On the face of it such treasure was of museum value but blood was as real as dice. It dried (this was true) on one’s lips and left its stamp there. But its imprint, its labyrinth of love and fear, was a miraculous toss of chance or fate … Was Breath a matter of chance or of fate? Did freedom lie between chance and fate?
I looked up at the Prisoner who stood at the heart of the mysterious battle in the Nether World. Pagan surrogate God? Solid apparition on the treasure chest of the globe? Christian surrogate God? I could not be sure. But I grieved with all my heart (as if it were the world’s heart) for him. The crowd closed in on him, it touched him, they touched him, but he seemed still set apart and able to withstand assault. An extraordinary Game!
‘Real rain, real blood, runs in his veins,’ I cried. ‘He is as real as the Breath in my body. I know only too well now — as I stand or kneel in danger beside him — how pitiless is the crowd that surrounds him. Should they succeed in genuinely seizing him …’ I stopped. There were tears in my eyes that dropped like fluid dice in the Paradise of the Rain God. ‘Should they seize him it would be a phenomenal event in the Nether World. Should they — this beastly crowd of savages — cross the frontier between themselves and him, it would be a phenomenal seizure …’ Seizure of God, the killing of God, surrogate Prisoner-God?
The ghost-players and Bankers and Peasants and Teachers and Politicians at the table — giants of chaos they were — dressed in natural, unnatural flesh like embalmed figures, underpinning ideologies and dogmas, looked up at me. They gave an incredible smile that shook me on my knees until the pain I felt broke into my joints. But I remained precariously whole and free to fight my way up from the Nether World of the Circus.
They threw their dice at the same instant that our eyes met. Diced eyes. I gasped as each die revealed a limb, an organ imprinted upon it, a splinter on my lip imprinted on it, eyes in my lips. Dream Body. Pagan Body. They were gambling on behalf of the crowds that surged around the Prisoner.
They piled the dice into a corner of the field or the table and secured another handful from their pockets to fling again upon table or field.
But it was the Prisoner’s turn now to throw. I gasped as he threw his lot on the table. The Players and the crowds leaned over — they shook their heads — when each die cast by the Prisoner proved as blank as a slate. Black slate. White slate.
‘Tell him,’ the giants of chaos said to me, ‘that he might as well surrender himself of his free will. Give himself freely to the crowds.’
I was heartbroken at the price that the Prisoner was asked to pay to reveal to the blind throng the jointed nests in the Phallic tree of space. ‘It is unjust,’ I said. ‘It is the mystery of injustice.’
There was a lull in the Game.
‘Here in Bonampak,’ they said to me, ‘we secure Prisoners and treat them as guests of heaven. If they want choice maidens they may have them. If they want banquets they may have them. All we ask in return is that when we bring them to trial at the gambling table they surrender their organs, heart and limb, to be given to the Sun. It’s an honourable vocation. To serve as a Prisoner taken in battle! In that way we light the Breath of the Sun in the sky.’
‘Barbarous, barbarous,’ I cried. ‘Barbarous, barbarous.’
‘Is the Sun barbarous, Francisco? The Sun requires sacrifice. It’s up to the Prisoners! If they give of themselves freely — few if any in our experience have so far — then they will be spared the assault of the crowds (we will carve them up gently like foxes in the field, that’s all); the crowds see them as the fountainhead of fortune and prosperity! They must give all they possess. Not only their body but the children of their body if they have any. For one of those children may prove to be a king or a saviour. If they hold back, if they claim that the gift of freedom under the Sun is premature, that Mankind is still unfit to carry the burden of freedom, then alas the bonfire of passion in the crowds awaits them, there is nothing we can do but roll dice and wait. We are Bankers, Teachers, Politicians. We please the crowds even as we make them subservient to Money and to Propaganda.’
I was tempted — God knows! — to applaud their cynical jesting at the state of my corrupt age but I knew I was witnessing an unforgettable counterpoint between ancient savage ritual and mystical dismemberment scarcely understood as the twentieth century drew to a close. Unforgettable yet scarcely understood! Did a chasm exist between Memory, the history of Memory, and the genesis of mystical dismemberments as a redistributive focus of variable supports not only for Suns and planets but for disadvantaged cultures in need of sustenance and Breath everywhere? Such a chasm — and its reconnaissance — was pertinent to the Nether World in which we confront ourselves, our spectral selves, our inbuilt peasants and exploiters, prosecutors, inbuilt victims that we are in the scrum of the Game …
I could scarcely speak but I managed to whisper: ‘What throw of the die from him — this Prisoner — do you wait for?’
‘A moment will come,’ they cried, ‘when a face or a Mask will appear on a die that he throws …’
‘What face? What Mask?’
‘Who knows? The Mask of an angel-bridegroom.’ They hesitated, then they were emboldened by the operatic mystery of the Nether World.
‘Yes,’ they cried, ‘this is a trial that he cannot escape. And sooner or later the bridegroom will appear on a die: one destined to marry his daughter whom he is unwilling to surrender. The crowds will break him then, Francisco.’
With this alarming pronouncement they shuffled together the dice that they had thrown and proceeded to expose them to my gaze. My head rested on its chin at the edge of the table.
I knew of the imprinted organs and limbs but there was another die that I had missed entirely. It was a cross-sectional exposure of the Prisoner’s body in which Deacon sat as upon a pillow of leaves or stone.
‘Is this the die of which you speak?’ I cried. I could not believe my eyes. ‘What does it mean?’
At long last they replied.
‘Deacon gaoled us in a Coffin. You do remember, don’t you? You and Mr Mageye were there filming the event.’ They spoke almost accusingly. ‘He is destined to be our liberator. Gaoler. Liberator. What a paradox. We bank on him. We teach his name. Deacon fell from the stars to expose centuries and generations in conquistadorial regimes in which populations were decimated and buried yet liberated in colonial history books. The legacy is strong. It encompasses all our presidents, prime ministers, etc. It encompasses the business of politics, industry, statecraft, education, everything. Burial. Liberation.’
‘Everything depends,’ I said, poking my head onto the gambling table, ‘on how we shoulder such legacies in order to take responsibility for our own fate enmeshed into the fate of others in ourselves. We need to go beyond politics and history …’
They eyed me severely as if my head had been draped in a veil. Then they put their lips against my ears which were plainly visible.
‘Let us put it like this, Francisco. Deacon is a cross-sectional apparition, at one level, of our residences in the Prisoner, our fate in the Prisoner, the gift of freedom bestowed upon us by the Prisoner.’
The smooth run of their voices filled me with misgiving.
‘You, Francisco,’ they declared, ‘may see us as thieves or tricksters but remember! we play interchangeable roles. Savage. Civilized.’ There was a hiss now to their voices. ‘We play voices in a crowd. We play that we fall on our knees, as you do, beside the Prisoner.’ I swore they were surreptitiously changing their masks as they leaned closer to my veiled or shadowed head on the table before them. ‘How can the rich save the poor,’ they demanded, ‘the poor the rich, the thief the saint, the saint the thief, the judge the judged, the judged the judge, unless they discard contentment, or self-righteous creed, self-righteous parasitism, and build dimensions of self-confessional, self-judgemental art, that take them into recesses and spaces that may pull them into and beyond themselves? Unless this happens in the theatre of civilizations evolution remains a WASTE LAND and religion contracts into a Void. Yes, the Prisoner sometimes seems the architect of the Void in his uncertainties as to the nature of freedom in art, in science.’