The mastiff had returned to his kennel without further ado, placid and watchful once more. The slave old man saw him that way every day but never stopped in front of him as did the unthinking little children of the slaves. Because grown-ups, even the most scatterbrained, avoided having the dog “take” their scent. With that in its nostrils, it could sculpt you in its dreams, taste in anticipation the splendors of your blood, and above all capture you with ease if you bolted in a décharge. So folks avoided the place, and the children, as the track-downs continued, abandoned the idea of the dog as entertainment. But nobody noticed that he, the old man slave, passed all along the kennel fence. Et-cetera times a day, without glancing sidelong at the mastiff. Without looking it up-and-down. Sometimes he even went by as the Master was opening the cage to bring it flesh and bloody tidbits, and smile at it, pet it. Nobody noticed either that, in the presence of this slave old-fellow, the mastiff became even more watchful, a tad more on the qui vive, a stitch more lying-in-wait, in a flawless raidi-stillness of its iron frame. In Creole folks cry that: véyatif o fandan. Vigilant to the uttermost.
The mastiff expressed the cruelty of the Master and that plantation. It was pathologically alive. When the old man slave went by the fence, it followed him with eyes of fire. Now and then the old-fellow shot back a glance, something gliding and lusterless. And their eyes would meet for seven nths of a second. The confrontation went on this way for months. The mastiff brought back six or seven nègres marrons from the forest. Tore the throat out of a blackblack-Congo woman possessed by a décharge. In time, he seemed even more deplorable. And although the décharges remained a constant (attacks sans manman,* some suicides or volcanic lunacies), fewer and fewer slaves were seen fleeing toward the woods. The mastiff mounted a ferocious guard over these captive souls. So you know everyone was dumbfounded to see that the old man had defied the dog anyway.
But how on earth had that been possible, with him so old and close to death? I will, without fear of lies and truths, tell you everything I know about this. But it’s not much.
*
The old man has never joined in at the slaves’ celebrations or the veillée storytelling, when the paroleurs-talkers tell how to defeat the mastiff. He does not dance, does not speak, does not react to the cattle-bell summons of the drums. He seems inert but manages to decipher undecodable things. His presence reinforces the drumming of the tambouyés. It brings them mysterious speed and balan-élan that fill them with joy. And he slakes his thirst there. In his company the dancers—without even realizing it—discover unsuspected muscular resources. The songs as well surround him, as they do the others. But the old singers who shiver with automatic memories—those lovely purveyors of nameless words—cultivate in secret the happiness of having him there listening to them. All—but not in so many words—suspect he is a shining sun of memories and try to bask in his light. And he, undaunted, accepts this gift. He plays the drums without playing them. He joins in the dancing while remaining stock-still. He stocks his soul with scattered, reconstructed, lopsided things, which weave him a shimmering memory. Often, at night, this memory crushes him with insomnia.
The Papa-conteur of the Plantation was a rather insignificant fellow (an African nègre-guinée with small eyes, a board-thin body, and a slightly hunched back). He transformed himself when he began to speak (wide eyes, burly body, beautiful bearing). He breathed in the life around him to invigorate his words. And thus he awakened life. He spun speech—parolait—and launched laughter. And the laughter loosened and swelled everyone’s chest. Their hatreds, desires, the lost cries and the silences expressed themselves through his mouth. When the Master disembarked all sudden-like, a commandeur at his side, to seat himself benevolently on the outskirts of the circle with a galoon of rum as a treat, and began to answer the Krik-Kraks,* the Papa-conteur did not shift his speech. His selfsame utterance pursued its course, circulating things that few beings could appraise. Yet the old man slave takes sustenance from that. He untangles the obscure parlance of the tale, knows hatred, desire, and fear, experiences a thousand stories come from Africa, a thousand narratives brought back from forgotten Amerindians, from the Master himself and, of course, from the mastiff.
The Papa-conteur’s words carry him off to strange borders. They give him flesh in the flesh of others, memories that belong to all of them and quicken them all with a wordless throbbing. The Master cannot see it, but there are so many shattering and bewildering presences in the old man that he must (like the other slaves) increase the inertia of his skin, the gentleness of his gestures, the drawl of his heartbeat, the bluntness of his face. He must go on with these forces inside him, maladjusted beyond measure, which do not explain anything to him about himself, or about so vast a life in this most cramped of deaths.
