Palace of the Peacock

by Wilson Harris

  Jennings jeered – “You silly dope, Cameron you,” he laughed. “I shit on devils like you. By the time you fall out of one scrape you land in another. Who is you to ask me a thing?”

  “What I want to know –” Cameron was in a greater rage than ever – “who trying to fool who?”

  “O buzz off” – Jennings laughed. “You is just anybody’s plaything and wood, Cameron, a piece of what I call flotsam and jetsam” – he spoke jeeringly and a little sententiously, advertising his phrases and words. “Me?” he cried. “I is me own fucking revolution, equal to all, understand? I can stand pon the rotten ground face to face with the devil. And I don’t gamble pon any witch in heaven or hell. I lef’ that behind me long long ago.” His voice grew wicked and chiding – “You is one of them old time labouring parasite, Cammy boy, you is such a big grown man but you still hankering for a witch and a devil like a child in a fairy-tale Cammy, boy. You must be learning more sense than that by now! You mean to say you ain’t seeing daylight yet Cammy, me boy?”

  Cameron saw red. His arm shot out and burst Jennings’ mouth. Jennings’ look lost its jeering ease and smile in a startled flash of surprise. He wiped his mouth, even as he tasted the salt on his lips, and he spied the blood on his hand. He sprang. Cameron took the over-eager blow on his shoulder, ducking where another deadly wild fist crashed to his skull. Jennings went mad and Cameron felt an onslaught such as he had never dreamed to face in his life. He defended himself, retaliating with the swiftest flying fists in the world. An overpowering sense of injury smote the air again and again in their joint nameless breath.

  “Stop,” Donne shouted. “Stop.” The voice was so terrible and full of suppressed turbulence and demonic authority, it halted them like an overflow of scalding self-confidence and self-knowledge.

  “Stop.”

  They were turned to stone stung to the bitterest attention by what they knew not. Jennings remained powerful, thrusting, the air of a primitive republican boxer upon him, and Cameron stood, heavy and bundled like rock, animal-wise, conscious of a rootless superstition and shifting mastery he had once worshipped in himself and now felt crumbling and lost. Donne stood pointing at them with an air of aristocratic fury beyond words. His eyes were liquid and misty and dark. It was a picture to be long remembered in an age that stood at the door of freedom though no one knew yet what that truly meant. It was a grave of idols and the resurrection of an incalculable devouring principle.

  *

  Once again the crew came around to the musing necessity in the second day’s journey into the nameless rapids above Mariella. They had hardly entered the falls when they knew their lives were finished in the raging torrent and struggle. The shock of the nameless command and the breath of the water banished thought and the pride of mockery and convention as it banished every eccentric spar and creed and wishful certainty they had always adored in every past adventure and world.

  They felt naked and helpless, unashamed of their nakedness and still ashamed in a way that was a new experience for them. They saw and heard only the boiling stream and furnace of an endless life without beginning and end. And the terror of this naked self-governing reality made them feel unreal and unwanted for ever in dreaming themselves up alive. They wished the man who stood before them, or next to them, was real and true and capable of exercising the last power of banishment over them by dismissing their own fiction and unreality and life.

  The monstrous thought came to them that they had been shattered and were reflected again in each other at the bottom of the stream.

  The unceasing reflection of themselves in each other made them see themselves everywhere save where they thought they had always stood.

  After awhile this horrifying exchange of soul and this identification of themselves with each other brought them a partial return and renewal of confidence, a neighbourly wishful fulfilment and a basking in each other’s degradation and misery that they had always loved and respected. It was a partial rehabilitation of themselves, the partial rehabilitation of a tradition of empty names and dead letters, dead as the buttons on their shirt. It was all well and good they reasoned as inspired madmen would to strain themselves to gain that elastic frontier where a spirit might rise from the dead and rule the material past world. All well and good was this resurgence and reconnoitre they reasoned. But it was doomed again from the start to meet endless catastrophe: even the ghost one dreams of and restores must be embalmed and featured in the old lineaments of empty and meaningless desire.

