The Carnival Trilogy (18 page)

Masters studied him closely, unable to trust his luck, unable to believe that after so many long weeks in the factory cudgelling his brains, now at last he remembered, now at last, upon the first rung of the dying ladder of an age in his body, he knew the identity of his fellow worker.

The newspaper floated a little in a breath of wind. It was brown and faded. It lacked the meticulous print of the “leaves of grass” in
Purgatory’s
Who’s
Who.
But despite this the picture of the young cyclist was impressive as skeleton or ivory or bone that had been browned – if that were possible – by heart’s fire. Parchment invisible heart’s fire. He (the cyclist in bone-brown fire) was wearing a cricketer’s blazer and flannels. His features were curiously round as if ready to bounce …
Ah
yes!
the
plague
of
the
heart
that
cuts
into
the
soul
of
a
brilliant
athlete
and
makes
him
bounce
into
eternity.
Masters knew him, yes, unmistakably. He had seen him running in the College grounds to catch a ball falling out of the sky from Philip Rodrigues’ bat. Ball. Heart. Bat. Philip of Spain. Remember? The Venezuelan high jumper! Masters was jolted through Carnival ladder of heaven to perceive the young cyclist clutch at the handle bar of his machine. He pulled his brakes hard but was unable to stop. He collided with the
half-sleeping
, half-dreaming advocate of a pagan body that Martin Weyl was.

Advocate
of
a
pagan
body.
How curious to see it like that, in such a light, with one apparently Christian foot on the rung of a ladder, of a gate, a palatial ladder, a palatial gate. As if that pagan body might restore his (Masters’) dying heart, might be of advantage to the kingdom he had glimpsed with mask glued to ladder and bar.

Then came the additional shock. Martin Weyl was flung into the centre of the road.
It
was
too
late
for
him
(
Masters
)
to
reach
out
and
save
his
friend.
He felt that if it were not for the acute pain in his chest he could have done it even now after nearly twenty years. He could have reached back through a hole in time and saved him. He could have reached through the ladder. He could have seized Martin by the hair, by a grain of fire, and saved him. But no! The dray-cart, the startled horse or mule, was upon him. He was dead. But that was not the end of the matter. Too late to save him but not too late to be saved by him, by the friend he dreamt he may have saved.

He was assured after his apparently total recovery on the last day of November 1958 that the heart attack he had suffered had been a minor one despite the hole or lapse or black-out into which he had fallen. But he knew differently when he stood in the palace gate or ladder pointing to the bride of heaven within a cricket bat or cricket ball floating toward Vega in space. In part he was saved by the shadow of Aunt Alice, by her ageing Bartleby humour, crumbling gesticulation through the bars of heaven, and by the
cautionary
mask she provided for the young, sensuous flying Alice whose wings encircled Quabbas, the young fiery Amaryllis to whom I made love when Masters descended into the Inferno. Aunt Alice cautioned him not to be tempted by the brilliance of such fiery intercourse; to turn back to archaic Earth, to seek to wed the museum of the elements that needed him still. She pointed to Martin Weyl, to his Carnival posture – under wheel or horse or mule – as
advocate
of
a
pagan
body.

“Yes,” said Aunt Alice, “too late to save your friend but not too late to be saved by him, to have his pagan confessional heart lodged in your breast.”

Her shadow had solidified. She seemed suddenly to become a divine gossip – how else may I describe it? – of heaven. “Do you know, Everyman,” she said to Masters, “that he’s still toiling away at his precious ‘charisma of the law’ theorem?”

“That was the main plank in his defence of the red prince,”  said Masters. “I recall how passionate he was – the law is valid, he said, indispensable, even in Purgatory and hell, not to speak of heaven – but because of territorial imperatives, absolute or rigid frontiers above and below (on sea, land, in the air), there is a hideous charisma, a moribund
authoritarian
fixture of emotion that bars or excludes even as it confines peoples. Moribund it may be, he declared, but in actual practice it remains terrifyingly constant and it
underpins
all liberal codes – even those liberal codes that attempt to argue sensibly that security is mutual, never one-sided.”

