The Carnival Trilogy (8 page)

I felt that Thomas’s uncertainty sprang from a wound that lay so deeply buried in the armour of a civilization that he almost doubted his original perception and wondered whether it had existed at all. So poignant and heart-rending is Doubt when Faith congeals into a fortress that blocks our vision of the starving and the emaciated in every corner of the globe.

Jealousy – on the other hand – was no fortress. It was the cancerous adoration and envy of establishment heroes or masters whose ransacking of species and cultures Sir Thomas found himself unable to achieve under any banner, Christian or Marxist, except as Everyman’s unwitting shadow. If, for instance, Masters instead of himself had collided with the marble/market woman that noon, he (Masters) – I am sure – would have had no compunction in running even more deeply into her, in accusing her of being as blind as he. And so in accompanying her across the Town and the Plantation, he would have clung, I perceived, to their mutual blindness as the foetus in the female body of humanity clings to blind fate, and the female – whose body it is, after all, that the flying
or clinging foetus inhabits – is blind to the accumulating scars of aborted antecedents in a fragmented humanity, a humanity that will turn upon itself at some despairing, later, phallic stage of civilization and penetrate itself as if
nothing
had happened in the past, as if the deed of coitus between man and woman – as if the intercourse of trade between cultures – is totally functional, totally without sensuous imagination or guilt.

(Thus it was that Masters at the age of seventeen as an apprentice-overseer had visited the neighbourhood in which the marble women lived. He had slept with one of them, a compliant marble prostitute, twice his age. Her flesh may as well have been egg or juicy fashion plate or glass. He had penetrated her with scarcely a thought for unseen
companions
, the echoes of shared human mask, the reverberations of hidden conscience his action provoked in Thomas – the cousinly shadow that he trailed behind him in history – and in me, his clerk or biographer of spirit.)

*

Thomas envied Masters; he envied him his capacity to run, to fly, to act, and it almost seemed as if such regression into the body of the glass-mother, or the marble-mistress, were
substantial
with Faith. Whereas he (Thomas), I felt, remained at the mercy of profoundest misgiving. If it were possible I would sculpt his arrival upon the Crocodile Bridge with the liquid tool I had seen that afternoon upon the crest of a wave. It was 1926. A common-or-garden year. Why should I wish to sculpt a passing moment into the Bridge? Precocious as Thomas was, biographer of spirit that I was, we could not say why each and every common-or-garden year or moment cries out to be sculpted in paradoxical contradiction to insane eternity, as if each sculpted fragile year is kin to a spirit one may ape or misconceive but whose innovative reality, whose foreshadowings, naïvetés, whose warnings, cannot be entirely suppressed by the logic of a uniform infinity.

Perhaps it was the sculpture of coming events that Carnival
felt in 1926, the economic depression of the 1930s, the war that would follow that depression. Perhaps it was the
gestation
of a nuclear age to be sculpted in the atom that Carnival felt in 1926. Perhaps it was a nameless foreboding that
Carnival
felt about independence for the colonies of the Inferno, an independence that would lay bare a variety of stigmata that would bleed in the 1950s and 1960s, but succumb to a brute hardening of the flame of blood, to tribal institutions that made all the more ironclad every ritual grievance of the 1970s and 1980s. In 1982 when Everyman Masters died, Carnival’s premonitions in the mask of Sir Thomas had come to a head, I felt, around the globe, and the writing on the Bridge I had nebulously sculpted in backward dream in the labyrinth of time turned into a climate of fear.

*

Thomas was now alone on the Bridge with the faint prophetic sculpture, the bandaged year, falling everywhere into the mist. The Bridge was the naive yet overshadowed vessel of Night, he was the rebel saint, rebel lover, rebel captain of humanity. The mist was ragged sail and bandage, the
coal-black
waters were timbered with the burnt schooner that had stood beside the Market-place. Crocodile bags were sold to tourists and well-to-do people for six shillings apiece, half the cost of the capsized basket of eggs.

