Ancient of Days

by Michael Bishop

  In between, deeper into the mountain, these same artists and their descendants had painted awesome murals synopsizing their people’s years on the savannah, their uneasy relationships with Homo erectus and Homo sapiens, their furtive exile in the foothills of Lolitabu, the dwindling of their numbers during this protracted time, the capture of their surviving remnant by Kikembu warriors, their humiliation and sale in the slave market of Zanzibar, their painful sea voyage from the Island of Cloves to the Isle of Coffee and Cacao, their years of labor on the Rutherfords’ plantations, and their near-extermination by the Tontons Macoutes of Papa Doc Duvalier in the early 1960s.

  These sprawling, almost phosphorescent murals took our breath away. Moreover, in front of each one stood a rock carving that subtly glossed the mural’s principal theme. Among these statues were a droll granite hippopotamus, a dying australopithecine, and a family of cave bats hanging upside down. I thought Brian would squeeze his eyeballs out of his sockets examining these works. Adam kept reminding him to stop touching the statuary and the paintings, particularly the murals, for too much touching would alter or deface them. Although the habilines’ pigments had strong color fastness, and although their artists had applied them only to the most absorbent rock faces, the preservation of this subterranean wonder still depended on its visitors’ respectful manners.

  “You can’t continue to keep this secret!” Brian’s words bounced off a stagger of receding walls.

  “We have to,” RuthClaire said. “To save it.”

  “But Mr. Loyd’s taking pictures. Do you believe that after they’re published, another plague of professional schemers won’t swoop down on Montaraz?”

  Adam said, “But these pictures, he won’t be publishing.”

  “Then why am I taking them?”

  “As a record,” Adam said. “If anything should destroy this magnificence, whether vandals, war, or volcanic eruption.”

  Caroline asked what photos, of what art, I would be allowed to publish or to carry to gallery owners in my agent’s portfolio. Adam replied that he was not asking me to represent the dead habiline cave artists, but instead Erzulie, Hector, Toussaint, Dégrasse, and Alberoi. It was their work that I’d come to photograph for business purposes, not the paintings and statuary now surrounding and thoroughly overawing us. I would also be given the chance to take some of their work back to Atlanta with us. Granted, I was presently taking celluloid inventory of these refrigerated basilica naves, but that was only a sidelight—an important one—of Caroline’s and my voyage to Montaraz. We had come to help the living rather than the dead. The dead were beyond our help, if not our memory and our gratitude.

  “Where are Erzulie’s and the others’ paintings?” Caroline asked.

  “In Prix-des-Yeux,” Adam said. “Mister Paul could have photographed them this morning, but we became involved in our free election for a species name. It’s best to visit caves early in the day so that nightfall does not catch us belowground. When we get back, you can see the paintings in Erzulie’s hut.”

  “How could they compare to these?” Brian made a sweeping gesture.

  “Why should they?” RuthClaire said. “They’re altogether different.”

  “Not really,” Adam said. “Hector and Erzulie did some of the cave paintings—farther on—of the Duvalier persecution: bogeymen with rifles, our young ones thrown from cliffs, and so forth.”

  “I understand their doing so,” Brian said. “Hector and Erzulie were alive during that very bad time. But this stuff—” he pointed at a two-dimensional scene of a habiline hunting party chasing a pack of jackals off a kill—“well, none of the Rutherford Remnant could have experienced it. None of your cave painters ever lived in Africa. Even more obvious is the fact that none of them lived there two million years ago.”

  “Very true,” Adam said.

  “So how did they render the entire history of their people in this unbelievably glorious way?”

  “Vaudun,” RuthClaire said.

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Voodoo and revelation,” RuthClaire told Brian. “All the way back in the 1870s, local houngans and mambos began putting Les Gens in touch with their species’ collective unconscious. Adam figures that the earliest of these paintings date from then. Later, some of the habilines became priests or priestesses themselves. Erzulie’s a current example. In a less thoroughgoing way, so’s my Adam. He always dresses like Papa Guedé—Baron Samedi, if you prefer—when he comes up here, to insure a sympathetic continuity between the dead habilines of Africa and those on Montaraz who spiritually rediscovered them through voodoo.”

  “That’s what Adam was doing last night,” I said. “What Adam and Erzulie were doing, I mean. With the snake.”