“Ah yes,” said Aunt Alice Bartleby, “if I were allowed, my dear, to take you up and through the ladder, I would show you where he sits writing day and night. Sometimes I find him arguing with a judge, the shadow of a judge, who assumes all sorts of shapes. Sometimes the judge looks like young Weyl, the son judges the father. It’s too absurd! It’s a dream. It’s amazing. His own son sitting there with Amaryllis.” Aunt Alice was laughing and weeping, I thought.

“Sometimes,” she said sombrely, “he plays the scene of his death all over again. Like a kind of cosmic cinema.
Why
,
bless
my
heart,
there
he
is
now.
He’s descended the ladder! He’s playing the scene. Look! There’s the newspaper cyclist. There’s the ancient donkey or horse or mule, the wheel, the cart.”

There he was indeed. I saw him, my father. I could see him through the bars of the ladder, even through Aunt Alice Bartleby’s solid, gesticulating, crumbling shadow. It was as if an unforeseen rumbling of the law made itself manifest in his advocacy of a pagan body. His frame, his chest, was suddenly rent before my eyes to illumine savage unconscious realms in which the innocent advocate pays for the guilty court he addresses. Was he falling – as the wheel caught him – through the ladder of the sky from a murdered aeroplane to illumine territorial charisma he had sought to unravel, had he been shot to ribbons under the divinity of the sea’s ladder to illumine Carnival bandages, had he been crushed on a
battlefield
to illumine a mask of shell?

He had paid the price for deliberating upon territorial imperatives to an indifferent, largely insensible court. He had become the savage hollow he sought to explicate and unravel. He had been broken on the wheel. He had trespassed beyond conventional pavements into the traffic of deadly highways. Or so it seemed to me as I contemplated Masters on his chain that wound itself into many worlds, past, present and to be.

My father had defended a pagan El Doradan whose hideous imperatives could be traced far up, far back, into ancient fires when statesmen-priests broke the organ in their victims’ chest and offered it to the sun or – should the sun fail – to unknown fires far out in space, to foetal plants around Vega.

Such charisma, he argued, had survived within the
civilization
of twentieth-century age as the reverberating
shock
of pagan body-ritual of which we were oblivious. Witness our predilection for black-out Carnival and games of nuclear holocaust we have played with computers, with robots, fallen numbers, surviving numbers, underground caves. And thus it was not to be wondered at that humanity, in its
subconscious
or unconscious advocacy of the body as fodder for the State, was articulating an ancient ritual dressed up in the vestments of purist obsession; it was not to be wondered at that societies were suicidal and accident-prone, and that even those who wrestled to enlighten us with parallel formations fell asleep and stumbled under Christ’s Trojan donkey or resurrection mule.

Christ’s
Trojan
donkey!
What a parallel! Could one bear the shock of such a parallel, I wondered? Could such a parallel bring a new beast, a new heart, a new love, upon which to ride …? Was this my father’s gift, the gift of the beast he dreamt he entered the moment he fell under shadow and hoof?

In an accident-prone, suicidal and conflict-ridden age, violence is a savage masquerade, is it not? It feeds on a void of sacrament and on the infliction of humiliation and shadow. It not only feeds on these but remains blind to the pressures to which it is addicted.

“I know, I know,” said Aunt Alice Bartleby. “I see massacres on earth when I look through the bars of heaven, so many pathetic bodies.”

“What has all this to do with Weyl and me?” Masters demanded. He knew the answer but it was difficult to shoulder such terrible knowledge, that an equation existed between Christ’s pagan donkey and the human beast of love upon which the universe rides.

He touched his own body, his own beast. It seemed to reflect the rent in Weyl’s frame. He had used labouring men and women in his plantation, overseering days as beasts of burden. But the heart of the beast was now his. Weyl had given it to him to pass on to me within the golden chain of existence. It was his, it would renew him, it would save him, imbue him with unbearable and bearable insights as time rode on his back.

