potent every saint stands to lose his good name. You stand to
lose your good name. You performed the things he did. You become the actor within his mask. Do not say I did not warn you, Anselm, of such terrible myth. Possession! That’s the bleak word. That’s what it is. The acceptance of another’s crimes and sins.’

He stopped and I listened in the starlit Night for the winged feather of angelic species as the globe moved and the stars faintly altered their course.

‘Danger, yes,’ I said at last. I pondered the fires far out in space. I pondered the nature of captor and captive. I
pondered
my ignorance of ultimate freedom, ultimate fate.

‘Danger yes, terrifying myth. You are right, Ross. But in such danger lies a catalyst of purification. Creation is a risk! You know that. Daemons and furies are a measure of balance within the lightning storm of creation that binds us to sky and earth. And at the heart of every trial, within every danger of possession – possession by what appears to be evil – lies a catalyst of purification in weighing the fabric of deeds performed by another. Without that weighing, that intricate balance, without the necessary truth of purification that applies to all of us, we may march a hundred, a thousand abreast, and we are still pilgrims of the void. We are lost. We may swear we have clean hands in the marketplace of freedom, that we are untainted by evil, and still we are lost, lost in the hubris of consciousness.

‘And so I plead again. Surrender yourselves to your captors before it is too late and you forfeit a true scrutiny of the Shadows that you bear. I know your pride in the appearances of freedom. Take Penelope!’ I stared into the heart of the starlit Night and into the drowned child upon her breasts whose outline was becoming clear to me now. ‘I see
something
there. I see a different kind of catalyst from mine. Another form of balance, another factor of necessary truth in weighing the fabric of possession.’

I stared into her arms and almost recoiled.

‘Tell me, Anselm! What do you see?’

‘I see the corpse of heroism,’ I said gently, ‘weighed in a balance that demarcates men and women.’

She gave a start as if her memory had been jolted.

‘What is true heroism, Penelope? What balance divides heroism into sheer possession of others, the sheer hunt, on one hand, and necessary sacrament, on the other, the
necessary
ritual burial of the stranger one bears who brings news of the chains that bind us, chains we hide from ourselves, for they have been upon us so long we have forgotten they are there.

‘To break those chains we need to see ourselves as captives in the hand of a stranger. We need to see our acceptance of a hidden state of unfreedom masked by ideal freedom in an eruptive light, the light of the strangest self-surrender. And that’s where the intricate balance lies between heroism that possesses and inner courage that liberates

I was unsure of the intricate design I had seen and of the words that had come upon my lips. Nevertheless they had scarcely dropped into the starlit Night when the savages encircled Penelope. They took the frail body from her arms. The stage was clear. The shape of Canaima had vanished. And now in its place appeared Penelope’s child.

‘Black,’ she said wonderingly. ‘It’s black.’

Ross came forward and placed an arm around her.

‘It’s the light of the stars in this curious transparency, this strange atmosphere, that makes it appear black. It’s so ancient.’

‘How could my child be ancient?’

She wanted to rush upon the stage and lift the child back upon her. She wanted to close her eyes and sleep. But Ross held her close. The savages made a wall around her. We turned and stared once again at the child. The light of the constellations had changed and it was as if we were looking now at the skeleton, starred, infant stature of a king. There were bracelets of gold on his ankles and wrists.

‘Impossible,’ said Penelope. ‘It’s a trick. They took my
child and replaced it with the Macusi fossil of a prince.’ And then she gave a faint scream that clothed itself in the echo of a drum. There was a silence. She was pointing to another adornment we had failed to see. Medals on the young king’s chest! They glittered like marvellous coins in the
constellations
of the Night. And before she spoke I knew. I had seen those medals on a warrior-ghost, on the Governor of a Colony, as he came over a hill on the first bank of the river of space. Simon’s medals!

‘Simon was not black,’ she cried, ‘except on one
occasion
…’ She stopped. Ross had withdrawn his arm from around her. ‘Let me descend on to the stage,’ he cried, ‘and I’ll show you, Penelope, that there’s nothing there. No medals. It’s the deceptive light. Look how it shines. As if someone is playing with a candle.’ But Penelope was eager to resume the thread of her tale in the Dream. She restrained him. She held him back from the stage.

‘I should have told you long ago,’ she said to him.

‘Told me what?’

‘Simon’s family and mine were neighbours in Dartford, Kent.’

‘I know that,’ said Ross.

‘Did you know that Simon was the victim of an accident when he was nine or ten?’

Ross did not reply. It was news to him.

‘He was struck by a car, a runaway driver. On the face of it he was lucky. A broken rib, a sprained arm, a bruise on his forehead. The car struck him a glancing blow. I thought it was nothing until I visited him in hospital. He asked me whether the runaway driver had been caught and I said No. A change came over him then. His face grew black. The bruise on his forehead turned into a fire.
Look!
there
it
is!
on
the
stage
now!
The
fire!
It’s burning him up. He’s stopped breathing.’

