I pulled the eyes from my head and flung them into the Pool. Carnival Lord Death snatched them up and popped them into his mouth. He held them there for a moment or two as if to test their immunity to poison that Deacon had inherited from the Scorpion. ‘They’re worth a million dollars at least,’ he cried. ‘Indeed much, much more. Insurance for dead or living actors’ eyes is priceless. Perhaps not as high as a dead footballer’s legs or a punch-drunk boxer’s wrists. Role models — who knows? — may fetch a billion on the Day of the Dead.’
‘What’s that? What’s that?’ cried Deacon. ‘Whose voice is that?’ He glared at me and the sockets in his head — with their Eagle’s glare — seemed wonderfully hollow. Jones was slightly mesmerized. It was a brilliant performance on Deacon’s part. He slapped me on the back. ‘It’s a rotten world, isn’t it Francisco? Can you play the role of a saviour?’ I shrank from him. He was mocking me. He was mocking himself. He was mocking role models.
He was pointing to the tattoo on my arm, the tattoo of Lazarus shaped like a T inscribed on Bone.
‘Play a surrogate Lazarus Francisco in the Milky Way, in the Virgin’s Pool, cohabit with innocent brides in the misty Pool, all in anticipation of the birth of my son when I return to wed Marie. She’s but a slip of a dancing thing now — a princess in my eyes — on a distant coast.’
It was as if the skies had fallen in on my head.
No, No, I wanted to scream as the naked misty-bodied throng jostled together in the grave of the Pool. Had I not seen them in that light (though I had forgotten it all) on the Day of the Dead when I lay on a pillow of stone at the edge of the Clearing?
To be survivor Lazarus — even in Jest — to play such a role is to know that the part involves an inner marriage to a resurrectionary Womb, inner eyes in a resurrectionary Womb, inner organs in a resurrectionary Womb, inner intercourse with Virgin, wilderness space, that may bring new birth to the Self (within a Sorrowing humanity); to contemplate such a role is to tap resources of forgotten initiation into a bridegroom or a fool as much as into the foetus of a saviour in order to acquire the strength to stand at the bar of time …
Mr Mageye saw my distress. ‘See the funny side of the sacred, Francisco,’ he said. He spoke softly for my ear alone on the Bridge with the Camera. ‘See the funny side of Deacon. Alas he knows that from birth, and his exposure in the savannahs, he began to play the role model of Fate. You have been tied to him as a Fool to be taunted and insulted and reviled. You (and the society to which you belong) must suffer his bouts of arrogance, and drunkenness, and bad behaviour. It’s Fate, it’s the role model of Fate, in the theatre, in the duelling arena, in sport, everywhere, when a civilization is addicted to violence as ours is. Only a Fool may absolve Deacon of the burden he carries …’
Mr Mageye saw my incredulity, my dislike of the label Fool …
‘Look at it this way, Francisco. You are an apparition in time on the Bridge above the Pool. You stand beside me. You are an apparition in time down there beside the Pool. So you may entertain the comedy of having many fathers. The Frenchman’s Catholic ghost for instance. Your mother’s great-great-grandfather and husband. Carnival theology. And why not? Such surrogacies break the spell of divine human incest and bring us into the mystery of freedom … Freedom confesses to the partiality of all parenting dogma which it entertains as sacred, human theatre …
‘When the sky falls treat it as manna from heaven and crumbs from the bodies of role models (Jones is a cult model, isn’t he?), the heroes, the monsters, that we feed upon in our gluttony for abuse at the hand of Fate …’
I was filled with fear, comic fear, uncanny fear, the fear of creation, of the possibilities of creation, the possibilities of fiction. Models of fiction cemented in the eighteenth and the nineteenth century are sacred in the twentieth. Sacred eighteenth-century, nineteenth-century linearity. But I was attempting to rewrite the past from the funny side of sacred, imperial time, from a futuristic angle that breached linearity. One drew one’s characters from the grave of time, they migrated backwards from the future nevertheless into the past, susceptible to one’s knowledge now (however flawed) of the past futures to which one belonged. The funny side of time in the future. Such is the resurrectionary, comic consciousness of the Fool Lazarus whom I sought to invoke in my texts though I knew without a shadow of doubt that Church and State showered him with fortunes and riches to keep him safely dead … This was the substance of my fear, my uncanny fear, as I wrote my Dream-book, as I sought to build Memory theatre …
There was no way around such fear except divine comedy and the acceptance of Fate, the abuse of Fate, the abuse of Prejudice, the abuse of Predator.
‘Is Lazarus — you call me Lazarus Deacon — a Colonial Fool in a so-called post-colonial, post-imperial age? I do not know. If he is he must die and die again and again and each resurrection will prove abortive … Unless … Unless …’
Deacon was outraged. He had been drinking rum and Coca-Cola all afternoon at the swimming pool with its misty embracing bodies.
He had also caught the drift of Mr Mageye’s conversation with me.
‘Fuck the Frenchman’s ghost,’ he cried. ‘Fuck you, Francisco. You are a Fool. Your mother was a Fool.’
‘It’s the Frenchman’s fortune which brought you here on a scholarshp in the twentieth century.’
‘I am the peasant, legendary father of the Americas. Folkloric father. Ask Marie to whom I am betrothed. We need a different Economy …’
Jonah Jones had had enough. He knit his brow like an ancient thunderer and struck the frame of the Milky Way until it shuddered as if to the rumble of an earthquake.
‘Nonsense Deacon,’ he cried. ‘Blue-blooded puritans are the fathers of the Americas. I am your father and every fucking bastard’s.’
He had been drinking too and swallowing the women in the Pool with his drink. Their reflected bodies sprawled on the glass in his hand. His rage melted and he laughed in Deacon’s smiling teeth.
‘You Francisco, you Deacon, are my sons. Together in the New World we will forge a new pact and build a new Rome unlike the Pope’s Rome. I nearly said Poe’s Rome. Poe was a racist. But never mind. He’s a genius all the same! Would you not agree, Francisco? Troy, believe me, has been sacked and Rome turned its back on the Jews when Hitler marched into Poland. Berlin and Paris and London have suffered bouts of racism and fascism. Fascism is the death of the Imagination. IMAGINATION DEAD IMAGINE.’
I wanted to shout to him from the Utopian Bridge. I wanted to shout a rain of questions at him as he swallowed the women in the Pool. I wanted to shout across a chasm of generations but my tongue froze, and his ear — for all I knew — was sealed.
I wanted to shout within my own grave of memory — as though I too lay on the sick bed of civilization in Port Mourant hospital. But I was a diminutive survivor and my voice was weak and small. Though I sailed into the past with knowledge I had gained from the future, the queer and the funny side of knowledge served to show how much — beyond reckoning — I still had to learn.
I wanted to shout to him — within my own grave of memory — as though I too had died in Jonestown: ‘Have you, Jonah, rid yourself of the disease of fascism?’
I wanted to shout: ‘I know little or nothing except that I survived …’
‘How is it,’ I said to Mr Mageye, ‘that one knows so little yet dares to write fiction’s truths, the hardest truths to garner?’
Mr Mageye laughed. ‘Fiction is not tautology. Fiction,’ he murmured, ‘must diverge within itself from itself to be true to itself. Or else it becomes the mimicry of fact, the shell of fact …’