“If you see that, my dear Masters, a spiritual evolution in the law may suddenly thrust you into the stars, as into the labyrinth of the Earth, to plumb the equation between fire and fire. If you cannot see it, or plumb it, accidents will pile up everywhere around you. For those accidents are your soul that remains oblivious of its parallel heritages and weeps with a thousand eyes on every battlefield, on every roadway.

“Unless you
see
yourself as paradoxically enriched by savage pathos, savage dream, you cannot break the spell of motiveless crime, you cannot overcome Hades, you cannot see God.”

*

Early in December, apparently fully recovered – new mystical “savage heart” lodged in his body from Weyl’s rent side and resurrection mule – Masters telephoned the factory in North London and discovered that his West Indian colleagues had been transferred to day shift. He felt he should visit them and say goodbye.

It was curious to reflect, I thought, upon the chain of being through life into death and back again and the necessity for a
revisualized chain in the dead king of whom I dreamt and whose steps I had retraced into childhood light year in parallel with the ancient game of the crab. I heard again the mysterious voice that had addressed him and me a moment ago, saying this time, “In El Doradan light-year crab the spirit or half-obliterated cosmic pattern cries out to be completed or fulfilled, cries from the other side of the womb or death-
in-life
. Cries to be reborn or resurrected. Such rebirth or
resurrection
is a mystery that resides in parallel shapes and riddles.”

Through the chain of being I began to treasure the
commingling
of elements in the marriage of Earth and sky, and thus I was able to visualize something I may only describe as “phenomenal resurrection”, healed character, enveloping Masters when he returned for the last time to the factory.

I dreamt the rain ceased the morning he set out on a bus from Notting Hill Gate, but everywhere the light seemed to drip into overcast translucency, mutated silver, mutated pearl. Space within the dead, resurrected king and space without him and me was diffuse, it was a web draping the bare, sculpted branches of trees. The conjunction of inner and outer space was a token of healed hollow or recovery from depression, from illness.

I felt silences within that hollow despite the sound of the traffic. Not only recovered heart but recovered ear
encompassed
those silences. Silent music. How did one respond to silent music?
There
it
was.
Seen music, unheard music. Recovered eye. Recovered ear. Recovered heart. Sight, sound, memory etched themselves into silences replete with harmony: etched themselves through recovered being yet ran upon the fine branches of trees that the dead king perceived as the bus moved, stopped, moved again in the vicinity of Kensington Gardens.

In the winter light that seemed to echo with intimate yet far-away vistas arching through Waterfall Oracle, I felt the imprint of black fire, black tone, numinous wonderful shadow. That imprint or sensation was so acute, so
deep
,
Masters was caught by the Carnival mask of Lazarus, mind of Lazarus
in
his
mind
,
as the heart of Weyl stood in his heart. Yes, mind, heart, shadow! Imprint of fire, shadow, was the mind of Lazarus in his mind to attune him to ivories of sensation, russets, and other alphabets of the elements within every hollow epitaph of memory, every hollow grave.

Winter lapsed into the carpet of autumn leaves under the bole of a tree that the bus was passing. The trampled leaves appeared to smoke with an arousal of spirit, trampled
greenness
, trampled yellow paint, in the hollow depression of time and place from which one arises to discourse with silent music within the roar of a great city …

The factory seemed different to Masters’ Carnival Lazarus’ eyes in this actual day of arousal of spirit; different from how it had appeared to him during night shift. Yet night shift had seemed to him but manufactured day, susceptible, at the same time, to blazing stars and constellations.

In the winter day the factory was susceptible to artificial noon. The lights were still on as at night but they were different, he perceived again, from the illuminations he recalled when he blacked out. They were deceptively natural, less glaring. Why should night glare and day time industry under the same manufactured stars be deceptively natural sky or cave of illumination in this late twentieth-century age?

The walls of the factory seemed sharper somehow, greyer somehow, to Masters’ Lazarus’ eyes. They seemed composed of slices and excavations, raw material blood that was white or grey not red, sliced pallor of noon, real noon (whatever that was), artificial noon (whatever that was).