Ancient of Days

by Michael Bishop

  “Then persuade him to be your valet,” Adam said. “You can both resign from the Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale. I will use my influence to help you do so. Your lives as an artist and his traveling secretary will enrich you beyond telling—in a spiritual, as well as a monetary, sense.” Adam added that they would both be able to take great private satisfaction from the knowledge that they’d delayed, if not forever prevented, the commercial despoilment of the caves.

  After pondering a moment, Bacalou said, “I dislike the name Francoise Fauver. It has, I think, the ring of phoniness.”

  “What do you prefer?” Adam said.

  “Why not my own? My real name, I mean, not my nom de guerre.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Marcel Sam,” the lieutenant said. “I have not used it since I was a boy, but it’s a real name, not an invention, and pretty too, ne pas?” He looked at Caroline. “An artiste should have a pretty name.”

  “Very well,” Adam said. “Marcel Sam it is.”

  But Marcel Sam’s happiness in this solution began to evaporate. He struck his forehead with an open palm. “Philomé is married. He has seven children. It’s not going to be easy for him to resign and become a traveling valet.”

  “Then kill him,” I said impatiently, half meaning it. “Frame him as a Castroite.”

  Adam shook his head. “Nothing as desperate as that is necessary. We will think of something, Monsieur Sam.”

  And, in fact, we did. We went back down to Prix-des-Yeux with the erstwhile Lieutenant Bacalou in our pocket and his partner persuaded that what he had just seen was a subterranean annex to the Duvalier family’s secret banking and warehousing system, whose existence on Montaraz he dare not bruit about. He could talk of it only at peril to his wife and seven children. For the time being, at least, Bobo, too, was in our pocket, a dupe of a story too plausible to dismiss as fantasy.

  *

  The unpleasant banal truth is that every story of individual consciousness—except perhaps God’s—concludes with a death. Toussaint was dead. What had I really known about the little man? Almost nothing. Of the five surviving habilines who’d tried to make a community-in-hiding on Pointe d’Inagua, Toussaint had made the least impression on me. Hector, Erzulie, Dégrasse, and Alberoi all had physical handicaps or personality quirks that quickened them in my affection and my memory. By contrast, Toussaint was a cipher, a pot-bellied, middle-aged little man with no obvious talents and no ingratiating idiosyncrasies. (He could paint, Adam assured me, but June was not his month to do so.) Back in Prix-des-Yeux, then, it surprised me to find that RuthClaire had wrapped Toussaint’s bullet-riddled body in clean linen and knelt beside him in the tonnelle to stroke his cold brow and cry a little over him. To me of scarcely more consequence than someone’s pet dog, to RuthClaire this dead habiline had been a person of sacred worth. His private story had ended, but it continued in the impact, whether forceful or modest, that he had had on others.

  A banal truth. A banal consolation.

  Like enemies observing a holiday cease-fire, the Tontons Macoutes and our own party cooperated in giving Toussaint a funeral and burial. Mud and mire impeded our labors, but at last we got him into the ground so that an evil houngan or bocor could not resurrect him as a zombie. Alberoi and Dégrasse, who had fled earlier, did not return to help us, but I had the feeling that, from some hidden vantage, they were watching and carefully evaluating our methods.

  Lieutenant Bacalou assured his fellow volontaires—Philomé, Charlemagne, and Jean-Gérard—that they had no charges under which to hold Toussaint’s companions. He assured Adam that for our promise not to report the unfortunate shooting of the habiline (who, in any case, had no certifiable status on the island), he would not mention, in his mandatory summary of tonight’s events, the discovery of Prix-des-Yeux. Officially, then, the incident had never happened. We all depended on one another to keep the lid on this tragic collision of purposes and personalities.

  Lieutenant Bacalou led his men down the mountain ahead of us. Alone again, our own party puttered back and forth between the houngfor and the huts trying to tidy up after the rain. We were going back to the Caicos Bay beach cottage—all of us but Hector and Erzulie—and I gave myself the task of gathering the paintings of “Francoise Fauver,” to be known henceforth as Marcel Sam. I rolled each canvas as tightly as I could, removing from their frames those that were stretched taut and tacked down. I was inserting these paintings into my backpack when Brian Nollinger came into the shanty and wordlessly began to help me. My stomach did a queasy flip-flop.

