Jonestown (4 page)

‘Such erosion, such intervention or breakage (however frail) of the forces of hell, may be all that we can hope for at this time …

‘But it is priceless, the intervention of the Virgin is priceless. Such intervention never sanitizes cruelty. I know. It almost breaks
my heart to learn of my own ignorance, my own obstinacy, to learn how necessary it is to transform my age. My grasp of the miracle of life is faint. Life may exist far out in space and may suffer within the womb of time when we direct a blow at others, strangers, aliens in our midst even as they would sacrifice us on the altar of their creeds …’

I stopped and then asked myself: ‘What link then exists between us and strangers?’

I thought I heard a faint reply – ‘In my body, in linked imprints, in still unwritten passages woven together from the brides and mothers of humanity! Build the Virgin Ship with the very instruments and terrors that plague you now, Franciso, but which you may convert into a new architecture born of profoundest self-confessional, self-judgemental nails and
materials
and fabrics …’

Thus
it
was
that
I drew my first nail in the construction of the Virgin Ship on which to sail from Jonestown into familiar strangers, unfamiliar friends in the body of the self.

First nail plucked from the sun, from the Tiger’s killing weapon. Convertible nail into energies of the Imagination to cross barriers and chasms in time. My fear of Jones lessened and I reached into the Clearing and drew from him a fiery claw, an emblem of his remorse.

Was he experiencing remorse? Was I deceiving myself?

Remorse is difficult, it tests all cultures to the core, the core of myself, the core of Joneself. Jone’s self, Bone’s self.

The claw became a fractured Bone in me. It was sharp as living, re-constructive steel. It was sharp as living blood, a fluid nail through ancients and moderns.

Remorse and repentance are not easy. All of a sudden in the darkening sky, sunset over Jonestown, he became a tall
cloud-Tiger
draped in blackness. The moon had not yet risen. His anger overshadowed me as I lay in the bushes and he sought to clothe me in his outstanding Night. But the Virgin intervened as the sun set. She broke the overwhelming texture of the tall Night and plucked a Bag of Nemesis from it which she placed over me.

I knew I would have been utterly demoralized in Jones’s tall
Night but I could sustain a portion of it, I could learn, I could see
in
it, I could see through it, I could see through the blind eyes of the Priest who murders in the name of love or loyalty.

The tall texture of catastrophe is eroded, in some degree, is miniaturized, in some degree, to make a re-creative vision possible, bearable, even at the end of time (or what passes for the end of time).

I rose from the bushes. But the Bag of Nemesis provided me with one more sighting of Deacon on the Moon, it seemed, that was slowly rising over the dead bodies in Jonestown.

My eyes were faint but I saw Deacon’s wing and shawl, I saw him trail the wing in space, I saw its imprint on Moon-dust. Jonestown was on the Moon. It had levitated. It had become an apparition upon scales of past and future time, it was rising bright as a Bomb under the vast network of the Milky Way. It descended again, Jonestown descended again, in concrete measure.
Jonestown’s
Earth, Jonestown’s Moon.

Deacon skirted his way through the bodies around him. It was as if he had resumed his duel with Jones though Jones lay dead.

Perhaps he saw Jones through my eyes, tall black Cat, tall black Night. Bright Moon. Black Night.

He crossed the Clearing. He stood now above Jones. He placed a hidden boot under his wing upon Jones’s skull in which the moonlight nested. He drew his boot along Jones’s head and neck and spine. He rested his boot in a cushioned space beneath Jones’s body. And then with a dancing stroke of the Scavenger’s Eagle wing he kicked the body over and around. The eyes ceased to stare at me. They were drilling holes into the Moon. They were drilling a ladder to the Moon.

I turned at last and made my way through the Forest to the Cave of the Moon in a cliff above a Waterfall overshadowing the river of Jonestown. I climbed the ladder. The Virgin Ship was tied there and I knew I would embark upon it soon.

*

The ship took me back to my childhood in Albuoystown.

I sailed on the convertible claw of the sun as if I rode futuristic energy on the back of a Tiger.

A Tiger that could turn and rend me limb from limb in a storm but was harnessed in this instance into Virgin space within a mathematic possessed of the life of fractions to diminish the power of overwhelming seas in the sweep of time, black seas, uncharted regions from which the voices of nature goddesses broke into the human ear.

