‘Who is Kali?’ I cried.
‘She is a pin-up Goddess for the peasants of Port Mourant. She came from India with indentured servants in the nineteenth century who are amongst Marie of Port Mourant’s antecedents. She is a severe and terrifying judge who walks in the shadow of Marie. There again one comes upon a frontier between caring love and judgement shawl that Kali wears. These shall be visible at Deacon’s (and your) wedding feast when you both wed the Virgin of Port Mourant: concretely (in Deacon’s tragic marriage to her), apparitionally (in your retrial of the wedding and of Deacon’s hubris of immunity to pain in planting the seed of foetal majesty and great but illusory fortune in her). These are riddling terms but you shall see. A seer tests the Imagination to re-examine all “futures” in the light of “pasts”. You shall see I trust.’
*
What was visible to me now in the Circus of the nether world was the game of PRISONERS in ‘futures’ and ‘pasts’… The game was in full swing in Bonampak’s Paradise of the Rain God.
The players were installed at a great gambling table in the middle of a field.
It was a sacred game set in a curiously pagan yet modern context that I could not easily define and which prompted me to ask my Skeleton-twin about ‘futures’ and ‘pasts’ … I heard him grumbling in response to my question: ‘There’s no short-cut for orphans like yourself, Francisco — born at the extremities of many cultures and civilizations in South America — with regard to “futures” and “pasts”. You are immersed in motherships, brideships, twinships, games of every complexion. No short-cut! Each riddle that I offer in the Circus of the Grave is a promise of immersion in experienced truth — the experience of truths to be borne by you within the blending of ages and times — not a recourse to formula or plot …’
He raised a bony cautionary finger into the air and I was reminded of my mother’s work-hardened hands and of the mystery of pain. I touched my lips as though they bled in the school ground of long ago yet of which I was conscious again as an ingrained callous in this instant within my present age. Dream callous! Dream-conscience and the labyrinthine ruses of love and fear through which one may seek to short-circuit pain. Had my mother’s work-hardened hands touched my lips they might have bled all the more. An extraordinary game!
One field of the past overlaps another riddling future in the Circus of the Grave when the dice are cut from Bone. Cut from my Skeleton-twin’s cautionary finger.
‘Cut also,’ said my Skeleton-twin, ‘from the bone beneath the flesh of the two fingers sliced from your hand, Francisco, in Jonestown from Deacon’s apparently random bullet.’
‘Do you mean,’ I cried, ‘that the dice are cut from me? And from you?’
‘And from the Virgin’s work-hardened nails as well …’
It was a cunning Jest of the crucifixion of the globe that Mr Mageye would have envied.
‘The ancestry and progeny of the dice in the Paradise of the Rain God — in a pagan Grave as much as a Christian Grave — are the substance of new riddles of the mystery of pain and the hubris that we now entertain of immunity to pain.’
I studied the players closely as they threw the dice which bounced it seemed in my own flesh upon the table. I felt I was in danger of being torn to shreds by Maya peasants and savages. But a Prisoner came forward. He was surrounded by a crowd of dancers who shuffled up to him and touched him.
‘They should be unable to touch him,’ I cried in alarm.
The Game in the Nether World had now become a battle: passions, emotions, spectres, realities, crossings, recrossings, judges, graces. But by and large the Game was steeped in terrors and uncertainties. Fear lit the Circus of the Grave. And I feared for my life. Grave Land. Nether World. Uncanny Circus. Staggered identities or names of Fear. Fear ran riot on the field. I would be unable to return to the Virgin Ship. Would I make it? Would I escape? Fear cooled a little within me. The riot seemed to subside. But all the danger signals remained.
No sign of my guide, seer, Skeleton-twin.
I looked for him at the heart of the scrum but he was not to be seen. The battle that ensued was fought, or played, at the gambling table in the field of the Paradise of the Rain God.
It was a battle over the Pagan Body (its susceptibility to the elements), Pagan Sport, Pagan Riot, Pagan Economies in Third Worlds, Second Worlds, First Worlds …
The Pagan Body had long seemed irrelevant to Western and Eastern, Northern and Southern ideologies. Yet one caught a glimpse of intrinsic paganism in the embalmed frames of charismatic warriors or revolutionaries or saints. One caught a glimpse of a family of Skeleton-twins fleshed with natural-seeming, unnatural flesh within the gloom and the glitter of sarcophagi open to tourists: Moscow, Vietnam, ancient and modern Egypt and Rome.
Such glimpses led me to fight for Breath to save my own life. And yet I was convinced of the complexities of resurrectionary pulse within the wrappings of the Pagan Body.
I heard the sudden clamour of giants of chaos that Deacon had embalmed in a coffin in Crabwood Creek when he lassoed the Horses of the Moon and the riders on their backs. Were Third World Presidents and Prime Ministers of Guyana and Brazil in that Coffin?
Could they spring up and seize me? They were here. Sudden clamour, for now I knew the masked players at the table! Not only Presidents and Prime Ministers but Bankers and Peasants played at the table. They belonged to all parties across the generations of colonial and post-colonial histories. Some looked as Mayan or as Chinese as Lenin in the guise of a Pope gambling with millions of followers at the table of Latin American history. All well and good to mock them I thought, but I knew they knew me as one of the involuntary architects of the Jonestown holocaust.
It almost took my Breath away again, for they gambled with the dice of my bones, a benumbed survivor’s bones …
Carnival has many wrappings in the Circus of the Grave and Breath becomes an essential mystery for survivors who descend into ‘futures’ and ‘pasts’.
Politicians and Peasants — in their embalmed masquerade — are also Bankers: quite ordinary folk whom Deacon had indeed thrust into the Coffin: ordinary, extraordinary Coffin. Was it the death of politics around the globe and in Guyana?
I repeated to myself again and again: ‘They are the ghost-players at the gambling table and my heart rises into my mouth.’
I fell on my knees in the scrum of worlds ancient and modern. I could not hold the players but they seemed capable of crushing me to smithereens.
I could not hold them but I was suddenly sensitive to my pagan lips bruised on the playing fields of Boyhood. I was sensitive to the Carib bone-flute within the natural, unnatural flesh that Deacon had bitten, it seemed, with his gun in Jonestown. Bitten from my hand! I was sensitive to the ground in which my mother’s body lay in Albuoystown. Two or three blades of grass from my Nemesis Hat still sprang there. They resembled rain in the Paradise of the Rain God.
The difficulty in identifying the Pagan Body in Christian currencies, in Marxian money, or in any other Political or Religious cash denomination, lay — I felt — in the weight one gave to the blood of apparitions which sit on chests of treasure, embalmed treasure, that have been secured in the teeth of battle. The apparitions wave like flags on the Moon upon which Deacon and Jonah fought so fiercely on the day and night of the holocaust.