Slave Old Man

by Patrick Chamoiseau

  Everybody winds up hating him. Then venerating him. Then hating him again. Then forgetting him. Then wondering how old he is. Then treating him the way one treats wretches from whom one no longer expects anything. With a somewhat puzzled respect, a neutral and slightly indifferent kindness. Thanks to this treatment, he, too, surely persuades himself that he has worn out his time. And although he gets used to this idea, it doesn’t change his behavior one bit.

  The only sign that this is all a mistake is that, one morning, on awakening, he does not answer the call. No one yelled out his name, of course, but his hand is missing in certain places where no problem usually occurs. A mule no one can calm down. Then a boiler that macaye, acts-up, when no poking around can find the cause. Then a sugar overheat that exhales toward the Great House the novel smell of singed caramel. Other annoying events leave everyone at a perplexing loss. Rats trotting in broad daylight all-round the cabins. Bêtes-longues flowing from the canebrakes, their fangs spurting with anxiety toward the sky. Mantou-mangrove-crabs erupting from muddy dormancy to hang in clusters from the branches of orange trees. And green breadfruits falling unseasonably out of reason, denting the ground without cracking open. And gangan-mangrove-cuckoos, squawking boisterously over dead springs that suddenly start sobbing. Work in the fields—the end of the cane cutting—becomes more difficult. The commandeurs, having to call out more than usual, take a notion to use the whips. The slaves fear entering the fields where so many Bêtes-longues are going crazy. On the trails, they tread on sheets of red land crabs suffused with an odor of sulfur and mint. And more than one soul is scared to find on his tongue the vieux-goût nastiness of wormwood.

  The Master has suspended his inspection tour: his Arabian horse rears with each step over invisible swarmings. Trying to understand what is happening, the Master must dismount and tramp through cane fields, then around the buildings of the Plantation. He goes, eyes wide and staring, without a word to say. His wickedness has so organized the world around him that the current derangement strands him in a highly indignant stupor. Nothing has changed but everything is slipping sideways: a kind of chemical decomposition, impalpable but major.

  A trade-wind breeze has stirred up some dust. It robes the world in an anxious grayness accentuated by the sun’s shackles. The Master proceeds, turns sharply, peers carefully around him, merely an attentive observer, barking no orders to anyone. He seeks the essential cause of this general malfunction, the pulsing seed of this intangible disaster, but finds nothing that might account for these bizarre little hitches.

  So, he sits down on a front step at the cane-trash house. His horse, pawing the ground beside him, bends a nervous neck toward the ground. The Master looks now and then to the heights where his Great House stands out against the sky and sees the frightened forms of his wife, his children, and some house slaves. Huddled close, they peer out at a property apparently unchanged but as if suddenly set aflame at its core. The Master remains that way for hours and hours, meditating on this burden of bad luck. What has happened to those ritual protections planted at the four corners of his lands? Has the rooster’s head sealed beneath the stair landing of his house lost its shielding powers? He is still closed in such calculations when a clairvoyant négresse advances to tell him, in the sunny flash of her teeth, “It’s that one who’s escaped his body, oui.”

  The slave old man—most docile among the docile—has gone marooning.*

  The Master abruptly realizes that for a long time already, the mastiff has been howling, and that this howling, all by itself, défolmante—is dis-in-te-gra-ting—the substance of his world.

  2. Alive

  The fugitive—the African doomed to the injurious islands—did not recognize even the taste of night. This unknown night was less dense, more naked, it was unnerving. He heard the dogs far behind, but already the acacias had snatched him from the hunters’ realm, and, man from vast lands, thus he entered another history, all unaware that there, times were beginning again for him.

  Principle of the bones,

  mineral and alive,

  opaque yet organizing.

  Touch,

  folio II

  The mastiff was a monster. It as well had voyaged on a ship for weeks in a kind of horror. It as well had experienced that void of a voyage via slave ship. The black flesh, crammed into the hold, enveloped that sail-winged hell with a halo the monster’s rage perceived and the sharks pursued across the ocean. As had all those who came in to the islands, the mastiff had endured the constant rolling of the sea, its unfathomable echoes, its engulfment of time, its irreparable dismantling of intimate spaces, the slow drifting away of the memories it engendered. A sea that penetrated flesh to harry and thwart its soul, or decompose it, replacing it with the petty rhythm of nauseating survivals, small deaths, bitter routines, the martyrdom of carcasses that must cope with disorienting uncertainties. The mastiff had known periods in the open air as well, hoisted on deck early by a strangling chain and there, goaded on by the lash, the dog was forced like the black captives to go around in circles so as to limber up its muscles and inhale a bit of iodine on the high seas. And the wind itself, dazzling as an onrush of darkness, would put the finishing touches on the devastation committed by the sea in the depths of those nights in the ’tween decks. The dog would stagger along, limp like a jellyfish. Then be sent back into the dead angle of a stern gangway, that tomb (its cage): the after-hold.

