The Carnival Trilogy

by Wilson Harris

  “Good god,” said Masters. “I see it, yes I do.”

  “Not a scratch. Sound as an unbroken egg. He was clutching the bubble horse. It had saved him. He remembered the dream he had had the moment he fell asleep. You were there, it was a river, you were a huge bubbling horse under the car. The rapids of history. He was about to topple into a pit. But you kept the car on your back. He saw your face through the windshield. You broke the fall, you broke the rapids. You let the car down softly though it had overturned. You saved him. What a Christmas gift!”

  “A dream,” Masters murmured. “Just a dream. I am no magician.”

  Jackson chuckled. “Ask James for his wife and he would consent, Everyman. The way he talk when I see him last night! He find religion in a dream. It was real. He would fall down now and worship you, Masters, more than he love Madame Guillotine who fill his pay-packet when the week end. And that say a hell of a lot.”

  Masters could not help smiling again and this partially broke the gloom that encrusted him, encrusted his mind, the mind of Lazarus. “Tell James,” he said softly, “to remember he’s no puppet.”

  Jackson was puzzled. “Puppet? What do you mean?”

  Masters did not reply. What did he mean I wondered? James is a bloody puppet, I said to myself. Did he not …

  Jackson waved at a tea lady. “Coffee or tea, Everyman?”

  “Coffee, please, milk, sugar.”

  If the world knew that Lazarus had returned to the Carnival of history and was eating a prosaic biscuit with Jackson, coffee, milk, sugar, millions of puppets rich and poor, fat and thin, would vote for him. Vote for him, yes, but not because of the genius of love or resurrection. No, through fear. A vote of fear. Puppets of fear. Yes, fear! Fear of the bomb, fear of the grave, perverse hope that he was the ultimate weapon, he would lift the sentence of death from them and they would bounce back, he would lift the sentence of death, if not war or famine or starvation from mankind.

  “Masters, what did you mean when you said I must tell James to remember he’s no puppet?”

  Masters started. He glanced at me where I stood in the shadow of dream protesting that the cyclist who ran into my father was … He had forgotten what he had said to Jackson. He touched his mask and remembered. “Ah yes,” he said at last, “I meant that James may have been saved by my gift but he had to give something of himself in return. There are two – indeed three and four and many more – sides to the bubble of resurrection.”

  I saw he had turned from Jackson and was addressing me. “I could not save your father, Weyl, by reaching back through the bars of time, but he saved me. I enlightened him nevertheless about his pagan body. I sustained his case. I helped him to evolve a little, to move on. That is the function of originality. Unless one brings originality to the resurrection theme it is hollow, it is impotent. I saved James. He liberated me when he jolted my memory. I saw a mere newspaper clipping – a mere clipping I say – but remember it had been fired into originality on his brow.”

  I protested. I hated James. “He is a bloody puppet,” I cried. I turned to Jackson. “Tell James, Jackson, he was a lucky devil when Lazarus pulled him from the pit, but I know who he is. He rode my father down in Brickdam. And then he came to the funeral with a wreath. He was filled with fear, I tell you, Lazarus. The wreath was nothing but a hollow crown. He is a bloody puppet, a bloody puppet.”

  “Easy, easy, Weyl,” said Lazarus gently. “The distinction between the bloody puppet and the art of freedom cuts deep. So deep our hate resurrects and, as it does, the bloody puppet is as much ourselves as the man or the woman we hate. Freedom should mean freedom from past fear. We have nothing to fear but fear itself in the resurrection of hate. That is the complex stake in all puppet resurrections that torment us, that chasten us in depth, in every aspect of our lives, in every encounter with Memory, every confession we make, every protest, every longing we cultivate or suppress, every chain upon which we dangle that brings us round and round and round again to know ourselves in dreadful part, in complex whole … My dear Weyl, remember my gift to you is the wages of descent into hell/ascent into heaven, every shade of emotion, however bitter, however terrible or sweet, that makes us prize the arts of freedom as originality to revisit the past and not be confounded or conscripted by the sorrows, the waste, the terror of time, partial time, whose biased face is the resurrection of the puppet, whose stranger, unfathomably whole face is the resurrection of life.”

