The little pear inside White Rabbit’s bottle bobbed around like a bewhiskered, wrinkled fetus. As if it were trying with its reborn roots to grip the glass, to change the glass and the alcohol back into earth and benevolent rain. Morgana put on a Beatles record and suddenly they were all dancing and the light was fading and I understood nothing, nothing at all, but decided to ride with them very patiently. The electricity had been disconnected because for four or five months I hadn’t paid, and I had made a pleasant virtue of dark necessity: I lived, I told them, by pale candlelight alone, like a demented monk. And the record player, then? Why, batteries, obviously. Anyhow, the record player wasn’t going around. Only I was going around, for I had asked White Rabbit (and I was beginning to like that little gringa) to teach me how to frug and all of them were laughing at me and for a moment I really thought that they had put on a record but actually it was Rose Ass-Long Dong and his guitar playing “Yesterdays,” a song I was sure the Monks had known long before the music was published or the Beatles recorded it. Hey, brethren. So back we go to the jungle of beginnings and I twist my sluggish behind without moving my feet, trying as hard as I can to imitate White Rabbit, but try as I may, I can’t keep up with the movement, at once elegant and savage, of her beautiful young arms. “Good,” says Brother Thomas. “We’ll hold the trial and I will be the attorney for the defense.” He jerks his head like a wound-up toy turtle, keeping his hands fast in the pockets of his charro pants. “And I’ll take on Franz,” mumbles El Güero, whose face has disappeared behind a waterfall of long yellow hair as he shakes, clicking his heels, to the almost visible rhythm. It is White Rabbit’s turn. Dramatically, now motionless, fixed in an arch pose of heavy espionage, the collar of her trench coat up, the brim of her floppy Garbo hat drooping around her ears, she announces, “I’ll be Elizabeth, Ligeia, Lisbeth, whatever her name is.”
I observe that they are all observing me and laughing at me for the clumsy absurdity I am making of a dance that is entirely improvisation, yet at the same time, and this is the rub, completely a rite. The need to display a bit of rhetoric comes over me and I begin to point out to them that one by one, nation by nation, people by people, we are all of us returning to our original prototypes. The Yankees are becoming an army of Edgar Allan Poseurs complete with the Gothic castles and the dripping dungeons that Pollyanna and Horatio Alger preferred to conceal beneath marmalade and Wall Streets paved with silver dollars; the English are going back as fast as they can to Tommy Jones and Mollucky Flanders and all the belching and bawding that Victoria and Gladstone wanted to screen away behind cricket and croquet. And as for the doughty Germans, they have been and will always be …
“I’ll take the bench and be judge,” Morgana interrupts. She is sliding gracefully through a series of steps that beyond doubt began as part of some puberty ritual. “I am Javier!” cries Rose Ass (not at this moment Long Dong. His guitar is weary and sad. Jakob clasps him by the shoulder and forces him, Javier be nimble, Javier be quick, Javier hop over your stick, to jump over his guitar). “And I,” says Jakob, “the prosecuting attorney.”
The guitar is silent. With one movement they all fall to their knees in a circle, holding hands.
They begin to howl like coyotes, at first softly, then louder.
I stand alone, stopped in an awkward movement of my hips. There is no light now and outside the mongrel dogs of the neighborhood are replying to the howling of my six young guests. At the same time you can hear the termites gnawing the beams beneath the old floor, sifting their eternal dust, and the scampering through the walls of rats who are as terrified by silence as by racket.
“What is the plea?” Jakob asks sharply. “Guilty or not guilty?”
I have my matches in my hand and am looking for a candle.
“Guilty, but with extenuating circumstances, I suppose,” speaks Brother Thomas in the darkness. “Good God, wasn’t his soul his own to do with as he damn well pleased?” Brother T.’s voice mocks itself. It is deep as Paul Robeson singing “Ol’ Man River,” yet as shrill as Butterfly McQueen begging Scarlett O’Hara to forgive her. The voice of a slave and rebel crawling up from the slime. Of a bird just loosed and still bewildered. Of sweaty torches winking through a night of fog. “He had a dream, man. He wanted to make it come true. The same as all of us. Just the same.”