  A groan rose from their lips to silence their half-hopeful half-treacherous thoughts that oscillated over their predicament as the sky dreams indifferently over the earth. The vessel had struck a rock. And they saw it was the bizarre rock and vessel of their second death. The life they had clung to and known before was turning into a backward incoherent dream of the first insensible death they had experienced. Even so a groan rose to their lips and a longing to re-establish that first empty living hollowness and brutal habitation. Surely ignorance was better than their present unendurable self-knowledge and discomfort. Their lips however were smothered and silenced in the hunger of spray.

  The boat struck and glanced into the foaming current on the edge of overturning. Wishrop danced at the bow. His paddle hooked and caught a sharp point an inch beneath the belly of the vessel’s wood. He hurtled into the air like a man riding a wheel. A nameless gasp riddled and splintered the crew. He vanished.

  The boat appeared to right itself miraculously. And Jennings’ machine – which Cameron kept a sturdy hand upon when Jennings had sprained his wrist in the struggle – sent a hideous strangled roar out of the water. It had lost its vulgar mechanical fervour and its enthusiasm was dwindling into an indefatigable revolving spider, hopeless and persistent.

  Hopeless to dream of finding Wishrop in the maelstrom. He too had dwindled in a moment. They had seen his hands aloft two times quickly after his immersion for all the world like fingers clinging to the spokes and spider of a wheel. The webbed fingers caught and held for an instant a half-submerged rock but the crouching face was too slippery and smooth and they had slipped and gone. The wheeling water lifted him spread-eagled once again for an instant. He disappeared from their view. But rose still again – a skull on whom the hair had been plastered for a changeling demon. It was impossible to say. Anything was everything in the whirling swift moment and in the fantasy of their shattered boat and life. All rose and were submerged a hundred feet or yards apart or ages.

  The boat still crawled, driven by the naked spider of spirit. Wishrop’s flesh had been picked clean by perai like a cocerite seed in everyone’s mouth. They shuddered and spat their own – and his – blood and death-wish. It had been forcibly and rudely ejected. And this taste and forfeiture of self-annihilation bore them into the future on the wheel of life.

  The water moved past with reflective backward strokes as the vessel went forward. The old Arawak woman stirred a little, a sudden wind fluttering her sleeves. She had been sleeping all the while but now that the danger was past she had awakened. The river was familiar ground to her, it was plain. High precipitous cliffs and walls had appeared on either hand and bank. She blinked a little, pointing her aged and active fingers. Vigilance saw trees growing out of the cliffs overhead parallel to the river and he wondered whether any man could climb and clamber there. He rubbed his eyes since he felt he saw what no human mind should see, a spidery skeleton crawling to the sky. It danced and gambolled a little, clutching the vertical floor that seemed to change in a shaft of cloudy sun into a protean stream of coincidence where every mechanical revolution and image was the inscrutable irony of a spiritual fate.

  Vigilance could not make up his bemused mind whether it was Wishrop climbing there or another version of Jennings’ engine in the stream. He shrank from the image of his hallucination that was more radical and disruptive of all material conviction than anything he had ever dreamt to see. The precipitous cliffs were of volcanic myth and substance h
e dreamed far older than the river’s bed and stream. He seemed to sense and experience its congealment and its ancient flow as if he waded with webbed and impossible half-spidery feet in the ceaseless boiling current of creation. His immateriality and mysterious substantiality made him dance and tremble with fear a little as Wishrop danced. It was incredible that one had survived. He saw into the depths of the deathless stream where the Arawak woman pointed. A flock of ducks flew, their wings pointed like stars. They were skeletons fixed from ancient geological time unmoving as a plateau. The sudden whirr of their wings awoke him as they flew living and wild across the river. The Arawak woman laughed. Vigilance drew himself up like a spider in a tree. He stood over an archway and gate in the rock through which swarmed and streamed a herd of tapirs, creatures half-donkey and half-cow. They were seething with fear as they ploughed into the river.

