The Carnival Trilogy (9 page)

“Johnny, you dead drunk,” the marble woman said sharply. Her voice was sharp but tired, peculiarly downcast as if Johnny’s “dead drunk” condition matched an area of stalemate in her at the pit of a wheeling imagination. She had changed, she was more vulnerable than ever, she was
without
an
audience.
It came as a shock to perceive this. In the Market-place with an audience to cheer, to applaud generously, she had been inventive enough and able to net the czar’s fist. With Thomas, she had been versatile enough, perceptive enough of a wheel of creatures he brought with him, the dancer Aunt Alice, the fleet-footed Masters, and me, divine clerk or biographer of spirit, who needed their guidance. But now that she felt she had lost us, on her own with the idiot giant, she fell on her knees, as if the wheel had been uprooted, had indeed fallen flat; she seemed to pray, she seemed to fumble for HE SAYS, SHE SAYS, she seemed unnaturally docile. And the flattened wheel almost made her believe she was the individual solitary whore, the individual rotten whore that the idiot giant said she was. She was the
wife and mother of orphans in a polluted, stilled universe.

“No rotten gold,” the czar said suddenly. “Give me
gut-deep
money, bloody money, carve me honest money.” He raised his fist to strike but Thomas could stand it no more. He tugged at the wheel, it resisted, he pulled again, it moved, it spun, he felt it turning into a community of mutual spaces, mutual creatures. He jumped miraculously through the wheel from “beneath/above” and seized the knife on the table, raised it so quickly it knitted afresh the net that had been rent, and then with a sensation that
her
hand was in
his
,
he plunged the dagger into Johnny’s frame.

As the blood came I wondered if it were true that the wheel was turning. Thomas was dizzy all over again, he stroked it, he stroked the woman’s prayer. The blood was true. The transfigurative wound or revolution came within an ace of realization but in his immaturity, her immaturity, my immaturity – in the way we were locked into self-perpetuating order and primitive habit – the revolution eluded us again. The woman sprang to her feet. She was still, she could scarcely speak, and then she found the voice of terrible oracle. She wrung her hands.

“O me god, Johnny the czar of Russia, he dead.”

It was all she could say. She was lost. She seized her savage love, her savage Johnny. She wept to break his heart and hers.

The czar is dead, long live the czar in the cave of abortive revolution.

In 1931 at the age of Carnival fourteen Masters became a Boy at the famous College in Brickdam next to Aunt Alice’s dancing school in the Alms House. His cosmic
apprenticeship
as princeling-overseer of the sugar estate of the globe formally commenced. Above the portals to the College was written an injunction attributed to Heracleitus the Obscure:

A high priority on the curriculum was athletics. And within the first year of his apprenticeship Masters shone at the Athletic Meet in two of the under-fifteen events. He beat Merriman in the hundred yards and Philip of Spain in the high jump.

After seventy-five yards (in which he kept me at his side and led me in a dream) he and Merriman were ahead of the field and suddenly it seemed to Masters that Merriman would win. The field stretched into a cave at the entrance to which stood two coal-black guardians or referees holding a ribbon or bandage chest high.

There was a fiendish grin on Merriman’s face. His skull shone through the seed of his hair that had been oiled. Masters and I were on the verge of panic. We saw the merry shadow of the false shaman at our side in the collegiate Inferno. We saw that everything we had gained on the beach could be plucked from us now in the laughter of Merriman. Such are the ruses of diseased Ambition. There is rape and rape. There is the seizure of others, there is conquest. That is one form of rape. There is panic – that is another form – panic in being overtaken by a grin.

Masters made his last crucial effort and succeeded in breasting the tape at the entrance to the cave ahead of Merriman. He found it impossible to say in the interior darkness that enveloped him to what degree he had outrun diseased and merry Ambition, to what degree he had profited from it. The sudden darkness left me blind in the cave and I returned to the sun dazzled and uncertain of where I had been.

Philip of Spain was the nickname given to the Boy Rodrigues, whose antecedents were Venezuelan. He was loose-limbed, sorrowful-looking, and his tutors concentrated on making him spell “crocodile tears” on every page of his exercise book until he had accumulated a body of waves he scaled in the mental high jump. He jumped with a priestly cassock on his head over the bar of the world, into other people’s hearts, other people’s Milky Way entrails.

Each contestant was given three chances to clear the bar or to retire from conquest. Each clearance ran into decades, generations, even centuries, and was a signal for the referees or guardians to take the bar up another inch, another
generation
. And thus the mouth of the cave heightened into an interior darkness in which a drama of the soul festered or transfigured the elements, the constellations.

