Babel Tower (45 page)

And so he pursued his quest, from particular to particular constructing the universal. There on ancient cracked boards were Germanic sufferers with snarling agonised lips, with black gouts of blood in hair matted with thorns and oozings, with lacerated rib-cages dripping darkly, with grim, foundering buttocks and knees and calves spattered with thick dark strokes of pain. There by contrast were sweet Italian innocents all prettily crimsoned on ivory and snow and linen, skins laced with trickles and seepings like bright ribbons, down sweetly complacent faces; there were ecstatic Baroque brothers of these initiates, rolling hot eyes to the complicit Sky, panting with red tongues, spreading the cockles of armpit and groin to the gaze and lash of the torturers, who were grave-faced and detached, or greedy and corpulent, or troll-like and toothless, or snarling and canine,
or dull and beastly, but always satisfied, always taking satisfaction from the bliss of blood or a job well done. As the artist took pleasure, Culvert told himself, pulling his fur robe tighter with a thrill of horrified pleasure in response, pleasure in the infinity of ways of representing the red lips of a wound or the tender bruised mound of a whip-welt. Is this, the analyst of human nature asked himself, the worship of Death or the worship of Beauty and Pleasure? And he answered himself, to his own satisfaction, The one is the other, and a kind of dark delight invaded his whole frame with a shivering heat, freezing and burning.

So he went on his way, musing on the cruelties of religion, or the religion of cruelty, and came to a winding stair which went down and down, smelling of mouldering growths and old wet stones, down, along, round, down, and his candle flame swayed and bowed and stank in the shadows. And at the foot of the stair was a round door in the stone, which opened with a great key, opened easily, for the wards of the lock were well-oiled, although it appeared forgotten. And inside the door was a Lady Chapel, which, although it appeared to be in the bowels of the earth, was lit fitfully through a stained-glass window, depicting a throned woman in rich blue robes, wearing a golden crown and a sweet smile, with a wheel of seven great swords stuck in her heart and a great apron of blood welling from her wounds to her breast and her lap, and running in tongues of crimson down her blue gown to the flowered mead she sat on. And on the left wall was a great painting of a woman white as stone, and staring, bearing on her knee the bruised and broken body of her son, a foul thing with gaping mouth and dislocated shoulders, with swollen ribs and trailing, piteous pierced hands and feet. And this image was framed in flowers, red roses, white lilies, blue irises, the only colour, where all else was stony and shadowed and veined with grey. And on the right was a painting, tenderly done, of a young girl bending her head over a new-born babe cradled against her naked breast, and the babe was swaddled tight in bandages, and had tight-closed bruised eyes and a mottled, purpled skin, a clammy skin it seemed, as the new-born and the newly-dead have, both.

And before all these women, all these three women, these Mothers of Pain, were row upon row of little lights bravely burning, which, when Culvert considered them closely, could be seen to be helical snail shells full of oil with burning wicks in the oil.

And the pews in the chapel were piled high with old bedding straw, for it was now a storage chamber, and the walls were lined with bales of hay, and in the centre of the chapel, before the altar, was an old woman on a three-legged stool, spinning thread by the light of three fat wax candles, standing in ornate church-silver candlesticks. She had a face like a nutcracker, the old biddy, and a watery, crazed eye and an empty socket of stitched skin next to it, and a mumbling mouth, fallen in, and knobbed, gnarled fingers like twigs, with sore red tips like bright buds. And Culvert had given orders (or suggestions, for the inhabitants were in theory free to reject his instructions) that the members of the community should wear bright, clear colours to signify the new order, but here was this old crone in a black scarf and a black stuff gown, just as the peasants of his childhood had been, and those of his father’s childhood, and his grandfather’s. And she was spinning a thread that combined scarlet and white, in a fancy twist.

She greeted him familiarly, “Good day, young master.”

“Good day,” said he, puzzled.

“You don’t know me,” said she, “and I could take offence at that, for I was your nursemaid once, your little mouth guzzled and sucked at these dry breasts, and before that I was there at your coming into the world, I was the
sage femme
who presided, the midwife who saved you, drawing you all bloody and reluctant out of your sweet mother’s bleeding cunt, and slapping life into your backside with one hand, whilst you dangled from your little ankles from my other hand and mewed and howled.