  *

  Masters left the factory clothed in my resentment still and entered a phase of existence that was haunted by dubious women. Or so it seemed to me – to my jaundiced mind – when I compiled notes upon him in 1958, 1959, and succeeding years. Now – when he addresses me anew as resurrected paradox, dead king – I see everything quite differently. I see their inner significance with sudden perception or shock. Masters the Fourth wore the Carnival mask of Lazarus in a loose characteristic way that overshadowed Masters the Second and Masters the Third in my dream. He came into the money he had been awaiting from the sale of his New Forest properties not long after his encounter with the devil and with James whom he had rescued from the pit and whose wife he was to pursue. Her name was Aimée and she came to see him not long after Masters’ conversation with Jackson and with me.

  Even now – within the labyrinth of resurrections that Carnival Lazarus unravels – I find it difficult to describe her. She was a very attractive woman in a curious downbeat fashion. She was listless yet susceptible to faint rhythms of hysteria and animation (the phenomenon of faintness that adorned her apparition within structured non-feeling made her survival or arousal all the more preternaturally vivid). Her faint arousal from a grave of non-feeling incorporated something of the lightning brow of Jane Fisher the Second with whom Masters slept on the day he died in 1982. And that meant that Aimée was also possessed by a resemblance to Jane Fisher the First who stabbed Masters the First in New Forest.

  Despite or because of all this Aimée remains a shadowy figure in my mind as I cling to Masters’ chain of existences in the past, in the present, in the future that is also the biased present, the unfulfilled past. Indeed it is this astonishing preternatural light of shadow and time that makes her unique in retrospect. She came to him in an evening veil, post-Inferno, early Purgatory, a new fashion that sold well in Oxford Street. Upset veil. Weeping shawl. Faint abandon. Edged hysteria. Her perception of James’ accident differed in tone from Jackson’s tale. James may have caught religion in dreaming of the horse that saved him but Aimée had caught the downbeat aroma of guilt distilled from flowers and soil. It lay upon Lazarus’ nose and brow like the vestige of a cloud. Slightly vulgar expensive perfume perhaps, slightly mystic. Aimée shopped without economic bother in Resurrection Road. James – as a skilled Madame Guillotine operator – earned a good pay-packet that she supplemented in a nightclub. She swore with a flick of her wrist – so gentle no bones were broken – that she had been responsible for James’ accident.

  “He had learnt I was carrying on with another man under Nightbridge,” she said. “That’s the name of my club. I saw he was upset the morning he left. But I thought nothing of it. He was always so quiet, you know, and I felt the cloud would blow over.”

  “Is Nightbridge a cloud that blows over?” asked Lazarus.

  “You know what I mean,” she said. “Don’t be mean to me. We need to deceive each other a little, some of the time if not all of the time, don’t we? I’ve come to you because he thinks the world of you and he’s changed and I’m worried he may do something bad to himself.”

  She was weeping, half-genuine guilt, half-stifled, ominous pleasure. He passed a handkerchief to her. She dabbed her eyes. Her features were a mixture, a paradox. Fragile, eggshell solid, exotic ghost, natural but artificial body, the strip-tease of the soul that made her a great success when she danced in the Club Nightbridge.

  “What do you think I should do, Lazarus?”

  Lazarus looked intently at her. “The accident,�
�� he said softly, “happened in the late afternoon when James was driving back home. Not in the morning when he left you. Is it not possible that something else, someone else, not you, Aimée, was on his mind?”

  “He was brooding all day,” she protested, “all day. It was me. He’s a careful driver. He drives so smoothly I could stand on the bonnet of his car and be safe. I could dance …”

  “I know you can,” said Lazarus.

  “It’s ridiculous but he says if he hadn’t dreamt of you at the last moment he would have died. What about me? Suppose I had been sitting next to him, and I had dozed off too, would I have lived?”

  “You would have danced with me,” said Lazarus, “on Nightbridge stage. I am the grave’s living understudy. I could take the place of your lover. James wouldn’t mind.”

