The Ten Incarnations of Adam Avatar (64 page)

I would not say dealing with their deaths was easy, but it was easier because, by the time I turned eighteen, I had very cogent memories of my lives. And, because I was a loved child, I was able to absorb my pasts without trauma. My grandmother then let me read all the records written by my former selves. By my twenty-fifth year – middle-age for all of my former incarnations – I had regained all my old skills. I believe this unusual rapidity was due, in part, to my mixed genetic heritage. (Adaku's biological father was of African and Amerindian descent.) I am now in a better position than I have ever been before to defeat the Shadowman and to live beyond my fiftieth birthday. Yet I cannot shake my conviction that the battle between us is not purely, or even primarily, a martial one. The Shadowman has never killed me just for the sake of killing me. The key to surviving our next encounter, I feel, is to understand who and what I am. And, for the first time in my long existence, I have some clue as to the what.

On the night of the death of my previous self, Emily and Adaku wept. It was my own conviction, the power of my will, that had persuaded them to follow my plan. The Guyanese landscape itself, with its overwhelming message that man is not the measure of all things, made what we did seem perfectly natural. But, once my wife and stepdaughter saw my dead body, it seemed to them that they had been deceived by superstition, and that the evidence of my immortality had been contrived.

So Emily wrote in her account of the night I killed myself, using a silver spike and a specially-made contraption to drive it into the exact point at the base of my skull where the Shadowman had always delivered his fatal blow. Perhaps a bullet would have worked just as well, and perhaps the spike did not need to be silver. But I didn't want to take the slightest chance, and as soon as the spring-loaded mechanism drove the spike into my brain, I knew that I had succeeded. In my fading mind I flew down the tunnel towards the light, eager for the first time in my lives, knowing that Adaku and Emily awaited my return.

After the police had come and the coroner had taken away the body, the women fell into an exhausted sleep. The investigation had not taken very long, because Guyanese police are lazy and because there was a suicide note in which I said that I was possessed by a demon and an obeah woman had told me this was the only way to exorcise it. Emily awoke in the small hours of the morning, the short hairs on the back of her neck prickling. She did not know what had awakened her. Adaku was lying on her back on the bed, the sheets thrown back because the night was very warm. Emily had fallen asleep in an armchair beside the bed. When she awoke, she lay very still in the chair, and tried to keep her breathing steady. She says she knew at once that my spirit was in the room, and that she quite expected to see my transparent shade standing beside the bed. But there was nothing to be seen save the moonlight shining through the window and on to the bed.

Then the moonlight on the bedsheets moved.

Emily says she would never have seen it had she been looking directly at the bed. But from the corner of her eye, she sensed some movement from the lower part of the bed, some flow that moved smoothly and slowly up the bed. Adaku never even stirred, and it took all Emily's strength of will to stay in her chair. She told me that the next day she found four depressions on each arm of the chair, where her fingers had dug into the black leather. Within seconds the movement had ceased, and Adaku continued to sleep quietly.

Emily and my mother did not tell me about this aspect of my nature until I was twenty-five years of age. Needless to say, I was rather traumatised – it is not an easy thing to discover that you are not truly human. But I have accepted the fact that my essence is not clay, but goo. This is the vehicle by which my selves, my memories, have been preserved between incarnations. No disembodied spirit wandering the spheres until rebirth, but a symbiote which senses and enters a gravid female. I have turned to science for answers. That I am a favourite creation of a Supreme Being, besides being arrogant, explains nothing. So I have read all the major texts of evolutionary theory, from Darwin's
Origin of Species
to Richard Dawkins's
The Blind Watchmaker
, as well as many technical papers on recombinant DNA. None satisfactorily explains how an organism like myself could have come to be. But that failure does not indicate any supernatural origin, for proof by ignorance is a trap many people easily fall into. ‘The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but it is nonetheless an intellectual vice,' wrote Bertrand Russell.

