The Angel at the Gate (Faber Finds)

by Harris, Wilson

  “I shave my head because …” Khublall began philosophically.

  “I know, I know,” said Jackson irritably. “Gandhi’s a spiritual goat. The sins of the fathers upon their virgin brides are visited upon your bald cranium. When will the funeral cease? It never will I suppose while the wedding lasts….” Jackson looked changed, suddenly sombre, a deep wound inside that he dressed up in a flying tongue. He touched the strings of a bitter harp, a pan-piano within himself, a vibration, a luminous scar, a luminous beak.

  “When I got to Marseille—beautiful harbour Marseille has—Sukey’s band was just leaving for Paris. Their first performance was in a club patronized by black and white Americans in Paris, Africans, West Indians, musicians, painters, etc. etc. It’s all like a mist now, a mist of faces. I haven’t been back there these past thirty years. I seem to see it from a great height through her eyes of the South, the black South. Cold eyes nevertheless. Marbles of fate. They glint, they split into many jealous facets. Sometimes when I go into a museum or church of evolution—as my eccentric biologist master used to say—I see them as if they’ve fallen out of the head of a black madonna into animals’ heads, birds’ heads…. Just a glint. Mean at times. Generous at times. Eyes like the name she adopted in which to star in her shows. Sukey and Tawdrey. Dark and Mean popular camouflage of Greedy, Transparent and Rich. A bitter lesson you may say for a bridegroom to prize above heaven and hell. No. Not a soul could have convinced me then. Professional slut she may have been—many a great actress is, acting is a complex profession. To play evil or mean or grand or notorious is to be evil or mean or grand or notorious while the play lasts. I was transported and depressed by every wonderful performance. It was grist of marvel for me, she was a marvellous experience, so marvellous I forgot my father’s hooves, the armour I possessed—or thought I possessed—to trample every bitch…. Not she. She never really forgot. She saw my naked fear of dying in her, my naked fear of impotence….”

  “Why impotence?”

  Jackson looked at him with blind eyes. “Love of country or of theatrical humanity sometimes kills with a made-up kiss as much as with a real bullet. A great man said that. Not me. To fear or to buy love is the beginning of impotence. And her auction-block strip-tease was the echo of that fear, the echo of my nakedness rather than hers. It was a way of making me see with her body presented to me like a commodity how vulnerable I was….”

  “But,” said Khublall, “as a black Jamaican, why should she see you…?”

  “As a rotten overlord?” Jackson laughed. “Love’s torment. She fell in love with me and so I was her target, her intimate audience. I was rotten overlord as well as hoped-for liberator. The schizophrenia of the Third World. Pigmentation—she was black American, I black West Indian—was irrelevant. One doesn’t easily dispense with the wounds of the past. The disease is as much in the new ruler’s mind as in the old brothels of empire. Let it suffice to say I became her prime target of war, slave, post-war, post-slave era. Prime slave and prime minister rolled into one. I became her authoritarian ace in a pack of cards that reduced me to a clown. I say ‘clown’ but I have no word for it, it was more ‘prey of the furies’… A mixture of imperial clown and prey of anxiety,” he paused, his eyes ravaged, “that’s how she was conditioned perhaps—I don’t know—to respond to a West Indian, to make love to him, to mock him … I remember the Sacré Coeur in the night sky above the stage where she danced. Her dances were the beginning of ‘half-clown, half-fury’ affair between Jackson jun. (myself) and Sukey Tawdrey (carnival body of bought-and-sold peoples around the globe consenting to their new, black and white masters).” Jackson stopped. He felt the fire of paranoia in his heart, the way he had named himself as if he were speaking of a stranger in the boudoir of chameleon politics, chameleon flesh-and-blood. Khublall nodded. He was confirmed in his vision of early-to-mid-twentieth-century sexual nemesis in late-twentieth-century powers.

  “She danced two dances,” Jackson continued. “The first was a unique interpretation of Scott Joplin’s rag, the second Count Basie’s jazz.” Khublall wondered what rag and jazz had to do with clown and fury.

