Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

“Look, Aimée,” Lazarus said at last, “I assure you there’s no need to feel guilty about James. He’s a quiet customer, as you know, and I know from something he confided to me in the factory …” he hesitated then plunged on, “that he was having an affair with another woman.”

“Another woman?” Her eyes were incredulous. Lazarus had stunned her. It was the first cue she received in respect of the coming dance.

“Yes, yes, you see it was not just you he was upset over. There was another woman! She threatened to leave him. She wanted a car and though his pay was good he couldn’t manage that. He hadn’t yet paid for his own car. He showered her with gifts but she said no. Time to draw the curtains on their little act. On the day of the accident she left him for good. He was upset, yes, and if he’s downhearted now it’s because he’s sober. One can be quiet as hell and still drunk inside. Some quiet people commit some terrible crimes! James is sober now. Not just quiet. He’s fasting. His stomach aches. He survived but he knows what death is. No more cannibal promiscuity if death sobers one, mind you, it isn’t always the case, death is also a heady champagne, ask any fast driver. James is truly sober now. No more cannibal promiscuity, each intent on eating the other’s wages of body and soul.”

Lazarus sought to lessen the shock of the disclosure of the other woman by rambling on a bit about sobriety, the difficult achievement of sobriety in a world that was drunk. He tried to hold her steady but nothing could dispel the naked faint profligate distress in Aimée’s staring eyes. The dance had begun. She sat in the car beside James and the frame of mutual deception they had played on each other for years unfolded in a flash as the car toppled.

She danced to the rhythm of the accident, she was drawn into a striptease of soul on the bonnet of the car upon Nightbridge stage. Lazarus also danced. He saw himself mirrored in her open faint eyes, trembling lips, astonished brow, as she lay crumpled beneath the embankment against the road. What a dance! Aimée sprang up.

Lazarus saw her eyes again, dark as hair yet segmented with the minuscule bars of a ladder, crossed by stars. She swayed before him on the brink of the wheel of the car on Nightbridge stage. The car was dressed with red ribbons. Advertising gimmick in a garage! (Aimée received an additional fee for this.) Car for sale on Nightbridge! Her lips were parted in a faint gleam to kiss a blade of grass and an autumn leaf descending upon the stage and falling beside the parapet or embankment or road. Her brows invited him, repulsed him. Climax. Anti-climax.

And then in a flash she was clothed again on the stage beside the living understudy of the grave. The wreck of the car had vanished into a mist. (I recalled the faint mist standing over my mother’s eyes at Masters’ window above the East Street garden on the day of my father’s funeral.) But in the interval — between the mist of the dance and the dancer’s quiescence on the stage — several orgasmic or climactic ghosts moved with Lazarus. They reflected a series of involuntary climaxes or relief, stilled rain upon fallen bodies. She was free of James, wasn’t she, he was free of her, wasn’t he? Let them go their separate ways, she said to Carnival Lazarus, into Purgatory or into hell or anywhere else on Resurrection Road. The shops were still there, food was still there, records, newspapers. Why should she be guilty of anything? Why should he be upset over her? But she knew in her heart of hearts she was guilty. She also knew she wanted him to be upset over her. Damn the other woman! “I want him to brood upon me, me , Aimée. Upset over me …” The climax of relief therefore — the climax of separation, that they were free to go their separate ways — was a deception. She knew it was. Lazarus knew it was. He held her close and offered himself to her in place of her Nightbridge lover. He (Lazarus) was the living understudy of the grave. He understudied the deceptions that men played upon women, women upon men, in every resurrection of hate or jealousy, vanity or love.

He understudied the frames of mutual deception that broke in a flash within the mirror of the dance of life. He understudied illusory male bodies in women’s arms in parallel with illusory female bodies in men’s arms through Nightbridge lovers or Nightbridge rehearsals of dual, multiple climax.

“I love James,” she said to Lazarus.

“Is it vanity then,” asked Lazarus, pondering his own lines in the Nightbridge play, “is it vanity, or love, that is hurt, that fractures, when you learn that the one you thought you possessed to brood upon you is possessed by another and broods upon another? Is vanity the root of outraged love?”

“ Vanity !” she almost shouted. “Oh my god! I tell you I love him. Don’t you understand?” And Lazarus saw he had hurt her deeply. He had wounded her so deeply I felt her anguish as if it were mine and Amaryllis’s. We were both angry. The dream is no respecter of persons. Lazarus had been, to say the least, tactless. He had taken her into his arms to soothe her distress, then he had turned upon her and accused her of vanity, of feeding upon a splintered faint mirror of multiple bodies to achieve an orgasm. Even Lazarus should mind his own business. Not probe, not question, the vanity of men and women who make love!

Lazarus’ disturbing mirrors, fractions of which lingered in my senses, and Amaryllis’s senses, shifted the gears of personality — at the instant of Aimée’s Nightbridge dance with him — from first to third or fourth dream-person upon the bonnet of the red-ribboned car as if to bring an echo of formidable ecstatic trinity, ecstatic quaternity, into play within multifarious suffering vehicles and bodies in the air, on the sea, upon the Earth. And thus in the dance, despite its deceptions, its schizophrenias, there lurked a nucleus of considerable originality, shared hells, shared heavens, shared self-confessions, shared divinities as well as daemons, shared resurrections as well as orgies, shared vanity so close to authentic affection that the distinction sometimes faded but remained nevertheless to help us define fractions of genuine love, fractions of genuine care, and the mystery of truth.

*

The blow to a universe of vanity that coats ambiguous lovers was a stratagem upon which Masters drew in the mask of Lazarus to gain some knowledge of the whereabouts of the mysterious overseer who had caused his first death in New Forest when he had been mistaken for him by Jane Fisher the First. Aimée and other women in Resurrection Road — who courted a fiction of double lives — might well lead him, he calculated, to seize the devil whose wound he carried and whose guilt he bore. It was a guideline, a dream-chain, to which I clung with immense fascination.

In understudying a sophisticated Nightbridge dancer — whose object in part was to provide a medium of exotic romance, exotic colour upon the ordinary, prosaic bodies of the common-or-garden husbands of bored women — Masters pursued a motif, however slender, that mirrored the privileged overseer who had slept with, and cruelly deceived, Jane Fisher the First. Had not he (Masters himself) profited from such privileges exercised and enjoyed by plantation kings and overseers? In sleeping with the women of the estate, the overseer gave an extra glitter, an extra glory, to the banality of intercourse between buried workers, clerks, even politicians, and their wives. Who, after all, could equal the glamour of a prince?

Who better therefore than he, masked as Lazarus, to understudy Aimée’s Nightbridge lover? Where better than Carnival Nightbridge to glean information about a character one seeks to confront beyond life and death with the injustices with which one has been saddled in life and which were the occasion of one’s first death, a character whose blood runs in one’s privileged Lazarus-veins of memory?