Philip was set to win. He had cleared every vertical extension of the cave in which Masters dreamt he discerned the ghostly donkey cart of Christ and the ghostly wheel of revolution that ran through Christ’s imperial masks. There were other relics as well in the cave. What a distance lay between a donkey ride and an emperor’s Byzantine saddle in heaven. It was this thought that drove Masters to face his opponent when the high jump seemed lost. The bar had been raised still another inch, another generation, and Philip had cleared it but Masters had knocked it flat. He jumped, knocked it flat again. Should he fail in the third attempt, he would have lost.

He looked at his priestly opponent. He perceived nothing really “priestly” about him. He was more of an engineer or an
architect than a priest. His faculties were primed to structural measures, to siftings, to making adjustments, making divisions, to creating a shield over his interests, an archaic mask, modern adjustments in the archaic shield, partitions, edifices, boundary lines, division of spoils; except that, in an odd way this time, diseased, archaic high jump Ambition was such that it had begun to speculate on diseased frontiers, on a clearance into all or nothing.

“What do you mean by all or nothing?” Masters wanted to ask the budding twentieth-century Philip of Venezuela in a collegiate Inferno or colony. (“Spain” was a nickname for Venezuela. Venezuela, it was said, contemplated invading New Forest. Indeed Philip Rodrigues was loose-limbed and athletic enough to accommodate many skeletons in the cupboard of America, many invaders, many old and new invasions.)

Masters gauged the bar for the last time. He ran at it. He leapt into the air like a daemon. He cleared window and gate and bar to come abreast of Rodrigues’ performance that he had endowed with proportions of contradiction and fantasy to drive him to mental and physical victory. He had seen into Philip, as it were, and profited from conscious, subconscious, unconscious, savage motivation beneath cassock and slide rule. He felt almost sorry for Philip now. His opponent’s powers, his drive to rule the roost, to build upon the bones of the defeated, was a necessary moral evil. Was evil sometimes moral, was evil the moral ground of frames that claim to be absolute? Did such absolutes conscript the imagination until alternatives diminished into lesser and greater evils, and the lesser evil became the moral imperative?

The high jump bar or frame had been raised again. This time Philip faltered. He failed to make the clearance. Masters soared over the cave by an extra inch or two. Philip tried a second time, struck the bar to the ground. He limped as if he were psychically maimed. Perhaps he had been caught off guard – though he was unaware of it – by Masters’
philosophic
gymnasium. He ran and jumped again. There was a
roar from the spectators. His ankle caught the bar and sent it spinning to the ground. He had lost and yet he had won. He had lost the event but he had secured a premise of “moral evil” that was to haunt Everyman Masters all his life. It was not just that Rodrigues’ high jump – his military, economic or whatever ascendancy – would have proven the greater evil, that his (Masters’) was the lesser. It was the realization that revolution – that the wheel that expands into the door of a problematic cave – required a complex relationship to the tyrant-psyche one overcomes, a complex apprehension of the tyrant’s blood as native to oneself and to the wounds of transfigurative inner/outer being, transfigurative
architectures
of the Carnival body of space.

“Can you tell me something about the cave,” I suddenly asked Masters, “into which you ran at the end of the race? It seemed so dark when you led me in. I saw nothing.”

The dead king stared at me in my dream.

“It was the cave of the tyrant-psyche,” he said at last. “Do you follow?”

I did not reply. He continued, “It was the cave of relics, it was the cave of heartfelt competition and divine right. It was also – and this was strange – the cave of abortive revolutions. You were actually in,” he paused, gestured, searched for an image, “a hollow shell symbolizing an embalmed god.” He paused again. “May I qualify what I have just said? Not necessarily a god in strict logic, no, that hollow shell may symbolize a beloved atheist or a beloved despot or an ambiguous saint, each or any of these may be embalmed into a god. Cast your eyes around the world and you will see. It was like running, I repeat, into an embalmed shell, into a comedy of excavations.”

“Comedy of excavations!” I was struck by the expression.

“Yes,” said Masters. “Place your ear to the shell and you will hear the echo of an excavated heart, lung, organ. We ran into all these. I tried to make you see but you were
hypnotized
by the semblance of immortality. Yes, hypnotic semblance of immortal regime.”

His voice faded and I was left to ponder the implications of what he had said. Indeed it was a confession, a deep-seated, far-reaching confession. Rather than accept the lesser of two evils as the nature of order, Masters sought a confessional frame through which to illumine the counterpoint between tyrant-psyche and age-old deception or semblance of immortality. Such illumination – he appeared to imply – might pave the way for a fiction of grace that led through the restrictions of alternative evils within the parameters of conquistadorial deity, conquistadorial morality; led through to a deeper comprehension and rebuttal of conquest in the creativity of underestimated moral being. It was a goal that lay unfulfilled and far in the distance in the race of humanity, and in the meantime I saw that Masters was depressed, chastened, beaten, even though he had won the two events in the collegiate Athletic Meet.