  “It’s getting a bit nippy,” Jackson said. “The air seems colder. Why not come over to my place in North Pole Road?”

  An apron of light and cloud had arisen in the direction of Bale. Jackson involuntarily shielded his eyes, then looked down and across the green. The players were still punting a football from foot to hand, foot to foot, never letting it touch the ground, though they had moved now much farther away. Their voices were faint. There was the rattle of a train behind him across the road. He turned. He could see the train high upon the embankment above the road. A couple of double-decker buses were approaching from the northern end of the road. For a moment everything seemed still, a still camouflage upon his senses. Someone had died in that instant. That’s why the world had invisibly stopped. Then he and Khublall moved in that instant—oblivious of all the others, the millions, who had died—and made their way to his basement flat in North Pole Road. It was curious but it was as if their faint breath set the train and the buses into automatic progression again. A hairline reflex, hairline moment, pushed the traffic on the road, a sensitive minute hand of gravity in one’s body that possessed its mutual riddle in fused crowd or ball punted from hand to foot.

  He lived in a basement flat but would have preferred something above ground. It was all he could afford. He made coffee for Khublall and a pot of tea for himself.

  “No sugar or milk for me,” Khublall said. It was a ritual observation that Jackson knew by heart.

  They sat in a bare room, spare and upright chairs, lean polished table, a radio, a vase of flowers, a Flanders poppy that remained on its shelf all the year round. Jackson wanted it and kept the room like that. The only decoration was on the ceiling—a bird’s eye on Bale in a mist of faces. The room possessed an air of authentic, psychological casualty within the nature of things, the marginal conversion of casualty nevertheless into a quality of subjective being. To fall—and to know one has let the ball of ghostly power masquerading as history fall to the ground—is a capacity to leave a wound or scar in space, where the earth turns, to die with others who die and yet in continuing to live to see for them the stillness of death to which they are blind, individual grave, still gravity, still fall that goes on forever to unravel the mystery of truth.

  “Yes, a bare room,” Jackson confessed. “Not that it makes me feel stripped of everything. But close to it, meaningfully close to it.” He was smiling and Khublall was nonplussed by such humour until he continued, “What’s the name of the old woman in a shawl who walks Shepherd’s Bush with everything that she has?”

  “Mother Diver,” said Khublall, and suddenly he perceived Jackson’s smile against Mother Diver’s unsmiling comedy. It was as if something had flashed in a mirror, one unravelled face hidden in another. It left him puzzled but aware.

  “The old woman has her shawl,” Jackson continued, “and I have my room. Who knows how each is located in the other? Sukey Tawdrey has her rag. Mother Diver has her shawl. One is music, one is fabric. I have my bone of a room. I toss my bone to them and they thread it subconsciously, unconsciously, into joint fabric, joint music….”

  “In ancient times,” said Khublall, “the dead were buried with mutual charms, musical instruments, clothing, food, etc. I say ‘mutual’ because I’ve heard you use the word. I’m not sure—how do you see it, Jackson?”

  “The burial of the dead mirrors the responsible imagination of the truly creative living. So I toss my bone of a room to be threaded into other rhythms, other things, until space sails…. That’s how I see it. The conversion of casualty that exists in each moment — the little deaths, the little births, that creep into and out of the world—so that what is inert or helpless is no longer helpless — space begins to sail and one’s life is not entirely wasted, some glimmer of wisdom takes one back, takes one forward…”

  “Tell me then about Monmar
tre club in 1950. You stopped when we came in.”