  The dog’s gaze resembled that of the sailors. And worse: the wraiths who rose from the hold (weighed down less by their chains than by their shattered souls, and who sometimes threw themselves overboard into the sharks’ jaws or suddenly, arching their bodies, swallowed their tongues, or even fell in wasted rage against the bayonet protecting a captain’s throat) had that same gaze. Only the ship itself, through its rhythm of waves, the snapping majesty of its tall sails, seemed to live and to keep those captives alive. The mastiff was a monster because it had known that absolute collapse.

  It came from who-knew-what Gehenna in Europe. No one knows the precise color of its coat, either. No doubt it changed aléliron: constantly and everywhere. The ship’s cargo manifest recorded it as white with a black blaze between the eyes. The sailor who handed the dog its water and salted hide through the bars of the after-hold described a black coat with a white patch on the muzzle. On the Plantation, they saw it black, gleaming into a lunar blue, with a few white spots that maybe moved around. But (while it was demolishing their leg tendons) the slaves it had caught had sometimes seen it red, or blue-green, or perhaps possessed by the vibrant orange tints of a living heart of fire. As for the eyes, better not mention them.

  The Master had bought the dog without any haggling and was probably the one who had brought it straight from Europe. He had set the animal beside him in the carriole. The two young male slaves, the little négritte girl, and the Provençal pottery from Aubagne purchased that day had all been packed into the mule cart driven by the slave old man. He was the one who escorted the Master to the big city where the slave markets were held when the ships came in. There were fewer such arrivals after the abolition* of the slave trade, but there had been a time when the Master had gone there often, even not necessarily to buy anything at all. He enjoyed the atmosphere of those torpid boats. Their crews (wild beasts) had known lands beyond those known, and behind the abattoirs sold melancholy objects and old portulan sea charts. Their shore leaves filled the taverns with shabby nonsense about ghost ships, women with seaweed hair, rash revolutions nullifying the blue blood of kings, or nameless peoples who pierced their lips with golden straws and drank bright blood in homage to the sun.

  Sometimes, these ships came into port wanderingly drunk. Their cargo would then be discovered in irons, dried out by hunger and the fevers that strike one yellow. The ’tween decks and rigging were deserted. The orphaned sails were turning into great parched leaves and the lines coming untied enough to be called ropes for hanged men. The crew had foundered in the grip of a mystery.
The casks of oil, salt meat, or potable water wriggled with the same worms, which seemed to await (or foretell) an end to time. Each belaying pin on deck gave birth to tiny flames that fainted straightaway in a musty whiff of basilic.* No one wanted to acquire the chained-together wrecks hauled out of the holds. Without even feeding them, the Governor chartered a military steamship to ferry them to some oubliette along the coast of Brazil.

  It was, for the slave old man, a bewildering moment: watching men come ashore who looked so much like him. All poorly recovered from the most drawn-out of deaths. The oil disguising their sickly skins mingled with their sweat and the remains of miseries. Their screams, so familiar with extremes, had left the corners of their mouths forever foamed with garlicky crusts. They still bore some smells from the Before-land, some last rhythms, some languages already in despair. The slave old man felt they were incanted by those gods of whom he still retained illiterate traces. And the ship affected him as well. He no longer knew if he was born on the Plantation or had known that crossing in the hold, but each swaying of a slave ship in the calm waters of the outer harbor revived a primordial rocking within him. Crackings and snappings, muddy shadows, and liquid lights peopled the depths of his mind fuddled with slimy algae and marine hautes-tailles.*

  After the Master, the slave old man was the first to see the mastiff. The slave old man and the mastiff looked at each other. The mastiff had barked tout là-même, right-on-the-spot. And even more than barked—it burst the bounds of utter slavering rage, its coat bristling every which way like a lion’s mane. The Master had displayed his delight at this reaction, convinced that black flesh whetted the dog’s appetite. He’d cajoled the animal with a hunk of fresh meat, a little special water collected during a thunderstorm, and the mastiff had so calmed down that it never again barked at anyone, not even the slave old man. Who, faced with its enigmatic fury, had remained as usual: more opaque and dense than heartwood of the bois-bombe charcoal tree burned seven times and the same again.

  Those two saw each other every day from then on because the Master had put the animal in a vast kennel fenced in on all sides, between the Great House and the sugar-works buildings. Everyone passed by at some moment of the day or week. The monster was there, at this strategic knot, this inescapable crossroads. Lying full length on a quivering flank. Persecuted drowser, or bundle-of-nerves irritated within the confines of its pen.

  The Master owned other, smaller, Creole dogs. Six or seven. They stood guard around the Great House. They barked whenever nègres, chicken hawks, mongooses or Bêtes-longues went by. They were barbarous of bite, for they were kept tied up the livelong day. When they ran as a pack, they amused themselves by chomping on one of the house slaves, or by ’molishing the leg of an old slave woman beached near the boilers, where the dogs lapped up the many-colored crusts of molasses. For which the Master never scolded them. The slaves hated these dogs in a way that can no longer be imagined. Sneered at them, too. They tossed them repellent poisons that could stiffen them at one go and prevent their flesh from rotting in the lime pits; heavy rains always exhumed their damned mummies off in some corner of the property. But their numbers were never exhausted: intent on stocking his surroundings with these canine alarms, the Master was constantly buying more off an elegant mulatto who had lost all sense of shame.

