Ancient of Days

by Michael Bishop

“Mais non, Monsieur.”

  “Why not?”

  “I had not heard it then. It was this recent sweeping-in of foreigners in quest of the cigouaves—the demon habilines—that reminded mon père of la petit terreur of twenty years ago. He told me the story but bade my discretion. It’s foolish to confess to outsiders the crimes of one’s own family. How do Americans say it? Hanging out the dirty laundry for the hoi polloi to gaze upon?”

  “But you’re telling us,” Caroline said.

  “You are nicer people than the pushy ones who came last year. Also, it’s a good story, and maybe nobody anymore will see the cigouaves again. So what harm?”

  “You think they’ve all been wiped out?”

  “Oui, Monsieur. A dozen deaths is no very formidable massacre—think of the thousands upon thousands whom Trujillo killed—but on this island it makes a type of genocide.” No longer smiling, he shook his head. “I had nothing to do with it. The sins of the father is not a doctrine I care to embrace.”

  “Do you consider Adam Montaraz a demon?”

  “Oh, no. He’s a great man, a great artist.” He touched the forward bulge of his beret. “Call upon me, please, if I may be of service to you during your sojourn here.”

  “But what’s your name?” Caroline asked.

  He looked over his shoulder at us. “Lieutenant Bacalou, Madame and Monsieur Loyd. Ask for me at our security headquarters in Rutherford’s Port.”

  Only later did we learn that bacalou is a Creole word for an evil spirit, a demon or a werewolf that feeds on human flesh. But our Tonton Macoute was making no attempt to hide his identity from us; rather, he was giving us the fearful nom de guerre by which his comrades and some of the common people under his jurisdiction already knew him. We also learned that cigouaves, his term for the island’s elusive habiline remnant, has its own superstitious connotations. It refers to another kind of lycanthropic demon, creatures with wolfish bodies and human heads whose singular method of attack results in the violent emasculation of their victims. Lovely: We’d come to an enchanted isle, a land possessed by black magic and primitive dread. The police were bogeys, and anyone who opposed them was an upright piece of meat animated by a malignant spirit. You exorcised the demon by killing its host’s body. Never mind that the rifle-toting exorcists, the Tontons Macoutes, housed malicious demons of their own. . . .

  RuthClaire met us in Rutherford’s Port. The city consists of ancient quays, government buildings and churches of a pre-revolutionary Spanish architectural style, a series of palm-lined public squares, a military barracks, and, still at sea level, dozens of private residences designed and built around 1900 by such masters of Gingerbread Gothic as Eugène Maximilien and Léon Mathon. These houses feature balconies, cupolas, and arabesque grillwork even more fanciful than the gimcracks decorating the old Montaraz house in Atlanta. (I was beginning to see why Adam had bought that house.) The yellow bricks used for walkways, foundations, and low decorative walls, RuthClaire told us, had arrived in Rutherford’s Port as ballast in ships coming for the island’s coffee, sisal, and cacao. The most famous house in the city belonged to the grandson of local architect Horacius Dimanche, who’d attended the Paris School of Architecture with Léon Mathon. Later, if we wished, RuthClaire would give us a tour of the Old City.

  Above the Old City, climbing the forested flank of the mountain behind it, were two distinct enclaves. On the western side: condominiums of steel and glass, charming old hotels and restaurants (survivors of a recent effort at urban renewal), and a monolithic terra-cotta business complex. On the eastern side: shacks with corrugated tin roofs, slatted or cardboard walls, and doors consisting of rusted scrap metal or ragged woolen blankets. Sunlight ricocheted among these hovels like a bouncing ball above the lyrics of an amelodic song. A sluice of mud ran down the slope of one precarious neighborhood from a broken pump supplying water for half of the hillside’s inhabitants. Shantytown’s only saving grace, in fact, was the open-air market at the foot of the mountain. It boasted colorful pennants, hundreds of booths with thatched roofs, and huge mounds of tropical fruits and vegetables. The bazaar abutted a section of the Old City, through which we rode in RuthClaire’s rented Jeep on our way up the coast to the secluded beach cottage where she and Adam were staying.

  “He didn’t come himself,” RuthClaire explained, “because he creates a lingering sensation wherever he goes.”

  “What about you?” Caroline said.

