‘We all have ghosts in this country for fathers,’ said Mr Mageye. ‘Fathers tend to vanish when their common law spouses (as it’s now called in English parlance) conceive. It’s a legacy of slavery. Mothers rear children invariably without help. And ghosts add a cubit or two to the stature of vanished fathers.
‘One is born of several ghost-fathers,’ said Mr Mageye, ‘and a mother who wears a variety of masks. She’s burdened with responsibility for a family of beggars, is she not? All sorts of orphans arrive from the street and cling to her skirts. She cries and she laughs, she is pathetic, she is sublime, she is nostalgic, she is practical, she is a saint, she is a siren, she is vulnerable, she is exalted … I sometimes wonder,’ said Mr Mageye, ‘whether this is why the Roman Catholic Church has such a hold on the masses in Central and South America. Within such a Carnival of history women suffer, but at a certain hidden level they are the true educators of a race that needs to judge itself, to breach a pattern of sexual irresponsibility. Such irresponsibility does violence to communities …’
Mr Mageye was looking at me with a quizzical look, a grave look, a jesting look, a serious look. ‘Your mother, Francisco, serves beggars in her shop, does she not, as if they were her children, and they call her, do they not, the Virgin of Albuoystown?’
I was stricken to the heart for I suddenly remembered that my mother would die this very night. She would be borne aloft by beggars, she would be mugged and stabbed by a tall Cat of a beggar, an evangelist-beggar, a crusading beggar, in the Carnival of Albuoystown. I had returned not to witness her wedding to a tall Carnival ghost of a Frenchman but her death all over again as I had done as a child on Carnival Night in Albuoystown. I had returned on the day and night of her death. It was the 24th March, 1939.
‘Why did the Frenchman give his estates such extraordinary names, La Pénitence and Le Repentir? Does anyone know?’
I knew but I was too grief-stricken to answer. When one returns to the past from the future everything is the same yet nothing is quite the same.
‘His estates became memorials,’ said Mr Mageye, ‘to a tragic duel that he fought with his brother. He was sixteen, his brother was nine. They were playing with wooden swords in a garden on a moonlit night. The younger brother somehow or other dug his sword into the other’s ribs. Not much pain but humiliation. Sword-play was highly prized. It felt like a national disgrace to be out-sworded, out-pointed, bowled for a duck. In a rage the older boy picked up a sharp stone and flung it at the nine-year-old boy. Flung it with venom and greater force than he had intended. The boy took the blow full and straight in the middle of his forehead. It was as sharp as a knife in the hand of a savage priest. He fell like a lamb in a crate or a boxing ring. Never moved again. Stone-dead like a statue that had toppled in the garden onto a bed of roses … The Frenchman never forgave himself. He brought a painter with him from France. Successive portraits portrayed him as he grew older, but his brother remained in each portrait as if frozen in time until by degrees they became not brother and brother but father and son.’
There was silence. Not absolute silence. I heard a clock ticking at the back of the classroom upon a wall with nothing but the moving fingers of time, my phantom fingers. They extended themselves into tracing a portrait on my mind’s canvas, a portrait of father and son.
I visualized my mother’s eighteenth-century protector and surrogate husband in the twentieth century. Would she break the mould of conscriptive protection in the end as Virgin animal goddess when she fell?
I visualized myself as his twentieth-century son. Fathered by my own painted slayer (as I was his painted son) in a game that became a battlefield, economic battlefield, sports arena battlefield …
Such is the paradox of imperial games and colonial sons, ornamental sonship, statuesque status, devoid of time’s eruptive originality that breaches frame or plot.
‘You do see, Francisco,’ said Mr Mageye. ‘Break the mould if you are to live and grow. And remember,’ he added, ‘this is a formidable task. But you can do it! It calls for daring, for profound imaginative truth. You are far older than your years, Francisco. You know that. I do not have to tell you. From the moment you arrived this morning we were enveloped in a fiction. The class melted into shadows on the wall. And you and I are alone …’
‘I know. I know,’ I said. ‘It’s as if we are rehearsing a play I know but how do you know?’
Mr Mageye did not reply to the question but he continued:
‘In breaking a mould, you sometimes break your heart, the heart’s addiction to fallacious glories, and you enrich — curiously enough — your ghost-father’s true heritage of Compassion. He was a Catholic, was he not? You lift that heritage out of subservience to another’s style or will, out of base and opportunist compliance with another’s cultural vested interests.’ He paused and considered.
‘Yes,’ he said softly, ‘equality between former masters and the genius of the new is only possible when originality is seen to be native as much to the powerless as to the powerful …’
‘What is inequality?’ I interrupted. ‘Tell me Mr Mageye!’
‘Inequality is habituated to incest, to persecution in the family, murder and incest. Murder in the ruling family projects incest upon colonized others to make all Mankind into a pawn. It is a terrifying lesson as we look around the globe, East, West, North, South. Yes, to teach history today is to entertain a complex vocation …’
‘You are my magus, Mr Mageye,’ I said impulsively.
It was a rash statement to make to a teacher in 1939 when School tended to be a rather authoritarian assembly. But not to Mr Mageye. I had not been a grossly favoured pupil by any means. For the records of the School show clearly that Mr Mageye had a reputation for freedom from bias. But there was a subtle understanding between us.
He knew of my curiosities with regard to shamans and seers and magi in the Americas. I loved maps of the Yucatán. I pored over legendary trade routes adorned with drawings of tumultuous forests and seas upon which dolphins and mermaids sat. South American rubber was used to fashion the ball in ball games played in ancient Mexico. Mr Mageye suggested that a brisk trade existed in rubber between South America and Mexico before the Spanish Conquest.
I loved charts of the Orinoco that were dated in the year that Raleigh adventured in search of El Dorado in Guiana. I had acquainted myself with books by the geographer Schomburgk and the anthropologist Roth.
Thus when I returned across a chasm of years — a nine-year-old boy (once again) with a bearded chalk-masked chin — my precocity heightened itself into a comradeship with Mr Mageye (unusual in that day and age). It heightened itself into the steepest, imaginary wave that I associated with the seas and rivers and forests that I had once consulted under Mr Mageye’s wry but spirited approval.
In taking the liberty of appointing him my magus I affirmed the birth of consciousness in which one writes and is written into a Dream-book to come abreast by degrees of unsuspected dimensionalities in space.
Even as I took the liberty I was affected by the memory of a steep wave that had threatened to overwhelm the Virgin Ship on my crossing from 1978 disaster-ridden Jonestown back to 1939 Albuoystown.
Black and steep as Night over Jonestown, blacker than the blackboard at which Mr Mageye now stood.
He (Mr Mageye) loved to play pranks. He would arouse laughter in his class and then resume his history lesson. He dodged behind blackboard and wave. As the Ship was about to fall through the roof of the world he occupied a crevice in the blackboard and peered through it as if it were a telescope. At that instant I heard the bells of the Sirens ringing. The Ship righted itself.