“What did you say?” cried the guide. “What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
“A great lady sir. It was she who instituted the play and procession you saw when you arrived. And the rumours you hear …” he stopped.
“What rumours?”
“That after that, after she was raped, it was she who seduced a Fool each year to play the part (went into the city and brought him back) — the stories are entirely false and without foundation. It’s the granddaughter who has put those rumours about. She’s mad.”
“A Fool? Each year? What I saw yesterday was a log of a tree, all carved …”
“For a time”, said the guide softly, “it used to be a man, a man with real feelings. But it made things ugly. She had nothing to do with that. She had learnt her lesson. And it was just as indecent having a man as a woman to play the part. She had nothing to do with that. We honour her today as the patroness of Christ and the firing squad. That’s all. It’s a monument, sir, her monument.”
All at once the Idiot found it difficult to know whether he felt pity, contempt or admiration for Hosé. In some quite astonishing and extraordinary way he was proving an admirable guide and the origins of the play (the procession) which the Fool had witnessed, into which he had been drawn, were displaying themselves now through him, through the very prejudices he embodied.
Why should he not seek to protect the reputation of ideal monument or “great lady”? Why should he not express his aversion for what seemed to him the violence to which she had given birth as distinct from the heroism she had cultivated? Why should he not seek to preserve a distinction between grandmother and granddaughter as between the preservation of an art (money and glory) and the life-blood of an art (scorn of money and glory)?
Were these not legitimate question to frame of illegitimate sanctity that came to an unconscious head in the prejudices of Hosé?
If Hosé had seemed to him a moment or two ago the very devil himself in respectable dress now it was the Fool who saw for himself the necessity to descend into hell in naked dress if one were to preserve heaven — to descend into hell as terrifying compassion and a capacity to entertain all guides, to be tolerant of all roles, without which the very origins of detachment, the very dress of perfection (like a beautiful body on the cover of a book) would lack the edges of resentment, the edges of callous fury or callous lust that made it priceless as the irony of a pearl in a marketplace of sorrows, of abused flesh-and-blood. Such was the drama of pitiless/pitiful humanity.
They were descending now into a hollow in the ground within which an old wall, an old building, crouched in the earth.
“There it is,” said the guide. “I have tried to scrape some fragments together. To scrape bits and pieces together in which to house a portrait of Sister Beatrice. She was the one who remained when the others fled. It’s not really finished, the portrait, done under stress, I fear, half-a-century ago. But it is possible to make something out of it I think — the seed of a place to which people may be drawn in years to come. And if you give your assistance sir — if you write something — I am sure …”
THE FIFTH DAY (Rape of the Winter Bride)
Perhaps every man knows he is being dreamt into existence by others, conceived by others; a sense in which he likewise dreams others into existence as husband/father to places and times, as Fool to every ghost-child he entertains or hunts for with pitiful, pitiless ambition. A sense in which every revolution of the hunt, every religion of the sexes, is related to a potentiality for child-bearing, ghost-bearing, capsules of ambition — the unborn child/ghost of hope for some, the never-to-be-born child/ghost of aborted future for others. Related therefore to a ceremony of expectations and of silent mourning concealed perhaps from oneself but active in every career night and day as fate.
And, in some degree, in the circuit of his travels as nameless child or clown to himself (as to others) the conception of ghostly born/unborn selves everyman possesses may fade into a deeper hollow of longing or animal ground or brighten into a blindness of reality and animal sun.
That hollow of longing may signify the strength of particular memories of the chase so strong they blot out everything else. That sun may signify the bullet of a particular morning of the chase so deep it appears central to the mystery of the animal of god one is.
Monument of a subconscious conception of wholeness — vulnerable parts, alarming roles played by respectable idols — with which the Fool lived as if it were his daily bread of fire that left him hollow and susceptible to nameless others.
He returned to his lodgings after his day in the wood; masked he felt, possessed of roles that led into the dead past and into the unconscious future …
He fell into bed and dreamt again he was a man on a log. He became that sculptured log. A log must learn to bleed, to fly, to be an animal. Hare of god. Autumn hare. Winter hare. Spring hare.
He looked back, it seemed, through the unfrocked spaces of that hare of dreams to a winter of preparations for flight…. Knocked at the sky, hare of a sky, animal board.
Rapped and shivered. Cold. Cobbled street. Was it an old part of an old town in Europe of which he dreamt? A monk’s body, a monk’s retreat, a monk’s self-portrait?
The door opened and a porter appeared who led him into a blazing studio, blazing fire, took his coat and gloves …
Alone. It was an hour or two past noon. The winter sky was glinting on the windowpane with the ice and the fire he felt in his blood, in his bones. Whiteness, sharpness, thickness as if one could slice into a beautiful half-misted world as into something invisibly hooded, invisibly black.
His glance turned now inwards, towards the dumb furniture in the room, heavy, dark. Head nodding. The room was warm, beautiful fire. A solid mourning language lay everywhere. He stirred, got up. Moved over to an easel which was turned away from him. A startling canvas. The Winter Hare (it was called). An enormous painted hare adorned with … he could not be absolutely sure … the paint was blurred … were they a man’s testicles?
A ghost of a hand ran between its legs with a thorn. Thorn of love? Thorn of hate? Thorn of accumulated longing?
The Fool retreated, resumed his chair and let his head fall deep into a huge desk, an enormous coffin. It was a curious room. There were Bibles, prayerbooks and a number of Mexican ornaments, calendars and effects that seemed to lift the room into space like a mid-Atlantic cabin suspended between Europe and Central America.
Far below on the skin of the ocean was inscribed the hand with the thorn … burning eyes … The Fool’s eyes were closed … He was asleep … Buried in the structure of a thorn that pricked his eyeballs …
“Sorry to have kept you waiting,” came a deep voice like a wave upon the floor.
The Idiot stirred, pulled his head up. He was asleep. Buried in the structure of a thorn that encompassed his head. For weeks now he had been burning the proverbial midnight candle, researching, writing up his papers, anticipating the pyramid of the sun, the vanished foundations of the moon, anticipating lakes and skies, haloes and furnaces.
It was all he could do to struggle to his feet.
“Please,” she said. “Don’t get up. I am sorry I am late. But it has been an effort to get here and I do want …” Her voice was trailing away and the Idiot was filled by a confused stab, a look of importunity, a plea to him not to abandon her so quickly, that ran close to the light of jeopardy in the painted hare.
He knew his sensations were irrational, that they sprang from the borderline of sleep (or of death) as though he were dead (or she was dead) though they were self-evidently alive.