  Aimée had not heard Lazarus’ response which was spoken under his breath. She cried, “And that’s why I have come to see you, Lazarus, in case James spake of me to you. I need help.”

  Lazarus looked at her even more intently. He saw beyond lucid dream that she was worried about James. And yet there was something else she desired, something that infiltrated her guilt. Was it that James’ sudden accidental death would have freed her, would have been a legacy to her to construct his epitaph in dance and to bring her Nightbridge lover home? Would it have given her, James’ death, the impulse to dance with greater mourning/ecstatic abandon than ever before?

  To care for a loved one, yet desire his death, is nothing new. Her guilty desire to see James dead was true but – if anything – it strengthened the bond between them. She needed him. She needed him to fill a dual hole in her affections. She needed him sometimes fictionally dead, concretely alive, sometimes concretely dead, fictionally alive. The knowledge of his presence at home or at work – performing the daily, the nightly chores – gave spice to her Nightbridge affair. The deception she practised prepared her for the greatest figure, the greatest dance, she would ever perform with the grave’s living understudy.

  “Look, Aimée,” Lazarus said at last, “I assure you there’s no need to feel guilty about James. He’s a quiet customer, as you know, and I know from something he confided to me in the factory …” he hesitated then plunged on, “that he was having an affair with another woman.”

  “Another woman?” Her eyes were incredulous. Lazarus had stunned her. It was the first cue she received in respect of the coming dance.

  “Yes, yes, you see it was not just you he was upset over. There was another woman! She threatened to leave him. She wanted a car and though his pay was good he couldn’t manage that. He hadn’t yet paid for his own car. He showered her with gifts but she said no. Time to draw the curtains on their little act. On the day of the accident she left him for good. He was upset, yes, and if he’s downhearted now it’s because he’s sober. One can be quiet as hell and still drunk inside. Some quiet people commit some terrible crimes! James is sober now. Not just quiet. He’s fasting. His stomach aches. He survived but he knows what death is. No more cannibal promiscuity if death sobers one, mind you, it isn’t always the case, death is also a heady champagne, ask any fast driver. James is truly sober now. No more cannibal promiscuity, each intent on eating the other’s wages of body and soul.”

  Lazarus sought to lessen the shock of the disclosure of the other woman by rambling on a bit about sobriety, the difficult achievement of sobriety in a world that was drunk. He tried to hold her steady but nothing could dispel the naked faint profligate distress in Aimée’s staring eyes. The dance had begun. She sat in the car beside James and the frame of mutual deception they had played on each other for years unfolded in a flash as the car toppled.

  She danced to the rhythm of the accident, she was drawn into a striptease of soul on the bonnet of the car upon Nightbridge stage. Lazarus also danced. He saw himself mirrored in her open faint eyes, trembling lips, astonished brow, as she lay crumpled beneath the embankment against the road. What a dance! Aimée sprang up.

  Lazarus saw her eyes again, dark as hair yet segmented with the minuscule bars of a ladder, crossed by stars. She swayed before him on the brink of the wheel of the car on Nightbridge stage. The car was dressed with red ribbons. Advertising gimmick in a garage! (Aimée received an additional fee for this.) Car for sale on Nightbridge! Her lips were parted in a faint gleam to kiss a blade of grass and an autumn leaf descending upon the stage and falling beside the parapet or embankment or road. Her brows invited him, repulsed him. Climax. Anti-climax.

