Palace of the Peacock Page 5

  He sought to excuse his deficiency and silence by declaring that he knew better Spanish than English. It was a convenient lie and it carried the ring of truth since he had lived for many years on the Guyana, Venezuela border. A look of unconscious regret and fear would flash when he spoke as if he feared he had already said too much. The crew knew what his guilt signified. He had whispered to them at various half-crazy times that he was dead for the record. He had told them secretly he would be a wanted man now, wanted for murder if it was known he was living. And so he wished to stay dead, he shouted, though he was perfectly alive.

  He was mad they all knew. And yet harmless as a dove. They could not conceive of him as a real murderer. They preferred to accept his story as myth. He was an inspired vessel in whom they poured not only the longing for deathless obedience and constancy (which they read in his half-shadowed face) but the cutting desperate secret ambition he swore he had once nourished – the love that became its colder opposite – the desire they too felt, in their vicarious daydream, to kill whatever they had learnt to hate. This dark wish was the deepest fantasy they knew mankind to entertain.

  As deep as the nameless fish Schomburgh sometimes hooked whose flat beady eyes and skulls made him shiver and fling them back into the river. Electric eels for example. His hands twitched with shock in the presence of these playful absurd monsters as before a spirit of innocent malady and corruption he knew in his blood and bone. Old as the hills it was, this electrification and crucifixion of the mind.

  Wishrop had dared to kill what he had learnt to hate. That was his mythical recommendation. He had dared to purge himself free – to execute what troubled him, to pluck from a phantom body both its arm and its eye of evil.

  The boon companions with whom he lived at the extremity of the known world were thieves. And the women were whores. They slaved for gold and diamonds, the most precious thing they knew. Wishrop did not feel himself superior to anyone. He was honest because of a native inborn fastidiousness like a man who loved wiping and cleaning himself for no earthly reason. He never wanted to conceal diamonds in his mouth and lodge them between the toes of his feet after a day’s work in the pits. Yet since everyone did it he accepted the principle and the practice. At that moment he started hating the phantom that was himself.

  He saw himself reflected intimately in one of the women, dreamt he was in love with her, and unable to resist the challenge and the destiny of hate, married her and set her up to prove himself and his gods. The catechist who performed the ceremony sniggered behind his book. Wishrop marked him and never forgave him, swearing he was married now for good to the devil’s country, and that he had started courting hell and disaster.

  He came upon his wife in bed with another man, and suddenly swept by a cold hard virginal joy and pleasure, knew abruptly, here was what he had waited upon to begin; he shot the couple in the head through the eye. He repaired to the drinking saloon cold and mad in his pride. The boon companions were riddled, astonished and surprised, waving their hand vaguely to the blind bullet.

  He shot the catechist stone-dead and sniggering under a couple of whores on the pathway leading to church. Lastly himself.

  That was the end save that Wishrop woke to find himself still alive; and crawling out of the fracas into the bush he met the inevitable Arawak woman (this was the crew’s ancestral embroidery and obsession) who nursed him to life. In the mortal hullaballoo that followed the muse reported that she had seen Wishrop crawling like a spider into the river where he had been tangled in the falls. Days after she pointed out his curious skeleton picked clean by perai, and that was the last of dead Wishrop.

  The living Wishrop awoke overwhelmed by a final spasm of murderous fury and he shot the poor Arawak woman, his muse and benefactress. The curtain vanished upon this last act removing the web of death within himself. An eternity dawned. His victims had never perished, constantly moving before him, living and never dying in the eternal folk.

  His faith and optimism endeared him to the crew and they fed upon his brief confessions and ravings as the way of a vicarious fury and freedom and wishful action they had known, not believing a word in the improbable tale he told of a harmless lover and lunatic: nevertheless they pledged themselves anew to the sense of their indestructibility.

  BOOK THREE

  THE SECOND DEATH

  I tune the instrument here at the door,

  And what I must do then, think here

  before.

