Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

Haroldian Ulysses was staring at me now and somewhere in his familiar/unfamiliar eyes, his buying/selling eyes in the marketplace of a corridor of space, I knew that he knew he was tempting me, tempting me to consume not a physical but a mysteriously elusive poison, a dish of hate, the spirit of hate. It was a desperate ploy on his part. ‘Hate sometimes masks love.’ Did he desire me to love him after all this time and felt he must feed me with the entrails of bitter passion, passion to hate, as a prelude to a confession of love, terrifying love, love for one’s enemy?

There had been no gesture of love from him when I arrived in his and Alicia’s house at the age of two on the death of my parents. In fact I had no memory of them, of those parents. It was as if they had never been and I had slipped myself down a precipice or hill into Proteus’s hands to live with Alicia and Harold and other obscure relations as a privileged slave. Harold resented Alicia’s love for me.

‘She was never the same after you came,’ he said. I saw the grief, the torment, the rage in his expression. It shocked me. He spoke so softly I had to listen hard to understand — ‘I learnt the reason why your arrival changed our lives when it was too late for me to profit from it. I was a dying man then …’

‘And still you were lusting after women‚’ I cried.

‘She told you so, did she?’

‘It’s true, is it not?’

He hesitated now for a long time: as if he desired to retreat or to fade into nothingness. And then a grain sprang upon his lips, the grain of confessional need. A subtle dam broke in the abyss between us and he cried. — ‘I learnt when it was too late that you were my son, Anselm. No one had told me before. They kept it from me. Your mother did. Alicia did. Proteus did.’

‘Your son ?’ I recoiled. It was my turn to be filled with terror, to taste as never before the spirit of hate he had offered to me. A dizziness arose. How had one arrived here, by what retraced steps of Dream? A ruined corridor of space, yes, that’s where I now stood. There had been the beggar’s rags in the gate of Home (I remembered that). There had been the subtle river upon Alicia’s vase (I remembered that); and the ladder I had climbed from the warehouse of Proteus’s cinema to gauge a deeper self-knowledge of the theatre and the industry of the great Dead who were my mythical and real (however dangerous) antecedents. Strong meat is the spirit of hate.

‘It’s not true. It’s not true. My true parents …’ I stopped. Who were my real parents?

Harold’s face was much darker now as if the corridor had been overshadowed by the first intimations of a storm. I began to consider how to trip him up, how to lay bare his lie. Alicia had often said he was a ‘good’ liar. ‘He’s a master player.’

‘The parents you believe in who died when you were two are a tale that Proteus invented.’

‘Why did he not tell me the truth?’

‘He and Alicia signed a bond to keep it secret. Had they not your mother would not have given you up. I was not to be told until she elected to do so. I thought I could buy everything. I could buy the beauty of nature, I dreamt of a child I would purchase with the blood of money. Money bleeds, Anselm. Money is a powerful passion in nature’s estate and garden of Roses, Rose-flesh, Rose-limbs, Rose-breasts. Money lies between men and women in bed to give teeth to their offspring. I invested in such teeth and the Rose sisters plucked them from me and left me hollow, drawn. I learnt of you, that you were my son, when it was too late.’

How much did I now desire to protest but was unable to speak!

‘I bought the first Rose sister with potent money, Anselm. I forced her to sleep with me. Please listen !’

I had blocked my ears with Proteus’s wax but on seeing his face now, his expression of greatest need, knew beyond a shadow of doubt that he needed my listening mind, my responsive — however repelled — spirit.

Incredible but true. Needed me. Needed to confess to me. Needed me so much that were I to refuse to listen the scaffolding of the great Play, the corridor, the ladder, everything (however apparently fixed and solid) would lose its spark of farflung, interior rehabilitation of the mystery of Conscience within doomed forebears and intimate, self-reflecting creatures. It seemed extraordinary that his need of me, someone as frail as me, was so crucial to the substance of the Play. Need of the living dreamer in the halls, the dimensions, the panoramas of complex, parallel existences of life and death.

