The Carnival Trilogy Read Online Free PDF Page A

glove tokens of addiction to the androgyny of the hunt, addiction to hermaphrodite beasts, dragons, slain by he-knights and she-knights of old?
    Thus woven into Masters’ “first death” in New Forest, I perceived an equation between plantation overseer and hunted beast, between the prince of the colony and the soul of all sliced creatures, between the enigma of love or jealousy and the emotion of the hunter/huntress elevated in space to alter our conception of complacent tradition in the heights as in the depths.
    I shall return to the stages of his “first death” from time to time in this book. Masters had acquainted me with these in many a conversation, but even so I remain in the dark about certain matters and shall need to seek him out, to consult his ghost, and discuss the matter of controversial first death with it (ghost) and with him (mask). Why “ghost” seems a gloved thing and “mask” pitiless/pitiful flesh-and-blood I do not immediately understand. Nevertheless the distinction – however enigmatic – is necessary if the genius of Carnival is to do justice to parallel gloves of emotion upon spirit-hand and spirit-face.
    His second death in London in 1982 was a climax for which he had longed since 1957, in order to fulfil a design that could only be achieved within parallel animalities or parallel universes of sexual fate and emotion.
    Within a week or two of his passing (an old-fashionedconcept I brought with me from New Forest) and the enquiries launched by Scotland Yard, I learnt through one of my “leaves of grass” or Whitmanesque democratic informants that Jane Fisher – the woman with the raised hand and lightning brow who had accompanied him into his flat – had been questioned along with other tenants of the building.
    She said nothing whatsoever about visiting Masters but time was to prove that she had. She had risen from bed, dressed hastily, tiptoed out of the room and left him asleep. She was confused and agitated to be plucked from nowhere, as it were, to play a major and crucial role. In her confusion she left the door to his apartment ajar. The intruder entered in the wake of her shadow. Masters awoke at that moment to cement a climax he had long nursed in his heart. He was convulsed by pain. His chest throbbed. He tried to spring at the stranger but fell back in bed. Fate could not have been more co-operative. The intruder was alarmed at the wild mask of the dying king but it addressed him, it imbued him with his part in the play, his signal to act. He seized the dagger and thrust it into the ageing seer who conspired now with royal fate. And with royal freedom. The intruder too wore a mask. He and Masters were related to each other within a labyrinth of rehearsals, a labyrinth of Carnival innocence and guilt within a deeply troubled, violent age. They were to become my guides on the beach and into the cave of character-masks and dreams and through many realms.

THREE
    “I am a mudhead though I ride high in your estimation, biographer,” Everyman Masters confessed to me. His words invoked the Atlantic foreshore of New Forest, South America. It was a complex gateway into the underworld of the cosmos. Sometimes it was littered by husks of coconut sculpted to reflect a straw caricature of the human brain, at other times to invest that caricature with lopsided genitals of the mind of place the human brain was. Sometimes it was a theatre of branches and trees, eroded, riven by the action of wind and wave. Etched into these, etched into branch or tree, one sometimes came upon the skeleton of a fish or the staring eye of a button to be pressed in the gallows of species.
    “All in all,” said Masters, “you need to seek a gateway here into the underworld, and overworld of the cosmos, an Orinoco-esque or Dantesque gateway.” He wept to my astonishment. “Mud, mud, everywhere and not a loaf to eat. New Forest mud is body and bread projected by the denizens of the underworld. The race