  “Exactly,” RuthClaire said. “Getting in touch with their habiline past. And a trip through these caves can do the same in a way that brings all the rite’s participants closer together. The first cave painters probably began their work believing it would help their people survive by educating and unifying them. It would give them a sense of the sacred. Sadly, the twentieth century has been pretty efficient at destroying the sacred. And how could the cave painters know that a man named Papa Doc would turn into their Stalin, their Hitler, their Pol Pot? They’d never heard of any of these butchers.”

  “Voodoo and revelation,” Brian said. “What did you mean by revelation?”

  Adam’s lamp lit him from beneath, giving him the look of a disembodied floating head. “That God revealed himself to early Homo habilis as he later revealed himself to the Hebrews. Even as we approach extinction, we know we were favored by the earliest manifestation of God to a hominid species yet on record—even if it is on record only with us. We know we have our own Christ.”

  “Your own Christ?”

  “Not a prehistoric Jesus of Nazareth,” Adam told Brian. “But God in a form of flesh that any habiline would regard as holy: our own Christ.”

  Somehow, our sensoriums overloaded with data, we groped our way to the surface and then back down the mountain to Prix-des-Yeux. Hector remained behind in the pitch-black darkness of the caves. He, after all, was their curator.

  In the village, Adam took Caroline and me into the hut that Alberoi was sharing with Erzulie. Its interior was larger than its haphazard outer walls and carpentering had led me to think possible. Alberoi knelt toward the rear of the shanty beneath a hole in the roof through which fell a dusty column of sunlight. Was he sick? I thought for a moment that a stomach cramp had taken him, that he had assumed this hangdog posture to vomit—but then I realized that he was hovering over a small sheet of canvas tacked to a piece of plywood lying flat on the floor. With the edge of a rusted spoon, he applied paint to the canvas: the artist in his studio. Indeed, the hole in the roof served him as a skylight. A rain-warped hatch cover rested on one end of this opening, waiting for the hut’s occupant to grab its handle and slide it into place. In the event of rain, that act would offer a bit of protection. Mostly, though, it would plunge the hut’s interior into leaky gloom.

  Speaking hesitant but well-accented French, Adam told Alberoi that we’d come to see his and the others’ paintings. The habiline backed off his canvas and squatted with his spine to the wall and his eyes cutting between RuthClaire and me. He still had his spoon. The pigment on it was a crimson acrylic, as if he had been sneaking tastes from a forbidden bowl of strawberry Jell-O: a naughty boy caught red-handed. We stepped around the room’s clutter—including a large crate resting on a foundation of bricks, a strip of oilcloth covering it—to see what Alberoi had been painting. Fortunately, he was fairly far along in the work, and I could tell a good deal about his talent.

  He had talent. The painting was a colorful market scene in the “naive” style that had dominated David Blau’s Haitian exhibit at Abraxas: accessible, representational art. Its human figures had an affinity with the human-habiline figures on the walls of Hector’s caves, but its setting was modern. I recognized the market as the market in Rut
herford’s Port. Vegetable stalls, milling people in bright clothes, a pair of buses with baskets tied to their roofs, groups of native musicians soliciting money from tourists. What drew my eye faster than these elements, however, was the grinning, dawdling giraffe in the midst of the crowd, none of whose members regarded its presence as a cause for either alarm or celebration. The giraffe belonged to the scene as surely as did the buses or the women in market garb. Delighted, Adam actually laughed aloud.

  “Very good, Alberoi. Excellent.”

  “A giraffe?” Caroline said.

  “He knows my secret,” Adam said, as if that explained anything. “Do you think you could sell a painting like this, Mister Paul?”

  “Sure. With no trouble at all.”

  “Then come see the others.” He led me to the crate up on bricks—like a teenager’s engineless jalopy, I thought—and when we were out of his way, Alberoi crept back to his painting, laid the spoon aside, and took up a fine-tipped brush from a tray of acrylics. With this brush, he stippled in the mountain shrubbery behind the market. His concentration was intense. The rest of us might as well have been in Miami Beach.