  “Me? I’m just another American tourist. That’s why I picked you up. Adam’s a local hero, and he’s tired of being mobbed.”

  “Don’t they follow you to your house?”

  RuthClaire lifted her eyebrows at me. “The people? No. They lack wheels. When we first got here, the press asked for interviews, but we declined. Then Haitian security put out word we weren’t to be bothered. Militiamen with rifles go up and down the road fronting our beach property, patrolling—one or two at a time, on their way back and forth between coastal villages. They’re not actually assigned to us.”

  “Tontons Macoutes?”

  “That’s not the approved term, Paul.”

  “We met one on the boat over from Cap-Haïtien. He used the term. He even took a certain pride in it.”

  “They do that, I guess. Instilling terror’s one of their collateral duties. They’ve been good to us, though.”

  Caroline said, “Our Tonton Macoute told us the habilines here are extinct, victims of a Duvalier purge in the early sixties.”

  “He’s right about the purge, wrong about extinct.”

  “How many remain? When will we get to see them?”

  RuthClaire laughed. “All in good time.” Still laughing, she swung the Jeep to the left to avoid hitting an old man wearing a straw hat and a polka-dot neckerchief of red and yellow. Behind the old man stumbled a donkey piled high with foraged firewood.

  “What about Blair?” I asked.

  “He’s here—another reason Adam didn’t come. He’s hosting the Great Man.”

  “With or without his latex mask?”

  Squinting at the unpaved, gully-riven coastal highway, RuthClaire sniggered. She was enjoying herself even as we traveled at ten miles per hour over terrain designed to inflict permanent kidney damage. She had not even asked about Tiny Paul’s ashes, and I was damned if I’d remind her that we had brought them.

  From the air, Montaraz looks like the three-fingered hand of a Disney cartoon character: Goofy, Mickey Mouse, or that bird Donald Duck. The hand is tilted in Manzanillo Bay so that the thumb points northeast across a hundred miles of ocean at Grand Turk Island. The middle finger shoots a Donald Duck on a long northwesterly diagonal at Miami Beach. (So far as I know, no one in Miami Beach ever takes umbrage.) Rutherford’s Port nestles in its harbor at the base of the thumb, closer to the Dominican coast than to the Haitian. Our destination was an arc of beach on the inside edge of the island’s forefinger. Had there been a road straight across the interior, our trip would have taken no time at all, but no such road existed. Also, Austin-Antilles limits traffic on its coffee plantations, and their access-ways, to company vehicles. Consequently, our switchbacking journey along the coast took nearly an hour and a half.

  The beach cottage was slightly more than a cottage—an adobe bungalow of beige stucco some three hundred yards from the road. A ridge of volcanic tuff and a phalanx of coconut palms and prickly-looking beach shrubs hid it from passersby. Whoever had stuccoed the cottage had adorned it with a low-level frieze of sea shells, shark’s teeth, sand dollars, and crab pincers. Red clay tiles shingled the roof, and an L-shaped screened-in porch clung to the building on two sides, one of them fronting the tiny inlet that locals called Caicos Bay. The sand here sparkled like refined sugar. RuthClaire and Adam had turned the porch overlooking this secluded strip of brightness into a studio. Easels, acrylics, canvases, and uncleaned brushes littered the shady L.

  Blair, when we arrived, was sleeping, recuperating from a three-legged flight from Zarakal and a vicio
us case of jet lag. He had reached Rutherford’s Port yesterday afternoon. Although still vigorous at seventy-one, he no longer found it possible to move through time zones without suffering painful temporal discontinuities. His advisors told him that in flying westward he was “gaining” hours, stockpiling minutes that he could later add to the biologically determined span of his life. But the Great Man reminded them that they always depleted this surplus by flying him home the same way he’d come. Why didn’t they ever think to route him back to Marakoi over the Pacific Ocean and the Indian subcontinent? Because jet lag hung on to him like an unshakable bout of intestinal flu, he felt that he was a time-traveler whose time was rapidly running out.

  Adam told this story after embracing us and showing us around the cottage. He recited most of it, in fact, while Caroline and I stood with him just outside Blair’s open bedroom door, looking in on the paleoanthropologist’s inert form and the sun-burnished tonsure of his massive head—like parents checking on a sick child. Blair snored while Adam talked: walrus-whistle arpeggios that overrode the lapping of the surf in Caicos Bay. We tiptoed off, and, in RuthClaire’s absence, I gave Adam Tiny Paul’s burial urn.