When he received the silver cups that were the prizes for the high jump and the hundred yards he turned and looked at Rodrigues and Merriman and his body hardened all of a sudden (as if it had received the embalmer’s knife) with the conviction that
they
had
won,
he
had
lost.
It was the avid way they stared at the silver in his hands and the fact that he kept it close to his heart (as if that too had been sliced); they stared at him as if he were a thief, as if he had stolen the prize from them, as if his heart were in their breasts and he were the shell of the race, not they.

They could not perceive the distinctions he wished to coin in the realm of the state between false shaman and true shaman, between diseased Ambition and confessional frame. It was their currency, their conquest, that he received in accepting the prize. He had robbed them. It was plain to him now. He could not make them see the springs, the torments, that had given him the edge to outwit their diabolic pressure upon him. What they saw was that he had profited from a native alliance, native savagery, and he was one of them, a king of athletes.

Athletics were supreme on the College curriculum but
attention was paid to the humanities and the sciences in the race of scholarship.

Mr Becks, a black Grenadian educated at Oxford and the Sorbonne, was the Latin master; a brilliant scholar and the recipient of many prizes. Unlike the other masters who drove cars or cycled on ancient bikes, he walked to College along Brickdam from his home. He always wore an immaculate white suit and a white cork helmet such as overseers donned when they climbed into the saddle to ride through the
sugar-cane
estate on the other side of the Crocodile Bridge. He strode at a beautiful pace that Philip would have envied.

A year or two before Masters enrolled, Mr Becks had taught both Latin and Greek, and though Greek had been
withdrawn
, he referred perfunctorily on occasion to Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus. They had become relics in the cave into which scholarship-masks upon Masters and me ran. In his first year Everyman read Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
and Caesar’s accounts of his invasions of Gaul and Britain.

“Latin,” Mr Becks said non-committally (or was it
perfunctorily
?), “is a dead language.” Masters was taken aback. He confided to me an anecdote of a precocious composer who wrote his first symphony at the age of seven but was astonished to learn that the keys of his piano were ivory relics from the cave into which music-masks run. Young Masters – though an adept of the cave of my dreams – was equally ignorant. He stated bluntly that Latin was the language of Philip Rodrigues. Was ignorance bliss in poking
unintentional
fun at Philip, in visualizing him as an imperial speaker, in attributing to him a sacred tongue, a sacred art, a sacred science within a colonial cave that stifles originality and breeds fear. How sacred is fear, how sacred is
hypocrisy
? Mr Becks rebuked him. The priests and engineers of Spain, he conceded, still conducted solemn Latin masses for the pagan soul of the New World. Masters was intrigued to learn of a new Latin dictionary that blessed the pagan mysteries of
surrealism,
jazz,
aeroplane
and
radio.

But a nagging doubt remained. What was a dead language?
Did
surrealism,
aeroplane,
jazz
,
radio
become instant dinosaur relics within an embalmed language? He asked Mr Becks.

“Latin helps us with modern tongues,” Mr Becks said evasively. “Think of the many words with a Latin root. Latin is an exercise of logical faculty. Latin has beauty and order.” He saw that Everyman was waiting for a reply to his question. “There are technical reasons, technological revolutions,” he hesitated as if unsure what a “technological revolution” was in the museum of progress, “that may explain the low profile or so-called death of a language. Latin still conquers souls.” He spoke grandly with a hollow flourish.

“And aeroplanes and radios?” Masters asked.

Mr Becks blinked uncomfortably. He spoke up all at once. “Language is, or should be, as much an art as a tool or a medium of tools. We need to question, to say the least, the innermost resources of language through the creative imagination, in the creative conscience. Such questions sometimes evolve into profoundest answers to the plague of robot intelligence. A living language is a medium of
imaginative
death as well as imaginative rebirth and life. It is a medium of
creativity
in morality. Fiction as much as language dies otherwise. I myself read nothing but mediocre novels and poetry. It is better to be on the safe side, to assume there is no hope. One is then in line to be promoted to the top of the robot league in entertainment, learning and politics.”

The class had been listening, yet not listening. And Masters was more fascinated by Mr Becks’ discomfort and uneasiness as he spoke rather than by what he actually said. Was Mr Becks a sick man or a prime white-coated skeleton in the cave into which we had run? He seemed fearful of his innermost thoughts as he uttered them. He seemed to glance over his shoulder at the running false shaman who might take umbrage at what he had said. It was clear that a class of indifferent college boys was the only audience he possessed, the only stage on which to air his heretical views. Were they really heretical – I wondered – or were they a kind of defiance within a cave assembly of young skeletons who did not understand what he was saying? He was safe indeed. He
returned to uttering eulogies of Latin, its beauty, its order. Then he sought vulgar relief by launching into an anecdote about a recent holiday in France.