The Angel at the Gate (Faber Finds)

by Harris, Wilson

  Stella paused to reflect on Engels’ communication to her centuries after she was born in an ancient land but a century and more before her birth in England. Then she continued:

  This split or gulf between the guardians of infant truth or humanity’s welfare continues today between those who idolize a centralized leader or saviour of the people and those who incline towards a decentralized marriage of evolving communities. Karl and Joseph were married men and Joseph was to influence Mahatma and Tolstoy. Tolstoy forsook his immediate family to found a wider community or family in which his mysticism veered at times towards authoritarianism. Joseph Proudhon’s half-Gandhian, half-Tolstoyan ideas found a permanent home in the Jura Mountains of Switzerland. The emphasis still is on watch-making, on the minute hand of ambivalent fate exercised by virgins of state.

  All this was unfamiliar terrain to Stella. She was no virgin of state and yet her desire to change the world was the foundation of Utopian marriage to god. It left her uncertain of the nature of god and god’s family—the nature of extreme vocation—until she cast her eye into another section of the wall where a display of models and books spoke of the quest for life and other civilizations in the universe. Pictures and models gestured at her from obsessed wall, like mutes of galactic space, Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, Uranus, and others far distant as if—for all the cosmos—Joseph Proudhon, Karl Marx, Mahatma Gandhi, William Morris, Mack the Knife, and others masked and secretive were cycling there in Anancy chariot whose wheels were the music of Asian plates, American plates, European plates, African plates within the earth’s landscapes and seas. Wheels within wheels of plates and continents in motion… The wall within which they cycled was human space, human controversy, and it differed from Jupiter’s oscillations and intensity of ice-ages. It was as if Jupiter’s paradisean virgin ice had become an epitaph; and thus—though life had never occurred on Jupiter to be buried and mourned — death had arrived there as extreme forerunner of the human imagination.

  Four

  Mary arose from the covered bench in the St Paul’s schoolground. She had been sitting there attentive to an inner call as if turned to hypnotic stone—however enlivened human blood—for about ten minutes in the mild, misty atmosphere of Friday noon, mid-February 1981. Two months had elapsed since Stella’s visit to the Goldhawk library in mid-December 1980 and her (Mary’s) presence in mid-February 1981 in St Paul’s, Hammersmith.

  Time seemed (as she arose from the bench and moved towards the street) less a progression and more a body of instantaneous parallels, parallel masks and “musics”, parallel mutes and voices, November mists, December echoes, Anancy February, running side by side in fictional trance, fictional transfusions of seasonal, yet perennial blood.

  She gained the pavement. The traffic, the passers-by, the light that filtered into sensational apprehension of moving legs and arms possessed a stark simplicity in tune with the faint shadow cast by the naked branches of trees against a suddenly clear sky. Reds, whites, greys on the buildings that lined the street suddenly stood at attention.

  Mary knew at last the time had come to visit Stella in hospital. The thought had scarcely crossed her mind when a chariot drew up, a head poked itself through a window. “Hello, Mrs Holiday, can I give you a lift home?” She recognized the driver. His voice was blurred. Had he addressed her as Mrs Holiday or Miss Holiday? Perhaps he appreciated the comedy of wife and sister—that Stella and she were not the same … yet the same… For a moment she was tempted to dismiss him from her automatic book, to wave him along and then she remembered with a smile that he was one of the solemn characters of chariot-and-cat in which a spectral hand had waved at Sebastian. Perhaps he was on the way back to the garage from another funeral.

  “How kind of you, Joseph,” she said. He didn’t seem to mind her addressing him by his Christian name though he was always formal with her except for the eyes in his rather puffy face that feasted on her legs. He opened the door and she climbed in beside him. The vehicle shot away as if under its own animal, mechanical, parallel volition, chariot and cat.

  She asked him, the cat-faced driver—John’s angelic chauffeur—with his slightly jovial, slightly greedy smile, to turn the chariot through a side street before they came to Olympia and drop her at Stella’s hospital. Joseph nodded as if he knew. He seemed all at once a rather coarse but good-natured mask for someone Mary knew. Who could it be? Had he been sent? Was he the messenger she had awaited as she sat on the bench under the net of the trees?

