“Please tell me everything,” said the Fool. “How do you play the part of Rose.?”
“There is a technicality to Rose — as to any person, any life — which I seek to gather about me. But also there is a ghost to Rose which may become visible within that technicality. One does not need always to die to become a ghost. An actress may be, when she plays a part, sheer even marvellous body technicality. But sometimes brilliant as her act is a paradox arises in that her performance (however successful) may have no bearing on the present moment in which she lives. And I feel myself that it is only when the ghost is partially visible through the dress of technicality that the past really connects with the present — with the naked present. I am not sure why I am telling you all this. If my husband were here …”
“Please go on. Tell me everything.”
“I am excited today as you see. And I have been talking a great deal since you arrived. I think it’s a discovery I feel I have made about Rose. She’s a dear old soul but she eats up our time, she makes excessive demands on us day after day. It used to be hard before but it’s a hundred times worse since Maria’s death.”
The Fool was astonished. “Her death? But I thought … I was told they were both …”
“Alas no. Maria was killed last autumn — a tragic accident. She was out shopping and was standing at a street corner in Manhattan when she was hit by gunfire from a passing car that was being chased by the police.
“It was a great shock, a terrible shock for Rose who has refused utterly to accept Maria’s death. She writes to her friends as if Maria’s still here. I have had to break the news to people. It’s as if she’s involved in a role that is life and death for her. And all her absurdities, her cannibalisms if you like (she subsists on everybody, devours anything at all she can put her hand on which relates however indirectly to Maria) reflect an intense bottled-up desire that is sheer ghost, sheer prince of a ghost she needs to project into eternity…. I don’t know why I am telling you all this.”
There was the rumble of a passing lorry like anonymous gunfire and Rose appeared at the door of the drawing-room, a portrait in a frame of exquisite hardened wood. Her thin features, painfully upright body, stood in contrast to the open-minded dress, sceptical and wry humour of Black Marsden’s wife. The Fool took two paces towards her … towards the heap of wigs and costumes Mrs. Black Marsden had assembled and which seemed now to be coming alive.
“I am sorry”, he began, “to trouble you at this time. I had not heard of Sister Maria’s death…. Mrs. Marsden”, he looked around but she had vanished, “has just explained …” He was pointing into space as if with a single step he had crossed from one stage to another. “If I had known I would not have come.”
“Not at all,” Rose said. “You are welcome. Maria would have told you so herself, will tell you so herself. She is here as you know. And if we — I—we can be of assitance to you it would make us very happy. We — I—have received a letter telling us of your plans. Please do take a seat.” She pointed to a chair by the window, repeating the invitation in a different tone, a different voice that disconcerted him. “Please do sit down.”
She sat on a sofa facing him. Very thin. Very upright. Almost shadowless he thought. Yet subtly enveloped in an atmosphere that glistened in furniture and brass as the curtains billowed suddenly around him like clouds in a draught as he fell from the pyramid of the sun. He shook his eyes out of a cloud. Pulled his chair back. Too close to the window. Too close to the curtains with their base of a billowing pyramid in his head. Was it royal bone (Maria) … was it royal blood (Rose) he saw there?
He could see the colour of Rose’s face animated and alive at the base of the pyramid. He could see Maria’s head elongated like bone, upright reflection, fastidious attachment to a structure embodying the past. Rose sat there facing him.
“Maria never forgave herself”, she said, “for running away. We came to Manhattan about fifty years ago. We were, she said, the aristocracy of the church. And the aristocracy never yields, never yields an inch. That is its glory. You would think, wouldn’t you, to hear her say that that she is a tyrant. But in fact she is all I possess, she is the dearest creature on earth and I love her. I love her.” There was the glimmer of a tear like a splinter of bone on the edge of her lips — transubstantiation of bone into rain.
“I am a tyrant,” the voice that spoke now was a different voice, inflexible and dry, Sister Maria’s voice on Sister Rose’s lips. “There was a time when princes earned their place in the realm … earned their privileges, bounties the hard way — sometimes with their lives.”
“Earned their place? What do you mean?”
“They fought to hold their assets and lived as princes did under the shadow of the axe — as a revolutionary lives today in the shadow of the bullet.” Maria spoke with pride, the perverse pride of a prince of the church. “I have earned my reward even if I seemed at first — half a century ago — to have deserted my post. In the end I was privileged to die….”
“Now, now Maria,” it was the confused, animated voice of Rose. “Now, now Maria,” shook Rose trembling a little, “you are extreme. To talk of dying as if it is the end of things. Princes of church and state do not die. They live forever. Born of … born of …” she stopped at a loss, caught herself, continued. “Born of … born of no one and nothing except god.”
The sun fell from the sky and melted into the heart of the Fool as though a sentence had been enacted upon him in which to be born was to be unmade in the legendary heart of Rose in compensation for Maria’s bone and death, to be born was to be broken in the dream-play of history in compensation for unfulfilled models of sovereign subsistence, to be born was to descend into a depth of frustrated appetite and need arching back across centuries — a rage for lost anchorages, lost securities that made him a vulnerable body of time with a reflected/glimpsed capacity to engross others within roles that were curiously unconscious of self-brutalised, self-cannibalised antecedents and peerages of the depths and the heights.
MARSDEN’S LETTER TO GOODRICH (Eight and Nine)
My Dear Goodrich,
During Easter weekend of the year 197– the body of a man was found at the base of the pyramid of the sun on the ancient urban complex of Teotihuacán. It is thought that he suffered an attack close to the edge and fell. I learnt of this because of a slip of paper on him which gave Sister Rose’s address. The authorities contacted me.
I was interested in the case because of the extraordinary impression Nameless (that is what he called himself) made on my wife when he visited her in New York a fortnight or so before his death.
I flew to Mexico City and my interest was further aroused by his papers and the unsigned canvases and sculptures which were in his hotel with a note directing that they should be forwarded to me in the event of anything happening to him.
I am aware of the formidable difficulties you face in translating these but I feel somehow you would want to do so.
When I was your guest in Scotland I was aware of your susceptibility to “objects” that symbolized, in various degrees, the “soul” or “glory” of cultures and civilizations past.