Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

A game of cricket was in progress as Thomas and the market woman passed the College. As they moved to a faint, moist pressure on the soles of their feet, the striking batsman was hidden from sight less within the shell of the sun over their eyes than within the bamboo and sugar-cane masks at the edge of the field. But soon the ball had risen from the bat, it almost seemed to whistle in the body of space before arching and descending into Thomas’s hands.

Thomas could scarcely countenance his luck. He wanted to pocket the catch, to take it away and examine its markings for the magic of blood in every game one involuntarily plays, the masked dead with the living, masked bamboo with sugar-cane, the unborn fodder with the born. Was it the redness of the ball that gripped him now or the unexpected metamorphosis of the yolk of an egg? A howl rose from the field. It reached him through every veil, tar and shell and sun, and he tossed the ball back into Carnival spaces.

They had soon left the game of cricket behind and were abreast of the Alms House gate. Thomas peered through the bars. They stroked his eyes like gigantic lashes borrowed from the mask of the sun. Some of the inmates were seated on benches in a burnt-earth enclosure beside a straggly garden with a rose and a lily. Aunt Alice had risen from a bench. She moved around the enclosure like an ancient, sailing doll. Her faded dress reached to her ankles to kiss with the faintest whispering sound the cracked leather of her boots. It was the hour of exercise when the players or puppets in this other kind of dance or game limbered up before daylight supper. Who was she to lead the dance? Who was Aunt Alice? Was she Thomas’s real aunt? She was not. Indeed you may recall, gentle reader, my saying earlier in this book that I have no record of Thomas’s relations except that he was young Masters’ cousin. Even that is unreliable since terms like “cousin” were loosely and inaccurately addressed to distant relations or no relations at all in Plantation New Forest.

Alice was everybody’s ancient purgatorial relative. The dustman called her “aunt”, so did the postman and the drivers of delivery vans and nurses and less uniformed, even nondescript, personages of Carnival. Rumour had it that Aunt Alice had been married to a high-ranking civil service star who had lived but a couple of blocks away from the Alms House. That was an age ago. She had been his third wife. The marriage had been contracted in his sixty-first year (she was then fifty-one or fifty-two) when he had been in retirement for four or five years and was in receipt of a pension. (Civil servants retreated at fifty-five or fifty-six as befitted stars within the Carnival sun.)

His first wife had died from tuberculosis. His second wife (one Charlotte I was informed by Masters) had skilfully stripped him of everything in his early middle age — all his property, in the heat of their romance, had been put in her name — and his former assets were to pass to her children by the marriage she made after their divorce. So it was that his pension, a good one by the standards of the day, kept the wolf from Alice’s door until his death when his pension ceased and she received nothing at all in her own right. It seemed grossly unfair in that he had contributed to the Widows and Orphans Fund all his working life. These contributions were deemed ineffectual in that she became his wife after his retirement.

I gleaned the uncertain facts from Masters.

How long, I wondered, had Alice been an inmate in the Alms House? Ten years or fifteen or ages? No one knew. I learnt, however, that her surname was Bartleby. No relation, I hasten to say, to Herman Melville’s Bartleby , though fiction-spirit, fiction-blood, runs between them. He, Melville’s poor Bartleby, had died a young man, whereas she, like her husband who died in his seventies, sailed into old age; she learnt to dance in the Carnival of the Alms House for her supper.

I checked the New Forest Argosy to see whether it may have glimpsed her genius in the early twentieth century and pleaded her cause. Not a line, not a word, not the flimsiest paragraph existed. It seemed remarkable that the widow of a star should have fallen into the oblivion of a dance of spirit in becoming everybody’s purgatorial aunt. Masters intervened — rather peremptorily when we discussed the matter in Holland Park — to declare it was less remarkable than I thought. The gulf between a “star” and the “inmates of a cosmic alms house” was less wide than it seemed; it was as narrow as that between a privileged survivor in space and the gestating wilderness of intergalactic species …

Thomas held fast to the bars of the gate within the mask of the sun he wore. “Aunt Alice,” he cried. She stopped and looked at him. The elongated eyelashes of the mask, as he peered through the gate, ran down his face and divided it into segments. It was a curious innovation. A human child yet many segments of plantation psyche, many segments of global uncertainty, to which Alice responded out of the strangest, almost old-fashioned, pity of heaven.

Thomas, her purgatorial nephew, could not articulate what he felt. It was too peculiar, too overwhelming, for him, however precocious he was. But he felt it deeply all the same. He felt the museum profit and the museum loss of bureaucratic Inferno in Widows and Orphans state, the elusive and untouchable spell of non-pensionable spirit that secretes itself in oblivion. Aunt Alice was nebulously related to him as to young Masters. She was sister to the “mask of the cuckold”. A nebulous relationship in that Carnival possessed no identifiable role for her and had thrust her into limbo’s purgatory, limbo’s heaven, as a consequence. The “mask of the cuckold” was a privileged humiliation, it sheltered the “mother of god” and gave legitimate status to the child, Masters. But Alice, the sister of the mask, had sunken so far beneath conventional contact, beneath pensionable and non-pensionable desert, that her universal fictional kinship to humanity expressed itself as nothing more than a sailing dress above lined, wrinkled boots, in the limbo heaven of New Forest Alms House.

Was someone actually at home in the pathos of her dress? Was she the prey of phantom nephews and nieces, phantom injustices, phantom diseases, diseased Widows and Orphans state, diseased unemployment in the decade of the 1920s that cast its imprecise, its inexact, parentage of shadow into generations unborn?

Diseased as they were, they sought to toss her pennies to dance. And when they had nothing to toss, they reminded her of the taxes they paid. For without their money, they claimed, there would have been no theatre of the Alms House in which Aunt Alice played the paradoxes of limbo’s evolution into other spheres, the paradoxes of the widow of a dead star and the sister-in-law of the mother of god. Not that they understood such comedy of destitution and non-existent status of wealth. Yet they applauded unwittingly by calling her “aunt”, spirit-aunt, oblivion’s aunt.

Thomas also applauded though he was terrified by “oblivion’s aunt” and by the thought of being swallowed or lost forever in her massive, sailing body. Alice understood. She felt profoundest compassion for him. How close is “oblivion’s aunt” to the seed of heaven that evolves into a family tree of spirit? Her curious dance (Thomas was uncertain whether she were a dream-puppet or sailing flesh-and-blood bound for divinity’s shore) mirrored the division between the two realms he had glimpsed through barred gate and segmented mask, namely, the realm of oblivion or absolute limbo and the realm of Carnival evolution into a family of spirit; and as she danced he felt he could trace the division within her, puppet breast/fertile breast, wasted breast/active breast at which he had never sucked but which she gave to him now.