  She alighted at a corner close to the hospital, thanked Joseph with a smile and made her way towards the zebra-crossing or cat-bridge opposite the hospital gates. (The founder of the hospital had specially painted it there—as if the whole world reflected a flattened beast, judgement-day signal, in the flat wall of the street to bear the glimmering tread of feathery souls as light as a butterfly’s wings that slipped through the hospital gates day in, day out, in timeless fictional race of death.)

  Mary stopped. She felt she must wait for a split-second. Joseph’s timing had been meticulous and perfect. But Christian patience was implied if it were to marry the chariot’s instinct. He had manoeuvred the vehicle—or been manoeuvred by it—through the traffic to bring her now where she stood in minute-hand time. A flash earlier would have been too early; a flash later too late. For in that very split-second that Mary held—as if once again in that long day she had been reduced to stone—Stella emerged from the hospital gates and set foot on the crossing. In that instant the traffic stopped, unconscious of stopping, unmoving though moving. Everything stood at attention. Stella looked pale as the face of Proudhon’s watch. She was transparent, Mary saw, as a feather and one almost saw through her into the echo of the iron fence or hospital building standing at attention on the other side of the road. It was an echo so still it left her imperceptibly shaken as if an underground train passed under her feet bearing joy and sorrow.

  It was true, Mary thought, in a corner of her mind, that every unprepossessing or prepossessing vehicle subsists on a buried echo, echo of attention, echo of foundation, at the moment of death. Stella was beautiful despite her casual attire. It was the beauty of longing for flight—a longing beyond foundations and echoes, a longing that gives the human species its unique essence written into mortal bone, mortal gait that mimics the immortal dance of soul on waving air or deck of a ship. To die is to wave every chariot down, to stop every city that knows not it has stopped.

  Mary recalled (as if she felt Christ’s fingers tug at her skirt) Joseph’s subtly devouring eyes upon her legs, her breasts, her body. The sensation invaded her from nowhere, it seemed, the sensation of news from nowhere and of being “eaten” by John’s teeth, and this made her wonder whether Stella was the maternal wraith, uneaten, whole, and she the morsel, cat and mouse, Stella and Mary.

  “Oh my god,” Mary said aloud. “Stella has died. And yet I am scared. She’s like a divine cat as she crosses the road. She lives in John. John will eat me some day. Or shall I eat him?”

  Stella heard her voice and rushed across the bridge of the street into her arms. They seemed almost indistinguishable one from the other as they embraced, longing to stay, longing to move, bound together yet inwardly torn, inwardly fighting each other. Stella knew she was the stronger one now, that the zebra-cat in the street was in her blood, that the soil, the stilled city, the buildings at attention, were in her blood, that she could leap nevertheless across worlds.

  “Let me take you to Father Marsden,” said Mary. “I know you can’t go home in your state of mind. He will help you. He knows everything.”

  “Not everything,” said Stella. “Remember that when I’m gone.” She embraced Mary more closely. “But not forever gone. I shall come and go.”

  “Come?” said Mary. “Go?”

  Stella laughed. “I shall do both, Mary. But first let me ask you a riddle. How is it that before Marsden follows me he will take you to India and on a boat that sails in his house?”

  “Boat? Sai
ls in his house?”

  Mary felt suddenly terrified. There was an assurance about Stella that seemed to overcome the mad-sounding riddle she had posed. She felt that she could no longer stand there in this close embrace and moving quickly pulled Stella with her.

  They made their way to the corner where Joseph Barber—the cat-and-chariot chauffeur—waited for them. There was a lean shadow upon his face now, the vestige of Marsden’s beard, the dust of many landscapes, the moss of many places that stand at attention in skeletal blood. He needed a bath, Mary thought. He opened the door of the chariot. They sped back to Angel Inn.

  *

  They arrived at the Inn; Mary rang the bell and when no one answered presumed Marsden was out. She was in two minds whether to go or to stay but the chariot had melted away on other business in the city. She recalled the chauffeur whose name was Joseph Barber and upon whom she had discerned a shadowy resemblance to Joseph Marsden, a kind of eccentric lust, an inferior Marsden. A shock of humour almost threaded itself into her distraught mind still reeling a little from the meeting with Stella.