The ear mirrored a passage in the womb of space, the ear became a receptacle, a caveat, a curious vaginal receptacle instilled with the birth of consciousness to absorb and convert the music of the Sirens into guardian lighthouses.

Through the Sirens and the nature goddesses, and their linkage with the Virgin, consciousness hears itself in layered
counterpointed
rhythms as never before, consciousness sees itself, questions itself as never before.

I could not entirely rid myself of ancient fear of such voices but their apparitional weight informed me that time would slide into concrete harbours within blended spirit and fact.

To learn to weather apparition is to arrive at a destination enriched with the voyaging wisdom of Spirit.

So easy to lose one’s way as one sails back in time but the universe opens into unsuspected dimensions and I am back – yes, I am truly back – in Albuoystown: a child of nine. It is 1939.

‘Albuoystown is linked,’ I wrote in my log-book or
Dream-book
, ‘to the former estates of an eighteenth-century French
landowner
and slave-owner. They retain, to this day, the names he bestowed upon them:
La
Pénitence
and
Le
Repentir
(the latter a famous cemetery in Georgetown).’ I paused but soon continued:

‘An unsettling experience it is to return to the past from the bleak future, to return to 1939 from 1978.’ As I stood on the deck of the Ship before I landed I saw a man darting through a crowd in a skeleton’s costume. He was rehearsing for Carnival Night in Albuoystown. He could have been my grown-up twin. He was in his late forties, the same age as I was in Jonestown from which I had returned in a backwards sweep of time to Albuoystown … He had wrapped his head in a newspaper mask but I was able to read a skeleton headline, WAR COMING IN EUROPE. I was startled as if I had forgotten … I touched the Bag on my head that
was invisible to everyone and felt it crackle like Nemesis newspaper.

I landed, aged nine, and made my way to my School in Albuoystown. Mr Mageye, the teacher, was giving a history lesson when I arrived.

‘Ah Francisco,’ he said, ‘you are late this morning.’

‘There’s a new ship in the harbour,’ I said, ‘I was having a look at it.’

Mr Mageye smiled, nodded, as I took my place on a bench under the blackboard.

He had written there the names of the Frenchman’s estates:

LA PÉNITENCE

LE REPENTIR

It was an old blackboard and I remembered it distinctly in the backwards sweep of time. There was a piece of chalk on the desk before me which I inadvertently rubbed on my face to acquire a slightly greyish unshaven look. A nine-year-old child with an ageing head on his shoulders within a Nemesis Bag invisible to all.

A jest that Mr Mageye appreciated, for he was laughing with me at the chalk-like apparition of a beard that I now wore.

I knew every dot and crack in the old blackboard. The School could not afford to purchase a new one.

Our ripple of mutual – almost ghostly – laughter subsided and Mr Mageye continued with his history lesson.

‘The eighteenth-century French land-owner came to Guiana from France not long before the French Revolution. He was an aristocrat. He was desolated when news came of the revolution. The beheading of poor Queen Marie Antoinette! No wonder he bestowed the name Marie on several of his black mistresses. Your mother is called Marie. Is she not, Francisco? An embodiment of our history lesson.’

‘I am told that the Frenchman is my great-great-grandfather,’ I almost boasted.

‘Quite so, quite so,’ said Mr Mageye.

I was a trifle crestfallen. ‘My poor mother claims that he’s her ghostly protector. A kind of surrogate husband in the early
twentieth century. You see my father died when I was two years old. He may never have existed. I never knew him.’

‘We all have ghosts in this country for fathers,’ said Mr Mageye. ‘Fathers tend to vanish when their common law spouses (as it’s now called in English parlance) conceive. It’s a legacy of slavery. Mothers rear children invariably without help. And ghosts add a cubit or two to the stature of vanished fathers.

