Ancient of Days (41 page)

“We knew you were on Montaraz,” RuthClaire said. “But we thought you were working on the Austin-Antilles coffee plantations.”

“I am. How do you think I bought a motor scooter down there at import prices?”

“You’re supposed to be in the Dominican Republic,” Caroline said, “doing demographic studies of the canecutters. To take that job, you left Atlanta without even telling me goodbye.”

Christ, I thought. Caroline’s really cleaning out her psychic cupboards today. . . .

“Caroline, I wrote you about not saying goodbye, and I did do demographic work in the Dominican. But I took that job to escape a bad situation at Emory and to position myself close enough to Haiti to do independent research on the Rutherford habilines. As soon as I could, I finagled a transfer from the Austin-Antilles sugar operation to the coffee ranches here on Montaraz.”

“Doing what?” Caroline asked. “Installing punch clocks for the peasants?”

“Supervising the construction of concrete drying platforms, Caroline. They’ve had them since the thirties on Haiti itself, but the workers here on Montaraz have always resisted the washing and drying process. Austin-Antilles was afraid to push them too hard for fear of provoking work stoppages. About three months ago, I implemented an education program with the help of the Pan American Development Foundation. A month ago, we actually got platform construction under way.”

“What’s demographic about that, Brian? Where does your anthropological background come in? How does it help the laborers themselves?”

“Not much maybe, but it’s the job that got me transferred over here. It’s valuable work economically, Caroline—it benefits the company. But my ulterior motive was to find Adam’s people. I’ve searched this island many times since March, using my work as cover, and when the Montarazes settled here, I knew it was only a matter of time. Blair came. And then, icing on the cake, you and—” He gestured at me.

“Caroline’s husband,” I said.

“Icing on the cake?” Caroline mocked. “Because you could finally get what you wanted, namely, unauthorized access to the habilines.”

“With you and Mr. Loyd along, it wasn’t hard to follow you up here, if that’s what you mean. Mr. Loyd was so slow I had to sit down every couple of minutes to keep from stepping on his heels. Finally, he cracked up and went down on his fanny for a couple of hours.” He put his hat on, tightened its draw string under his chin, and stuffed his hands into his bush-shorts pockets. “I’m glad you’re okay, Mr. Loyd. I hung back a while, to figure out what was going on—but when Caroline returned to you and the two of you started arguing, well, it didn’t seem fair to sit there listening, so I made a big circle around you and came on up here to Habiline City.”

“Prix-des-Yeux,” RuthClaire corrected him. “You think following people without their knowledge is less despicable than eavesdropping on them?”

“Ma’am?”

“Why didn’t you come to our cottage, knock on the door, and ask us to bring you here? Didn’t that ever cross your mind?”

“I knew you didn’t want to see me, Mrs. Montaraz. You ducked me in the market one day.” He shook his head. “Don’t deny it. Don’t apologize. Anyway, if I’d done that, if I’d come to you and asked you to bring me up here, would you have done it?”

“Of course not,” RuthClaire said.

Brian Nollinger shrugged, then glanced about to see if anyone was sneaking up behind him to knock him senseless with a monkey-coco club.

I glanced about, too. On the sides of the
houngfor
sat squatter’s huts of cardboard, plywood, scrap metal, palm thatching, and broken cinderblocks. These dwellings might have been transported in from Shantytown in Rutherford’s Port—except that whoever made them had refrained from using any tin or glass, and had not employed any scrap metal on their roofs—because the habilines had no wish to disclose their village’s location to searchers in small aircraft. And so Prix-des-Yeux had an earthy drabness and a natural green canopy concealing its modest environs from aerial snooping.

“Now you’re here,” RuthClaire asked Nollinger, “what do you intend to do?”

“Study the habilines. With your permission, I’d like to do field work here.”

“With our permission? You did all you could to avoid asking for it, mister!”

“But now that I know where the Rutherford Remnant makes its home, surely you’ll let me follow up. I admire Adam. I’m sympathetic to his people’s desire to live out their lives as an autonomous community. Most of my work has been in primate ethology, yes, but that’s not an inappropriate background for such research. I’m strong on method, a good organizer, and can do whatever I put my mind to, given a chance. Supervising the construction of coffee-drying platforms proves that. Moreover, I’m able to—”

“Brian, old boy, you’ve got a job,” I said. “So just skip the self-serving resume.”

“What you lack,” RuthClaire told him; “is discretion and a basic regard for others’ feelings. To you, these people—” waving at the temple and nearby shanties, a township barren of visible inhabitants—“well, they’re nothing but subject matter. As I’m nothing but an obstacle to research and Adam’s only a means to personal advancement.”

“Forgive me, but that’s not fair. Remember when I showed up at Abraxas to apologize? Mr. Loyd here hustled me off, but I was sincere in my intentions.”

“I’m sure that’s true,” Caroline told RuthClaire.

“Caroline!” I said.

Brian hurried to add, “Can you blame an anthropologist for being obsessed with Adam? The secret of our origins may rest with these persecuted habilines, ma’am.”

RuthClaire slipped her hands into the pockets of her jeans and walked several steps away from our mutual nemesis. “Suppose you do your precious ‘field work’ here. Suppose Adam gives you a free hand. What then?”

“Ma’am?”

“What would you do with the results of your research?”

“Publish them, of course. That’s essential.”

“To whom?”

“To Nollinger,” I said. “He’ll one-up the entire paleoanthropological community, not excepting its high muckety-muck, A. P. Blair.”

“And destroy the Rutherford Remnant in the process,” RuthClaire said. “It was a small miracle they outlasted the first onslaught of scientific fortune hunters. Like their ancestors in Zarakal, they had to go underground—literally—to survive that dismaying siege. Montaraz is a small island, but their cunning and nimbleness, an inherited ability to lie low, saved them. A published account of their culture would be its death knell and eulogy. That’s not alarmism, Dr. Nollinger, but a realistic assessment of the likely results of human curiosity and greed.”

“Including yours,” I told my wife’s ex-beau.

“What if I refuse to pinpoint the location of this village?” Brian said. “It’s almost impossible to find it without prior knowledge. After all, thousands have suspected the existence of a habiline hideaway, but no one’s ever found it.”

“Until today,” RuthClaire said. “And that exception doesn’t prove the rule—it sabotages your entire argument.”

“You were careless, Mrs. Montaraz. You let a habiline woman visit your cottage, and then put her in a Jeep with your two foreign house guests. You took off as if going on a three- or four-day picnic. You never tried a single dodge to see if anyone was following you. And once on foot, you let Mr. Loyd and Caroline yak like school kids on a weekend field trip. Without such carelessness, I wouldn’t be here now.

“Well, you don’t have to be careless,” he went on. “Do things differently. Insure the site’s total anonymity. Keep doing so even after I’ve issued my monograph.”

RuthClaire spoke to the blue Haitian sky: “Too bad I don’t believe in murder. I could end this whole mess by putting a bullet in Dr. Nollinger’s brain.” She stared at her tormentor. “Do you think anybody’d ever find your body, mister?”

“Probably not,” he admitted.

“Your bones, maybe—two million years from now. But only by a conjunction of skill and luck. Too bad murder’s not in my behavioral arsenal.”

“Where’s a bloodthirsty Tonton Macoute when you really need one?” Caroline asked RuthClaire. She added, “Why don’t you talk to Adam? Brian may be just the man to write an ethnography of the Rutherford Remnant . . . if anyone’s going to do one. I can vouch for his character.”

“And the Pope could vouch for Colonel Khadafy’s,” I said. “Never mind that he’d be an idiot to do it.”

Pointedly, the two women ignored me.

Where was Erzulie? Where were her fellow citizens of Prix-des-Yeux? For that matter, where was Adam?

RuthClaire led us across the clearing to the
houngfor
. Inside, we found Adam seated at the base of the
poteau mitan
, the central post of the roofed part of the temple called the
tonnelle
. Down this post, the gods of the voodoo pantheon, known individually and collectively as
loa
, descend upon the service from their spiritual abode in “Yagaza,” meaning either “Africa” or “the immaterial world beyond death.”

But Adam, still in his Baron Samedi costume, was not alone in the
tonnelle
. Facing him at the foot of the spirit pole sat Erzulie, legs crossed lotus fashion and hands clasping Adam’s in the same viselike manner that couplings on railway cars achieve an unbreakable grip. Adam had shut his eyes, and when we went deeper into the peristyle, walking cautiously beneath its hanging gourds and trinkets, we saw that Erzulie had shut hers too. The wizened habiline and her well-traveled grandson were communing through the agency of trance. What addled me even more than their abstraction from the present moment, though, was the fact that providing a weird Laocoön link between them was the sinuous body of a twelve-foot python. It curled about Adam’s torso, made a spavined loop around his and Erzulie’s arms, and, after lazily girdling the woman’s waist, rested its flat, evil-looking head atop her grubby scarf.

“My God,” Caroline said. “Are they all right?”

“They’re fine,” RuthClaire said. “We just can’t talk to them for a while.”

“But the snake—”

“It’s nonpoisonous, Caroline. Haiti has no poisonous snakes.”

Brian said, “It’s a local kind of python called a
couleuvre
. Islanders revere them because they eat rats. I’ve been in Dominican and Haitian homes where they put out food to attract the blesséd things: saucers of milk, fresh eggs, dishes of flour. You’re lucky if you have a
couleuvre
, Caroline.” He tilted his head to look at it. “Pretty, no?”

Even in the shade, the python glinted bronze and garnet. Its eyes sparkled like beryls. No one could dispute its prettiness, but it stank. The unmistakable odor of serpent drifted through the
tonnelle
like a thin gas. I covered my nose and turned aside.

“Cripes!” I said. “How do they stand it?”

RuthClaire regarded me with some sympathy. “It hit me that way, too, at first. You get used to it, just as you get acclimated to Montaraz.”

“But what are they doing?” Caroline asked.

“View the three of them as a symbiotic unit of old Arada-Dahomey spirits—Papa Guedé, Erzulie, and Damballa. There are plenty of other
loa
in the voodoo pantheon, but on Montaraz, that’s the Big Three. Damballa’s personal symbol is the serpent. He’s the god of rain, a guardian of lakes and fountains. Erzulie is Damballa’s mistress. Adam says when they link up like this, they make a metaphorical conduit between past and present, Africa and the New World, the spiritual and the material. The python’s the flow—the electricity—necessary to convey the gist of their messages.”

I was standing just inside the temple’s door again. “That doesn’t sound like Adam, RuthClaire. It sounds like superstitious gobbledegook.”

“The gist of what message?” Nollinger demanded. “What kinds of information are they supposed to be communicating?”

RuthClaire said, “The kinds that can’t be verbalized.”

“That’s appropriate,” I said. “Erzulie can’t talk much, the snake’s probably no orator, and Adam’s natural eloquence is lost on their likes.”

“Telepathy?”

“I wouldn’t call it telepathy, Dr. Nollinger. That has an unsavory paranormal ring. Mostly, though, it’s inaccurate.”

“How about witchcraft?” I said. “When it comes to savoriness, witchcraft takes the cake. Give me witchcraft over telepathy any day.”

“You’re making fun,” RuthClaire said, “but witchcraft implies an element of mysterious interplay that telepathy lacks. To explain what’s going on here, that element has to be accounted for. It’s religious, Paul, not crassly materialistic.”

“Wow. With you and Adam, everything’s religious.”

“Try holy. Or sacred. That’s even better.”

Avoiding the cabalistic
vevés
that had been laid out on the floor with cornmeal, flour, and colored sand, Caroline picked her way across the temple and crouched behind the center post to look at Adam and Erzulie. The
couleuvre
flicked its tongue. She drew back so quickly that she had to put her hand behind her to keep from falling on her butt. Recovered, she shifted but kept staring at the habilines. Without looking up, she said, “Can’t you give us a general idea of what they’re not talking about?”

“It’s hard to say,” RuthClaire said. “Details of Adam’s life on Montaraz before ego-crystallization. Maybe some stuff about habiline history both here and in the Lolitabu catacombs. It may go as far back as the beginning of the species. In fact, Adam says it does. Erzulie’s knitting him back into the unraveling fabric of his people without tearing him out of the life he’s made with me. He does this at least once every time we come up here. In a way, I envy him.”

“Why?” Caroline asked.

“Because it’s making it easier for him to forget what happened to Paul. I could use that kind of help myself.”

“Can’t you do this, too?”

“I’m afraid to. And I’m not a habiline.”

“Do you have to be? Isn’t simply being human enough? It was enough for you and Adam to marry.”

“Well,” RuthClaire said, “he’s human, but I . . . I’m not a habiline. It’s like time’s arrow, I guess—a one-way street. So I’m frightened and envious.”

“If you were an anthropologist,” Brian began, “you could . . .”

“What?”

“Try to identify with the habilines. Take part in their ceremonies. Translate the nonverbal images Adam and this woman are trading into an impressionistic history of human origins. You can see what that would mean. You can see why I’m badgering you to let me try it. It might revolutionize our whole species’ self-concept, our fundamental notions of who and what we are.”

I said, “You never let up, do you, Brian?”

Here, Adam leaned his head back and let go such a piercing cry that all four of us ducked away from it. Then Adam’s eyes sprang open. So did Erzulie’s. The
couleuvre
, Damballa’s living avatar on Montaraz, slipped the knots that it had tied around Erzulie’s waist and Adam’s torso and crawled away from them. Caroline leapt aside to let it pass.

The snake knew where it was going, namely, up onto a crude wooden dais beyond the
poteau mitan
. There, the habilines had arranged the three sets of Arada-Dahomey drums traditionally played during a
vaudun
ceremony. The python, taking its time, gripped the base of one of the tall
asotor
drums and flowed up it to the leather drumhead. Here the serpent balanced, as if on a fulcrum, until it could bridge the chasm between the drum and one of the posts supporting the
houngfor
’s outer wall. Still calmly flowing, the great bronze-and-garnet snake reached the top of the truncated wall, and, as its weight shifted from the drum to the rafter of the peristyle, the entire temple shook. To prevent the
houngfor
from collapsing on me, I stepped outside. Soon, though, Damballa came to rest on the flimsy rafter, and the temple stopped swaying.

Adam and Erzulie awakened. They had ceased to be
loa
—had become themselves again. Adam pulled Erzulie up, and the two groggy habilines turned to face us with a reluctance, or an apathy, that was palpable. The reality of this moment, no matter how strange, could not compete with the colorful intensity of their possession by the Haitian gods. Adam’s pupils were huge, as if he had imbibed light with which to illumine the visions of his trance. He stumbled toward RuthClaire before finding both his balance and his place in our small consensus world.

“Are you all right?” RuthClaire asked, catching him.

He was looking at Brian Nollinger. His pupils had contracted to the size of microdots. Something inside him, I thought, wanted to squeeze Nollinger utterly out of his sight.

“I was,” he said, his guttural voice scarcely audible. “I was.”

*

The five of us remained in Prix-des-Yeux for three days. We let Brian Nollinger stay because he had found us and would have little trouble finding us again. Too, he earnestly reiterated his promise not to divulge the location of the habiline village, if Adam would consent to his doing a respectful ethnographic study of the Rutherford Remnant. Adam consented, but his lack of enthusiasm suggested that he viewed Brian’s plea as a subtle form of blackmail. If he’d withheld consent, Nollinger could have avenged himself by returning to Rutherford’s Port and telling what he knew. Then Adam’s people would have had to move. Tearing down their
houngfor
and their huts would have posed no real problem, but on an island as small as Montaraz, finding an equally well-camouflaged site for a new village would have. So Adam let the blackmailer stay.

His decision irked me. Caroline’s offering the Montarazes unsolicited testimonials on Brian’s behalf didn’t sit well with me, either. What stake did she have in his staying with us? Why did she so value his talents—wholly untested talents—as an ethnographer? Why did she recall him with such fondness, when he’d deserted their earlier relationship without so much as a flippant ta-ta? I tried to find reasons. He was younger than I. His brief career in the Caribbean, begun out of something like Byronic desperation, gave him an irresistibly romantic air. Or, the least happy of all my conjectures, Caroline still loved him. She’d married me on the rebound, albeit a long one, and Brian’s reappearance in her life had come to her as a godsend.

Self-doubt. Paranoia. An absence of charity. I owned all these negative attributes. I kept thinking about what RuthClaire had jokingly said about killing Nollinger. The surreal tropical setting of Prix-des-Yeux had deprived me of all adult perspective. I was a teenager again, and the fact that I was living an oblique Lost Race fiction out of Bulwer-Lytton and H. Rider Haggard simply heightened my adolescent self-doubt. And the Lost Race whose culture Brian hoped to observe, whose art my new wife and I had come all the way from Atlanta to see, and whose survival the Montarazes wanted to insure? Well, on the afternoon of the day of our arrival, we met these unusual people one at a time over a period of about two hours.

At Adam’s bidding, Erzulie left Prix-des-Yeux, hiked into the dense shrubbery uphill from the huts, and returned in half an hour with one of her habiline compatriots. Then, after mutually awkward pantomimic greetings, Erzulie accompanied her charge back up the mountain to fetch the next. Each habiline came dressed in a togalike garment that varied not at all in style or color from person to person. With the appearance of the third habiline, I realized that Erzulie’s relatives were all wearing the same garment. An ochre stain on its hem gave the game away. Although the motto “one size fits all” was not strictly true (the smallest of the four members of the Rutherford Remnant had to gather the toga’s skirts and carry them across one arm), they pretended otherwise. In the absence of visitors, they obviously wore no clothes at all. Hence these serial debuts.

Erzulie’s head scarf and chemise were dictated solely by her current status as a go-between, a role that she must often have played with the superstitious islanders grubbing out their livings farther down the mountain. Older and more worldly-wise than most of her conspecifics, she could pass herself off as a deaf-mute
mambo
or
vaudun
priestess. The Haitians might suspect she was a habiline, but to regard her as a witch—rather than a deceitful weredemon or a quasi-human survivor of Sayyid Sa’īd’s slave market—conferred a degree of safety on their dealings with her.
Cigouaves
and habilines, after all, you should report to the Tontons Macoutes, and the fewer contacts with those guys the better. You could trust a four-foot-tall witch a lot further than you could a six-foot-tall cop with mirrorshades and a Springfield rifle.

In any event, Erzulie—both
mambo
and goddess—introduced us to her people.

The first of the four habilines was a grizzled old man with a broad flap of flesh for a nose and eyes the hue of cloudy gin. He was blind. Adam told us his name was Hector, but, as with all the names that Adam gave us, I felt sure he’d invented it as a convenience for the rest of us. Although blind, Hector oriented himself to every rock and blossom in the landscape as if he could see. Once, when a butterfly with iridescent moiré patterns and peacock eyes on its wings tumbled past us, Hector moved his head as if to follow its flight. RuthClaire conjectured that an acute sensitivity to air currents and minuscule temperature changes had allowed him to perform this trick.

The remaining three habilines came out in turn. They included a furtive, middle-aged male whose pot belly pooched out the fabric of the toga; a relatively young female with a deformed pelvic structure that gave her a gimpy walk without really slowing her down; and an adolescent male whose fierce mistrust of us revealed itself in his flashing eyes and the irrepressible tendency of his upper lip to pull away from his teeth. Adam called these three Toussaint, Dégrasse, and Alberoi. French names, every one. I reflected that before Peter Martin Rutherford deeded Montaraz to President Nissage Saget, most of the habilines had had English or Spanish names—if they’d had names at all. It hardly mattered, though. Among themselves, they most likely used primeval East African syllables, throaty names with no modern counterparts. Or maybe they had communicated by touch, gesture, facial expression, and eye movements. Because none of the Prix-des-Yeux habilines spoke, we had no way of knowing.

Toussaint, we learned, was young Alberoi’s uncle. Toussaint’s brother—the father of the edgy Alberoi—had belonged to the same gunrunning crew with which Adam had worked early in 1980. Adam had seen the murders of Alberoi’s father and his own brother by a Cuban thug (whom Caroline, by coincidence, had later interviewed in the Atlanta Penitentiary). As for Dégrasse, she’d broken her pelvis in a fall from a natural stope in the cave system above Prix-des-Yeux to a chamber far below it. She had been carrying an unborn child. The child died, and she had almost died. Friends managed to get her to the level on which she and her husband had made their home in the catacombs, and here she had eventually recovered. Destroyed along with her baby, however, was her ability to conceive. As the only surviving habiline woman of child-bearing age, she suffered from the knowledge (dim and unfocused, but ever-present) that her tenacious species was finally—after nearly three million self-abnegating years—doomed to pass away. Alberoi might well be the last of them to die, but Dégrasse had been their only viable hope for continuance.

Gone, that hope.

All that was left was for the males to mate with human women. Ironically, Adam had pioneered that option with results that had persuaded him and RuthClaire not to try again. Hector was old and blind. Toussaint and Alberoi might one day seek Haitian brides, but their fear of the human world—their experiences with Tontons Macoutes, plantation overseers, fortune hunters, and Marxist revolutionaries—argued against their doing so. Their people were universal victims. Even others who wished to protect them often endangered them by shining upon them the light of sincere concern. Adam, a habiline himself, had inadvertently done that. So it was unlikely that the anxious Toussaint or the feral Alberoi would ever venture down from their village to woo the sloe-eyed daughters of men.

I asked Adam why he had limited our first contact with his people to these stiff, serial meetings. He said it was simply to give them a chance to get used to our presence. They were suspicious, and shy. Erzulie had had some experience with outsiders, but the other habilines were innocents with soft ego structures. They had threaded their lives into the elemental natural beauties and terrors of the island, but latter-day humankind totally confounded them. Tomorrow, and the next day, we would see more of them. Meanwhile, we must let them think about our first meetings with us. In the darkness of the caves—I began to realize there were caves higher up the mountain—they would begin to weave us into the psychic patterns tying them to Montaraz and their immemorial family past. Or so, at least, Adam hoped.

That night, we lit candles in the
houngfor
and shared a rude picnic near its center post. We included Brian and made nervous jokes about the
couleuvre
coming to join us. Afterward, Brian asked questions about Blair’s visit to the cottage, and Caroline told him about her tapes of the Great Man’s conversation with Adam. Since we had brought our equipment with us, Brian insisted on hearing them. RuthClaire and I told Caroline she’d be crazy to let Brian eavesdrop on a privileged interview, especially before it saw print in
Popular Anthropology
, but Adam, having surrendered once, saw no reason to hold firm on this point, either. Besides, he wanted to hear the tapes. Up here in Prix-des-Yeux, what other entertainment did we have?

We listened to the tapes. Brian, like a man praying at an altar, leaned forward in the candlelight. Although he laughed aloud during Blair’s attempt to persuade Adam that
Homo zarakalensis
was a better species designation than
Homo habilis
, he was respectful through the latter two thirds of the interview. Only when Adam claimed to be the “last of my tribe” did Brian raise his eyebrows and let his gaze travel around the shadowy circle of our faces. The concluding section of the tape about the soul, the ego, and God, he listened to raptly, without criticism or censure.

“Good stuff, Caroline, but incomplete. You ought to do another interview like that—with me as the third participant.”

“No,” said Adam clearly. “No way.”

We spread out our sleeping bags in the
tonnelle
. The serpent in the rafters made me uneasy, but RuthClaire swore it coveted only small rodents, birds’ eggs, and
vaudun
offerings. No need to fear waking up as a paralyzed lump in its throat. We slept.

During the night, all the other habilines but Hector returned from the caves to the village. Alberoi and Erzulie had one of the Shantytown huts, Dégrasse and Toussaint the other. All four were up and about by the time we rubbed sand out of our eyes and pushed our creaky selves off the ground. The men had donned walking shorts, and Dégrasse was a vision of yellow and brown in a floral-print chemise whose pattern reminded me of nursery-school wallpaper: groups of baby ducks swimming through stands of graceful reeds. From hidden larders, the habilines had produced a small black cauldron of red beans and rice that they were heating over a fire not far from the
houngfor
. We emerged to the pleasing aroma of this stew. Alberoi stirred the pot, Erzulie ladled globs into chipped porcelain mugs, and Dégrasse passed out tin spoons to those walking by to be fed. Seated on the log by the temple, Toussaint was already greedily eating.