As I had instructed, Emily and Adaku both flew to Trinidad later that week. The police investigation had not yet been completed and, as is always the case in such matters, Emily being the spouse was a suspect. But Guyanese officials were corrupt even before the Burnham era, and the assets of my previous selves were more than enough to smooth her way out. Adaku completed the rest of her pregnancy in Trinidad. She did not have an easy time. I am being kind in calling myself a symbiote. ‘Parasite' would be the more accurate term. Adaku was by then four months pregnant and her morning sickness had stopped. But she again began vomiting every morning and every evening the day after my essence entered her. She was never well for the next five months of her pregnancy, and the labour was hard. It was only when I was a grown man that I remembered that I always knew this. None of my mothers had ever borne children after me. Most of them seemed to have been already pregnant when I entered them, which means that my DNA overwhelmed that of their foetuses. And I wondered if my decision to be reborn through my stepdaughter was as unselfish as I had made out. At the time, I thought so. All that was on my mind was how after the rape Adaku hardly spoke, wept when she thought no one was around, and had nightmares every night. I would have done anything to bring the light back into her eyes. I knew she loved me, and I knew that if the Shadowman killed me on schedule that I would die almost exactly after her unwanted child was born. I wanted to spare her that future trauma, and I wanted to ease her present one. Yet, surely, at the back of my mind, I knew I was placing her at grave risk?

When I was a young man, I told Adaku, now my mother, of my guilt. She hugged me and said, ‘You were born with your eyes open. The moment I see that they were green, the world got all right again.'

It made me feel a little better. And if the ‘what' of what I am is not human, I am confident that the ‘who' is very much so. Which is one reason I had wanted to be reborn in Trinidad.

I have described this island as an outpost of the future. The genetic and cultural history of Trinidad made it the most suitable place for me to hone my potential; its technological and political backwardness made sure my true nature would escape detection; and, if signs of my unusual abilities were displayed, no one would be too surprised or too curious.

That is because the Caribbean, with its relatively small population, has produced an unusually large number of top-class achievers. In sport, we have given the world champion sprinters, footballers, cricketers, and karatekas. In the intellectual field, three Nobel Prize winners have emerged from these former British colonies. We have also produced an absurd number of superb musicians and writers. Walcott speaks with the voices of many civilizations, Naipaul has always used the island to pen the stories of the oppressed, Marley still riffs the strings of the world.

This statistical anomaly made my unusual achievements not too noticeable. Even so, Emily and Adaku exercised extreme caution. I could have been world karate or judo champion. They refused to let me participate in tournaments. I would have been an academic prodigy (because of recovered memory, not because of inherent brilliance) but they had me write my exams privately.

Even so, I was well-known even from a young age, although only within Trinidad. But no one thought I was more than a talented, bright youth. I made sure to know others who were high-achievers like me. None was immortal. And I wondered why our small population was so anomalous. My hypothesis is that there are unique genetic factors, plus cultural traits which are specific to our colonially-constructed societies, which could account for the unusual number of high achievers coming out of the Caribbean.

The genetic factors apply mostly to the African descendants who make up the major racial group in the region. Historians estimate that about twenty million Africans were brought to the Caribbean in the four hundred years of the slave trade. In his book
From Columbus to Castro
, Dr. Eric Williams estimated that about thirty percent of the human cargo died in the Middle Passage. Once on the islands, the mortality rate continued to be high. For every fifty-six Africans who left Africa for the West Indies, forty-four had died at the end of three years.

Now there has never been any other group of people in known history who went through such a harsh winnowing experience. The result was a culturally enforced process of natural selection which, rather like the Darwinian process among the lower species, ensured that only the healthiest and most intelligent individuals survived. We can see the results of this culling even today: it is not accidental that so many young black men and women have such naturally fine physiques. This may explain, though only partially, why our region has produced so many world champions in sports.

I say partially, because achievement also depends on what are called temperamental factors. East Indian descendants in the Caribbean have contributed to this statistical anomaly, but my experience in my ninth life tells me that cultural and psychological factors, rather than genetic selection, more account for this. Self-selected immigrant groups often progress far more quickly than the equivalent socioeconomic groups of the society to which they have emigrated. This may be partly because immigrants go to a new country with the specific intention of creating better lives for themselves and their children. So the feelings of alienation which I knew so well as Krishna Singh may have actually helped East Indian descendants to progress academically and economically.