  After a while, he said, “Mr. Loyd?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What are you going to do with all your photos? Of the caves and so forth.”

  I wanted to reply, What the hell’s it to you?—but instead said, “File them until the last of Les Gens has died.” I looked him in the eye. “I don’t intend to publish them.”

  “Alberoi’s younger than you, Mr. Loyd. He could outlive you. He could outlive you by a great many years.”

  “I hope he does.”

  In the muggy damp of the hut, poor Brian looked down. The rolled painting in his hands was trembling.

  “You’re afraid he might outlive you, too, aren’t you?” I said. “Well, that’s a possibility I’ve got my fingers crossed for.”

  “I was going to do an ethnography of this wretched place. I wasn’t going to reveal its location, just record the lifestyle of these last habilines under oppressive conditions: a rigorous scientific study of a lost race of only five individuals. It would have been good, Mr. Loyd. It would have been an unparalleled—an unduplicatable—piece of work.”

  “Buck up. You’ve still got your coffee-drying platforms to build.”

  “The stupid Tontons Macoutes ruined everything. They barged in, shot Toussaint, and now, to preserve the fiction that he never existed, we’re all having to abandon Prix-des-Yeux. Doesn’t that offend you?”

  “Not half so much as the death of Toussaint.” (A noble sentiment. Had I not seen RuthClaire crying over him, though, I might never have thought to utter it.)

  “They ought to be exposed and made to pay for their arrogance and cruelty.”

  “Exposing the macoutes means exposing the habilines, but that’s what you want, isn’t it? Once the world knows that the Rutherford Remnant is real, you can publish your I-was-there-when-they-victimized-Toussaint memoirs without a twinge of conscience.”

  Brian sighed. “You’re really going to stick those photos in a drawer somewhere?”

  “Why not? Did you want them to illustrate your paper? Text by Brian Nolo Contendere, pictures by Judas Loyd?” I chuckled. “Of course, you could leave my name out altogether. There’s precedent, isn’t there? You once took credit in the Atlanta papers for a photo of mine.”

  “I meant to do you a favor. I was trying to keep your name out of a controversy that might’ve—”

  “Do me another favor and shut up.”

  He shut up. The damp canvas backpack held as many rolled paintings as I could stuff into it. To get those still remaining in the homemade filing cabinet, we would have to make a second trip. I hoisted the pack, squared it across my shoulders, and bounced it a couple of times to make sure I could carry it.

  “Do you remember when RuthClaire told you that murder wasn’t in her behavioral armory, Brian Old Boy?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Shut up. Well, it may be in mine. It’s my bewildered belief that if you try to make capital of what you’ve seen here by publishing anything, down to and including a squib in Reader’s Digest, I’ll go to great pains to find you and do you malicious bodily harm. You’re the only person in God’s creation I feel that way about, Brian, but the down-and-dirty grunginess of that feeling just can’t be gainsaid or whitewashed. Believe me, Brian, I’d do it.”

  “Bullshit,” he said, but the bleakness in his eyes told me I’d really scared him.

  “I’m talking about the States. Here i
n Montaraz, it’s Lieutenant Bacalou you’ll have to be wary of. If you make any noises about the habilines while still a guest of Baby Doc, expect a late-night knock. Expect the key in your motor scooter’s ignition to trigger a bomb. Expect your next shower to greatly gratify the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock.”

  “You’re all talk, Loyd.”

  “Maybe, but Bacalou, well, Lieutenant Bacalou you can’t write off so easily. He knows who you are, and he’s bayoneted babies for breakfast. He’s a butcher, a trained assassin. Just because you think I might hesitate to cut your liver out, don’t sell Bacalou short. That’d be a terrible, terrible error.”

  “Don’t you care what light Adam’s people can shed on our species’ history?”