  John Donne

  VII

  The crew came around like one man to the musing necessity in the journey beyond Mariella. We set out in the rising sun as soon as the mist had vanished. We had in our midst a new member sitting crumpled-looking, like a curious ball, old and wrinkled. Her long black hair – with the faintest glimmer of silvery grey – hung in two plaits down to her waist. She sat still as a bowing statue, the stillness and surrender of the American Indian of Guyana in reflective pose. Her small eyes winked and blinked a little. It was an emotionless face. The stiff brooding materiality and expression of youth had vanished, and now – in old age – there remained no sign of former feeling. There was almost an air of crumpled pointlessness in her expression, the air of wisdom that a millennium was past, a long timeless journey was finished without appearing to have begun, and no show of malice, enmity and overt desire to overcome oppression and evil mattered any longer. She belonged to a race that neither forgave nor forgot. That was legend. In reality the legend and consciousness of race had come to mean for her – patience, the unfathomable patience of a god in whom all is changed into wisdom, all experience and all life a handkerchief of wisdom when the grandiloquence of history and civilization was past. It was the subtlest labour and sweat of all time in the still music of the senses and of design.

  Her race was a vanishing one overpowered by the fantasy of a Catholic as well as a Protestant invasion. This cross she had forgiven and forgotten in an earlier dream of distant centuries and a returning to the Siberian unconscious pilgrimage in the straits where life had possessed and abandoned at the same time the apprehension of a facile beginning and ending. An unearthly pointlessness was her true manner, an all-inclusive manner that still contrived to be – as a duck sheds water from its wings – the negation of every threat of conquest and of fear – every shade of persecution wherein was drawn and mingled the pursued and the pursuer alike, separate and yet one and the same person. It was a vanishing and yet a starting race in which long eternal malice and wrinkled self-defence and the cruel pursuit of the folk were turning into universal protection and intuition and that harmonious rounded miracle of spirit which the world of appearances had never truly known.

  Before the sun was much higher we were in the grip of the straits of memory. The sudden dreaming fury of the stream was naught else but the ancient spit of all flying insolence in the voiceless and terrible humility of the folk. Tiny embroideries resembling the handwork on the Arawak woman’s kerchief and the wrinkles on her brow turned to incredible and fast soundless breakers of foam. Her crumpled bosom and river grew agitated with desire, bottling and shaking every fear and inhibition and outcry. The ruffles in the water were her dress rolling and rising to embrace the crew. This sudden insolence of soul rose and caught them from the powder of her eyes and the age of her smile and the dust in her hair all flowing back upon them with silent streaming majesty and abnormal youth and in a wave of freedom and strength.

  The crew were transformed by the awesome spectacle of a voiceless soundless motion, the purest appearance of vision in the chaos of emotional sense. Earthquake and volcanic water appeared to seize them and stop their ears dashing the scales only from their eyes. They saw the naked unequivocal flowing peril and beauty and soul of the pursuer and the pursued all together, and they knew they would perish if they dreamed to turn back.