  Marsden was a great man, a holy man, but who knows whether perhaps a long time ago he too had been prone to eccentric, bodily desires. She felt closer to him now, he was her superior (not inferior) Joseph, and she smiled as she inserted the key he had given her into the lock, turned it and ran into the house. She rushed Stella into the study and repaired to the large bathroom to wash her hands. It seemed to her they were blackened from the park bench on which she had been sitting or from the chariot.

  A moment later the door opened and Stella was standing there. Mary felt subtle terror. It was a huge ornate room and Marsden’s presence was everywhere. The bath was full as if he had just run it and Stella laughed and pointed to a ship that floated against one edge. A picture of Gandhi stared down at them from a high wall. Mary felt Marsden’s presence so acutely and potently it was as if she saw him there in the bath, his bony limbs winning approval from the Indian saint and his black-greying beard dripping rain from the skies on to the sea on which the ship sailed.

  There were diminutive artefacts on the wall, artefacts of gods, goddesses, processions, the Himalayas. All were from India where Marsden had worked as a young man. One carving—an Indian sailor—Mary now named after her own father. Mack the Knife. He stood just under Gandhi’s feet, a sharp-featured young man of twenty-two, a sharp-featured mask. Marsden, Mary knew, accepted the inevitability of the name and pitted himself —in the diminutive ocean of the bath—against the terror of the shark associated with Knife. Another carving, an Indian child of twelve, her brow wreathed in flowers, Mary named Lucy Brown, It was a common enough name but it seemed uncommonly appropriate in this instance, in tune with Mack the Knife.

  Stella leaned forward suddenly. “Here’s the boat, Mary, that sails in the house.” She laughed. “I shall go aboard now for Proudhon Utopia. When the boat returns you will go with Marsden on a flying trip to India.”

  “Is that … is that …” Mary faltered, “Joseph’s departure of which you spoke? Shall I too…?”

  “Father Marsden,” said Stella severely, frowning on the use of Marsden’s Christian name, “will return with you. But he is to make another trip in a box that’s a planet.”

  “A box that’s a planet?” Mary was bewildered.

  “You will see,” Stella cried. “Planet Bale is composed of a simple box. You could fill it with silks or dates if you wished. That’s when he’ll really go.” She stopped speaking, pushed the boat off and was away.

  After a moment that seemed an eternity the boat returned. It was Mary’s turn to step with Marsden on to the ship.

  *

  The minute hand that struck, when Stella died, to stay the world, struck again to set it in curious motion. And Marsden demonstrated that Stella’s and Mary’s personal memories—Mack the Knife, Lucy Brown, etc.—possessed a motionless yet moving thread in global memory, sarcophagus-globe. Personal symbol was a rhythmic dimension of global wedding and funeral. Personal minute hand existed in the global clock to read events far and beyond oneself and to delineate a pattern of inimitable divisions of pain, of affection, of subtlety, of wisdom, of cunning. Those divisions were part of an inscrutable, sometimes terrifying law of love.

  The sea of the bath undulated and Mary perceived the fate of the ship on which she sailed that was manned by divine shark—Mack the Knife—and divine, non-violent personality, Mahatma Gandhi. A strange pair, she thought; she wanted to close her eyes and vanish into Marsden’s cabin, into the darkness of eerie encounter with a holy man, a god, a priest. But she felt that Stella’s riddle had not yet achieved its climax.

  The ship drew them through an upset sea to the continent on the other side of the bath, a map of India, where they landed. They set out for the city of Mysore with its golden turret and its children in the marketplace like birds, divine birds with wounded eyes, half-eaten eyes that were closer to Mary’s flesh-and-blood than to Stella’s uneaten, virgin apparition when she had crossed from the hospital into Mary’s arms. Then they progressed to their destination, a village some two hundred miles or so from Mysore on the bank of a river (by the scale of sprinkled rain from the bath on the map on the wall). There the pain of the law, the divisions of the law, began to cut into Mary’s flesh.

  A wedding procession was emerging from a temple in the village. It was crystal clear in diminutive artefact on extended parallel or horizon drawn from the map. Mary kept her eyes glued to that procession as the law seemed to mount her in the bath. Mack the Shark or Knife was the bridegroom, Lucy (twelve years old) the child-bride. Mary felt promissory stab of pain, promissory insertion of the phallus of the sun that covered Mack’s knife.