I turned away from him for a moment and looked into the storm that overshadowed the corridor. There was a Presence there . Yes, a presence. A presence far greater, far more mysterious than the ‘living absences’ I had invoked, painted, sculpted. It seemed to embrace us all within the Dream-play. It drew me to recall the ‘shattering peace’ that I had glimpsed in the beggar’s eyes within the gate of Home when the burden upon him lifted for an instant into the uncanny reversal of all expectations and premises of myth one anticipates or entertains. Perhaps that Presence had been there overshadowing every retraced footfall I had made but I had not felt it as truly as I did now.

‘The Rose twin-sisters‚’ Harold confessed, ‘both became pregnant by me.’

My first reaction to this was a sense of curious anticlimax. It seemed banal, nothing new, just plain sexual business in a nihilistic age. How does sexual licence, sexual freedom of expression, that an age takes for granted matter, bear upon, or fit into, the moral business of sacred theatre?

‘It fits into the business,’ Harold said, ‘it fits because it bruises our iron-clad scars and opens an abyss between exploited nature and the ground of reconciliation between ourselves and those we have abused.’

He spoke with deceptive clarity and ease but within it I sensed a rhythm that troubled me deeply. It was as if he were cloaking one voice in another (antiphon or discourse of ancestral tongues), speaking deceptively through me, within me, with a shadow-tongue or incantatory rhythm that reminded me of myself (the way I spoke) even as it seemed to breach all complacency in the given self. Was this incalculable rhythm the art of confession between priest and supplicant? Did its origins — the origins of the confessional — lie in such theatre overshadowed by a Presence?

Of one thing I was sure. This was no enchantment, no spell. It was intensely human, intensely real. It possessed its humour. The emphasis on ‘business’ for instance reminded me of Haroldian and Protean comedy as they aped the marketplace of God! Harold was, I perceived — in gratitude to me for listening, for playing the part of divine ape or priest to whom he confessed — seeking to give his utterance both luminous self-mockery and practical detail. It was my listening ear imbued with the mystery of the singing ape I was (and he was) that encouraged him to speak the intimate poetry of his fate — and of matters he had long suppressed and hidden in himself — within a context that revealed his need of me, of the living dreamer, his need through me, my frail imaginative quest for the City of God, of redemption by the overshadowing Presence I had glimpsed as intricately woven into ‘living absences’, into the arts, into the sciences, into architectures, Waterfall, rainfall, riverfall.

‘They were twins‚’ he said at last, ‘women of the estate, the estate of nature, in which one buys or plunders the beauty of the world. The slave-Roses. Believe me! I saw it all when it seemed so late, too late. Perhaps it’s never too late, Anselm. That’s why we need one another. But it seemed desperately late for me when I learnt you were the child of … my child …’ He stopped. Unable to speak. Then continued — ‘The first Rose I bought … She left me. She said I was a mean bastard. And then some seven or eight years later when I was dying (I had less than a couple of months to live though I did not know it) the other Rose came. She slept with me. No word of meanness. She said I was generous. I paid her handsomely. And then she turned on me. Six weeks to the first night we slept together she knew she was pregnant. She turned on me. What is meanness, what is generosity, when one buys or sells souls? I did not listen for I was transported by the news that she was pregnant, that at last I had hunted and cornered the wild beauty of the world, that she was mine ,a pregnant vessel, pregnant with my child, my first child. Rose said: your first child? Not your first child. Your first child has lived in your house for eight years and you have been blind to it. Your first child was my sister’s child. Remember her? You bought her too. She was staring at me. She knew, I swear, my days were numbered. Less than two weeks to live. You cannot seize, or buy, or conquer, the wild beauty of nature, Harold. I have been waiting to tell you this for a long time. My twin-sister has been waiting for eight years. You were blind to your first child. You shall never see your last. They have inherited the thorn and the knife.’