  “I’m more concerned that we let Adam’s people—Les Gens, thank you—live out their own histories in peace. I’m more concerned those caves up there remain a habiline secret until there ain’t no more habilines to keep it.” I looked him square in the eye again. “What about you, Dr. Nollinger?”

  He took off his wire-rimmed glasses and rubbed their lenses on one of the front pockets of his bush shorts. “Okay.”

  “Okay what?”

  “Okay, okay, okay!” he sang in annoyance. “I’ll lock everything I know in a vault in the back of my brain and let it molder there until the Montarazes relent and let me bring it out again. Not you, Mr. Loyd, the Montarazes. You’re hardly even a walk-on in this.” He put his glasses back on. Distractedly, he pulled an original Fauver/Sam from the crate, rolled it, and began tapping it lightly but obsessively on the cabinet’s edge. A voodooist coaxing Arada-Dahomey rhythms from some arrhythmic recess of his soul. I grabbed his wrist to make him stop.

  “There’s one thing about you I’ll never understand,” I said.

  His expression was neutral. I could explain myself or not explain myself—it made no difference to him.

  “I’ll never understand what Caroline saw in you.”

  “You’re of the wrong generation,” he said indifferently. “And you really don’t get people, anyway.”

  I let go of his wrist and stalked out of the hut, my legs as flimsy as licorice braids. My backpack contained more than a major portion of the habilines’ output in acrylics: the weight of everything that had happened. I needed help getting down the mountain, but I needed none falling asleep on the featherbed in the guestroom of Adam and RuthClaire’s cottage on Caicos Bay. The white noise of the surf ebbed and flowed through my sleep like the hydrogen hiss interconnecting the myriad stars . . . .

  The following evening, Adam and I were sitting on the L-shaped porch of his cottage, darkness thickening around us. On the beach, visible as lithe silhouettes, RuthClaire and Caroline were building a bonfire. They planned to bake yams deep in the accumulating coals and barbecue several varieties of fish on a smutty grill that RuthClaire had found in the storage shed. Adam and I were supposed to prepare exotic tropical drinks, but the women—who had chosen bonfire-building over tending bar—were gathering driftwood and poking at the feeble flames licking up through the scrap lumber that we had helped them drag down there earlier. It would be a while before we ate, but no matter, for in our anticipation lay much of our pleasure.

  Adam said, “Alberoi and Dégrasse joined Hector and Erzulie in the caves today. They’re all well—the last of Les Gens, the last of my people.”

  I said nothing. Prix-des-Yeux was going to have to be abandoned and torn down. Maybe we had dealt effectively enough with Bacalou and Bobo in delaying the disclosure of the caves’ existence—but, with their own eyes, the other two macoutes had seen the habilines, too. Chances were good that they’d tattle. Rumors would spread, and Pointe d’Inagua would become a popular vacation site, a mecca for rock hounds and hikers and amateur naturalists.

  Shifting in his rattan chair, Adam said, “Agarou carried you to revelation? You saw God?”

  “I saw something. The prehistoric creature who gave your ancestors a divine validation of their survival struggles. It didn’t look particularly holy, Adam. It was a kind of monster, in fact.”

  “All gods, Mister Paul, are monsters in human eyes. That is to say nothing very terrible against it.”

  “It looked something like a hyena or a dog. Its head did, anyway.”

  Adam smiled. “I know. With a hominid body, yes? What you saw was the avatar of God most meaningful to every prehistoric specimen of the human family—by some reckonings, the Master of the Hunt. It lived in the collective unconscious of Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis, and early Homo sapiens. It lives in many so-called primitive peoples even today. It ties the human to the divine and the divine to the animal—so that they are interconnected not just by Mind, but also by a unifying perception of the Sacred.”

  “I saw the Sacred?”

  “Yes. A projection of the God Beyond Time into the evolutionary aesthetic of his creation. You saw meaning, Mister Paul, and spoke in your possession to a messenger from its source.”

  “Not Buddha or Jesus but the Master of the Hunt?”

  Adam—a shadow in the indigo twilight—lifted both hands in an unsettling draw-your-own-conclusions gesture.