  “Thank you from my heart.” Adam carried the urn into his and RuthClaire’s bedroom and set it on an end table by their bed.

  Later, on the porch, Caroline and I had cold rum drinks with our host and hostess. We talked and talked, but never got too close to subjects that might be either emotionally painful or pertinent to our having come so many miles to see them. But that was the way we all wanted it on this first day, and we had a good time, anyway.

  The next day, Blair was better: gallant, gracious, and witty. He spoke in the orotund tones of a word-drunk Welsh poet—a cross, said Caroline, between Dylan Thomas and Captain Kangaroo. It was hardly his fault that his every utterance put me in mind of a rutting sea lion. That afternoon, Caroline got out her notebooks and her recording equipment. The interview that she had agreed to moderate for Popular Anthropology took place in the cottage’s living room. RuthClaire and I were present, but we kept our mouths shut, and the tape spools turned inside their cassettes with a relentless whirr that trembled in the tropical air.

  CAROLINE: It’s on, Dr. Blair. Why don’t you and Adam talk about whatever you like? I’ll stay out of the conversation—except for some followups and maybe some general explanatory comments. Okay?

  BLAIR: That’s fine. Adam, I’ve spent better than fifty years digging up the bones of your ancestors and your collateral relations. It’s a surprise, and a profound honor, to meet a representative of your species in the flesh.

  ADAM: Thank you.

  BLAIR: Once, of course, I doubted. Except for you, I presume, your species is extinct. That any of your people have survived to this day is nothing short of miraculous. I’d scarcely be less astonished, Adam, if I were to go out and find Homo habilis fossils in a stratum containing the remains of Neanderthals and early Cro-Magnons. Your intrusion into even that stratum would have struck me as utterly fantastic six months ago. I would’ve had to assume that a smart-alecky mischief-maker was perpetrating a hoax: an inept hoax. How much more amazing to meet a hominid of that otherwise extinct kind—a living, breathing, English-speaking exemplar of Early Pleistocene humanity.

  ADAM: Very much more, I would guess.

  BLAIR (laughing): You’d be right, too. Listen, Adam, I hardly know where to begin. I’m a digger, not a diva of the interviewing trade, and far better with a fossil brush than a microphone.

  CAROLINE: Your Peabody Award for Beginnings notwithstanding?

  BLAIR: Never mind that. It was scripted. Adam, let me begin by asking you how you feel about the taxonomic terminology by which the scientific community has designated your species.

  ADAM: Homo habilis?

  BLAIR: Exactly. How do you feel about that nomenclature?

  ADAM: About it, to be very candid, I have no feelings at all. Sticks and stones can break my bones, as the children sing, but names can never touch me. Hibber never touched me, either. It was to shrug off.

  BLAIR: Does it strike you as accurate, Homo habilis?

  ADAM: “Handyman”? Probably not. I am an artist, but around the house I am no good at all. Miss RuthClaire can vouch for my great unhandiness in household matters. Dripping faucets confound me.

  BLAIR: You’re a living fossil with your own fair share of funny bones, aren’t you? That’s quite a droll observation, but it’s not what I’m angling for, Adam. I wonder how you’d feel about adopting a somewhat different nomenclature. Homo zarakalensis, to be precise. I ask because it’s an unwritten tenet of contemporary civilization that free nations and free peoples have the right of self-determination when it comes to the matter of what they wish to be called. Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, for instance; and in the United States, fairly recently, most thinking Afro-Americans determined that they would rather be called blacks than Negroes. Do you see what I’m suggesting, Adam? Extinct species can’t tell us what they would like to be called. Living species, provided of course they’re human, do have that important option.

  CAROLINE: Excuse me, Dr. Blair. Isn’t Homo zarakalensis a term you coined two years ago for a hominid skull that one of your Kikembu assistants found in the Lake Kiboko digs?

  BLAIR: Yes, it is. It means “Zarakali Man.”

  CAROLINE: But there’s controversy over that designation. Your skull appears similar to those of the habiline specimens unearthed by the Leakeys at Koobi Fora in Kenya. Richard Leakey, in fact, claims they’re identical.

