Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

Thus, at a stroke, as it were, my mother was removed from the funeral stage itself yet ensconced in a high balcony next door as in a theatre. There, locked into a frame, with two servants to keep her company and to prevent her from escaping, she beheld the procession beneath.

I remember glancing up at her from the aisle in the garden along which the funeral audience — the New Forest citizenry — was arriving. Bodies moved in single file into the house, past the wreaths and the show-piece of a coffin, and out again into the street where they stood in slightly tense, somnolent, pleased, passive groups or repaired to sit in their carriages and cars and wait for the coffin to be borne from the house to the hearse and the procession to come alive and take its course to the cemetery. A thrill ran down my spine on seeing my mother far up in her frame. It was not simply her expression but the sensation I had, as I dreamt of her, that rain was falling in the air over the window. It was an illusion, for the sun was sharp and bright and not a drop fell upon me below. But the sensation persisted that my mother was veiled by Waterfall Oracle, by some extraordinary ruse of the light years wheeling in space, by some veil or abstract premise Masters had brought back with him from his expedition upon the river El Dorado.

It is said that a newborn child, with the gift of a seer, sometimes wears a caul over its eyes, and now it seemed that my new-dead father had projected a caul over Jennifer’s eyes through which she looked at me (as if two eyes were raised into a single third eye) — looked at me as if I were her judge and executioner rolled into one around the wheeling years.

I judged her, yes, but she resisted me in that sudden caul of rain. She was a prophetess, the Delphic oracle of slain queen, though not a sound issued as yet from her lips.

Funerals are the most important social event in the New Forest calendar. It was an unforgivable offence if relatives of the deceased failed to attend. Such relatives were but a trickle, however, in a river of mourners drawn from the distant relations of less distant relations of close relatives of the deceased. Then there were the friends of the deceased and the friends of friends of the friends of the deceased. Then there were acquaintances of acquaintances of the acquaintances of the deceased. Then there were colleagues of the deceased and the friends of colleagues and the friends of the friends of colleagues of the deceased. Lastly, as if to defy all convention, there came the curious, and the friends of the curious, and the acquaintances of the friends of the curious who haunted the premises of Carnival.

In my father’s case, despite the universal hostility he had aroused in his conscientious defence of a pagan prince and a savage, all barriers were broken when fate struck — as if by accident — to punish him. The community flocked to him then, not as a free people but in a phantom concourse of solid souls bound for a. racecourse, or a football match, propelled by a devil to mount a gigantic treadmill upon which, it seemed, everybody that was anybody, nobody that was somebody, moved to pay their respects to the shell robed in a coffin in the professional vestments of the advocate.

A reporter stood at the gate and entered the names of important persons attending the funeral. The Governor had asked Masters to represent him. There were representatives of the legal profession, the medical profession, the Church, Sport, Scholarship, Politics, the Prisons, the Estates. The men wore black serge suits, white shirts, black ties. The women wore white dresses and white or black hats. Masters wore black as well but he had had no time to have it dry-cleaned and it was painted with faintly discernible stars like the flame of a match from the El Dorado river. I saw them if no one else did. Even as no one, in the dream, looking up to the frame in which my mother stood, saw the glisten of tears, the glisten of rain.

By degrees, the passive funeral throng acquired a faintly unsettled mould. The lid was fastened upon the coffin. Masters and five other citizens of Purgatory; namely, a lawyer, a doctor, and three Old Boys from College, bore the coffin through the garden into the roadway and toward the hearse. The horse, for some unaccountable reason, took fright and the bearers were driven to deposit the coffin upon the grass verge by the roadside. The horse reared as the mule or donkey had reared to overshadow Martin when he fell under the wheel of the dray-cart. It not only reared but succeeded in backing the hearse on to the parapet. It drew so close to the garden that I dreamt it extended its neck like a harlequin, Carnival giraffe and cropped the sunflowers in the garden to leave the stage under the faint mist of Waterfall Oracle dry and shorn.

The driver of the hearse succeeded at last in calming the frightened phantom-rock of an animal and in restoring the hearse to the roadway. Masters and his fellow bearers lifted the coffin again. They succeeded this time in transporting it to the hearse and depositing it therein. Wreaths were piled upon the coffin; they gleamed through the glass body of the vehicle that had escaped fracture. The horse was frightfully motionless and its panting (however still), perspiring (however dry) sides also gleamed. It was a dappled rock of a creature and its coloration seemed to reflect the garden sun-fodder it had consumed. I wondered whether the glass vehicle had also eaten the wreaths piled upon the coffin within it or whether my father actually lay in the body of the horse with the sunflowers from the garden that the rock-animal had consumed sprouting from him.

At last the phantom horse responded to the driver. The driver was attired in a long threadbare feathery cloak. Not a feather from a duck’s back but a feather that had drifted down from the sun-raven that flew with the duck through the mist over my mother’s eyes. It was black. The procession moved inch by inch, it seemed, under the yellow sunflower yet black sun-raven in the body of space.

The procession moved through East Street, Orange Promenade, into Brickdam. The passivity of the procession — the passivity of the audience sealed into their slowly moving carriages and cars — was possessed now of the faintest rumbling. Not thunder, but the agitated digestion of the rock-phantom horse that led the long line of vehicles towards the cemetery. It was at least a mile long. Masters sat with me in the principal mourners’ carriage. We may have been sailing upon the bed of a river sucked dry and in which the prospect of fluid evolutionary/revolutionary soul existed in the inhabitants of the Town who lined the route of the procession.

There they were with curious waiting gaze as if rooted in a spell within the phantom horse in which I was convinced my father lay. They too had been cropped by that gigantic creature. They too were subject to drought-stage, drought-garden, in Purgatory’s belly. Had not Masters read to me — on one occasion when he visited my parents — the story of the Trojan Horse that became the seed of an overturned age or frame? So now, it seemed to me, a colonial regime, such as poverty-stricken New Forest, secreted in itself the stratagem of Purgatory within its rock-horse that had cropped my garden, and that therein lay the catalyst of modern allegory, modern fiction or biography of terrifying spirit to judge the age in which I lived.

Fly, sunflower, star, feather, crocodile, cannon — to list a few spectres that haunted the route of the procession — were mutual catalysts on the Delphic blackboard of space outside my window and they rumbled in the digestive organs of phantom Carnival daemon or horse.

In running along tarred Brickdam at slow-motion cosmic pace (that recalled the game of the crab that Masters had played on the Arawak foreshore), the hooves of the horse bit into the road soft and hard. They were acquainted with the pitch of night melting in the sun. They were acquainted with the heights and the depths. Daylight night, night-time sun, rumbled in the belly of the horse. We gained the Alms House and I was aware of plucked scouts, the feathered police, their plumes waving as they held the traffic in tributary side streets to allow the procession to pass. We passed the gateway through which Thomas had been knighted by Aunt Alice. The garden theatre in which she had danced was as dry as East Street river. The Bartleby dancing school was finished. Finished? Clean slate? Not really. A wisp of paper blew through the gate and floated into my carriage window. White paper. Black slate. It had been crunched by the horse and the teeth marks listed a throng of hopes, desires, biases as dark as midnight pitch; so deceptive and dark is the pitch of slate crunched by the daemon horse that it seems angelic material, clean slate, the purity of existence, whereas it is the litter of hidden injustice that plagues the human imagination.