At night, cast sleepless ashore inside himself, he confronts incomprehensible chasms, stifling densities, tempos combined according to muddled laws that hurtle into uncertainty. Worlds are dying in his depths, and these agonies give him no respite, nothing but more entanglement that only dancing, the drums, the words of the Storyteller (as they go on fathomless) can soothe. That’s why the old man seems so cataleptic at those véillées, savoring the balm spread on that blesse-wound seeking its own sense. The Word of the Storyteller does not come to him in speech: it carries along too many tongues, too many cries, too many silences. It is like an inborn song felt above his belly. With a few impossibles stuck in his throat, without participating in the appeals of the Storyteller, he launches his presence at him like a silent hand. He offers him his spirit, some specters of remembrance, and prophetic pains that glisten in every scrap of his flesh. His flesh: that virulence preserved unmoving from which the Storyteller always knows how to drink deep.
The décharge had scourged the old man many a time. No one had ever known. Some felt the thing only once in their lives, yet he had endured it almost every day. Day after day, and most often when it was slackening off among the others. The first time, it had set him writhing on the dirt floor of his cabin in the middle of the night, with the irrepressible longing to hurler-anmoué (scream-for-help), dé-courir and run counterclockwise to undo bad luck, saisir-déraidir in a seize-up-go-limp confusion, or plain strangle something. He’d calmed down by eating earth and scraping his forehead against a wall, which had released a shivering heat that gentled his mind. The other times were during the day, in the fields, in the sugar-sack carts, at the port, on the roads when he was the coachman, then in the grease of the boiler shed where his life was wearing itself out. And every time, his body became a burning stone, an immense ouélélé-uproar resistant to décantation spell-breakings. He had felt like dancing, bouler du tambour—rolling with the drums, braying those incomprehensible sounds that were hacking up his head, but each time he had held back, knotting his gestures and actions and emotions like vines around a body gone berserk. That’s how he became as placid as a backwater marsh. Stiller than a chapeau-d’eau, a water lily. He must live self-contained to control his fits of décharges. No movements. No useless words. No raised eyebrows or voices. Nothing but the impeccable mastery of motion, mind and gesture compressed to a murmur, the blood’s dance reduced to a minimum, an eruption noted solely in the immobility of the most terrible deaths or the most stolid substances. It is his only way of living and being—as no one knows—catastrophically alive.
And he rediscovers in the mastiff the catastrophe inhabiting him. A gimlet-eyed fury that lashes out from afar. This inner chaos carries along things that don’t belong to him. He seems possessed by presences other than his own, but his self, his very being, he cannot find anywhere: no spine of memory, no helpful pattern, no ridge beam from a time when he was a distinct entity. Nothing but this boiling up of violences, disgusts, desires, impossibles—this magma triumphant on the Plantation and making him what he is to his core. And the mastiff is like that as well. But in the animal’s impressive ferocity, this catastrophe has pulled itself together, becoming a blind faith that can master t
he dire trouble born on the ship.
The old man slave does not remember the ship, but in a way he is still down in its hold. His head has become home to that vast misery. He has the taste of the sea on his lips. Even in the light of day he hears the dramatic snouts of sharks against the hull. He also remembers the sails, the crosstrees, the lines—as if he had been one of the crew, all mixed up with visions of the Before-land, and even more than visions: women, beings, things, beauties, uglinesses that quiver within him, are him, and mingle with the open chaos. The mastiff is like that, but it commands a mass of instincts that delude the dog into seeing sense there, a meaning now tied to the taste of the bloody flesh the Master feeds the beast as the meaning of existence. The dog is the Master’s rudderless soul. It is the slave’s suffering double.