  BLAIR: That may be. We paleoanthropologists are aggressively territorial. What I’ve always stressed, however, is that my discovery is somewhat older—perhaps by as much as a half million years—than the Leakey “habilines.” In other words, this distinctive hominid probably originated in what is today Zarakal and only later migrated into what is today Kenya. For that reason, if for no other, it ought to be called Zarakali Man.

  CAROLINE: But habilis is altogether neutral in regard to the hominid’s place of origin. It suggests the creature’s tool-making ability. Is it fair to discard that bit of preexisting descriptive nomenclature for a term that has only your own egotistical chauvinism to recommend it?

  BLAIR (chuckling benignantly): Well, that’s what I’m trying to ask Adam. You see, it’s his place to decide. Just as American blacks decided they wished to be called blacks, Adam ought to be the sole authority in this matter. It directly affects only him. I’m not going to throw a tantrum if he opts to go with habilis. He’s the one who’ll have to answer to Handyman, Handyman, Handyman.

  CAROLINE: Dr. Blair, it seems to me—

  BLAIR: For someone who was going to let Adam and me converse, young lady, you’re becoming a fair threat to monopolize our talk.

  CAROLINE (forthrightly): Forgive me.

  BLAIR: Now, then, Adam. Which do you prefer? Homo habilis—Handyman, you know. Or Homo zarakalensis? Your word, I have a strong hunch, will be the paleoanthropological community’s command.

  ADAM: Is not Homo sapiens sapiens within my humble purview? I’m not a handy person, and never in my life have I set foot in Zarakal.

  BLAIR: Homo sapiens sapiens?

  ADAM: Mais oui. With Miss RuthClaire’s tender help, I fathered a human child. And thanks to the surgeons at Emory, I speak even as you do, sir. Also, I have many perplexing spiritual longings and a freshly emergent concept of God. Considered in these lights, am I not a twentieth-century human being whose archaic bone structure is irrelevant to his dignity and worth?

  BLAIR: But many species are interfertile, Adam. And your ability to speak is an acquired characteristic. A surgically acquired characteristic. To assign yourself to a species classification on that account is to fall prey to insidious Lamarckian error. Please, Adam, think.

  CAROLINE: He’s thought, sir. He wants to be called Homo sapiens sapiens. You said you wouldn’t quibble with him.

  ADAM: In truth, I’d prefer to be called Adam. Adam Montaraz.

  CAROLINE:
That’s fine with me. How about you, Dr. Blair?

  BLAIR: I find it perfectly acceptable. But let’s get on with this. We’ve many important things to talk about.

  (At this point, the participants took a short break. Caroline checked her recorder. Then the conversation resumed.)

  BLAIR: I’m afraid I’ve been doing all the talking, Adam. What I’d like to know, of course, is how you were raised, what you remember of your childhood and youth, and whether any of your people, be they called habilines or Homo sapiens, still exist on this island. Would you mind addressing those questions?

  ADAM: Very happy to. The first two are more difficult to answer than the last one, however. I can only do my best.

  BLAIR: No one asks more of you, Adam. Begin with the easiest of the three and then proceed as you like.

  ADAM: Miss RuthClaire told me once of the Yahi Indian called Ishi, about whom Theodora Kroeber wrote eloquently. Ishi was the last of his tribe in the state of California. Like Ishi, I am the last of my tribe—my species, you would say—on the island of Montaraz. In the entire great world, too, I fear.

  (I glanced at RuthClaire. Her letter, of course, directly contradicted Adam’s testimony. Ostensibly, after all, I had come to Montaraz to see, evaluate, and perhaps represent the work of an unspecified number of habiline artists. Was Adam lying to Blair, or had RuthClaire lied to us to give us a compelling reason to come? Wearing a sheepish grin, she shrugged and looked away.)

  BLAIR: What happened to your people?

  ADAM: Exterminated. Persecuted, hunted, killed. Those who escaped the Duvalier pogrom—a very few—were scattered on the winds of politics and commerce. Off the coast of Cuba, five years ago, two of my people died at the hands of a man greatly more animalish than we. One who died was my brother. These deaths ended all our desperate struggles to prevail in a world such as this. I was then the last one of us all.