Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

I saw he had turned from Jackson and was addressing me. “I could not save your father, Weyl, by reaching back through the bars of time, but he saved me. I enlightened him nevertheless about his pagan body. I sustained his case. I helped him to evolve a little, to move on. That is the function of originality. Unless one brings originality to the resurrection theme it is hollow, it is impotent. I saved James. He liberated me when he jolted my memory. I saw a mere newspaper clipping — a mere clipping I say — but remember it had been fired into originality on his brow.”

I protested. I hated James. “He is a bloody puppet,” I cried. I turned to Jackson. “Tell James, Jackson, he was a lucky devil when Lazarus pulled him from the pit, but I know who he is. He rode my father down in Brickdam. And then he came to the funeral with a wreath. He was filled with fear, I tell you, Lazarus. The wreath was nothing but a hollow crown. He is a bloody puppet, a bloody puppet.”

“Easy, easy, Weyl,” said Lazarus gently. “The distinction between the bloody puppet and the art of freedom cuts deep. So deep our hate resurrects and, as it does, the bloody puppet is as much ourselves as the man or the woman we hate. Freedom should mean freedom from past fear. We have nothing to fear but fear itself in the resurrection of hate. That is the complex stake in all puppet resurrections that torment us, that chasten us in depth, in every aspect of our lives, in every encounter with Memory, every confession we make, every protest, every longing we cultivate or suppress, every chain upon which we dangle that brings us round and round and round again to know ourselves in dreadful part, in complex whole … My dear Weyl, remember my gift to you is the wages of descent into hell/ascent into heaven, every shade of emotion, however bitter, however terrible or sweet, that makes us prize the arts of freedom as originality to revisit the past and not be confounded or conscripted by the sorrows, the waste, the terror of time, partial time, whose biased face is the resurrection of the puppet, whose stranger, unfathomably whole face is the resurrection of life.”

*

Masters left the factory clothed in my resentment still and entered a phase of existence that was haunted by dubious women. Or so it seemed to me — to my jaundiced mind — when I compiled notes upon him in 1958, 1959, and succeeding years. Now — when he addresses me anew as resurrected paradox, dead king — I see everything quite differently. I see their inner significance with sudden perception or shock. Masters the Fourth wore the Carnival mask of Lazarus in a loose characteristic way that overshadowed Masters the Second and Masters the Third in my dream. He came into the money he had been awaiting from the sale of his New Forest properties not long after his encounter with the devil and with James whom he had rescued from the pit and whose wife he was to pursue. Her name was Aimée and she came to see him not long after Masters’ conversation with Jackson and with me.

Even now — within the labyrinth of resurrections that Carnival Lazarus unravels — I find it difficult to describe her. She was a very attractive woman in a curious downbeat fashion. She was listless yet susceptible to faint rhythms of hysteria and animation (the phenomenon of faintness that adorned her apparition within structured non-feeling made her survival or arousal all the more preternaturally vivid). Her faint arousal from a grave of non-feeling incorporated something of the lightning brow of Jane Fisher the Second with whom Masters slept on the day he died in 1982. And that meant that Aimée was also possessed by a resemblance to Jane Fisher the First who stabbed Masters the First in New Forest.

Despite or because of all this Aimée remains a shadowy figure in my mind as I cling to Masters’ chain of existences in the past, in the present, in the future that is also the biased present, the unfulfilled past. Indeed it is this astonishing preternatural light of shadow and time that makes her unique in retrospect. She came to him in an evening veil, post-Inferno, early Purgatory, a new fashion that sold well in Oxford Street. Upset veil. Weeping shawl. Faint abandon. Edged hysteria. Her perception of James’ accident differed in tone from Jackson’s tale. James may have caught religion in dreaming of the horse that saved him but Aimée had caught the downbeat aroma of guilt distilled from flowers and soil. It lay upon Lazarus’ nose and brow like the vestige of a cloud. Slightly vulgar expensive perfume perhaps, slightly mystic. Aimée shopped without economic bother in Resurrection Road. James — as a skilled Madame Guillotine operator — earned a good pay-packet that she supplemented in a nightclub. She swore with a flick of her wrist — so gentle no bones were broken — that she had been responsible for James’ accident.

“He had learnt I was carrying on with another man under Nightbridge,” she said. “That’s the name of my club. I saw he was upset the morning he left. But I thought nothing of it. He was always so quiet, you know, and I felt the cloud would blow over.”

“Is Nightbridge a cloud that blows over?” asked Lazarus.

“You know what I mean,” she said. “Don’t be mean to me. We need to deceive each other a little, some of the time if not all of the time, don’t we? I’ve come to you because he thinks the world of you and he’s changed and I’m worried he may do something bad to himself.”

She was weeping, half-genuine guilt, half-stifled, ominous pleasure. He passed a handkerchief to her. She dabbed her eyes. Her features were a mixture, a paradox. Fragile, eggshell solid, exotic ghost, natural but artificial body, the strip-tease of the soul that made her a great success when she danced in the Club Nightbridge.

“What do you think I should do, Lazarus?”

Lazarus looked intently at her. “The accident,” he said softly, “happened in the late afternoon when James was driving back home. Not in the morning when he left you. Is it not possible that something else, someone else, not you, Aimée, was on his mind?”

“He was brooding all day,” she protested, “all day. It was me. He’s a careful driver. He drives so smoothly I could stand on the bonnet of his car and be safe. I could dance …”

“I know you can,” said Lazarus.

“It’s ridiculous but he says if he hadn’t dreamt of you at the last moment he would have died. What about me? Suppose I had been sitting next to him, and I had dozed off too, would I have lived?”

“You would have danced with me,” said Lazarus, “on Nightbridge stage. I am the grave’s living understudy. I could take the place of your lover. James wouldn’t mind.”

Aimée had not heard Lazarus’ response which was spoken under his breath. She cried, “And that’s why I have come to see you, Lazarus, in case James spake of me to you. I need help.”

Lazarus looked at her even more intently. He saw beyond lucid dream that she was worried about James. And yet there was something else she desired, something that infiltrated her guilt. Was it that James’ sudden accidental death would have freed her, would have been a legacy to her to construct his epitaph in dance and to bring her Nightbridge lover home? Would it have given her, James’ death, the impulse to dance with greater mourning/ecstatic abandon than ever before?

To care for a loved one, yet desire his death, is nothing new. Her guilty desire to see James dead was true but — if anything — it strengthened the bond between them. She needed him. She needed him to fill a dual hole in her affections. She needed him sometimes fictionally dead, concretely alive, sometimes concretely dead, fictionally alive. The knowledge of his presence at home or at work — performing the daily, the nightly chores — gave spice to her Nightbridge affair. The deception she practised prepared her for the greatest figure, the greatest dance, she would ever perform with the grave’s living understudy.