Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

Thomas felt himself masked by their vulgar and banal appetite, vulgar and banal spit. So much so that he led me under the eyes of coal, in the crocodile’s grasp yet hidden from it, on the blind inner side of the crocodile’s skull, as if he possessed a cosmic faculty or guideline born of a globe or planet that defecates in space, cooks in space, apparently beneath, apparently above, the light-year stars.

It was this profound “beneath/above skull and anatomy” of the plantation Inferno that gave him a route through time of which the keepers of the coal pot and the chamber-pot were unaware. And that was just as well. For whatever their complaints, or unanswered prayers, Johnny was president and revolution was taboo. And yet for one moment when we passed by they seemed to look up at unseen Thomas like a dog lipsticking its wounds. Such was their presentiment of the androgynous miracle of Carnival revolution.

Flatfoot had now gained the lantern moon under the donkey cart and Thomas said to me that his vertical descent into the underworld sky of the canal, upon bandage, through absurd crocodile belly, lipsticked dog, within the shell and the roof of coal, beneath/above the stars, had ceased and revolved into horizontal arm or axis of Carnival. He felt a commotion in his stomach. He felt faint and dizzy. He had scarcely eaten a scrap or a morsel since his flight from the foreshore in search of Masters. And the sight of food had enlivened and sickened him.

His phallic entrails akin to the Milky Way were turning. Sparked basket of pubertal sex. He had glimpsed the marble woman’s breasts. She stood in her cave. He glimpsed her through the radii of the spokes in the donkey cart wheel. She, unlike the others, was cooking her meal inside as if each spoke that passed through her were a spit to toast meat or milk. Or so it seemed to Thomas with his masked eyes glued to her. In point of fact she was engaged in peeling sweet potatoes. She had shed her dress for a low petticoat. Her statuesque limbs and breasts revolved slowly in the wheel of his eyes like a slow motion legend of storm. She had anticipated Johnny’s flatfooted approach and her humours, her tensions, obscurely matched his. Flatfoot cried through the revolving door, “Where the damn Boy who smash the egg? I see you with he in the Market-place today.” The woman watched him. She tested the strength of the net she had flung over him. Thomas perceived through the wheel that she was unsure. Johnny was so drunk he seemed capable of rending every garment, uprooting every spoke.

“Who tell you all this?” she asked, playing for time.

“I hear. I hear. Not from you but I hear. You take the Boy home? You see he parents? You make them pay?”

“He has no parents,” the marble woman said quietly. “But he promise to come back and pay in gold.” It was a joke. Thomas hoped Johnny would see it and desist from uprooting the wheel.

“No parents?” Flatfoot exploded. “Is what cock-and-bull story the Boy spin you? He’s a white Boy though he coloured. He got white parents.”

“I tell you he’s an orphan.”

“Orphan hell! I know what orphan mean. It mean he cycling with mother in bed. Orphan hell!” Johnny glared around the cave as if he were searching for someone.

“You filthy , Johnny. You in my bed every night. I pray to you to believe …”

“I don’t believe. I know. I know what you up to with Boys, golden Boys. A piece of gold for an egg!”

“Johnny, you dead drunk,” the marble woman said sharply. Her voice was sharp but tired, peculiarly downcast as if Johnny’s “dead drunk” condition matched an area of stalemate in her at the pit of a wheeling imagination. She had changed, she was more vulnerable than ever, she was without an audience. It came as a shock to perceive this. In the Market-place with an audience to cheer, to applaud generously, she had been inventive enough and able to net the czar’s fist. With Thomas, she had been versatile enough, perceptive enough of a wheel of creatures he brought with him, the dancer Aunt Alice, the fleet-footed Masters, and me, divine clerk or biographer of spirit, who needed their guidance. But now that she felt she had lost us, on her own with the idiot giant, she fell on her knees, as if the wheel had been uprooted, had indeed fallen flat; she seemed to pray, she seemed to fumble for HE SAYS, SHE SAYS, she seemed unnaturally docile. And the flattened wheel almost made her believe she was the individual solitary whore, the individual rotten whore that the idiot giant said she was. She was the wife and mother of orphans in a polluted, stilled universe.

“No rotten gold,” the czar said suddenly. “Give me gut-deep money, bloody money, carve me honest money.” He raised his fist to strike but Thomas could stand it no more. He tugged at the wheel, it resisted, he pulled again, it moved, it spun, he felt it turning into a community of mutual spaces, mutual creatures. He jumped miraculously through the wheel from “beneath/above” and seized the knife on the table, raised it so quickly it knitted afresh the net that had been rent, and then with a sensation that her hand was in his , he plunged the dagger into Johnny’s frame.

As the blood came I wondered if it were true that the wheel was turning. Thomas was dizzy all over again, he stroked it, he stroked the woman’s prayer. The blood was true. The transfigurative wound or revolution came within an ace of realization but in his immaturity, her immaturity, my immaturity — in the way we were locked into self-perpetuating order and primitive habit — the revolution eluded us again. The woman sprang to her feet. She was still, she could scarcely speak, and then she found the voice of terrible oracle. She wrung her hands.

“O me god, Johnny the czar of Russia, he dead.”

It was all she could say. She was lost. She seized her savage love, her savage Johnny. She wept to break his heart and hers.

The czar is dead, long live the czar in the cave of abortive revolution.

In 1931 at the age of Carnival fourteen Masters became a Boy at the famous College in Brickdam next to Aunt Alice’s dancing school in the Alms House. His cosmic apprenticeship as princeling-overseer of the sugar estate of the globe formally commenced. Above the portals to the College was written an injunction attributed to Heracleitus the Obscure:

THE AION IS A BOY WHO PLAYS,

PLACING THE COUNTERS HERE AND THERE.

TO A CHILD BELONGS THE COSMIC MASTERY.

A high priority on the curriculum was athletics. And within the first year of his apprenticeship Masters shone at the Athletic Meet in two of the under-fifteen events. He beat Merriman in the hundred yards and Philip of Spain in the high jump.

After seventy-five yards (in which he kept me at his side and led me in a dream) he and Merriman were ahead of the field and suddenly it seemed to Masters that Merriman would win. The field stretched into a cave at the entrance to which stood two coal-black guardians or referees holding a ribbon or bandage chest high.

There was a fiendish grin on Merriman’s face. His skull shone through the seed of his hair that had been oiled. Masters and I were on the verge of panic. We saw the merry shadow of the false shaman at our side in the collegiate Inferno. We saw that everything we had gained on the beach could be plucked from us now in the laughter of Merriman. Such are the ruses of diseased Ambition. There is rape and rape. There is the seizure of others, there is conquest. That is one form of rape. There is panic — that is another form — panic in being overtaken by a grin.

Masters made his last crucial effort and succeeded in breasting the tape at the entrance to the cave ahead of Merriman. He found it impossible to say in the interior darkness that enveloped him to what degree he had outrun diseased and merry Ambition, to what degree he had profited from it. The sudden darkness left me blind in the cave and I returned to the sun dazzled and uncertain of where I had been.