I heard the voices of the Sirens through the magical bells declaring that Mr Mageye was a rare phenomenon, a genuine and a sacred jester. He stood there in the telescopic wave with the look of a gentle Sphinx. The expression passed from his features, he moved back to the front of the blackboard, and he resumed the history lesson.
‘The Frenchman returned to France in the Napoleonic era but he was unhappy with the state of his country and he crossed the English Channel and married a rich lady in Sussex.’
I held up my hand to ask a question. I was suddenly angry.
‘Just a moment, Francisco, let me say first of all that the Frenchman left half of his considerable Guiana fortune to be used in the Colony on behalf of orphans. European orphans at first left bereft on the death of a planter or a slave-owner but across the decades all Guianese have benefited. Now Francisco …’
‘A rotten shame,’ I cried. ‘He left my poor mother without a penny. What use such grandiloquent gestures and legacies …’
Even Mr Mageye was taken aback at my outburst.
‘He left your great-great-grandmother without a penny! She was but a slave. He had many slaves, many mistresses.’
At first it seemed that Mr Mageye was dreadfully unsympathetic, dreadfully complacent, and then it dawned on me as I looked into his self-mocking eyes that he was testing me, pushing me to perceive the nature of conventional morality, the burden in language to grapple with disturbing factors in a society that takes cruelty for granted within the norms of the day. He saw I was puzzled despite my greybearded mask. And he spoke gently — ‘I understand, Francisco. Synaesthesia!’
‘What do you mean?’ I cried with sudden tears in my eyes. I remembered that my mother would die that very night! I knew. I had returned to the past on the very day and night that her death would occur.
‘The spontaneous linkage that you make between the organs of the past and the present (your long-dead great-great-grandmother and your poor mother today) is a kind of synaesthesia or stimulation of different moral ages and visions.’ His face was grave, the gravity of a sacred Jester. ‘The Virgin of Albuoystown, your mother,’ he said, ‘reflects synaesthesia — at the heart of the evolving theatre of Carnival — in her bones, her sacred bones: these lay beyond the pale of moral plot or cognizance in the Frenchman’s day; now they offer shelter to beggars in Albuoystown.’ He hesitated but I possessed the curious sensation that his hand lay in my hand in writing the Dream-book.
‘The Virgin of Albuoystown stands at the core of a multi-faceted wave, however black, that threatens to fall on our heads unless we can break the mould of a complacent morality.
‘A transference of psyche is at the root of all theatres of mothers of humanity, seers and visionaries. Think of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the capital city of Mexico. Pagan and Christian. Yes, your mother — I am inclined to say my mother now — is affected by a variety of masks which slide in the Waterfall of space into singing Sirens (that we hear differently from those who have encountered them in the past), warning voices, pleading voices. Thus is it that you Franciso and I (your magus-Jester of History) may begin to break the mould of the past and to release a creative/re-creative capacity to right ancient wrongs in the family of Mankind.’
*
I left School when the afternoon sun was still high in the western sky above the Virgin Ship in the harbour. I left with the heavy knowledge of my mother’s coming death at the hand of a mugger. Mugger. Evangelist. Crusader. Carnival masks.
She had asked me to go straight from School to the leather Shop where she worked. There were to be many processions that night in Albuoystown. Some revellers wore newspapers on their heads, others were dressed as skeletons.
I knew of quiet alleyways we could take to avoid the pressure of the processions.
It was a dateless day to me (24th March, 1939) and when the Shop closed at night she would draw her last weekly wage before Death struck at her purse in the street.
Marie felt — my mother’s name was also Marie Antoinette — that she could lean on my child’s tall Lazarus arm as she made her way through the crowds after work. My Lazarus arm I had brought from the future and tacked onto my present/past body. I too was a creature of Carnival’s reconnaissance of the past from a wave of the future …
When I arrived at the Shop there was a queue of shoemakers purchasing choice leather. Each shoemaker would take a sheet of leather, bend it, study its texture, pass his head along the rough edges of the sheet, taste it with tip of his tongue, bring it to his nostrils and inhale the bouquet of the tanned skin.
It was a studied ritual. Leather was a Carnival ritual, a sacramental alliance with the dead, dead cattle transported from interior savannahs. In due course the leather was fashioned into shoes in which the living danced with the ghosts of cattle or rode on their backs.
With my eyes that had returned in a Nemesis Bag from the future I saw the ghosts of Jonestown purchasing shoes in Albuoystown. My sacramental treaty or alliance lay with them. As Jones’s left-hand man had I not ridden them in my Sleep, in my unconscious? I had wanted to save them on holocaust eve (when flocks of sheep and horses and cattle were groomed to be burnt as a sacrifice to the gods in ancient Greece) but had succeeded in saving only my own skin with the intervention of Deacon, my own soul with the intervention of the Virgin.
The cattle lay in the Jonestown Clearing on the Day of the Dead. Cattle have human faces, tigers that burn in the sun have the faces of gods, horses weep. I could not help noticing the leather on their feet, the boot with which Deacon had kicked Jones onto his face in the Moon-dust until Jones’s eyes drilled holes into a ladder between the Moon and the Earth, between the Moon (the Cave of the Moon) and my Virgin Ship. Deacon’s boot and the shoes on the feet of the Jonestown dead reminded me of the leather in Marie’s Shop.
In certain circumstances my poor mother might have made a Bomb in profit from tourists who came to Carnival by selling relics of Bone shaped as the Cross or saints fashioned from relics of leather. But thank God! she resisted the temptation.
The shoemakers bought the leather in the Shop, took it away, made shoes which they brought back to the very Shop to be exhibited for sale by my mother. It was a transaction that Marie understood and which she exercised with a rare and tender compassion, for I had seen her purchase shoes out of her meagre wages and give them to barefoot beggars. It meant her going without bread for a day at least every week.
I now realized that there were two intermingling queues in the Shop, one purchasing leather, the other buying shoes. Imprinted on the sole of each boot or shoe was a miniature Ship of Bread within a bubble or a fluid Shop, my mother’s Economy, my mother’s beggars’ dead men’s Shop on which she was sailing now (as each minute passed) to her death in Third World South America.
I had seen the imprint of trade unmistakably there, trade in bodies and souls across generations and centuries, in which my mother intervened when she fell in the street with a blow to her heart and was lifted shoulder-high by grey-bearded young beggars. Such is the legality of intercourse with violence, such is the trade between complacent life and matter-of-fact death in which mothers of poverty, mothers of humanity, intervene.
I had seen the imprint of trade unmistakably there on horses and cows that Jones had stabled along with the membership of the Mission whom he had provided with bunks and stalls.