‘One is born of several ghost-fathers,’ said Mr Mageye, ‘and a mother who wears a variety of masks. She’s burdened with responsibility for a family of beggars, is she not? All sorts of orphans arrive from the street and cling to her skirts. She cries and she laughs, she is pathetic, she is sublime, she is nostalgic, she is practical, she is a saint, she is a siren, she is vulnerable, she is exalted … I sometimes wonder,’ said Mr Mageye, ‘whether this is why the Roman Catholic Church has such a hold on the masses in Central and South America. Within such a Carnival of history women suffer, but at a certain hidden level they are the true educators of a race that needs to judge itself, to breach a pattern of sexual irresponsibility. Such irresponsibility does violence to communities …’

Mr Mageye was looking at me with a quizzical look, a grave look, a jesting look, a serious look. ‘Your mother, Francisco, serves beggars in her shop, does she not, as if they were her children, and they call her, do they not, the Virgin of Albuoystown?’

I was stricken to the heart for I suddenly remembered that my mother would die this very night. She would be borne aloft by beggars, she would be mugged and stabbed by a tall Cat of a beggar, an evangelist-beggar, a crusading beggar, in the Carnival of Albuoystown. I had returned not to witness her wedding to a tall Carnival ghost of a Frenchman but her death all over again as I had done as a child on Carnival Night in Albuoystown. I had returned on the day and night of her death. It was the 24th March, 1939.

‘Why did the Frenchman give his estates such extraordinary names,
La
Pénitence
and
Le
Repentir
? Does anyone know?’

I knew but I was too grief-stricken to answer. When one returns to the past from the future everything is the same yet nothing is quite the same.

‘His estates became memorials,’ said Mr Mageye, ‘to a tragic duel that he fought with his brother. He was sixteen, his brother was nine. They were playing with wooden swords in a garden on a moonlit night. The younger brother somehow or other dug his sword into the other’s ribs. Not much pain but humiliation. Sword-play was highly prized. It felt like a national disgrace to be out-sworded, out-pointed, bowled for a duck. In a rage the older boy picked up a sharp stone and flung it at the nine-year-old boy. Flung it with venom and greater force than he had intended. The boy took the blow full and straight in the middle of his forehead. It was as sharp as a knife in the hand of a savage priest. He fell like a lamb in a crate or a boxing ring. Never moved again. Stone-dead like a statue that had toppled in the garden onto a bed of roses … The Frenchman never forgave himself. He brought a painter with him from France. Successive portraits portrayed him as he grew older, but his brother remained in each portrait as if frozen in time until by degrees they became not brother and brother but father and son.’

There was silence. Not absolute silence. I heard a clock ticking at the back of the classroom upon a wall with nothing but the moving fingers of time, my phantom fingers. They extended themselves into tracing a portrait on my mind’s canvas, a portrait of father and son.

I visualized my mother’s eighteenth-century protector and surrogate husband in the twentieth century. Would she break the mould of conscriptive protection in the end as Virgin animal goddess when she fell?

I visualized myself as his twentieth-century son. Fathered by my own painted slayer (as I was his painted son) in a game that became a battlefield, economic battlefield, sports arena
battlefield
…

Such is the paradox of imperial games and colonial sons, ornamental sonship, statuesque status, devoid of time’s eruptive originality that breaches frame or plot.

‘You do see, Francisco,’ said Mr Mageye. ‘Break the mould if you are to live and grow. And remember,’ he added, ‘this is a formidable task. But you can do it! It calls for daring, for profound
imaginative truth. You are far older than your years, Francisco. You know that. I do not have to tell you. From the moment you arrived this morning we were enveloped in a fiction. The class melted into shadows on the wall. And you and I are alone …’

‘I know. I know,’ I said. ‘It’s as if we are rehearsing a play I know but how do you know?’

Mr Mageye did not reply to the question but he continued:

‘In breaking a mould, you sometimes break your heart, the heart’s addiction to fallacious glories, and you enrich – curiously enough – your ghost-father’s true heritage of Compassion. He was a Catholic, was he not? You lift that heritage out of subservience to another’s style or will, out of base and
opportunist
compliance with another’s cultural vested interests.’ He paused and considered.

‘Yes,’ he said softly, ‘equality between former masters and the genius of the new is only possible when originality is seen to be native as much to the powerless as to the powerful …’

‘What is inequality?’ I interrupted. ‘Tell me Mr Mageye!’

‘Inequality is habituated to incest, to persecution in the family, murder and incest. Murder in the ruling family projects incest upon colonized others to make all Mankind into a pawn. It is a terrifying lesson as we look around the globe, East, West, North, South. Yes, to teach history today is to entertain a complex vocation …’