“Charlotte Bartleby,” the marble woman said to Thomas before she vanished, “fond of crocodile to store her lipstick in, her sacred nail varnish, mirror, kerchief, and other items and wisps of paper. You can go home now, Boy. No use to come another step with me. My cave is at the bottom of the lane.” She pointed along the false dawn of the dimly lit path with its antiquated road lamp. “You see that lantern like a half-moon down there?” Thomas barely saw the flash of her teeth. She was laughing in the misty darkness. “It hanging by a wire under the belly of a donkey cart that Flatfoot Johnny inscribe ‘Orion chariot’. When you come next time with a piece of gold for each egg,” she was laughing again, “remember,
whether it’s in the day-sky or the night-sky the donkey cart’ll be there by the parapet where I be. You understand, Boy? I easy to find once you pass the Crocodile Bridge constellation.” Before he could protest she was gone. He made an attempt to follow but she waved him back.

Within an afternoon resembling an age he dreamt of defending her against all sovereign powers that sought to ride her, or run into her, all overbearing masters.

Perhaps he had been moved more deeply and dangerously than he understood by the net of counterpoint (HE SAYS, SHE SAYS) that the market woman had flung over Flatfoot Johnny when he raised his fist to crush Charlotte in the Carnival Market-place. Perhaps from that moment he became a
dangerous
rebel. Perhaps rebellion upheld the invisible net in which Flatfoot was caught, upheld it and converted it into the sparked basket of incipient sexuality or pubertal age
interwoven
with mist and sail and bandage. Sparked basket! Capsized basket!

Thomas was about to go, albeit reluctantly, when he and I perceived Flatfoot Johnny approaching the Crocodile Bridge. Johnny had been drinking in the late afternoon and his movements were even more cramped and shuffling than usual. The restraints of the net bit into his soul. He was angry. Thomas and I were possessed by a sinking feeling at the pit of our basket stomach, capsized feeling, sparked feeling, acute foreboding. Flatfoot’s powers, however shackled or netted, were extraordinary. Not only because of his formidable back but because of mutual incapacities between himself and us, between rulers and rebels, mutual Byzantine masquerade in which the net of majesty that Johnny trailed around his limbs was a sieve of longing in ourselves. We knew through porous basket, or sparked tapestry of Night, the frustrations that Johnny endured as Carnival czar of Russia in New Forest.

Every shilling, every dollar the czar spent on rum matched the capsized basket of eggs Thomas had blindly engineered in involuntary social experiment or collision of cultures. The
art of Carnival revolution lay in involuntary match,
involuntary
equation, matched sovereign and common peoples. One throne makes another footstool visible. The czar’s indulgences matched the gold, wounded El Dorado, Thomas had agreed to pay.

I sought to read Thomas’s comedy of values in “art of Carnival revolution”. I sought a link between the puberty of the twentieth century – the growing pains of adolescent humanity – and the uncertain desire, the uncertain necessity, to right age-old wrongs everywhere. I sought a link between vulgar relief and comedy, between comedy and tragedy, a link so curious that one blended into the other or lapsed into the other, the serious into the absurd, the absurd into terror or blood or revolution.

The die was cast when the czar passed Thomas on the Bridge. Johnny was drunk. Thomas smelt danger for the marble woman. He kept pace with the czar along the path where primitives trundled, or lived in, cannon. It was a curious scene, but, in point of fact, Thomas dreamt he was descending a ladder or a bandage of mist into the sky of the canal under the Bridge where he had seen the natives move rockets or crocodile weaponry.

What astonished us as we descended the ladder was not the awesome power of such weaponry but – because of Johnny’s shuffling netted footsteps – a sense of absurdity as if Thomas and Johnny and I were inside Charlotte’s bag, in the lipstick, in the mirror, in the other items of sacred toiletry within a crocodile’s belly.

We would have laughed at Jonah in the whale of a crocodile but the idiot giant might have turned upon his unseen companions, seen us in spite of everything, seized us, bled us. Lipstick blood!
Eaten
us
!
In the false dawn in which we had paused for a moment of vulgar relief Johnny seemed an ancient woman wiping her falsely reddened lips and seated upon a black chamber-pot with murder in her heart.

The intimacy of Carnival murder executed in a closet, in Charlotte’s crocodile bag, gave way all at once to blazing coal
(as if we had flown around the globe from Iron Age sugar mills in black canals to electronic faeces). Johnny arose. Thomas and I stood now somewhere in the roof or the palate of the crocodile, under its night-sky eyes or stars. The inmates of the caves had ceased to trundle crocodile and were cooking their night-time meal in the open barracks of the plantation.