  Jackson’s eyes looked ravished again. He kept his voice rather low. “Sukey wasn’t her real name (it was Josephine) but she wore it like a badge of chimney grease or honky tonk; it was her black bone to toss around, her relic of honky-tonk music in the American South. She had grown up in the blare of honky-tonk bombast —music and battle for survival. When she came to Europe after the Second World War, she revived strip-tease Scott Joplin Rag. It was a defiant performance—a whittling away of honky tonk into a classical kind of gesture—she was tilting against the old South that may have lost the Civil War, may have been defeated over slavery, but was back in the saddle. Scott Joplin died in 1917, she was born in 1927 into a world of Jim Crow…. High time for another revolution to be backed up by a black Napoleon. I had come from Jamaica—just off the USA—that was her Corsica. Where better to find an emperor and a clown? Mind you, she was serious at first. Jamaica had already thrown up a Marcus Garvey who had paraded through New York City in military uniform. I was deficient in uniforms but as strong as a horse in those days and that’s as close as I came to an emperor, a horse for an empress to ride.” Jackson was laughing at the prospect of a horse that could rule a kingdom or republic with a woman in the saddle.

  “That’s when I became a clown,” he confessed. “She wasn’t really appreciative of my joke and yet the thing is—you can never tell with a woman—I am sure she knew from the start I was a born casualty, strong and subtle, yes, a good horse beneath her in bed, but a casualty, a source of trouble, apolitical as all horses are.”

  He was staring into space. “The truth is we came together because—though we did not see it then—the problems we faced were rooted in a kind of blockage in ourselves, in our one-sided natures that had grown bombastic. Sukey’s and Joplin’s word! And to become a creature of the furies—to be shorn of bombast —emperors had to regress into horses and through horses into clowns or daemons or angels. It was a regression to the womb as much as to the grave of power.”

  Khublall was profoundly startled. Jackson had said he was deficient in uniforms but all at once it was as if he were clad in brilliant style that seemed to combine the mystery of the womb and the grave in the clown as well as the ambiguities of dress in Sukey Tawdrey’s strip-tease as she mounted him in bed.

  There was a lull in the conversation. They resorted to common-or-garden tasks and replenished their coffee and tea, but Khublall was seized by the sensation of being sliced, half on earth, half on Bale, as if he were the creature of another and resided in her dreams or as if she resided in his. Was this part and parcel of the young woman he mourned? Was she—that young woman—part and parcel of another woman or other imaginary women in whom both Jackson and he existed as “prey of the furies”?

  Jackson leaned upon him for support he knew as if the bone of space that divided them in punting the globe from hand to foot, foot to hand, drew many related presences in every continent, sea and air and land, into half-involuntary, half-voluntary cycle or circle or related dance and chorus of brothels as well as temples of history.

  All this sharpened Khublall’s ears to Jackson’s confessions and disclosures. An ex-Hindu he (Khublall) sometimes dubbed himself. There were times when he perceived himself a father-confessor that the ex-priest Marsden would have understood in relation to the young men and women whose lives he assembled in the Inn. Stella, Mary, Sebastian, and the “no man’s land translator of Mary Stella Holiday’s automatic book of fictional lives”. There were times when Jackson seemed split, almost feminine in spirit—a curious transformation or involuntary humour this was in a man as male as he—as if the bird’s eye of Bale in its mist of painted faces on the ceiling of the room veiled him for an instant with a spark and a feather, womb-spark, beak like a feather within womb or brain. In the animal kingdom—Khublall reflected, staring at the ceiling—the male tended to wear brilliant colours like foetal, sometimes majestic, imperial blood, the female a drab or modest uniform. Whereas in the human kingdom, it was the woman who wore the gay and bright, seductive fashion, the male who tended to be plain. So, when Jackson seemed dressed for an instant in spark and feather he was animal-male in the animal kingdom but his bright adornment drew him down into ridden human-female in the human kingdom.

  That Jackson therefore had confessed in veiled and adorned (therefore logically feminine) dress of words that he had been mounted and ridden by aggressive Sukey Tawdrey moved Khublall to perceive more deeply than ever the paradox of soberly clad (therefore logically animal-female) ex-priest, ex-Hindu, ridden by the funeral skull of god in Bale and in heaven, ridden by child-bride raised into exaggerated male beak or brain that pointed higher still through priest and convertible god, convertible maiden, into a dark womb-universe susceptible to human and spiritual re-birth in the very death— the very funeral of an age.

