Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

Billionaire Death turned from me to Peter. He knew my voice. He remembered the voice that had addressed Peter and outwitted Doctor Faustus. He felt the time had come to make me aware of his wealth and his power.

‘I have received billions and trillions to gain the eyes I possess.’

‘You mean you are rich enough to have paid or spent billions …’

‘Not so. Received. Death never pays. Death receives. My eyes reflect the accumulated receipt of love’s death wish. My eyes are the substance of all atmospheres that pour into me. I do not spend, Robin. I receive. The cheaper life is, the greater the undervaluation of the mystery of life — the more it sings to me in all sorts of fashions and follies, the more it grieves for me — the less it resists theatres of extinction and the destruction of species and populations.

‘Who really cares, Robin, how vast are the sums civilization devotes to weapons of destruction? Life is cheap, so spend, spend, spend on fashions of death becomes the refrain that falls into me and fills my treasury.’

He paused and placed upon me the imaginary and brooding vistas of his unwritten music in which I saw through his eyes the terrible opera of an age. ‘From the last two World Wars alone I pocketed billions of royalty. Calculate the astronomical sums spent on the war poems written in the trenches! How much did it cost civilization to bring a handful of poets there and throw a sunset/sunrise blanket over their eyes? I plucked those eyes out of their heads and planted them in mine.

‘Imagine what it costs Redbreast Robin to maim a child or a man or a woman in a bombed city. I have reaped imaginary harvests and Ghost knows what in Vietnam and the Lebanon.’ He turned and pointed to an imaginary bed on which I dreamt I saw three children dressed in Alice’s masks — the mask of Beirut, the mask of Belfast, the mask of Jamaica. They oscillated or stirred in the hospital of infinity.

He saw me staring at the Jamaican mask. ‘Oh that! Just a pittance. People were stoning one another and the little female mask ran on the battleground and was killed. How much did it bring? Let’s see.’ He plucked a blur of stones from his brow and chest. Blurred stones in the photography of pupil and orb in Death’s majestic eyes. Jagged. Sharp. They had cut to the brain. I looked at the child again and wondered whether she had seized love’s death wish with her last breath.

‘You said a pittance,’ I spoke helplessly. ‘Just a pittance.’

‘Oh yes, a pittance,’ Billionaire Death repeated. ‘Let’s see.’ He adjusted his imaginary eyes and I saw angry bodies breaking a surf of cane and vegetables upon a glowing hillside. Their arms were slashed but it did not matter. I saw hands coated with dust digging the sun from the hillside. The broken stones from the hillside lost their glow as they were lifted and flung.

‘Say five hundred dollars for loss of crops,’ said Billionaire Death, ‘their loss, my gain. Twenty dollars for each hillside stone. A stone has fossil value in geologic space. A score of stones. Twenty by twenty. Four hundred dollars. Five plus four. Nine hundred dollars. Make it a round sum for a child’s life — a thousand dollars. Death’s a banker, life’s a … life’s a … life’s a … life’s a bloody pauper. ’ His voice, I suddenly realized, seemed to have stuck in his throat. A hiccup of a song in a child’s breaking breast.

Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.

Death pulled the window down upon the frightful scene and brawl I had witnessed through his eyes. But not before leaving on the windowsill a pair of glittering scales and the stone from the hillside that had killed a child. Peter and I placed Alice’s ring on one scale and the stone on the other. They drew level in perfect equilibrium, perfect equality in the heart of light.

‘I wonder,’ I said to Peter, ‘what Death received on behalf of Alice and Miriam the afternoon they drowned? (And I with them?) It couldn’t have been much. Alice had spent virtually every penny. And there were debts as you know. Miriam’s little theatre would have fetched but a pittance. Yes …’ I found myself brooding on the word pittance , ‘just a pittance.’

I stopped. Peter was silent.

‘Do you know,’ I said, ‘when we drew level with Billionaire Death’s hospital and treasury I remembered my pork-knocker library, every morsel and text into which I dug. I used to play, remember, I was a grave-digger in the magic wood. What are those books worth now? Another pittance.’

‘Enough,’ said Peter, ‘to bring me a bed in space. And the flavour of being cared for and caring for others. Books of a certain kind — written and revised (as you would say) by the hand of the magical dead — have anti-gravity substance. Death may laugh at them but they have a place, an original place, on his scales.’

I scarcely heard what he was saying except that my books had secured him a bed in space. ‘You?’ I demanded. ‘Bought you a bed?’

‘Why yes me and alter ego you in a manner of speaking, Robin,’ said Peter mildly. ‘How could I be here ascending the Mountain of Folly, how endure its riddles in the heart of a dying age, except I had died to the machinations of Skull? A creative dying! A shared mask with the dying living in every theatre of conscience. Emma’s alive. She wears the mask of an archbishop in AD 2025. Her coronation’s today. Eighty years old. She like ourselves was born in 1945 when the Bomb fell.’

‘But when I dreamt I saw you and her in the tunnel … She dropped an ancient letter in my pocket and you were a book in her hand whose pages she turned …’

‘You were digging in your library and theatre of Sleep, Robin. You saw her through Death’s quantum eyes. And the quantum imagination risks everything to know the truth. Death becomes something of a classic when we fictionalize it, the classic penetration of all our ills and a revolutionary moment in our submission to the resurrection.’

‘You have not understood, Peter!’ I cried. ‘I am saying that when I saw her I sensed something, I sensed a struggle with ancient plays and texts and letters — I knew she was worn — she confessed her difficulties of an intimate nature — but she seemed so incredibly close to my immortal youth, immortal drowned Glass youth and mirror of space through which all things flit in the alchemy of the imagination.’

‘I know, I know, immortal Robin. The machinations of Faust. Beware of the Glass that may mesmerize you. And yet in another light immortality is the comedy of a changeless romance between true, inner flesh and true, outer spirit. Immortality is a feather in the Nightfall of the sea and the land. A feather by which we know that a stone and a ring and other relics that seem unequal may float and link themselves into a chain. Infinity’s chain. That that chain remains unbroken despite everything is our slender passion and hope of the transformation of injustice that we inflict on ourselves and upon others. Should it sever then we are lost. Then we fall into the abyss. But it will not, it cannot.’

His words were the cue for us to move up to another room in space. Ghost had given this ward or room to his chauffeur of infinity who was tinkering at this moment with the rocket of which Doctor Faustus had spoken, the rocket band that had fallen from the sky.

‘It’s a fast car,’ I said to Peter. ‘It’s a still drum or band or something yet it’s moving at a fantastic speed. How can anyone hold on and work! Gravity’s — anti-gravity’s — miracle. I see it as if my eyes are glued into a camera yet flying in a moving fast photographic lens and object in a dark night beyond Mars and Venus.’