  Adam lifted the oilcloth covering the crate, which thin plywood dividers sectioned into a dozen compartments. Its cover off, the crate looked like a makeshift filing cabinet. Each compartment held canvases, some rolled, some stretched taut on narrow frames. We pulled the paintings from the crate and examined them. Almost all were in the bright naive style of the market scene that Alberoi was finishing. Several were portraits—or self-portraits—of Prix-des-Yeux people, the best being those of Erzulie and Dégrasse, as if the artists preferred the female countenance to the male. Three or four of the paintings, in stark contrast to the majority, radiated a gray or muddy-blue pessimism rather than a gaudy Caribbean joy, but their subjects were Tontons Macoutes or demons from local voodoo lore. Flipping past these, I saw several moderately realistic renderings of such loa as Damballa, Petro Simbi, and Ogou Achade, who is famous for being able to drink a great deal without becoming drunk. Unlike the demons, the loa were presented positively—in citrus-fruit colors and broad but enigmatic smiles. I liked what I saw.

  “Am I supposed to photograph these?” I asked Adam.

  “Only if you wish. Take a few with you, if you like, champion them about, and sell them for modest prices. Keep your commission and send the rest to RuthClaire and me. We can ship others to you, if your markets will bear such an influx.”

  “I’ll take ten or twelve,” I said. “It’s probably best to see what sorts of interest they’ll generate before taking the lot.”

  “You don’t want all of them?” Caroline asked me. “You’ll sell every habiline painting, or toenail clipping, entrusted to you.”

  “But he won’t let me identify them as habiline artifacts.”

  Caroline looked at Adam. “No? That’s self-defeating.”

  “I am not trying to mop up, Miss Caroline, only to preserve what’s preservable and to pay for the privilege as we go.”

  I had noticed an unusual, although perhaps not surprising, fact about all the paintings in the crate. “Adam, not one of these is signed. What names do you want to give the artists? I need names for gallery owners and department-store buyers.”

  “Not names, Mister Paul. One name.”

  I glanced at Alberoi. “He didn’t do all of these, did he? Didn’t you say Erzulie painted too? And all the others, for that matter?”

  “Erzulie does. Likewise the others. But only one name is necessary for all the paintings, don’t you think? Regard them closely.”

  I did as Adam asked. Caroline helped me compare. The canvases, no matter their subjects, did seem the work of a single hand. Brush strokes, color choices, draftsmanship, compositional techniques, overlay patterns—all these telltale criteria suggested but one artist. Even the bleak portraits of the Tontons Macoutes and the Arada-Dahomey demons differed from the other paintings only in color choice, and it was hard to think of many artists who did not sometimes vary their palettes to imply the full spectrum of human feelings. (RuthClaire had stayed with murky pastels for the Souls series, of course, but that series composed only a small fraction of her total output.) So, yes, it would make some sense, and simplify my marketing approach, to offer these paintings to prospective buyers as the work of a solitary talented naif.

  “How did they manage this? It’s uncanny, Adam.”

  “There is nothing to manage. It happens. In this creative endeavor, at least, the feelings of one are the others’ feelings; also, the talents. Because art requires leisure, they take turns at painting. They work turn by turn, by months. This is Alberoi’s month. Next, Dégrasse’s again. And so on. While the artist does art, the others tend their cassava patches, forage for firewood, or barter with trustworthy islanders for food items and such. It works very well. No one becomes disgruntled.”

  Caroline said, “The canvases. The paints. Where do they get them?”

  “Of late, RuthClaire and I have supplied them, but before we came, Erzulie went to Rutherford’s Port for them. She took carven figures of rosewood or mahogany to trade in the art shop next to Le Centre d’Art near the International Hotel. It was her idea. She saw primitive paintings like these—not as good, really—selling to tourists in the bazaars. This crate holds three years’ work—not quite, though, because Erzulie has sold some of these paintings already. To guess who may have them is impossible.”

  “Used-car dealers from Ohio,” Caroline said. “Not knowing what they have, they hang them in their dens next to big paintings of Elvis on black velvet.”

  “Maybe,” Adam said. “I don’t know.”

  I asked him what name he favored for our solitary naif. Would it be wrong to use his? Adam rejected this idea. He was not ashamed to sign these canvases, but no one who knew his own paintings would believe that he’d done these, too. The styles diverged too widely. He worked with the advantage, and disadvantage, of a crystallized ego, whereas Alberoi and the others painted from the soft core of their unspoken common experience, from a collective unconscious too rubbery for any “I” ever to get a firm grip on it.

  “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,” RuthClai
re 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.”