Wilson Harris - The Angel at the Gate

“Right. The holiday wheel of sobering age comes round again and again. Who said that? I can’t remember. But it sounds okay to me. When one has knocked around as I have … It was Mack who got me a cheap passage out of Montreal to Marseille in 1950. I’d gone to Canada straight from University College to try my luck but things were slow and I elected, god knows why, to come to England by way of the Mediterranean. I suppose it was my elder brother beckoning, he’d enlisted and died in the Royal Air Force. Shot down in a raid over Bremen.” Jackson stopped. His face was veiled. “I’ve never been able to locate his grave. He’s one of those with a blank tombstone. Perhaps his bones are at the bottom of a ditch or a lake and will lie there in an ocean of time. Now where did I read that? Sounds too grand for my brother! Mack also had a wife in England, by the way, and a baby daughter called Stella. She’d be in her early or mid-thirties today. I’m not sure. He also had a grown-up daughter (an earlier marriage) twenty-three or twenty-four, and she was singing under the name of Sukey Tawdrey in a band in Europe. A luscious strip-tease, a beautiful slut. Nothing new in that. He said I’d find her in Marseille and he gave me a letter. It was fate. Within a year we’d had a daughter. I used to wonder when I settled in England whether that child — Mack’s granddaughter — and his English daughter Stella would meet. There wasn’t more than a couple of years or so between them. Four or five at the outside. I’m a stickler for dates and years though much else is retreating into a mist. Perhaps they have met in paradise wherever paradise parks itself nowadays. Perhaps they’ve stood on the grave of the unknown soldier of paradise, a random grave possessed of many faces, the face of the master and the face of the servant. What has Donne said about it or is it Paul in his letters to posterity? I used to dream of bringing them all together, the living and the dead….” He stopped and poked Khublall in the ribs, then stared at his shaven head. “In the 1950s I used to cut my hair close, Khubbie Old Boy. Not as damned close as you …”

“I shave my head because …” Khublall began philosophically.

“I know, I know,” said Jackson irritably. “Gandhi’s a spiritual goat. The sins of the fathers upon their virgin brides are visited upon your bald cranium. When will the funeral cease? It never will I suppose while the wedding lasts….” Jackson looked changed, suddenly sombre, a deep wound inside that he dressed up in a flying tongue. He touched the strings of a bitter harp, a pan-piano within himself, a vibration, a luminous scar, a luminous beak.

“When I got to Marseille — beautiful harbour Marseille has — Sukey’s band was just leaving for Paris. Their first performance was in a club patronized by black and white Americans in Paris, Africans, West Indians, musicians, painters, etc. etc. It’s all like a mist now, a mist of faces. I haven’t been back there these past thirty years. I seem to see it from a great height through her eyes of the South, the black South. Cold eyes nevertheless. Marbles of fate. They glint, they split into many jealous facets. Sometimes when I go into a museum or church of evolution — as my eccentric biologist master used to say — I see them as if they’ve fallen out of the head of a black madonna into animals’ heads, birds’ heads…. Just a glint. Mean at times. Generous at times. Eyes like the name she adopted in which to star in her shows. Sukey and Tawdrey. Dark and Mean popular camouflage of Greedy, Transparent and Rich. A bitter lesson you may say for a bridegroom to prize above heaven and hell. No. Not a soul could have convinced me then. Professional slut she may have been — many a great actress is, acting is a complex profession. To play evil or mean or grand or notorious is to be evil or mean or grand or notorious while the play lasts. I was transported and depressed by every wonderful performance. It was grist of marvel for me, she was a marvellous experience, so marvellous I forgot my father’s hooves, the armour I possessed — or thought I possessed — to trample every bitch…. Not she. She never really forgot. She saw my naked fear of dying in her, my naked fear of impotence….”

“Why impotence?”

Jackson looked at him with blind eyes. “Love of country or of theatrical humanity sometimes kills with a made-up kiss as much as with a real bullet. A great man said that. Not me. To fear or to buy love is the beginning of impotence. And her auction-block strip-tease was the echo of that fear, the echo of my nakedness rather than hers. It was a way of making me see with her body presented to me like a commodity how vulnerable I was….”

“But,” said Khublall, “as a black Jamaican, why should she see you…?”

“As a rotten overlord?” Jackson laughed. “Love’s torment. She fell in love with me and so I was her target, her intimate audience. I was rotten overlord as well as hoped-for liberator. The schizophrenia of the Third World. Pigmentation — she was black American, I black West Indian — was irrelevant. One doesn’t easily dispense with the wounds of the past. The disease is as much in the new ruler’s mind as in the old brothels of empire. Let it suffice to say I became her prime target of war, slave, post-war, post-slave era. Prime slave and prime minister rolled into one. I became her authoritarian ace in a pack of cards that reduced me to a clown. I say ‘clown’ but I have no word for it, it was more ‘prey of the furies’… A mixture of imperial clown and prey of anxiety,” he paused, his eyes ravaged, “that’s how she was conditioned perhaps — I don’t know — to respond to a West Indian, to make love to him, to mock him … I remember the Sacré Coeur in the night sky above the stage where she danced. Her dances were the beginning of ‘half-clown, half-fury’ affair between Jackson jun. (myself) and Sukey Tawdrey (carnival body of bought-and-sold peoples around the globe consenting to their new, black and white masters).” Jackson stopped. He felt the fire of paranoia in his heart, the way he had named himself as if he were speaking of a stranger in the boudoir of chameleon politics, chameleon flesh-and-blood. Khublall nodded. He was confirmed in his vision of early-to-mid-twentieth-century sexual nemesis in late-twentieth-century powers.

“She danced two dances,” Jackson continued. “The first was a unique interpretation of Scott Joplin’s rag, the second Count Basie’s jazz.” Khublall wondered what rag and jazz had to do with clown and fury.

“It’s getting a bit nippy,” Jackson said. “The air seems colder. Why not come over to my place in North Pole Road?”

An apron of light and cloud had arisen in the direction of Bale. Jackson involuntarily shielded his eyes, then looked down and across the green. The players were still punting a football from foot to hand, foot to foot, never letting it touch the ground, though they had moved now much farther away. Their voices were faint. There was the rattle of a train behind him across the road. He turned. He could see the train high upon the embankment above the road. A couple of double-decker buses were approaching from the northern end of the road. For a moment everything seemed still, a still camouflage upon his senses. Someone had died in that instant. That’s why the world had invisibly stopped. Then he and Khublall moved in that instant — oblivious of all the others, the millions, who had died — and made their way to his basement flat in North Pole Road. It was curious but it was as if their faint breath set the train and the buses into automatic progression again. A hairline reflex, hairline moment, pushed the traffic on the road, a sensitive minute hand of gravity in one’s body that possessed its mutual riddle in fused crowd or ball punted from hand to foot.