“My name is Griva,” said she, somewhat huffily since he showed still no sign of knowing her.

And it seemed to him that he remembered a sweet smell of her laundered undergarments on a sunny day, but he could not swear to it. He felt in his pockets for something to give her and came upon only a wizened little apple, which he looked at, perplexed, until she took it from him, saying, “Thank you,” and bit into it fiercely, so that the juice spurted on her chin.

“And what are you doing in the bowels of the Tower?” she asked him, chewing with her toothless gums.

He sat down on the end of a pew, amongst the dusty hay.

“I am thinking,” he said, “about religion, and what it means, and about the human tendency to need its practices. I am not thinking very well.”

“Thinking,” said she, “will not get you far, in that context, my sweeting. What do you think, my nurseling, where do your musings lead you?”

“To ceremonial,” said he. “To rites performed. To the question Why? and the deep question Why
in truth
? For it is my observation that all peoples observe certain festivals, to wit, the turn of the year, the feast of the dead, the return to life and such matters. I remember the blessing of the fields, a pretty ceremony, and the candles for the dead souls, all flickering and gleaming.”

“I could tell you much,” said she, “of the Carnival as it was held in the halls of this house in the days of your forefathers, of the dancing there was, and feasting, and mumming, and ceremonies there were performed.”

“Tell me,” said he, “for this is what I was in search of. And chance led me to you and your memories.”

“Chance,” said she, “or something by another name, strong too, chance’s sister.”

So they sat together in the half-dark, the winter-dark, candlelit and waxy-smelling, and she told him of the old Feast of Misrule at the turn of the year in the Old Hall of the Tower. Of how a Lord of Misrule, the Babu, was chosen from amongst the grooms or footmen—“Sometimes he was a bit lacking, as they say, bats in his belfry, and sometimes he was chosen because he was above himself, an uppity being, a pompous nob, a puffed-up capon, and in the first case, your fool would give out silly orders, as it might be, to wash all the ladies’ faces in winelees, or to make pies of live blackbirds, or to dress the hall with bulls’ pizzles and pigs’ bladders, and no matter what it was, it had to be done, for he was the Lord, but only for a day, only for a poor day. But the uppity lordlings whose come-uppance was near, they was more savage, my young nurseling, for they knew what was coming to
them
and they made sure their pains were paid and their election got its quittance in advance so to speak, so there were roastings and whippings of other young lordlings in plenty, ordered by the Lord of the Day, there was trousers pulled off and spankings performed—and more ingenious punishments, and hangings and danglings and spittings and pokings that would take me a month to retail to you—”

“I should be delighted to hear them—”

“And so you shall, my lovely, and so you shall. But in all cases, whether the Lord of the Day, the Babu, was fool or knave, at the end of it certain things happened as sure as night follows day or death follows
life. And these things were: the birth of the new Sun out of the fat body of the Babu—who ate beans and other flatulent things to bloat his belly. And the topsy-turvying of all folk, so that the menfolk danced in skirts and bodices and the ladies had the freedom of trousers and hunting-jackets, and at the end all danced and chased in masks all around the stairs and halls of the Tower, beginning at nightfall of the Shortest Day and ending at the first light which finished the Longest Night and brought the New Year, who was a bloodied babe in the skirts of the Babu.

“And the Yule Log came in—which had been smouldering away for a whole year under the hearth, and the boar’s head came in with it, with spiced apples in its snout, dripping with fat, and the Great Pie came in, which was made of snails and pigs’ tails in a great spiralling savoury tower, topped with a pastry bird to finish. And they lit the fire in the hearth from the old log, and put in the new, and danced in the light of the flames, and they roasted more snails on its crest in great iron pails, dropping the hot oil into the shells so you could hear the creatures wince and sigh and screech as best they could. The peasants, you know, my nurseling, roast a tower of live cats over the great fire at the year’s end, but this was not done in the Tower, for the ladies were squeamish. Indeed in the later days of the Tower they made the little snails from chestnut flour and marzipan but those were soft, sweet parodies of what should be, for there is spirit-life in snails, my dearie, and marzipan is a stolid substitute for succulent flesh.”