Our old fellow goes back and forth around the dog for those mysterious reasons. Confronted by inner anarchy, he finds himself drifting toward the animal. He has no need to look at it: the mastiff lives inside him. His look of the living dead has never fooled the dog. No doubt the monster perceives in him a passel of possibilities. It sees itself bound to this old man slave who gives off no vibration at all, nothing but the brute density of unplumbable matter, crammed with damps and slit-eyed suns. The mastiff’s cruel vigilance perceives this confusion. On each approach, the slave old man feels the trouble capsize him, the chaos submerge him. Right by the fence, he does battle with the forces within him. They awaken, fly together like magnets, lay waste to him even more fiercely. Charges and décharges!
He had seen the beast race off after the runaways. Had seen it return. He had seen the dread it inspired in the slaves’ evening vigils and how its mere presence stripped their dances of energy. He had seen how the Storyteller had begun assigning insane attributes to the animal. This mastiff, he said, was the watchdog of hell and the dead. He gave it the body of a furry bird, a feathered horse, a one-horned buffalo, a carnivorous flower, or a mute leprous-toad crapauladre-man. Masoned from wounded moon and the mother-water that forms crystals, its flesh was the guardian of precious gates. He said defeating it would lead to joys as yet unnamed. He described the dog on subterranean voyages, flanked by shadow-spitting suns. Sometimes, he appointed it the jailer of a swarm of glimmerings fluid as a virgin’s tears. He described it decorated with palms beside unimaginable tombs among budding new births. He told of it eating some unalive-things cut up for it by old men in accordance with the movements of the stars. He said it could stare into the glassy eyes of the deceased and there awaken nine times three times seven souls. He saw it guiding pregnant women onto the bridges of destiny and leading them to term. He always placed the dog at turning points, stream-boundaries, passages and chasms, shortcuts and alleyways. He saw it draped in leopard skins, stretched out above its master, offering its auguries to those who swallowed its flesh. He watched it call up words that only the prophets strove to name. He saw it clinging to the solemn shoulders of mystic initiates and gratifying their liturgies with a cruel wisdom. He saw it gobbled by ghouls, ogres, grotesque chimeras until it changed itself into a quite pure and most enviable clarity. The old man slave listened to all these tales without hearing; understood without understanding. He was attuned only to the distant murmur they knotted inside him.
From the moment the animal arrives, the décharges become terrifying. He who has believed himself the master of this chaos now sees himself go under. From then on he fears the décharges. Fears they will carry him away into pathetic gestures against the triggers of the commandeurs or the Master’s flintlock musket. Fears no longer being himself and suddenly appearing before everyone’s eyes as a nègre marronneur who never did dare. Try as he may to become pure matter when drawing near the dog, that beast awakens his turmoil in extremes that leave him stupefied. That’s doubtless why he had the feeling of death: the substance of his soul was struggling, chaos was seeking its cry, and the cry its word, and the word its voice. So he decides to go away, not to maroon, but to go.
Therefore, he prepares nothing. Neither salt, nor oil, nor water, nor big bi chunk of boiled cabbage. No ruminations, no grim glance toward the woods. He is even more motionless, placid to the last bit of him. His actions around the machines grow more fluid as the chaos stiffens inside him. This irrepressible force—on that day—lightning-strikes him against a boiler. His skin touches the hot sheet of metal. Sizzles. He thinks he’s losing his head under a welter of pains suddenly loosed at him from everywhere. But his practiced mastery regains control. His skin comes out of it intact. His vision does become troubled, and in this trouble he can see landscapes that blur his eyes. He sees quicksilver roosters celebrating evangelical nights and moulting into snakes before they dissolve.
He knows he is ready.
He does not know what for.
This time, when he approaches the fence, the mastiff rises. The old man slave stops. For the first time in so many years, he looks at the monster. Which slowly comes closer. Staring. Studying. Ears on edge. Muzzle slightly frothed. Standing still, facing the old man slave standing even stiller looking back at it. The slave old man gestures toward the dog in a way he himself does not understand, an imperceptible movement no one sees but which the mastiff follows with its icy eyes.
