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strange and confusing tradition beyond words. Vigilance saw that Schomburgh had been overwhelmed in some unnatural way that fractured his vision and burdened him with a sense of fantasy and hoax. It was the darkestnarcissism that strove with him and fought against accepting Carroll’s name as Carroll, against relinquishing paternity to some one who was still untouched by and unknown to the spirit of guilt. He wished to give the boy his own name but the desire frightened and killed him. No one knew and understood better than a mother what a name involved. It was the music of her undying sacrifice to make and save the world. Sometimes he accepted and grew enamoured of the thought that Carroll was his nephew and nothing else. Often times he lived in the flight of mortal gloom and fear Carroll was nothing to him at all, a bastard memory from a bastard hellish tribe and succession and encounter. Who and what was Carroll? Schomburgh had glimpsed, Vigilance knew with an inborn genius and primitive eye, the living and the dead folk, the embodiment of hate and love, the ambiguity of everyone and no one. He had recognized his true son, nameless out of shame and yet named with a new distant name by a muse and mother to make others equally nameless out of mythical shame and a name, and to forge for their descendants new mythical far-flung relationships out of their nameless shame and fear.
    Vigilance read this material hoax and saw deeper than Schomburgh to the indestructible element. It was a simple lesson for him since he was born to discern and reflect everything without the conscious effort of speech.
    His eyes were brighter than ever after their fit of crying. The past returned to him like pure fictions of rock he had never wearied spying upon since childhood. Sometimes they stood in columns, or they embraced each other in groups, or in couples, or they stood solitary and alone.
    Donne was the only one in their midst who carried on his sleeve the affectation of a rich first name. Rich it seemed – because none of his servants appeared at first to have the power to address him other than obsequiously. The manner of the crew could change, however, one sensed, into familiarity and contempt. It was on their lips already todeclare that their labouring distress and dream was the sole tradition of living men.
    He had come from a town on the coast they knew to found and settle, be baptized again, as well as to baptize, a new colony. He was careless of first name and title alike they saw. All were economic names to command and choose from (as one chose to order one’s labouring folk around). All were signs of address from a past dead investment and history with its vague pioneering memories that were more their burden than his.
    They knew he had once dreamt of ruling them with a rod of iron and with a ration of rum. His design was so brutal and clear that one wondered how one could be so cheap to work for him. There was nothing he appeared to have that commended him. Save the nameless kinship of spirit older (though he did not yet apprehend it) than every material mask and label and economic form and solipsism. Vigilance had seen clear into the bowels of this nameless kinship and identity Donne had once thought he had abused as he wished, and in one stroke it had liberated him from death and adversity.
    He recalled as he bowed that his father had built a new house after the second marriage. The three-roomed cabin – his first home – remained; a stone’s throw away stood the new rough-hewn spacious five-roomed cottage into which the family had moved.
    It was natural to Vigilance to perceive what was going on wherever he lived. He was always there when his parents spoke, or he always seemed to see something through a half-open door or window or crack. It was a habit of fortune he possessed, ingrained and accidental as all remarkable coincidences are.
    The new house was a year old, and his father was away that afternoon for a couple of