  I leaned toward him in my rocker. “Why didn’t bells go off, Adam? Why didn’t the sky open up and light pour through? Why didn’t I feel that I could float eight feet off the floor of the cave? I mean, if that was a religious revelation, Adam, I prefer falling in love. With falling in love you get Roman candles and light-headedness and invisible champagne bubbles. With that business in the caves, all I got was horror-movie special effects and a theological lecture, and a lingering headache. How can I put any credence in a revelation like that?”

  “Did you learn anything that you did not know before?”

  “I was told some things I didn’t know before. Why?”

  “Because if you didn’t know them before, or hadn’t been told them before, well, then, you would be foolish to conclude that what you experienced was nothing but your own subconscious talking. Something outside you was putting in its two cents of worth.”

  “I don’t feel any different than I did two days ago. I’m the same materialistic rational pagan.”

  “Who has been ridden by the vaudun loa of our African ancestors. Who has broken through one of God’s masks to talk to him face to face.”

  I shivered. “Only in a manner of speaking.”

  “It will come gradually, Mister Paul. Your bells will sound like they’re ringing at the bottom of the sea. Your fireworks will unfold in big slow-motion umbrellas. You will float only at the most modest, and so nearly imperceptible, heights. But it will come, and each instance of it will have its own design, and the many individual designs will compose an encompassing pattern, and that pattern will have its ground in the Mind and Megapattern of God.”

  “You sound like a crackpot Indian guru, Adam.”

  “Then I’ll shut up. Right now. Better to think about eating—” he gestured at the beach— “than get lost in the metaphysics of another.”

  We sat in silence watching our wives pull coals into a circle of stones upon which they would soon place the greasy grill rack. Paul and Caroline, Adam and Ruthie Cee. Just another pair of sophisticated fun couples partying in a secluded cove on Montaraz. The bonfire ten feet away from their makeshift barbecue pit leapt like the funeral pyre of a Roman emperor. Caroline’s and RuthClaire’s shoulders gleamed in its roaring blaze as if made of bronze. They tonged strips of fileted fish out of a metal cooler onto the grill rack. They took turns basting each strip with the sauce that I had made. I watched them for a long time.

  Finally, RuthClaire stood and shouted, “It’s nearly time to eat!”

  Adam and I carried two pitchers of iced daiquiris to the beach, and, sitting on the sand at a remove from the bonfire, we ate and drank—somewhat solemnly, considering the late hour and the formidable size of our appetites and thirsts. Tomorrow, Caroline and I would fly back to Miami from Cap-Haïtien. That knowledge may have contributed to our solemnity,
but, of course, a lot of it had to do with Toussaint’s death, the upheaval at Prix-des-Yeux, and the uncertainty of our own several futures. I found myself thinking forlorn thoughts about Livia George, Paradise Farm, and the West Bank. To keep from getting maudlin, I limited myself to three small lime daiquiris in a ceramic coffee mug. In fact, I did everything in threes—three strips of fish, three baked yams, and three avowals of either eternal love (that one for Caroline) or eternal friendship (one for RuthClaire, one for Adam) for my companions on the beach.

  The bonfire started to die.

  RuthClaire said, “We’ve got to build it up again,” pulled herself to her feet, and trudged up the sand toward the cottage. Halfway there, she turned and beckoned to us with a tipsy wave. “C’mon, you guise! He’p me get some stuff fer th’ fire!” Adam, Caroline, and I struggled up and followed her on her drunken anabasis.

  Over the next hour or so, we hauled from their storage niches inside the cottage all the paintings in RuthClaire’s series Souls. Then we tossed each canvas, whether loose or affixed to a stretching frame, right into the crackling pyre. They burned well. In fact, in the fire they had the kind of stunning luminous beauty that they’d had for me on only one other occasion—a memorable occasion in the upstairs studio at Paradise Farm. Soon, though, they scrolled and blackened and turned to oozy char. It amazed me that we were abetting RuthClaire in this activity—Adam as eagerly as anyone else—and yet I asked no questions until we’d flung the last painting in.

  “You destroyed them because they weren’t popular, is that it?”