Did I — when I flew up the wall in Bonampak with winged feet — touch Deacon’s mourning, sorrowing wing perpetually falling?
Perhaps I had been equipped then to wear Deacon’s terrible brow or Mask in the theatre, the brow of heaven inscribed into Eagles that soar and plunge into the Void.
The Prisoner knew and when I knelt before him I felt his hands confirming the holes and rivets, flesh-and-blood miraculous rivets to take Deacon’s Mask in my shoulders and neck.
I would take Deacon’s absent place. I would share his torment and remorse and tenderest grieving love which his ghost had conferred upon me. I knew the pain of laughter in the Body of the Law, the pain that had stricken Deacon when he lóst his way in the black Forest and fell into the ravine beneath the Cave of the Moon.
Such is the transference of roles that chastening comedy confers when falling heavens converse with diminutive survivors upon Earth.
*
I rose from my knees and moved again from the Prisoner to the window of his cell. A wedding — not Marie’s in Port Mourant — was taking place in the street or aisle of a Church in Carnival land.
It was an absurd affair but I was in no mood to laugh.
I had witnessed Jonah’s affair with the Animal Goddess or the Virgin of Jonestown. That was a kind of wedding …
Now I was called upon to witness my mother’s apparitional wedding to the ghost of an eighteenth-century slave-master. She acted the part of her great-great-grandmother who had slept with a French aristocrat and owner of La Pénitence and Le Repentir estates. He had owned her as well.
It was his money that had paid the fees for my scholarship to the United States. A ghost’s money to endow scholarships for orphans or for disadvantaged poor families with only one parent.
Were I to meet him in the street he would — despite his largesse — not know me or scarcely wish to know me.
Yet Money was the heart of morality in any eighteenth-century Portrait of the Family. So my mother reasoned. It was necessary to legitimize the legality of scholarships — bestowed by past slave-masters upon their future progeny — in the Carnival theatre of the Church.
My mother’s apparitional flesh-and-blood was ripe to play the part of the wife of the Frenchman in the legitimization of Money and Scholarship.
The Frenchman himself had long vanished and there was no one coming forward on his behalf in the Portrait of the Family.
Carnival Lord Death however solved the problem. He draped my mother’s arms and breasts with the heirloom or suit or robes of a nobleman that the Frenchman had left in Albuoystown with his favourite slave-mistress.
What in God’s name, I wondered, was the object of such theatre of the Absurd in the Void of a Colony?
‘No theatre of the Absurd‚’ my mother cried. ‘A Portrait of the Moral Family is relevant to your age, Francisco. Is it not time to claim your inheritance on all sides of the blanket?
‘Suppose for example that you went to London or Paris or Berlin or New York as a High Commissioner or an Ambassador, it would be morally sound, would it not, to secure a Swiss Bank Account for your family. Suppose a coup occurred in Guyana or Trinidad or Brazil or Nigeria! Where would you be without Money? Money ensures that wars on foreign soils, famines, etc., won’t touch you. You would be as safe as a character in a Jane Austen novel or in Madame Bovary.’
I was stunned by all this. It seemed out-of-character with the memories I possessed of my mother in Albuoystown. True, she had a passion for Carnival theatre and had read English and French eighteenth-and nineteenth-century novels which she borrowed from the Carnegie Library. She was a Virgin nevertheless — a sacred mother of beggars — not a Madame Bovary. But Virgins are also furies. They embrace the longings of fallen women from all areas of the globe, they embrace poor and rich wives within the glitter of structured romance so unlike the waste land of their own existence. They embrace idyllic churches and manses and middle-class homes in England in which eligible suitors woo ladies and plot with sophisticated strategies of behaviour to advance their prospects in the marriage market. Was Madame Bovary a prisoner-Virgin in such idyllic Portraits of the Moral Family?
Carnival Lord Death was laughing — Carnival Death sometimes mimics the laughter of the Law — but my mother was grave. A hidden smile on her lips. She held the nobleman’s robes close to her breasts. Music was playing in the aisle of the Carnival church in the street. They were a talented lot: Carnival Lord Death and his crew. They could have easily staged Hollywood on the backs of painted, black, Southern plantation slaves. Hollywood Limbo in black Carnival.
‘Imagine, Francisco — God forbid!’ my mother said, ‘a coup in Guyana! Imagine yourself as a High Commissioner or even a President. Imagine that you have been shrewd enough to salt away sweet money in a Swiss Bank Account. Your wife — let us say — for the sake of Carnival argument — is a French woman or a Dutch woman or an English woman. You wash your hands of the wretched politics of your country. And why not? You buy an abandoned country manse in a quiet village in Europe. There are guard dogs. Or perhaps you settle in a villa on the Mediterranean. You send your son or daughter to Yale or Harvard or Princeton or the Sorbonne or Cambridge. Your family is safe. You gamble discreetly on the Stock Exchange. You have a number of discreet affairs. Money is the central moral in your existence. Money banishes tears. Indeed you write books about the horrors of the Third World. They sell well. You are knighted. Not a Maya knighthood. A Birthday Honours knighthood. Money is morality in your villa or converted manse.’
‘It’s not true‚’ I cried. ‘It’s not true. What difference would there be — if it were true — between my hypothetical Swiss currency, Money without tears, and Deacon’s immunity to pain?’
‘Dread‚’ said my mother. ‘Deacon’s immunity turns into Dread Love at the last moment within perpetually falling heavens, tides of refugees who envy the security of the sick in rich countries (as medicine prolongs the life of wealthy populations). Angels become signals of perpetually falling heavens and their re-visionary spectacle of Love, the pain of Love, a re-visionary spectacle that we scarcely understand though the message is interwoven into every wedding to a sacred Virgin.’
The aisle in the Church in Carnival street threatre appeared to narrow as my mother walked away from me in Mr Mageye’s Camera.
I followed my children’s children’s children as they streamed into the future. They loomed but I grew increasingly indistinct to them, remote from them.
I heard my mother saying: ‘No one knew it but he loved my great-great-grandmother.’ She lifted the suit or heirloom then pulled it back upon her breasts. ‘He loved her with all his heart but he never really knew until it was too late. An ocean and the Grave divided them when he returned to Europe and was killed by a Jacobin who wore his brother’s Mask.’
Her voice seemed to be fading. I saw myself now at the far end of the aisle within the loom of my descendants. I stood in my great-great-grandfather’s suit, my mother’s gift for my coming honeymoon with Marie. I stood in that suit at the window of the Prisoner’s cell.
‘You do see,’ my mother whispered in the midst of the shuffling footsteps of Carnival, ‘that you shelter many ghosts in Memory theatre within your Mask, Francisco. You are my long-lost husband’s son. And he has returned to witness your coming trial though you may not see him as I do. There is pain in the Body of the Law. Your Swiss Bank Account topples. Jonah’s Bank Account toppled. You grow wings. You shall fall. But with a difference. I cannot say more.’