  “Is War Office,” Schomburgh screamed but his voice was silent and dead in his throat. And then the full gravity and climax of our predicament came home to us
. We had entered the War Office rapids, a forbidden passage, deceived by the symbols in the inhuman drought of the year, and by the bowing submissive rock that guarded the river. We should have kept to the other bank in this season of nature. To turn back now and ride the stream was to be swept so swiftly and unpredictably along we were bound to crash and collide and collapse. The only course was to fight, glued to the struggle, keeping our bow silent and straight in the heart of an unforgiving and unforgivable incestuous love. This fantasy had descended upon us like a cloud out of the sun. Everyone blamed everyone else for being the Jonah and for having had an evil intercourse with fate. Donne had arrested the witch of a woman and we had aided and abetted him. A murderous rape and fury filled our heart to an overburden, it seemed, nevertheless balanced and held in check by our voiceless impossible wrestle and struggle in the silent passage in the lava of water. We were screwed to boat and paddle in sending the vessel forward inch by inch. The spinning propeller spun in Jennings’ head and beneath our graven feet. The great cloud sealed our eyes again and we saw only the spirit that had raped the old woman and invoked upon us our own answering doom in her daemonic-flowing presence and youth. We began to gripe and pray interminably and soundlessly. Carroll – the youngest in the crew – stood up quickly as though he had been inspired to behold Schomburgh’s straining difficulty at the bow and Wishrop’s helpless engagement with Donne at the stern. He had hardly made a step when he appeared to slip and to fall with a cry into the water. He disappeared silently and completely. The crew set up a further cry which was as helpless as a dream. The old woman bent over the water, suddenly rolling a little in her seat. She looked old as ever, old as she had looked fantastically young and desirable before. The crew were filled with the brightest-seeming clarity of tragedy, as cloudless as imperfectly true as their self-surrender to the hardship of the folk they followed and pursued: the cloudy scale of incestuous cruelty and self-oppression tumbled from their eye leaving only a sense of disconsolate flying compassion and longing. Their ears were unstopped at last and they heard plainly Vigilance’s pointing cry as well as their own shout penetrating their ears with the grief and the musical love and value in the stricken fall and sacrifice of youth. In an instant it were as if we saw with our own eyes as well as heard with our own ears an indestructible harmony within the tragedy and the sorrow of age and the malice and the nature of youth. It was Carroll’s voice and head that turned to stone and song, and the sadness of the baptismal lamentation on his lips which we heard in the heart of the berserk waters was our own almost senseless rendering and apprehension of the truth of our art and our perfection in the muse.

  *

  The boat seemed to gain momentum as though every effort we made carried a new relationship within it. The water heaped itself into a musing ball upon which we rolled forward over and beyond the rapids. The stream grew wide and gentle as a sheet, and with a sigh we relinquished our paddles – save at stern and bow – and allowed ourselves to be propelled forward by Jennings’ engine.

  I knew that a great stone of hardship had melted and rolled away. The trees on the bank were clothed in an eternity of autumnal colour – equally removed from the green of youth as from the iron-clad winter of age – a new and enduring spiritual summer of russet and tropical gold whose tints had been tenderly planted in the bed of the stream. The sun veined these mythical shades and leaves in our eye. Old Schomburgh had been relieved by Vigilance and he sat silent and wondering and staring in the water. No one had dared broach Carroll’s name out of some strange inner desire not to lose the private image and thought within us which at the moment bore our gratitude and our mature joy and sadness more deeply than seasonal words.

  Carroll was one of the old man’s beloved nephews. Schomburgh knew him first as a lad arriving from a distant mission, a little inquisitorial, but much more shy and wistful than dogmatic he had appeared after dawdling his time away in idleness and speculation far from Sorrow Hill where Schomburgh lived. He was seventeen, and a shocking long time it was, Schomburgh said, he had been idle. Now at last he had deigned to think of looking for a real job on the watertop (when he had already wasted so much time) Schomburgh scolded his nephew. He remembered it all now with a shock as he sat staring from the bow of the boat – the intimate cold shock of old that had served to bait the guilt he had already felt and known even before his new nephew came. There had always been a thorn in acknowledging his relationships – an unexplored cloud of promiscuous wild oats he secretly dreaded. His family tree subsisted in a soil of entanglement he knew to his grief in the stream of his secretive life, and Carroll’s arrival brought the whole past to a head before him. Still Carroll proved himself in the fits and starts of the older man’s dreaming adventures to be superior to the ambivalent ominous creature he first looked to be. He was tough, tougher than expectation. He slept easy as an infant on the hardest ground. His bones were those of a riverman, hard and yet fluid in emergency, and his senses grew attuned to musical footmarks and spiritual game. Many an evening he borrowed Cameron’s guitar and his painstaking light-hearted predisposition to melody emerged and touched the listening harp in every member of the crew. No one knew where or what it was. Schomburgh felt the touch of harmony without confessing a response when in the midst of his evening recreation with rod and line in the stream he listened deeply to the stirrings within himself. He would suddenly catch himself and declare he had found the hoax that was being played upon him.

