Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

Masters, dressed to play his part, proceeded to Nightbridge Club to dance with Aimée. He rang the bell but had some difficulty at first in gaining admittance. Aimée came to the door and told the doorman that the resurrected king was foul and persona non grata.

“I hope your damn heart bust open again, Lazarus,” she said. “That will teach you the difference between vanity and love.”

He was on the point of leaving when a figure in a great winter overcoat — rich as a fur coat — spoke to the doorman. (Fur coat, I dreamt — where had I seen it or something like it before? Had it not lain on the floor of Masters’ bedroom that day in 1982 when he died at the hand of an unknown assailant in the wake of Jane Fisher the Second?) Lazarus did not see his face in the night but in point of obscure fact I knew that this was the closest Masters was to come to the sovereign daemon of an overseer who long ago had borrowed his face in New Forest. The doorman was instantly agreeable. “Mr Lazarus,” he said, “it’s okay. The play’s started. It started the moment you rang the bell.”

“But Aimée refused …”

“Someone higher than Aimée or anybody else in this club say it’s okay, sir. So it’s okay.”

“Do you mean …”

“The same.”

Masters instantly looked around for his mysterious benefactor but he had vanished in a Soho side street. “I missed him,” he cried. “Oh god, so close yet so far.”

The doorman held Masters and pulled him in. Lazarus was reluctant yet glad to enter the club. It was a chill evening outside. Through a crack in the door he could see — fifty yards or so away — the gleam of a street-light upon the bare arm of a tree. Beneath it the cloth of night had been cut into a square. And beyond the square a church tower loomed black and still. Masters shed his coat and passed it to a young woman with a red ribbon in her hair. He settled at a table inside and ordered a whisky. In a flash — as if a subtle torch had flared or signal been given — the curtains over the stage were up and Masters beheld a winding stairway that rose into heaven. It was a replica, he thought, of the ladder or gate through which Aunt Alice Bartleby had looked down on earth. Aimée now appeared with her dancing partner. They were still, as if frozen, while someone made an announcement to the effect that the real dancer, Aimée’s true partner, was ill and an understudy would perform the part.

“Understudy!” Masters cried with impatience, with confusion, but his voice was lost in the music. He felt cheated. Who was this new understudy who took not only the place of the “real or true dancer” but his (Masters’) place as well? He was exactly the same build, the same height, as Masters. Masters half-rose from the table to leave the club, then sat down again. The path to the door was blocked. His heart was beating fast with sudden anger. My heart was beating fast. I had anticipated another dance between Masters and Aimée in succession to the one he had performed with her on the red-ribboned car. But the cue that the mysterious overseer had delivered at the Nightbridge door had changed the rhythm of Carnival theatre into a form I had not anticipated.

The dance or play now revolved around a core of creative anger in lieu of vanity, genuine creative anger that sometimes runs close to fierce love or fierce hate to offset the illusion of vanity.

It was the dance of purgation through creative anger in which Aimée was now involved and though Masters was not with her on the actual stairway into the stars on Nightbridge stage I suddenly saw how profoundly he was involved in the play, in the dance of anger.

All at once the dance enlisted great heaps of soil piled high at the foot of the stairway. These vibrated. A series of dancing mudheads, freshly risen puppets-Lazarus, appeared. They sprang from the stage on to the floor where Masters sat. They occupied tables there. They formed a great circle around him. And as I stared at them closely I remembered Masters’ distinction between bloody puppets and the art of freedom.

Yes, they were bloody puppets. It was a subtle comedy. They were dead, however active, triggered by strings, manipulated. Masters was alive. Alive? Risen? Yes, I dreamt that he was alive, that he was risen from the humus of a civilization. His anger was real. That was my only proof that he had risen. He had come to the club to seize … Seize whom? The mysterious overseer. Yes, but there was more to it than that. He had come to seize a slender motif, an inner vein, an inner artery in that overseer, an inner current within the wound he carried, a wound that really belonged to the other. His anger was therapy, the therapy of justice he needed to create within his own being through the other.

He might never see his enemy — the enemy — face to face, deceptive face within deceptive face, but the originality of therapeutic anger, therapeutic blood rather than bloody puppets was a form of seizure to withstand every ape of the resurrection.

Even as I perceived this, I also perceived that Aimée’s anger, her resentment at the injustice of being labelled vain and hollow, was equally potent. Lazarus — the risen, alive Lazarus rather than puppets-Lazarus — had aroused her. Not that she was beyond the hysteria of manipulated being but her anger was so real that an original transfusion of justice possessed her. I saw those faint wonderful eyes of hers. The languor of her limbs, her faint arms, reached out not only to the immediate dancer on the stairway but towards the puppets-Lazarus on the floor or pit of the theatre. That reach endorsed her outer gaze on the edge of manipulated being. But her inner faint body glanced at Masters as well with the rage of longing, with the certainty of the genius of love, the genius of vocation within her blood, true blood not bloody puppet. She was a dancer of freedom’s cousinship to epitaphs of fate.

I held Amaryllis close. I knew. And yet … I could not be sure. Aimée was no puppet but I wondered whether the flick of a die on the stairway might tighten the strings around her and about us and change the batteries of anger in the theatre of the world into a strike at humanity that would ape our rage, our longing, our tenderness, and lose the therapeutic originality of inner justice, inner transfusion, inner blood born of transformative organs of power and lust.

A flood of music swept the theatre and lifted Aimée into the sky upon the stairway of Nightbridge, into the arms of the dancer who resembled the overseer of god.

“There is anger and anger,” Masters cried to the dancer with his own body on the stairway of god. “I know the limits of anger. I have ruled and served, have commanded labour and been a labourer myself, have stood high and stood low.”

“Never high enough, never low enough,” said the terrible dancer. “And that is why we deceive ourselves. We project ourselves into the stars but fall far short of the mind , the original mind of angry creation, angry for justice. We project ourselves into the grave but fall far short of the original sobriety, the original seed of the spirit of life. Never high enough to mind, never low enough to original humility, original spirit.”

I saw that the mask of Lazarus had slipped a little from Masters’ face and that it floated between Amaryllis and me. “Is this your gift?” I cried to him, “the gift of true fiction, the gift of the understudy, the living understudy of heights we have not yet achieved and depths we have not yet plumbed? Is this your gift, Masters?”

*

An impulse of obscure anger wrecked Nightbridge Club in the late 1960s or early 1970s. Someone tossed a cigarette end into an accumulation of puppet-rags, a fire blazed, the building was gutted. The stage or stairway on which Aimée had danced shot up virtually uncharred in a charred shell of a building. It was curious and bizarre.