  Khublall was moved more deeply than he knew. He felt no inflation of consciousness whatsoever and this prompted him to recall an earlier question that had crossed his mind about the matter of relations between “bombast” and “music”…. Jackson studied the question like an involuntary lecturer in Human Paradise University. He tossed his bone at it. It caught the ambiguities of dress in which Khublall had been immersed, the ambiguity of skull, the ambiguity of the daughter that Sukey and he (Jackson) had conceived in the world of 1950. Space changed again into invisible class or audience that crowded Khublall’s mind.

  “Bombast was honky-tonk music, honky-tonk sex, imperial sex—a basis for refinements of black power, Sukey used to say. The bombast of the old slave South ran in her blood like a fever…. Joplin had confessed his debt to honky-tonk crowd that ran in his blood too and he sought to convert it into individual compositions of subtlety and cunning. His rag subtlety was to open the dress of a new mood, the new jazz or distribution of talents, the new musical punt of an age. It was a denuded punt (rag) but possessed of imperial memory, imperial bombast, in subtle echoes, sounds that were to cap Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and others, in a black Honours List, a black House of Lords.

  “Sounds that cut two ways, into a humanity possessed by good, possessed by evil. Possession by good was daemonic goods, possession by evil was not always the straightforward satanic trumpet it sounded in jazz. It could imply traces of early Christian communism that had been soured by Marx—so the propaganda went —into devious evil saints.

  “Sukey’s roots were unmistakably good—refined bombast and daemonic property. Sex was daemonic property. Music and love were daemonic politics and property. She danced like an angel. She danced the tawdry rich-in-the-poor. She danced Joplin’s “The Entertainer”, his “Maple Leaf Rag”, his “Paragon”. She danced hot Count Basie.

  “On our return from the club at nights she re-traced her steps with me not as if we were private souls but public bodies under the eye of an inquisitive, invisible crowd. She pursued a divided self playing ball with static inquisitor in static performer. This static emphasis was rag’s decorum of collective individual into which we were bound. Unfree. My consciousness of this unfreedom divided us. She was less—or not at all—conscious of it. I suffered for her. I was she….” Jackson’s tone had changed. Supplicant clown addressing his furies. “She was male … and somewhere in that reversal a crack arose…. I conceived. The music of spaced rain ran up instead of down a ladder of flesh. I knew it was wrong, I would be torn to bits if I were not careful. The static tease of her body defined a strict boundary I had crossed…. I would need to defend that trespass against the ruthless crowd that peered at us…. Mother Diver’s shawled body of gravity hung over a million deaths, a million wounds, that branched from the Sacré Coeur close to our hotel. Scarcely five years had passed since the end of the war … What a moment for horse to conceive a daughter of man, Sukey as rider, I as clown…”

  Daughter of man. Son of man. Khublall, the Hindu, pondered the Christian paradox. He felt powerfully grieved, uncannily sad, and sorry for Jackson. “When was she born,” he asked
, “and when did you lose her?”

  “She was thirty this year when she came to see me in London before going back. Mack’s granddaughter! Mack was a guy for women. Mack’s black granddaughter. Rumour has it—word from the furies—that his white grandson is called John.”

  “John would be your daughter’s cousin across the divide of a generation.”

  “That is so.”

  “Did you remain in Paris?” Khublall sensed that Jackson was evading his earlier question, so he asked again, “When did you lose her?”

  “I came to London in the summer of 1950. My wife followed.” He spoke the word “wife” in an absolutely colourless tone. That lack of colour was a gesture for the furies to read. “Our marriage was already on the rocks. When Josephine, my daughter, was born, Sukey returned to America. I cared for the baby, fed her, washed her nappies, spent virtually every penny on her that my father had left me but my god I adored her. I was able to afford a nanny to help out two days every week. Paid her five pounds. Good money in the 1950s. All went well until 1954 when I fell from a ladder, broke my leg.” His staccato voice also broke but he recovered and raced on, lame, yet Anancy swift. “I had to cable her father.” The words had come in such a rush that Khublall was just able to hear. It was as if Jackson were convinced that the woman he had slept with was the father of his child. Did he know what he was saying? Was it a slip of the tongue? Of course it was.