  “Look – chased by the folk,” Donne said. He spoke from the bow of a skeleton craft Vigilance discerned in the stream of the rock. “Look one has been wounded and is dying. We are close as hell to the huntsman of the folk.” His deathless image and look made the Arawak woman smile. Vigilance winced a little and rubbed his eyes where he climbed and clung to the cliff wondering at the childish repetitive boat and prison of life. What an enormous spiritual distance and inner bleeding substance lay between himself and that crust and shell he had once thought he inhabited. He could hardly believe it. He tried to convey across the span and gulf of dead and dying ages and myth the endless pursuit on which Donne was engaged.

  “Rubbish,” Donne said. “That herd is a good sign. The folk are not so far away. We can catch up and repair our fortunes. They’ll lead us home safely and we’ll cultivate our fields and our wives.” He spoke out of a desire to hearten himself and the crew. The truth was he no longer felt himself in the land of the living though the traumatic spider of the sun crawled up and down his arms and his neck and punctured his sides of rock.

  Vigilance was sensible to the fantasy of his wound and alive, the sole responsible survivor save for the Arawak woman who clung with him to the wall of rock. He dreamed she had kept her promise, her stepmotherly promise, and had saved him from drowning. Donne’s boat had righted itself, he dreamed, in the volcanic stream and rock and the crew were all there save Wishrop’s spider and transubstantiation: wheel and web, sunlight, starlight, all wishful substance violating and altering and annihilating shape and matter and invoking eternity only and space and musical filament and design. It was this spider and wheel of baptism – infinite and expanding – on which he found himself pinned and bent to the revolutions of life – that made his perception of a prodigal vessel and distance still possible. Darkness fell and the banks were too steep for the crew to land. The river had grown smooth and this was a great good fortune. The stream sang darkly and the stars and harmony of space turned into images of light.

  *

  The sun rose on the third day of their setting out from Mariella. The cliffs appeared to rise higher still on both hands and the river seemed to stretch endlessly and for ever onward. The water was as smooth as a child’s mirror and newborn countenance.

  Nevertheless the crew were downcast and dejected. They had forgotten the miraculous escape they had had and recalled only fear and anxiety and horror and peril. This was hard-hearted nature they contemplated without thinking they may have already suffered it and endured it and re-lived it. Rather it seemed to them only too clear that the past would always catch up with them – when they least expected it – like a legion of devils. There was no simple bargain and treaty possible save unconditional surrender to what they knew not. Call it spirit, call it life, call it the end of all they had once treasured and embraced in blindness and ignorance and obstinacy they knew. They were the pursuers and now they had become the pursued. Indeed it looked the utmost inextricable confusion to determine where they were and what they were, whether they had made any step whatever towards a better relationship – amongst themselves and within themselves – or whether it was all a fantastic chimera.

  They stared hopelessly into the air up the high walls and precipice that hung over their head – an ancient familiar house and structure – and as hopelessly into the bright future and sun that streamed. It was all one impossible burden and deterrent they could neither return to nor escape.

  They felt themselves broken and finished in the endless nightmare and they slouched and nodded in the stream. Vigilance alone preserved the vessel straight ahead, steering with spider arm and engine. The water grew still and quiet and clear as heaven. The Arawak woman pointed. A dense flock of parrots wheeled and flew and a feather settled on Vigilance’s cheek with a breath of life. They wheeled closer and nearer until he saw the white fire of feathers – around their baiting eye, giving them a wise inquisitive expression and look – and the green fire on their bubbling wing as they rose from the stream and the cliff and the sun.

  Vigilance had been wounded by a nameless shaft from the enormous unpredictable battlements he dreamed he stormed – cliff and sun and rock and river all set with their ceaseless pursuing trap as if he were the most precious remarkable game in all the world. Nevertheless he was the one most alive and truly aware of everything. He saw differently and felt differently to the way the herd slept in the innocent stream of death. All blind lust and obfuscation had been banished from his mind. Indeed the living life that ran within him was a unique and grotesque privilege and coincidence because of the extraordinary depth and range he now possessed. Vision and idea mingled into a sensitive carnival that turned the crew into the fearful herd where he clung with his eye of compassion to his precarious and dizzy vertical hold and perched on the stream of the cliff. The light of space changed, impinging upon his eyeball and lid numerous grains of sound and motion that were the suns and moons of all space and time. The fowls of the air danced and wheeled on invisible lines that stretched taut between the ages of light and snapped every now and then into lightning executions of dreaming men when each instant ghost repaired the wires again in the form of an inquisitive hanging eye and bird.

