Read Online The Carnival Trilogy by Wilson Harris - Free Book Online

purgatorial nephew, could not articulate what he felt. It was too peculiar, too overwhelming, for him, however precocious he was. But he felt it deeply all the same. He felt the museum profit and the museum loss of bureaucratic Inferno in Widows and Orphans state, the elusive and untouchable spell of non-pensionable spirit that secretes itself in oblivion. Aunt Alice was nebulously related to him as to young Masters. She was sister to the “mask of the cuckold”. A nebulous relationship in that Carnival possessed no identifiable role for her and had thrust her into limbo’s purgatory, limbo’s heaven, as a consequence. The “mask of the cuckold” was a privileged humiliation, it sheltered the “mother of god” and gave legitimate status to the child, Masters. But Alice, the sister of the mask, had sunken so far beneath conventional contact, beneath pensionable and non-pensionable desert, that her universal fictional kinship to humanity expressed itself as nothing more than a sailing dress above lined, wrinkled boots, in the limbo heaven of New Forest Alms House.
    Was someone actually at home in the pathos of her dress? Was she the prey of phantom nephews and nieces, phantom injustices, phantom diseases, diseased Widows and Orphans state, diseased unemployment in the decade of the 1920s that cast its imprecise, its inexact, parentage of shadow into generations unborn?
    Diseased as they were, they sought to toss her pennies to dance. And when they had nothing to toss, they reminded her of the taxes they paid. For without their money, they claimed, there would have been no theatre of the Alms House in which Aunt Alice played the paradoxes of limbo’s evolution into other spheres, the paradoxes of the widow of a deadstar and the sister-in-law of the mother of god. Not that they understood such comedy of destitution and non-existent status of wealth. Yet they applauded unwittingly by calling her “aunt”, spirit-aunt, oblivion’s aunt.
    Thomas also applauded though he was terrified by “oblivion’s aunt” and by the thought of being swallowed or lost forever in her massive, sailing body. Alice understood. She felt profoundest compassion for him. How close is “oblivion’s aunt” to the seed of heaven that evolves into a family tree of spirit? Her curious dance (Thomas was uncertain whether she were a dream-puppet or sailing flesh-and -blood bound for divinity’s shore) mirrored the division between the two realms he had glimpsed through barred gate and segmented mask, namely, the realm of oblivion or absolute limbo and the realm of Carnival evolution into a family of spirit; and as she danced he felt he could trace the division within her, puppet breast/fertile breast, wasted breast/active breast at which he had never sucked but which she gave to him now.
    It was a colonial dance that responded to his deprivations; it symbolized hunger for proof, thirst for proof of genuine survival. It seemed to imply that he too, like Masters, had come close to extinction, and Alice’s breast proffered to him now in the dance was a gesture of succour after all that he had forgotten he had received. It matched Masters’ assumption of kingship. It matched that dream-kingship with a dream-knighthood for Thomas, a dream-enterprise of the milk of freedom that he (Thomas) so desperately needed to prove.
    Thomas bowed, he knelt to Alice. He was the plantation king’s knight. In the milk of freedom, the breast of freedom, he perceived the obscure Magna Carta of the womb. And of the grave. Thomas reached out through the bars of dream but he could not quite seize her or touch her. He wished to prove her reality by sculpting her to embrace the rose and the lily in the straggly Alms House garden. He wished to sculpt the shadows of great knights, great ladies, great households buried in her eclipsed breast.
    “Take the measure of any statue in a formal square or garden,” Masters said to me. “It weeps with bird droppings. If you