  How had such a priestly metamorphosis occurred? How had the knife been fired, yet blunted, to achieve a climax of the spirit of pain, spirit of creation, a violation that was no violation, a riddling penetration?

  Marriages between child-brides and adult men were forbidden by political and legal statute in modern India but ancient and archaic law of tradition (feudal Europe in modern India it seemed to Marsden) died hard. The mutation of knife into phallus of the sun lay less in legal strictures and punishments and more in the genius of the creator-mind to disguise itself within distinctions of the pain of the law and judgement-day scenarios. Thus it was that the Indian sailor-shark found himself seized by judgement-day wedding guests not to be castrated or sterilized or abused (though that threat of judgement was imminent in the logic of karma, the logic of past deeds for which one is punished in present lives), seized not to be castrated or sterilized or abused for the projected rape of a child but to be embodied with the mask of a god. Sick shark. Sick sailor, yet curative genius of love. The mask of Gandhi, the very one in the portrait in Marsden’s Angel Inn, was placed upon Knife to council him against rape of a child.

  Mary recalled the divinity of the cat Stella had seemed as she crossed the road. Mack the Knife seemed now—as he clung to sarcophagus-globe in Indian artefact—no longer a shark but invested with the stigmata of the wounded children of Mysore, Gandhi bird-beaked nose and an almost comical pair of glasses stuck not upon blind eyes within the intimate flesh of children but high on his brow where they gleamed with the golden sun, phallic gold, phallic pole of the sun that threatened to lift Knife’s skull into the heavens, Knife’s cruel brain, should he persist with cunning rape of innocence.

  The degree in which Knife was torn and translated into the music of pain was abundantly clear, Mary felt. He was torn between brain aloft in the heavens and the mystery of love higher still, in more remote womb of space or heavens still; higher still in order to regress into earth and into every room, shelter, bed, house, cave, forest, bath where Marsden’s beard dripped with the tears of the distraught child-in-the-woman he held in his arms. She had rushed in upon him and he had consoled her without violation.

  The mask of Gandhi high on the wall blended into a carving by the Christian carpenter Joseph. Indian Lucy was destined t
o die as a young woman in India. Khublall was the actual name of the sailor to whom Mary had given her father’s name Mack the Knife. It was written in faint Sanskrit under the carving on the bathroom wall. Khublall would mourn Lucy to the end of his days. Marsden was destined to die in London. Mary would mourn him as her everlasting Joseph, in all vicissitudes of lust and pain, to the end of her days. More about Khublall would emerge—Mary promised—as her automatic book moved, stopped, moved on.

  *

  Judgement-day paradoxes lay in every foundation of human paradise. Mysore Gandhi existed in Angel Inn, Stella in Proudhon Utopia, Lucy in Khublall’s child-bride. They would never entirely vanish. They would ebb forwards, flow backwards. A tide of reversed transference of every nuance of passion from one person back to the other, a tide of projections upon one from the other running back from one to the other, gleamed everywhere. The mask of Gandhi transferred itself into reverse multi-faceted Joseph and vice versa to encompass judgements of the law beyond personal dogma or wall of bias. The intriguing potential for epic, for comedy, for tragedy, of creator-brain in creatress-womb implied reversibles that Mary had not yet fully grasped. She sought to begin to do that now by descending into inchoate, human paradise as the ship on the bath returned to dock in London.

  The compression of an ocean into a bath, a ship into minute-hand sail in the clock of the globe, invoked a new scale into Mary’s epic, tragic, comic book. The scale of the diminutive. No gigantic pretensions. Infinity of hope. Seed of hope. Endangered seed of life everywhere. And so, as a consequence, her fears were enlarged against a mere seed. And yet ominous and enlarged as her terrors appeared at times to become, the conception of the diminutive was in itself paradox, protection and defence. It was the ground of humility—not only that, it was above all an acceptance of miracle in the oldest and the youngest creatures. Age was renewal, age was potency, despite its closeness to death; and the smallest, youngest creature was a measure of deity’s skill in random evolution. Her three-year-old son was the embodiment of miracle, the wonder of the ages.