  The feather on his face pricked him like a little stab of fear as though he had not yet become reconciled to his understanding. He felt himself drawn again into the endless flight that had laid siege to the ambivalent wall of heaven and every spidery mis-step he made turned into an intricate horror of space and a falling coincidence and wing. The parrots wheeled and flew around his head on the cliff and the Arawak woman pointed again to a close silver ring that girdled one flying foot. Vigilance rubbed his eye in vain. It was strange but there it was.

  “That bird got a ring on he foot,” said daSilva, opening one sudden leering dreaming eye, his face all puffed and unnatural in awkward sleep. One could see he was struggling with all the might of his mind to recall something. “I sure-sure I see that bird long ago, sure as dead.” He stared fixedly at the creature and shook his head.

  “In the London Zoo,” Cameron jeered and snored. “Is there you see it and now it fly all the way to Brazil with its pretty ring on its foot to look at you and me. We is a sight for sore eyes. But is where this ring you seeing? I can’t see no ring on no bird foot. Is how many ring and vulture you counting in the sky?” He laughed a little, unable however to hide his fear of the beak of death that had been born in his sleep.

  “I never been to London or to a zoo,” daSilva yawned lugubriously. “And I didn’t tell you nothing about vulture. Is parrot Ah seeing and one got a ring on she foot. O God you think I blind or what? How you can’t see it I don’t know. You mean is another dream Ah dreaming?” He turned wooden and still, speaking almost to himself in the lapping whispers water made against the boat when the wind blew. “Ah been dreaming far far back before anybody know he born. Is how a man can dream so far back before he know he born?” He looked at Cameron with conviction and enquiry in his eye.

  “Because you is a big fool,” Cameron cried. “A fool of fools. Look at you. You face like a real dead man own. I hungry.” He tried t
o laugh and his tongue was black. “I going nail and drop one of them vulture bird sure as stones….” The novel idea seemed to wake nearly all of the crew from boredom and they stared in encouragement as Cameron felt in the bottom for a rock.

  “I is a fool yes, a foolish dead man,” daSilva puffed, “but I seeing me parrot. Is no vulture bird….”

  “What in heaven name really preying on you sight and mind, Boy?” Cameron suddenly became curious. “I only seeing vulture bird. Where the parrot what eating you?”

  “Ah telling you Ah dream the boat sink with all of we,” daSilva said speaking to himself as if he had forgotten Cameron’s presence. “Ah drowned dead and Ah float. All of we expose and float….”

  “Is vulture bird you really feeling and seeing,” shouted Cameron. His voice was a croak in the air. DaSilva continued – a man grown deaf and blind with sleep – “Ah dream Ah get another chance to live me life over from the very start. Live me life over from the very start, you hear?” He paused and the thought sank back into the stream. “The impossible start to happen. Ah lose me own image and time like if I forget is where me sex really start….”

  “Fool, stop it,” Cameron hissed.

  “Don’t pick at me,” daSilva said. “The impossible start happen I tell you. Water start dream, rock and stone start dream, tree trunk and tree root dreaming, bird and beast dreaming….”

  “You is a menagerie and a jungle of a fool,” Cameron’s black tongue laughed and twisted.

  “Everything Ah tell you dreaming long before the creation I know of begin. Everything turning different, changing into everything else Ah tell you. Nothing at all really was there. That is”, he grew confused “that is nothing I know of all me life to be something …” He stopped at a dead loss for words open mouthed and astonished as if he had been assaulted by the madness and innocence of the stream.

  “Tek a batty fool like you to dream that,” said Cameron. “A batty fool like you …”