  The day the mastiff arrived at the Plantation, the Creole dogs had yowled from afar. As the carriole had drawn closer, they’d plunged into a fury unheard of for their kind. When the carriole entered the circle drive, the mastiff leaped to the ground. The dogs shut up, flap, seized suddenly by an ominous quiet there they would only rarely abandon in future: for some nègre gone astray toward the Great House, or some specially sinister cyclone, or some earthquake revealed in advance to their hysterical senses.

  The slaves feared the dogs, but they were appalled by the mastiff. Its massive body was like a slab of sulfur, its muscles bulged like lava bubbles; the pitiless face, unbaptized; the gaze, unseeing. The most chilling thing was its silence. No barking. No grunting, yet no calm or serenity. Merely, above its bated breath, that scrutinizing stare, honed-filed-sharpened-trenchant, with which it followed the living souls that went by its fence. Whenever a Creole dog got loose and came skulking around its cage, the mastiff did not even budge. The prowler would lie down belly up, whimpering, offering submission simply to a flick of this monster’s ears.

  The Master fed it in a strange and, above all, secret way. Palpitating meat. Bones with flaming marrow. Bloody fleshy things that he kneaded himself in a Carib warrior’s skull. In which, some said, he crushed together wasps, hot peppers, hummingbird heads, snake fats, bone-powders from rabid men, the manes of crazy chabines,* the bones of mother-big barracudas, and the brains of mama ballyhoo needlefish. The mastiff devoured it all more from dark determination than from appetite. In a few months, it regained that incredible strength the ship had worn away. Even-more-compact flesh. Muscles supple as cables when the Master took the dog running on a rippling rope for hours, atop his chestnut going at a steady gallop just to keep up with the beast. And the horse, mightily out of sorts at having that around its hooves, lost a little more of its joie de vivre.

  Folks wondered what this monster could be for. They soon had their answer. There was, as happened almost every month, a young nègre convinced he was wilier than his predecessors and who was hit out of the blue by la décharge. I am going to tell you about the décharge. The old slaves knew about this: it was a bad sort of impulsion vomited up from a forgotten spot, a fundamental fever, a blood clot, a dé-sursaut pas-bon: a not-good jump-up, a shivering summons that jolted you raide off the tracks. You went around being taken to pieces by an impetuous inner presence. Your voice took on a different sound. Your gait grew gently grotesque. A religious flutter set your cheeks and eyelids trembling. And your eyes bore the customary fiery marks of awakened dragons.

  The décharge would take you at any moment. It was invoked to explain those desperate, hopeless attacks on commandeurs. Those slave hands that grabbed their throats flap! That cutlass rachée-slash launched despite the pistol that would shoot down these madmen who never had a chance. The décharge would send you hurtling above all in frantic flight into the forest. Then the Master would pursue you astride his Arabian steed with his pack of yipping little dogs. He always caught up with the runaways, and rare were those who managed to dissolve into the humid shade of the very tall trees. The Master said as much. He never announced, “So-and-so escaped.” He would say, “So-and-so evaporated into the woods,” satisfied to know they’d fallen victims to the zombies he claimed infested the forbidden high-forest.

  So, this slave youth had his décharge. And, instead of cutting a commandeur’s throat, he went off, just like that yes, en plein mitan du jour, at high noon, abandoning his patch of land with an endless cry and beelining for the nearest woods. Marooning! . . . The commandeurs chased after him for an hour but could not catch the smoke from his heels. They then trumpeted on a conch shell to alert the Master, who came running. The Master took stock of the situation, squinted up at the hills, listened to the muteness of the tall trees. Then he smiled (unexpectedly), but no one had time for surprise: the mastiff, off by the sugar works, had begun to growl. Not bark, but growl something astringent and acid and irresolvably evil, which revealed to everyone how the monster would be used.

  The Master rode to the fenced-in kennel and fetched the animal at the end of its thick rope. The mastiff had stopped growling. It was now alert, staring up at the hills as if following some invisible movement with its muzzle. It neither strained at its rope nor tried to quicken its pace. In the runaway slave’s cabin, the Master had it smell a few rags from the pallet. Then, together, they headed for the silent Great Woods, leafy with rooted mists and lost dreams. The slaves followed the chilling team with their eyes. The Master, the horse, the mastiff: an accord old as eternity seemed to unite them. To mix-combine them. They advanced in a single movement, with the same deadly resolve. Nothing
could deflect them, united in their mission.

  The Master loosed the mastiff at the first raziés-undergrowth. The animal plunged in without barking, without growling. One heard only the stunning energy of its paws hammering the forest floor and the Master followed this calmly, his blunderbuss slung at his shoulder. Afterward? No time for an afterward. Redévirer: they swiftly retraced their steps, with the black youth—savaged—dragged at the end of the rope, the attentive mastiff weighty at his side. What the animal’s teeth had done was seen close-up. Which the Master had wanted everyone to notice before he applied his pepper sauce.* The mastiff had mangled his victim better than the wickedest of whips and the most barbarous board-of-nails. The young slave walked forevermore like an old man, stuttering, with empty eyes.