  And still he knew it was impossible to abandon an inexplicable desire and hope, the invisible pull in his fingers, a tautness and tension within, around which had been wrapped all doubtful matter and flesh like bait on a fisherman’s hook. A long bar of secret music would pass upon the imbedded strings and his flesh quaked and shook. The nervous tension of the day – that had now rooted him in the bow – had broken every barrier of memory and the tide came flooding upon him. He felt the fine stringed bars of a universal ecstasy tuning within him beyond life and death, past and present, until they neither ceased nor stopped.

  He was a young man again – in the prime of maturity – meeting his first true invisible love. She had appeared out of the forest – from a distant mission – far from Sorrow Hill. She was as dark as the curious bark of a tree he remembered, and round and promising like sapodilla. Schomburgh was a stranger to her it seemed (she had not yet discovered his name) fair-skinned, older by wiser years, athletic and conscious in his half-stooping, half-upright carriage of an ancient lineage and active tradition amongst the riverfolk.

  What a chase it was. He cornered her and poured upon her his first and last outburst of frenzied self-forgetting eloquence until he felt the answer of her lips. She smelt like leaves growing on top the rocks in the sun in the river, a dry and yet soft bursting smell, the dryness of the hot scampering sun on the fresh inwardness of a strong resilient plant. She smelt dry and still soft. The vaguest kerchief of breath had wiped her brow after her exertion running with fear and joy.

  He had hardly found her when she had gone. So incredible it was he rubbed his eyes again as he sat staring into the water. He set out after her but it was as if a superior fury – insensible and therefore stronger and abler than he – had propelled her away. It dawned upon him – like an inward tremor and voice – that she had learnt his name – from what source and person he did not know since she had spent such a very short time at Sorrow Hill – and this had engineered her suspicion and flight. Dread seized his mind, the dread of sexual witchcraft. He drew at last to the distant door of the Mission where she lived, and the dubious light of the fantastic wheel of dawn strengthened and sliced his mind. It was an ancient runaway home of his father’s he had reached. His father had settled here late in life – with a new mistress – and founded a separate family. Some said he guillotined his birth-right for a song, a flimsy strip of a thing, beautiful as a fairy. All was rumour and legend without foundation. Even as a boy Schomburgh had known the truth and dismissed the exaggerated fairy-tale. His fathe
r was dead. That was the living truth. And yet he could not stir one step beyond where he now stood. He stood there it seemed for the passage of months until he grew greyer than the ghost of the stars and the moon and the sun. She was waiting for him he told himself, like any young girl – frightened in a first indiscretion and affair – nevertheless waiting for love to enter and take her everlastingly. Her folk and parents would kill the fatted calf and welcome him like a son. He shuddered, and the vibration struck him inwardly, a lamentation in the wind, fingers on the strings of his spirit, the melancholy distant sound of a raining harp. His fear and horror lifted a little as he heard it – riveted to the ghostly threshold and ground of his life. It no longer mattered whether Carroll was his nephew or his son or both. He had heard clearer than ever before the distant music of the heart’s wish and desire. But even now he tried to resist and rebuke himself for being merely another nasty sentimental old man.

  *

  Vigilance bowed for Schomburgh, his paddle glancing and whirling along the gunwhale, equally alert and swift on both sides when the occasion demanded. His penetrating trained eye saw every rock, clothing it with a lifelikeness that mirrored all past danger and design. His vision of peril meant an instantaneous relationship to safety. He offered himself to the entire crew – as he bowed – a lookout to prove their constant reality – and he hid his tears from everyone. The truth was Carroll was his stepbrother. Vigilance had introduced him to Uncle Schomburgh, and the old man had stared at the ultimate ghost he both dreaded and loved.

  Vigilance had been a boy of thirteen when his father had taken Carroll’s mother into his house as his wife, the boy Carroll, her only child, being four or five years old then. Vigilance was the eldest of seven, and their mother had died a couple of months ago in her last childbirth. Carroll’s mother thus became the adoptive mother of the Vigilance brood who were lucky to get such a young woman and stepmother for the large family, the youngest of whom was an infant two months old.