That night, the slave old man feels not a décharge but a combustion. His body becomes a prey to convulsions. A great heat knots his limbs. Every object in his cabin sweats blood all ablaze, and the polished earth underfoot takes fire as well. He sees himself surrounded by gleaming lights drawing tiny orbs in the air. He fights these nightmares. He is heard (who hears him?) moaning. Then groaning harshly as if feverish, but no one worries because suffering no longer moves anybody. Before dawn—when a healing glint prepares to rise from the earth to prophesy an innocent sun—the slave old man straightens up. He puts on his coarse linen livery. He settles his old chapeau-bakoua* straight upon his skull. He grips his staff and leaves, tranquil, his step vibrant with a holy energy. He passes among the cabins, crosses the cane fields, where the Bêtes-à-feu—fireflies—watch him go by. When he reaches the first trees, the mastiff springs to attention. Although already far away, the old man slave feels a shiver along his back. He turns around toward that Plantation where he has worn out his life; he looks at the distant buildings, the sugar-works chimney with its leaping flames, so familiar; he hears one last time the sound of the now-widowed machines. The shiver slips away at his nape. Then, the slave old man plunges into the tall trees. The ancient howl of the mastiff begins to undo the domain, provoking the eleventy-thousand strange little hitches already described, and faced with which the science of slavery gave way.
3. Waters
The cask burst; Marie Celat* saw the seafloor there. No growth from clays or black earths, only the basalt mornes, sown with green-mantled cannonballs, and those traces that memory chewed down to the quick: the mark shredded into the bark, the bête-longue’s vertebrae and the gunpowder to cram into the nègre marron. Through the cask Marie Celat saw a horizon of sky blossoming out of the forest. Then she climbed to the summit of this Morne that nobody has managed to descend. The one who does battle with the beast awaited her.
Reflections of the bones,
sole images sans images
of the gestations and agonies.
Touch,
folio III
The old man ran. He quickly lost his hat, his staff. He ran. Ran without haste. A steady pace that took him surefooted through the back-of-beyond zayonn undergrowth. He sent his body across dead stumps, laid low the kneeling branches with his heels, hurtled down reclusive ravines devoted to pure silences. Around him, everything shivered shapeless, vulva dark, carnal opacity, odors of weary eternity and famished life. The forest interior was still in the grip of a millenary night. Like a cocoon of aspirating spittle. Another world. Another reality. The old man could have run with his eyes closed: nothing could orient him. Sometimes he bumped into unseen little branches, his toes, ankles, face—whipped! He had to run behind his bent forearm to prote
ct his open gaze. Then, as he went on, the trees drew closer together in the thickest of pacts. The boughs fastened themselves to the roots. The raziés-underbrush gave lavishly of its irritating prickles. The Great Woods loomed. His pace slowed. At times he had to crawl. The enveloping vegetation stuck to him, sucking, elastic. With bleeding elbows, step by step, he made his way. It went up. It went down. It monta-descendre: up-and-downed. Sometimes, the ground disappeared. He tumbled then into sheets of cold water that gurgled with emotion.
The old man felt close to the sky. The stars diffused a blissful radiance etching the forms of the ferns. But the darkness—so intense—sent that pallor to him in a starry dust: it dissolved all forms. Often he headed down again, he had the impression of descending endlessly, of reaching even the fondoc-fundament of the earth. There he thought to find the vomiting of lava or the fires said to flame from the foufoune-pudenda of femmes-zombis. The torn rachées of his heart throbbed within him, stirring liquid, glowing embers that shattered his body to rejoin the sky. Such incandescence summoned up wild earthy fumes in his bones. Leaves, roots, trunks, took on the odor of ashes graced with those of green corn and newborn buds. Water, invisible, showered in drops from certain large leaves; at other times, it became a sweat that greased his skin until he seemed covered with scales. Unsettled by an incontrollable energy, he was neither hot nor cold. He did not feel the raide licking of water or those thorns prying at his fingernails, or even those sharp branches that in trying to disembowel him made a lovely mess of his livery.
Nothing seemed able to extinguish his energy. He proceeded like a ship at the mercy of a liquid womb. From going up and then down, and feeling up high after coming down, he no longer even knew where the sky was, where the earth lay palpitating, which side was his left, where to go to the right. This was no longer the earlier absence of landmarks but a profound disorientation. He advanced with the impression of standing still. At times he felt he was backtracking even while convinced he was heading for the heart of the Great Woods.
Slave Old Man Page 3
