Wilson Harris - The Waiting Room

He recalled how secretively she used to move within her small body of Indian companions and how his impulses of recognition — as if she had belonged to him within another frame and place and circumstance — faded time after time into nothingness with each step he made. He excused himself now for every inroad of imagination he visualized upon her, with the reflection that it was all in the involuntary nature of fantasy. She was woman and he was man, situated in bewildering circumstances of unpredictable light or shade bordering upon the density of the remainder of the world. Fantasy indeed. How could he dream of such a thing. And in the presence of her husband, then still at her side. She had not yet suffered bereavement. Four guides in all: herself, her husband, another man, his wife.

It had been his expressed intention at the outset to employ only two — both men — but the women arrived before long. He greeted them with anger and consternation but secretly was glad they had come. It was good for the morale of the men to have their women with them. And in fact he was quick to point out that they possessed no alternative now but to remain with the party and go on. Far into the interior droghing their rations on their back which they supplemented with fish and game.

ENTRY FOUND IN HIS DIARY. Encamped by nameless creek. Propose to stop for a while. Curious Amerindian woman — SUSAN?

FURTHER ENTRY illustrated by long jagged line ( written in strange hand though this may have been due to violent emotional stress ).

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The above entries with others pertaining to come from “his” diary were pasted into the log-book as if to confirm a shadow of participation and identity involving all the “characters” of the log-book — a shattered witness of events running like a species of remarkable fiction.

*

LIKE A FLASH THE BUSH MASTER ROSE AND STRUCK. Out of the blue. Stood high on its tail, writhed, spat. And it was Amerindian Susan’s husband upon whom sprang the mark of the venomous fangs, holes in his skin….

HORROR. Stupefaction. Intimate course of the poison in his veins. The tooth of the cayman alligator was placed on the wound. Nothing prevailed — neither civilization’s first aid chest nor mesmeric tooth of the wild, remnant of the skull…. THE MAN DIED.

It had happened at very close quarters — as close as she ( Susan ) now stood to him whom, she believed, in her primitive reckoning — since he happened to be their employer, living employer of consciousness — to be obscurely responsible for the fate of each member of his party (and therefore the death of her husband). Dream and capacity. WAITING ROOM.

All at once “he” could hardly believe his ears and eyes as if these had truly returned to him out of the cavern of death — to guard her equally in himself. As if he — and not his Amerindian servant and guide — had suffered the fangs of the snake. He recalled now the lightning stroke of the bushmaster which seemed to marry the sun as it earlier stood poised and still racing, fiery luminous ball, glowing feast of eyes upon the crumb of place. A great burning tooth was administered to the holes in “his” skin — puncture of memory — and converted and swallowed by a pinprick of blood. Poison as well as antidote.

He saw her now in a light he had never seen, since he had not been thus healed and safeguarded before. Her hair, black and glinting, piled high like a coil of dreams where the head of the snaking sun had been fierce and wild. Her eyes, black as a pit. He recalled the flight of the stream where it fell like a beam of light from the torch of sun. Self-division of elements he began to witness on his voyage in pursuit of the nameless river of the world where it descended into the ground at his feet to where he visualized its emergence — crack of illumination — upon cliff or stone. Two indistinct points these were (when seen from the middle obscure distance of the cavern). The glare of the torch in his hand blew out as if a cloud had sealed entrance and exit and shattered every skylight and clearing. But the faint stunned eyes within the subterranean cave of Susan grew brighter still, stars of consciousness blown by the very fist of night.

He had been walking upon a skeleton framework on the bank of the stream but now descended into the water and made his way forward within the very body of the current. The hidden river was suddenly colder than he imagined it could be at the heart of the tropics. The seal of the sun was upheld and splintered again and again — idiosyncratic purity and flaw of the landscape like an explosion of memory, jungle of nights, inset of days. The black eyelid of nature flickered with each stroke of enlightenment, stamp of flame, ice….

*

It was a journey which he felt had begun in the very obscurity of ages, as if at one time fire had sealed the cavern — at another time ice. And these seals were the peculiar stamp of insulation from total disaster upon a living crew of fate who were deprived of the extremity of experiencing the very function of death they performed. Cloud or seal, blocking of ears, blinding of sight which rendered one and all immune and faithful guides or servants of each other through the unenviable passage of the underworld. Vessel of reality. Bond of translation.

Each relic “he” touched — antique skull, tooth, fluid object — was instinct with paradox; chafe of fury on one hand and insensible freedom of proportion or function on the other.

Each constellation of properties he visualized — sacrificial litter, dog or snake, ancient, newborn — was both “alive” and “dead” within the crucial operations of the nameless cavern, middle way, middle passage — astronomical man and slave, doctor and patient, lover and mistress, captain and instrument, artist and model. And the ghostly sun which now seemed to glare at him existed both within its own naked right, indescribable, pure, and in another sacred anthropomorphic skin, masthead and shroud of reality. Furnace of blindness as well as blackness of vision. Bound to the stars as well as indestructibly alien — free from total ordeal and attraction within an operative seal and design. Unendurable canvas of fire save for each insulation portrait. Multiple impress and circuit of compassion within the transit of the “living” and the “dead”.

The subterranean cave of Susan. It was as if he had spoken her name aloud and the echoes combined into a crumbling fixture, property of the imagination. There was no price he would not pay to grasp such an ultimate seal of freedom and conviction within the borderline capacities of nature.

The cavern shook once again and rumbled — not with the same echoes this time but with a new distant faint blast. Incredible … surprise … revelation. He knew (as surely as if he had been told) that the blast he now heard had actually occurred ages ago: and that, at long last, it was able to reach him in an echo long muffled and nurtured and preserved (like the sound of the sea in a shell) by its very sovereign stamp of irruption— persona of “deafness” to the original catastrophe and, in fact, “blindness” (until a moment ago) to the ancient shroud of the sun. Shroud of love. Ancient metamorphosis, endless creation, gods, species of fiction within whose mask of death one endured the essential phenomenon of crisis and translation.

Delayed blast. Short circuit. Reaction. Within the radius of which “he” felt himself begin to relive — with new awareness — his descent through the door of the middle passage (down the nameless river of the underworld) as one who had been smitten by the bushmaster of space until “he” and “it” fell through a common skin into a naked darkness they had never dreamt would heal and safeguard them.