Johnny seemed oblivious of their activity, but they called out to him as to a foul emperor they adored.

“Hey Flatfoot Mask, hey Strong Boy, you drunk or what? You lips stick together or what? Say a damn word. You don’t hear we praying to you night after night as we sit on coal?”

Flatfoot Mask saw nothing, heard nothing, he was already a dead man, and his progress was so slow that Thomas and I had ample time (like an archaeologist, an anthropologist, excavating the body of space, assessing its cracks, its crevices) to inspect the coal pots on which the natives cooked and in which the lighted eyes of darkness shone to miniaturize far-away storms blown by cosmic winds in the anatomy of god. Strips of iron or some nameless metal rested on each coal pot and these supported a frying pan, in some instances, or a vessel with rice or a saucepan with beans or with meat for those who were phenomenally lucky.

The strips of iron created the effect of a laced mask. Within each open segment of the mask, the deposit of an animal face glowered at us. The coal sometimes lay lumpy and naked in its concave bed. Tripods were then constructed above it from which the saucepans hung. Where neither tripod stood nor mask lay above the eyes of the crocodile, the long arm of Carnival had fashioned a metal bar or spit.

Thomas felt himself masked by their vulgar and banal appetite, vulgar and banal spit. So much so that he led me under the eyes of coal, in the crocodile’s grasp yet hidden from it, on the blind inner side of the crocodile’s skull, as if he possessed a cosmic faculty or guideline born of a globe or planet that defecates in space, cooks in space, apparently beneath, apparently above, the light-year stars.

It was this profound “beneath/above skull and anatomy” of
the plantation Inferno that gave him a route through time of which the keepers of the coal pot and the chamber-pot were unaware. And that was just as well. For whatever their complaints, or unanswered prayers, Johnny was president and revolution was taboo. And yet for one moment when we passed by they seemed to look up at unseen Thomas like a dog lipsticking its wounds. Such was their presentiment of the androgynous miracle of Carnival revolution.

Flatfoot had now gained the lantern moon under the donkey cart and Thomas said to me that his vertical descent into the underworld sky of the canal, upon bandage, through absurd crocodile belly, lipsticked dog, within the shell and the roof of coal, beneath/above the stars, had ceased and revolved into horizontal arm or axis of Carnival. He felt a commotion in his stomach. He felt faint and dizzy. He had scarcely eaten a scrap or a morsel since his flight from the foreshore in search of Masters. And the sight of food had enlivened and sickened him.

His phallic entrails akin to the Milky Way were turning. Sparked basket of pubertal sex. He had glimpsed the marble woman’s breasts. She stood in her cave. He glimpsed her through the radii of the spokes in the donkey cart wheel. She, unlike the others, was cooking her meal inside as if each spoke that passed through her were a spit to toast meat or milk. Or so it seemed to Thomas with his masked eyes glued to her. In point of fact she was engaged in peeling sweet potatoes. She had shed her dress for a low petticoat. Her statuesque limbs and breasts revolved slowly in the wheel of his eyes like a slow motion legend of storm. She had
anticipated
Johnny’s flatfooted approach and her humours, her tensions, obscurely matched his. Flatfoot cried through the revolving door, “Where the damn Boy who smash the egg? I see you with he in the Market-place today.” The woman watched him. She tested the strength of the net she had flung over him. Thomas perceived through the wheel that she was unsure. Johnny was so drunk he seemed capable of rending every garment, uprooting every spoke.

“Who tell you all this?” she asked, playing for time.

“I hear. I hear. Not from you but I hear. You take the Boy home? You see he parents? You make them pay?”

“He has no parents,” the marble woman said quietly. “But he promise to come back and pay in gold.” It was a joke. Thomas hoped Johnny would see it and desist from
uprooting
the wheel.

“No parents?” Flatfoot exploded. “Is what cock-and-bull story the Boy spin you? He’s a white Boy though he coloured. He got white parents.”

“I tell you he’s an orphan.”

“Orphan hell! I know what orphan mean. It mean he cycling with mother in bed. Orphan hell!” Johnny glared around the cave as if he were searching for someone.

“You
filthy
,
Johnny.
You
in my bed every night. I pray to you to believe …”

“I don’t believe. I know. I know what you up to with Boys, golden Boys. A piece of gold for an egg!”