“Why snails, old woman?” asked Culvert, not because he believed the old creature knew the answer, for it was his opinion that the peasants of modern times did many things of which the original sense was lost in the antiquity of inherited practices. But he thought also that these stunted folk with their repetitive lives might have preserved some wisdom of the earth, some harmonious chord between them and the original Nature in which men and beasts and plants all participated, which might be apparent to a keen intelligence. And the idea was coming to him that their practices, reintroduced, might make in his community a new life of the blood, more subtle and profound as a source of energy than cool-headed local reasonings.

“What spirit-life is in snails?” he asked old Griva, leaning towards her in the half-dark, in the scent of her unclean black garments and the apple-juice of her eating.

“Men say they go between us and those who sleep under the earth,” said the old woman. “They weep continuously for the dead, their trails are bright with their tears, they go on their bellies like Him who was punished in the garden, but they are not evil beings, but wanderers, between this world and the next. For the fattest ones are always found in the graveyards—and those we do not pick, or only the naughty boys, in secret—and they hang on fennel, the plant of the dead, and taste of it too, when they are stewed or roasted. They are creatures of the night, making moony trails by starlight, but they are creatures of the Sun too, for when he goes to bed early, they go to their long sleep, and pull a horny window over their shelly, spirally houses. And when he returns, they return from their deathly sleep, their flesh stirs and out they come, cold creatures seeking the warm. They go between, you see, my dear boy, they go between earth and sky, they go between fire and water, they can play the king and the queen too, and their children are like glass and pearls. And when we have sucked them from their hiding place we make little lamps of their dead shells, for that they live in the dark and yet come into the light—they make silvery light with their weeping pathways in life, and hot fiery light in death. They are neither fish nor flesh nor fowl, and so magical, as things undecided are magical, because they are not fixed.”

“This year,” said Culvert, “we shall hold Carnival again in the Tower. We shall make beautiful costumes, and fantastic masks, and there shall be a rite of the new Sun, we shall welcome the new Sun in our blood, we shall have a Babu and a Woman Clothed with the Sun, and be beasts and men. And I shall send people out to collect snails, old woman, and you shall instruct our cooks in the making of the Great Pie.”

“I am already spinning scarlet and white wool for your robes,” said the old woman.

“And how did you know that I myself would be the Woman Clothed with the Sun?”

“I knew,” said the old woman, shaking her head, whether with grief, or palsy, or grim humour, Culvert could by no means see. “As I know you will prick your finger if you play with my distaff as you are doing.”

“Nonsense,” said he, wielding the distaff and tangling the thread. “I have an insatiable desire to know how things function in this world.”

And he pricked his finger, as she had foretold.

And she took his bloodied finger and put it in her own mouth, and her old, brown, wrinkled lips closed softly on his flesh, and her tongue licked his rough skin and sucked sweetly on his blood. And as his blood ran into the wet saliva and apple-juice on her tongue he remembered everything, his nose up against the warm bag of her breast, the scent of her milk, his little fists kneading her like sweet pastry, the hot swaddling bands between his legs. And tears ran down his cheeks, for the onward flow of time, for the crumpling and drying of flesh and blood, for the singularity of a man shut in his skin as time sucked the marrow from his bones.

“It is odd,” said Colonel Grim, “that there should be such a preponderance of scarlet in the costumes or robes for the coming Carnival. Our honoured leader’s
name
is evergreen, but his taste runs to flames and blood.”

“You should not be surprised at that,” said Samson Origen. “For soldiers have always loved to be brilliantly clothed when they parade about, and you yourself have worn a scarlet coat and a scarlet cloak with gilded buttons.”

“I have heard it said,” said Grim, “that the coats were red so that the blood of wounds should be hidden. But I give that small credence, for our small-clothes were white as driven snow, and there are also green soldiers, like holly trees, and black soldiers, to hide in the night. No, we were red to strike fear of our bloody-mindedness into the enemy, and brassy to glint like the hot sun as we advanced. How we loved our uniforms, and how tender we were to what lay under them.”