“Will the attorney for the defense specify precisely what dream?” Judge Morgana asks.
And now we are leaving. In the darkness the flies that during daylight hang like clouds in my garden of refuse have departed. The smell is sweet, rotten, sticky. Broken glass, rags, vomit, excrement. And here and there something that might be used again, for even the poor have their moments of luxurious deniaclass="underline" that bicycle wheel, for example. Brother Thomas, picking his way through with enormous grace, is still speaking, and I can’t tell from his accent whether he comes from a ghetto in the North or a sharecropper’s cabin in the South. “The dream precisely? Precisely the dream of long-frustrated desire finally confessed and fulfilled. Of lost unity in life recovered again. Of complete power put to the final proof, to the test, man, make or break. He had one chance. His only chance. He had to take it and do with it what he could.” The stench of the rottenness around us is a little dizzying, a little like sweet wine. “But no one understood. Really, you know, quite a great dream. Merely a hopeless one. For he dared to believe that a life of heroism was still possible.” None of us pays Brother Thomas the least attention. We let him rattle on and don’t listen, for the attorney for the defense is expected to lie, that’s his function and duty. Or isn’t it?
I lead them through the narrow way out and now we are in the alley in front of the tiny neighborhood store. For twelve years the storekeeper has known that I was squatting here but he has never squealed on me. A scholar and a gentleman. “The accused,” Brother Thomas is going on, “because he lived that dream, could comprehend its poetic and mystic greatness.” Brother T. is the Invisible Man. He is Uncle Thomas now, not Brother Thomas. I greet the storekeeper with a nod and we all crowd in to buy cigarettes and Pepsis. The storekeeper’s daughter, a girl of thirteen, straight-haired and pallidly green, like a willow, puts our purchases on the glass-top counter and holds out her open hand for us to pay and Brother Thomas is saying in his tenor-basso voice, “You may ask, what did the accused abandon for the sake of his dream? Music and architecture? Yes, but remember, music and architecture without the possibility of greatness.” We tilt our Pepsis back and White Rabbit steps in front of a votive candle that casts flickering light on a print of a Black Virgin who weeps wax tears and wears tinsel and satin clothing. White Rabbit crosses herself. “A world in which he could not be a musician or an architect without accepting beforehand that society would not honor his occupation but would regard it as something at most to be tolerated, basically useless, such a world,” Brother Thomas is saying, “seemed to the accused to be a world that ought to be destroyed. Music. Architecture. Mere pastimes not related to the basic business of living, the getting…” The green-skinned daughter of the storekeeper listens and laughs and covers her mouth with her hands, their fingers rose-nailed, dark hands adorned with sick but happy roses. She cannot understand Thomas, for he is speaking English, his voice booming low, squealing high. But she laughs. She senses that she is watching a performance. Yes, it’s a minstrel show and Brother Thomas is Al Jolson, saying, “… the getting together of money so that you could live high on the hog down in Alabammy.” The storekeeper sits outside with his chair tilted against the wall. A small chair with a painted back, red and yellow flowers and blue one-eyed ducks, and he is very dark and very fat and breathes audibly, heavy as a burro, as an ocean. “To live high on the hog with a fat bank account and an easy conscience, using all the old familiar words to stay on top and to keep those not also on top jumping through the hoop just as always: be patient, brothers, be patient, your time will come. Oh, yes. Turn the other cheek. Be loving. Yes, oh yes, be charitable. The meek shall inherit the earth. By and by. By and by.” Brother Thomas is on his way now. He is on his pony, jogging rhythmically, chanting while the others clap their hands to his beat and sing out the proper responses: amen, say it, brother, say it. In the alley a dog begins to whimper and the storekeeper kicks at it and suddenly a crowd of ragged children appear from nowhere, barefoot urchins in gray overalls who throw stones at piles of dust in the alley and then give their attention to chasing after the dog, which now is howling, running away while Brother Thomas in his charro costume goes on with his star-touching, earth-rooted chant, cold, fleshless, yet as compelling as the beat of a tomtom: