Ancient of Days (44 page)

“What, then?”

“Fauver,” Adam said. “Call this unknown artist Fauver.”

“From
fauve
? That’s a school of painters, Adam, not a single artist. And it means ‘wild animal.’ ”

He smiled broadly. “Yes, I know.”

We could have chosen a dozen paintings, rolled them up, and bid farewell to Prix-des-Yeux, but Adam insisted that we must not leave Montaraz without experiencing a
vaudun
ceremony. A rational pagan like me, he declared, ought to subject himself to at least one powerful mystical experience in his life, and he and Erzulie would guide me safely through it. The other habilines would form a chorus, an upland rara band, to play drums and chant the needful chants. Fortunately, tomorrow was Saturday, and our voodoo service would begin a split second after nightfall. In the daylong interval, I must finish my photographic inventory of the caves—while Caroline and RuthClaire drove to the capital for items essential to the service. I liked none of these arrangements, but the others voted in a bloc against me (two cheers for democracy), and it was decided.

“There’s danger?” I asked. “I need help to see me safely through the ceremony?”

RuthClaire said, “It’s only dangerous, Paul, if you provoke the
loa
. Keep an open—preferably, a blank—mind.”

“He ought to be able to manage that.” Caroline was teasing, not being malicious, but the remark prompted RuthClaire’s laughter, too. The resurgent chumminess of the women, united again in playful ridicule, stung, and that Brian Nollinger was also present did nothing to pluck out the barb.

“Why the hell do they have to go to Rutherford’s Port?” I asked.

“To do this right,” Adam said. “We need a baptismal gown big enough to fit you, Mister Paul. Also some rum,
orgeat
, Florida water, cornmeal, oil, and two chickens.”

“Chickens?”

“Don’t ask,” RuthClaire said, and she and Caroline guffawed again, their arms around each other like long-lost-but-lately-found sisters.

“Do we have to get the chickens, too?” Caroline managed through this sputtering.

“I’ll drive you,” Brian said. “You can shop for trinkets. I’ll buy the chickens.”

“Live chickens,” Adam said.

“They don’t need you to chauffeur them, Herr Professor,” I said.

“I
like
to buy chickens,” RuthClaire said. “Even live ones. It’s hauling them home in a Jeep that rapidly loses its glamor.”

Brian tried to explain: “I’ve got to check in with my bosses. They give me a fairly free rein with this PADF project, but not so free that I can skip the island.”

Adam’s eyes widened and narrowed again. Nollinger saw, and I think both men remembered that nearly two years ago Brian had betrayed Adam to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. What would keep him from calling in the Tontons Macoutes in the hope of a reward, either money or preferential treatment?

“I’ll tell no one what I’ve seen here,” he said. “You have my word.”

A cynical snort escaped me.

“What would be the point?” he added. “I’d destroy my chance to do important field work here. I’d put myself in competition with dozens—maybe hundreds—of other would-be ethnographers. Do you really think I’d do that?”

“He wouldn’t,” Caroline said. “Brian knows what he’s got in Prix-des-Yeux.”

“And I want to see the
vaudun
ceremony tomorrow night. I’ll buy the damned chickens and truss them so they won’t flap. I can’t promise they won’t cackle, but that’s chickens for you.”

“Crumble sleeping tablets into their feed,” I said. “Do that methodically enough and maybe you’ll get research funding from the National Institutes of Health. You could call your paper ‘On the Tendency of Barnyard Fowls to Fall Asleep When Administered Mickeys.’ ”

This time Caroline and RuthClaire laughed with me, rather than at me, and I had the pleasure of seeing Brian’s annoyed look. But, hat in hand, he argued that he would be foolish to reveal what he knew and that RuthClaire and Caroline would be better off with him along than tooling down the coastal road unaccompanied. He’d help them load their purchases—he’d haggle for every item on their list. He was an expert at open-air bargaining, a skill he’d picked up in the Dominican Republic.

“We’ll keep an eye on him,” RuthClaire told Adam. “He’ll report to his bosses at Austin-Antilles, and that’s it. No side trips. No private phone calls. Et cetera.”

“Okay by me,” Brian said. He had won. He showed me a raised eyebrow of ironic triumph. Because RuthClaire and Caroline wanted showers and a good night’s rest before going into Rutherford’s Port, they hiked down to the beach that same afternoon and spent the night in the cottage on Caicos Bay. Brian Nollinger drove them. He made a pallet for himself on the porch, and, the next morning, he wrestled the rented Jeep along the coastal road into the city so that the women could do their
vaudun
shopping. This summary of events, of course, I report secondhand, trusting that it does not deviate too much from what actually happened. I slept very little that night, though.

At sunrise, the coolest part of the day, Dégrasse brought breakfast: mild Haitian coffee with
rapadou
and a spoonful of powdered milk, a stew of plantains, and a piece of odd-looking but tasty fish. The stew and the coffee were hot, but the fish seemed to have been forked out of lukewarm brine. Although groggy from lack of sleep, I ate ravenously. In the lee of the
houngfor
, Toussaint and Dégrasse ate with me, neither paying me the slightest heed. Then Adam appeared, in walking shorts and a pair of Adidas sneakers. He handed me the camera equipment and led me uphill through the fortification of sablier trees to Hector’s secret entrance to the caves.

We spent all day exploring them. I took so many pictures that my forefinger began to throb. Hector led us through the main rotunda and the most accessible galleries, but Adam, more nimble, took me places that I hadn’t already visited:
chatières
, rock chimneys, lofty crawlways. I saw ritual statuary, painted symbols, and weird faces cut out of the dead ends of labyrinthine tunnels. On at least six occasions, through different corridors of stone, we emerged to rest our eyes and clear our minds. Then we plunged back into darkness, to wriggle our way to deeper grottoes and worse bouts of vertigo. It was a daylong dream, this activity: a nightmare at tropical noon.

By the time Brian Nollinger and the two women returned, I was long since exhausted. Stars had begun to wink through the twilight sky over Prix-des-Yeux, and all I wanted to do was sleep. Adam wouldn’t let me. So I was standing bruised and bone-weary beside the
houngfor
when the marketing party came into camp with their duffles and baskets and trussed chickens, laughing ruefully through their own weariness, happy to have completed their journey.

Toussaint and Dégrasse fed the marketgoers, and Adam urged them to finish eating so that—in his self-appointed role as Lord Saturday—he could initiate the service that would allow Caroline and me to experience the full mystery and power of the
vaudun
gods. Only then, after all, would we be able to go back to Atlanta with a real appreciation of the spiritual forces that had sustained
Les Gens
in their Caribbean exile.

It was totally dark when Caroline, Brian, and I entered the sacred peristyle of the habilines. In his top hat and tails, Adam led us in. RuthClaire awaited us in the palm-thatched
tonnelle
with Erzulie, Toussaint, Dégrasse, and Alberoi. Even Hector was there, sitting cross-legged in a corner next to a series of stylized cornmeal designs that Alberoi had laid during the day. The three younger habilines occupied the low platform on which the
vaudun
drums rested, while RuthClaire and Erzulie walked about sprinkling water on the ground from flip-top metal pitchers like the creamers you might see in a roadside cafe in Alabama or Georgia: an odd, improvisatory touch.

Only Brian, Caroline, and I would be “couched” tonight, “put down on the floor” as potential communicants with the Yagaza gods. This service was expressly for us. We wore white baptismal gowns similar to the cambric robes in which the habilines had first introduced themselves. RuthClaire and Caroline had bought our garments in Rutherford’s Port, and they were spotless when we donned them, as immaculate as new wedding gowns. Candles in globelike pots burned at various places about the temple, reminding me again of the tacky accoutrements at a cheap stateside restaurant. Brian kept saying he wished just to observe, not to participate, but Adam forcibly rejoined that no one who came to Prix-des-Yeux could do so as an observer, that participation in its life and rituals was a requisite for staying.

Erzulie lit two tall red tapers in cast-iron holders at either end of the drum platform. Then she centered herself in front of the platform and nodded at Adam. Behind her, Toussaint began to tap out a light beat on the tallest of the drums; he was seated on a rickety stool that permitted him to lean forward over their taut skins. Alberoi picked up this beat on the set known as
mama
, largest of the ceremonial drums, and Dégrasse began to counterpoint these rhythms on the drums called
boula
, smallest of the three kinds. Although their beat was hypnotic, the drummers played with a curious delicacy, as if fearful of waking the birds. The faintness of the rhythms, even in the
houngfor
, mocked their purpose, that is, to induce a trance in us communicants. And then I realized that, to keep from revealing their presence and whereabouts to any hostiles on the mountain, the habilines must always conduct their
vaudun
service so.

“Lie down by the
poteau mitan
,” Adam said, “like so many nesting spoons.”

Spoons don’t nest, I thought. Spoonbills maybe, but not spoons.

Nollinger and my wife were not so literal in their thinking. They knelt by the center post, then assumed clumsy fetal curls facing it. Nollinger was first, with Caroline cupping her body into his and touching her chin to his shoulder blade. I lay down behind her in the same posture, grateful that Brian hadn’t tried to come between us in this matter. I pressed my groin into Caroline’s buttocks. Our robes were no longer immaculate, our first contact with the ground having soiled them.

Hector and the habiline drummers began to chant—faintly, in a guttural singsong that counterpointed or mimicked the rhythms of the Arada-Dahomey drums. The sound reminded me of Adam’s singing before he’d learned to speak, but rougher and more ritualized. Caroline shuddered. I shuddered with her. My place on the floor kept me from seeing much, but the
tonnelle
ceiling and the upper portions of the wall were visible to me, and down one of the peristyle posts came gliding the
couleuvre
that had linked Adam and Erzulie on our first evening in camp. I wanted to stand. A paralysis of fear or fatigue had gripped me, though, and I could merely watch. The guttural chanting of the habiline choir veered into spooky falsetto registers.

Like a spry gnome, Erzulie danced, her bare feet slapping the floor near the center post. The python kept flowing down its own post behind the drum platform, its bronze and garnet body shimmering in the candlelight. A chicken began to cluck: two chickens. Erzulie’s hand came into my view, swinging a chicken by its bound legs. Adam, who appeared above us near the
poteau mitan
, took this flapping fowl from her and bit off its head. He spat the head out, along with a mouthful of feathers, and gouts leapt from the decapitated bird’s neck, fountaining in a gaudy, queasy-making rain. Our white cambric gowns were spattered, and the stench of hot blood filled our nostrils, as did the fainter scent of flowing serpent.

“O great
loa
,” Adam chanted, “your horses await your mounting. They invite you to ride.” He dropped the headless chicken, which beat the ground with impotent, reflexive wing flaps. “O
loa
, come!”

The second chicken, which Erzulie thrust aloft, cackled hysterically. It, too, smelt blood, sensing that a like fate lay in store for it. And Erzulie beheaded it as quickly and surely as Adam had executed the other. Blood parachuted away from her like streamers from a crimson Roman candle. I shut my eyes and covered my mouth and nose with my palm. Caroline leaned against me as tense as a vibrating metal pole. When I pushed my groin against her again—to reassure us both—my cock was now a shriveled nub. What, exactly, was mystical about this ceremony? So far, it was an abomination and a horror, and I wanted out.

Drumbeats, chanting, dancing.

Opening my eyes and peering down the length of Caroline’s body, I saw that the
couleuvre
had reached the ground. Only an arm’s length from Caroline’s feet, it lay loosely coiled at the base of the wall. Having unhinged its lower jaw, it was methodically swallowing—with terrible, wavelike gulps—a headless chicken that, a moment past, had lain next to the center post. That damn serpent, I thought, is gagging down its dinner feathers and all. I shut my eyes again.

Drumbeats, chanting, dancing. Adam danced barefoot with the barefoot Erzulie. The drummers on the platform—or, at least, Dégrasse and Alberoi—undulated behind their instruments like revelers in a stalled conga line. Even Hector had got to his feet. He bounced up and down behind us, stutter-stepping between the
vevés
that Alberoi had designed. I could feel him moving, just as I did everyone. The drumbeats, the chanting, and the dancing pulsed in my temples like angry blood. Brian groaned, and Caroline’s head popped back so quickly that she split my bottom lip.

“O Legba,” Adam cried, no longer dancing, “let the
loa
descend into this temple and mount their horses. We call for Agarou, god of ancestors, and Aïda Ovedo, virgin wife of Damballa, and for Damballa himself, whose serpent we have propitiated. Let them descend and ride their horses. Let their horses run with them like thoroughbreds!”

Someone yanked my head back. Erzulie, I think. Over my split lip, she poured
orgeat
, a syrupy drink with a tang of almonds. This, Adam said, was another offering to Damballa and his wife, consumed by us prostrate horses so that the
loa
could enjoy it once they’d mounted us and brought us to our feet. If nothing else, the taste of the orgeat routed the sickening odors of
couleuvre
and slaughtered chicken. Then I could smell rum. A habiline drummer splashed it about, renewing the baptism of the already baptized ceremonial drums, being prodigal with the native
clairin
simply because Les Gens had it to be prodigal with.