Jonestown by Wilson Harris Read Free Book Online

puzzled despite my greybearded mask. And he spoke gently – ‘I understand, Francisco. Synaesthesia!’
    ‘What do you mean?’ I cried with sudden tears in myeyes. 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-facetedwave, 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 hisnostrils 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