‘Impossible,’ said Ross.

‘I tell you, Simon died,’ said Penelope. ‘I was convinced he
would never come back.’ She was possessed by the gravity of the starlit Night with its constellation of warring kings and imperial crusades. The starlit cloak of Night parted. The ancient, royal body of the child-king in the pit, or on the stage, floated up to our eyes. We were possessed by the starlit Night. I heard Penelope’s voice as if it came from far away. ‘I was a child, a bit highly-strung perhaps.
But
that
look!
You
see
it
now,
don’t
you?
I shouted for a nurse. “Simon’s died,” I cried. They all came running. My mother took me away. She was amazed and horrified at the way
I
looked. I had become the ghost. “Whatever came over you, Penelope,” she said. “Such a scene.” I tried to say, “Simon died. I know he did. It’s the runaway driver. Simon was so angry he fled into becoming a corpse. Angry that the runaway driver had escaped.” That’s all I wanted to say. But I couldn’t. I didn’t. Until now. It’s a relief. When he came out of hospital I couldn’t shake off the feeling that he owned me. Yes, women – even queens – have long been the property of the realm.
Owned
me.
But I hid it in myself. It became an unspoken legend that blended into respectable ideal, respectable
convention
, respectable freedom. We grew up together.
Childhood
sweethearts (whatever that means) became adolescent lovers. He went to public school and university. We fell deeper in love, we got married. He became a hero. He never forgot the runaway driver. He saw him on every battlefield. He grew nerves of steel and a jealous fury and rage.

‘Before the accident he was a marvellous child. After the accident, though I hid it from myself, he became another person. I married that other person. I married a hero. I felt his fist on my arm. You know the rest.’

A veil came over the Night. When it lifted the medals had disappeared from the boy-king’s chest. He lay on the stage. He seemed as old as Time. A fossil pre-Columbian king. A king of ancient Greece. Penelope’s expression had acquired a wonderful calm. She looked closely at the child she had pulled up from the river of space. It had floated up to our
eyes but now it lay once again on the stage. Its two hands were open to the sky. One hand was tense and drawn, the other relaxed, so relaxed it seemed to weigh in its spirit the link of a broken chain. Penelope’s inner Dream-courage had made it possible for her to retrace her steps and to confront a spectre that had dominated her life. She was free. A numinous, starlit freedom that travellers may find at the heart of a desert. She had surrendered herself to the frail, magical king in the pit. The chain she had long hidden from herself was broken at last.

Ross was shaken but he preserved his steady and fateful aplomb. He had no hesitation now in surrendering in his turn the child he had brought from the river of the dead. ‘My child I am sure is simplicity itself,’ he said. ‘Nothing like Penelope’s.’ But was it? Canaima had vanished, Penelope’s king had vanished. And in their place lay Ross’s child.
Simplicity
itself
he had said. I was glad for my Dream-narrative was simplicity itself. So Ross and I had much in common. We knew the face at once and the slender body of the child robed in the evanescent cloak of the Waterfall. Here at last was one of the drowned children who had danced with the eel. We knew her
immediately
. She had been one of the finest young voices in the Mission House. Clear as the laughter of a bell. Sometimes soft as a flute. Ross’s expression changed. He had seen her dancing in school. He remembered her black, lustrous hair, her grave child’s face. She had danced in his class a day or two before she drowned. Was this the body of a uniform race? Were these the eyes to mirror a long primitive queue awaiting its turn to ride the globe? Were these the eyes of the new conquistadores?

Ross was humane. His vocation was that of a teacher, his temperament that of a sceptic, an agnostic, despite his
religious
calling. I saw from his expression – the expression of a complex suitor – that he was on the verge of surrendering himself to … To what? To whom? Not to conquest. To the miracle of hope in a child-queen who might still breach an epic formula.

It was a question of personal relationships, personal involvements. Ross surrendered himself to the child-queen who had danced in his class on the eve of descending into the sky of the Waterfall with its pooled stars under the guardian rocks and clouds.

Our captors (were they perhaps our guardians now?) began to beat the drums of Home, the drums of the turning world. Not frenziedly but with a haunting rhythmic pulse, like rain that seemed to encompass us all and as the music widened and flew we were caught up in its embrace.

This rain of Night seemed to glimmer in the stars. Captors and captives began to loom in the new darkness of the Dream, the new guardian rocks, the new guardianship of sky and cloud at the heart of the Waterfall of space, a theatre of interchangeable masks and fates and elements upon savages and civilizations. The rain that fell upon us was so fine-spun and delicate that it seemed an impossibility when within it we discerned the burden and mystery of the rising sun.