  And then in a flash she was clothed again on the stage beside the living understudy of the grave. The wreck of the car had vanished into a mist. (I recalled the faint mist standing over my mother’s eyes at Masters’ window above the East Street garden on the day of my father’s funeral.) But in the interval – between the mist of the dance and the dancer’s quiescence on the stage – several orgasmic or climactic ghosts moved with Lazarus. They reflected a series of involuntary climaxes or relief, stilled rain upon fallen bodies. She was free of James, wasn’t she, he was free of her, wasn’t he? Let them go their separate ways, she said to Carnival Lazarus, into Purgatory or into hell or anywhere else on Resurrection Road. The shops were still there, food was still there, records, newspapers. Why should she be guilty of anything? Why should he be upset over her? But she knew in her heart of hearts she was guilty. She also knew she wanted him to be upset over her. Damn the other woman! “I want him to brood upon me, me, Aimée. Upset over me …” The climax of relief therefore – the climax of separation, that they were free to go their separate ways – was a deception. She knew it was. Lazarus knew it was. He held her close and offered himself to her in place of her Nightbridge lover. He (Lazarus) was the living understudy of the grave. He understudied the deceptions that men played upon women, women upon men, in every resurrection of hate or jealousy, vanity or love.

  He understudied the frames of mutual deception that broke in a flash within the mirror of the dance of life. He understudied illusory male bodies in women’s arms in parallel with illusory female bodies in men’s arms through Nightbridge lovers or Nightbridge rehearsals of dual, multiple climax.

  “I love James,” she said to Lazarus.

  “Is it vanity then,” asked Lazarus, pondering his own lines in the Nightbridge play, “is it vanity, or love, that is hurt, that fractures, when you learn that the one you thought you possessed to brood upon you is possessed by another and broods upon another? Is vanity the root of outraged love?”

  “Vanity!” she almost shouted. “Oh my god! I tell you I love him. Don’t you understand?” And Lazarus saw he had hurt her deeply. He had wounded her so deeply I felt her anguish as if it were mine and Amaryllis’s. We were both angry. The dream is no respecter of persons. Lazarus had been, to say the least, tactless. He had taken her into his arms to soothe her distress, then he had turned upon her and accused her of vanity, of feeding upon a splintered faint mirror of multiple bodies to achieve an orgasm. Even Lazarus should mind his own business. Not probe, not question, the vanity of men and women who make love!

  Lazarus’ disturbing mirrors, fractions of which lingered in my senses, and Amaryllis’s senses, shifted the gears of personality – at the instant of Aimée’s Nightbridge dance with him – from first to third or fourth dream-person upon the bonnet of the red-ribboned car as if to bring an echo of formidable ecstatic trinity, ecstatic quaternity, into play within multifarious suffering vehicles and bodies in the air, on the sea, upon the Earth. And thus in the dance, despite its deceptions, its schizophrenias, there lurked a nucleus of considerable originality, shared hells, shared heavens, shared self-confessions, shared divinities as well as daemons, shared resurrections as well as orgies, shared vanity so close to authentic affection that the distinction sometimes faded but remained nevertheless to help us define fractions of genuine love, fractions of genuine care, and the mystery of truth.

  *

  The blow to a universe of vanity that coats ambiguous lovers was a stratagem upon which Maste
rs drew in the mask of Lazarus to gain some knowledge of the whereabouts of the mysterious overseer who had caused his first death in New Forest when he had been mistaken for him by Jane Fisher the First. Aimée and other women in Resurrection Road – who courted a fiction of double lives – might well lead him, he calculated, to seize the devil whose wound he carried and whose guilt he bore. It was a guideline, a dream-chain, to which I clung with immense fascination.

  In understudying a sophisticated Nightbridge dancer – whose object in part was to provide a medium of exotic romance, exotic colour upon the ordinary, prosaic bodies of the common-or-garden husbands of bored women – Masters pursued a motif, however slender, that mirrored the privileged overseer who had slept with, and cruelly deceived, Jane Fisher the First. Had not he (Masters himself) profited from such privileges exercised and enjoyed by plantation kings and overseers? In sleeping with the women of the estate, the overseer gave an extra glitter, an extra glory, to the banality of intercourse between buried workers, clerks, even politicians, and their wives. Who, after all, could equal the glamour of a prince?

  Who better therefore than he, masked as Lazarus, to understudy Aimée’s Nightbridge lover? Where better than Carnival Nightbridge to glean information about a character one seeks to confront beyond life and death with the injustices with which one has been saddled in life and which were the occasion of one’s first death, a character whose blood runs in one’s privileged Lazarus-veins of memory?

  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.”