Good genes, talent and ambition are necessary in order to excel. But they are not enough in themselves. One must love what one does, even if that love is based partly on a desire for acclaim. There must be a love for the thing-in-itself. Often, the seed of such love is pure escapism. And that is our cross here in the West Indies: that we want to escape that which has made us. Our history has created certain limitations, but it has just as surely given us certain advantages. I know this from personal experience. But I am not equipped to truly excel: immortality confers complacency.

Moreover, I have grown up as a true aristocrat on this island: in money, in complexion, in ethnicity, in gender, in education. There are few true aristocrats on the Caribbean, because true aristocracy imposes social obligations - what used to be called
noblesse oblige
. That is why I have written an account of my lives, and why I do the work I do. Perhaps I should have spent my time and energy figuring out a way to survive the Shadowman. Yet, with only hours to go before our final confrontation, I cannot say I regret anything I have done in this life. And, after what occurred in the previous five centuries, that is a notable accomplishment. I do not believe in wisdom, but perhaps it is important I leave behind a record of what I have learned.

I am, genetically and otherwise, a ‘true Trini'. My
cafe-au-lait
complexion, my tight cap of curly hair, my slanted green eyes mark a mixed ancestry that fits me into any company. Triniafricans see me as black, Trinindians as brown. And, since I am wealthy, Whites and Chinese also find me acceptable. But, because I grew up in the country, in Cap-de-Ville, I am more comfortable liming with working-class people. Emily bought an estate filled with trees – mainly cashew, guava, mango and teak – and I spent many of my boyhood days trying to catch the bushy-tailed squirrels that scurried along the thin branches of the eucalyptus trees and picking guavas and mangoes to make chow. Villagers often raided the cashew to make bush rum. At night, I would read by the light of a Coleman pressure lamp, which threw uneasy deep shadows in the corners of my bedroom. There was no electricity in our area and we got our water from a well with a hand-driven pump; my grandmother even cooked with a coal-pot until the late 60s. Our only luxury was a Ford Prefect motor-car. I was home-schooled, because both Emily and Adaku felt it would be better if they were in charge of my education. It was a very quiet life, literally – when soldiers passed in their trucks we could hear their voices singing clearly even though the road was several miles away.

We moved to Port of Spain in the 1970s, because the estate life had become too onerous for Emily (though she never said so and protested the move until we were ensconced in the city). It was still an imitation city then, with its 19th-century buildings and small dark rooms on the upper floor overlooking glass-fronted businesses at ground level. People still walked with a free-stepping rural stride, most of them dressed in some formality, even the poor in long-sleeved shirts or good frocks. The African descendants were now almost all of that tribe that Lloyd Best would christen Afro-Saxon, though the younger ones were already adopting the caps and leather jackets and other styles of Harlem – and, here and there, the Rastafarians had started to appear. When you went into the banks, there were mostly fair faces behind the counters, though that had begun to change after thousands of black people marched in 1970. Then came the oil boom and the city grew bigger buildings and the people who had lived in the city were pushed to the outskirts until now there are only a few old houses that are not businesses: and they will be taken over one day soon.

So I became a city boy in manner, though I remained a country boy at heart. And, although I have lived with electricity and running water and fast cars for three decades now, I am still in a perpetual state of surprise at the advantages of modern technology, though ultimately, to my five-hundred-year old mind, it seems only a thin disguise over the unchanged human heart. So I know within myself that I am a true West Indian – or, in other words, a man for all seasons. Living in the capital city, where divers people came to live or work or conduct business or just to look, convinced me that the Trinidadian has an inbuilt advantage over people in homogenous or larger societies. I felt that, with the several diverse cultures pressed into this island space, we can more readily discover what the essence of humanity is. J.A. Froude's infamous assertion about the Caribbean – ‘There are no people there in the true sense of the word, with a character and purpose of their own' – was and is meaningless. People are always people: you can dismiss a culture as invalid only if you have some ideal that no culture lives up to. And, as CLR James has pointed out, we have been a modern people since we were brought here: a construct of modern industry, with all the good and bad that implies. In short, it seems to me that the essence of a true Trini is that we contain the universality which is common to all people, but ours is buried less deeply below the weight of history and geography. Trouble is, we don't realize it.