Slave Old Man

by Patrick Chamoiseau

  In the beginning, he had been scared shitless. He expected to suddenly see the monsters feared by the folktales: the impish Ti-sapoti,* the dog-head women, the fireball soucougnans,* the flayed-flying-women perfumed with phosphorus, the unbaptized misery of coquemares,* and the persecuted zombie persecutors. But he saw nothing of all that. He saw nothing at all. Except this tragic blackness. This slapping, lashing vegetation. This energy living inside him as a stranger. The more he imagined the monsters, the bigger his eyes grew, the wider his mind opened, and the more the darkness maneuvered around him. His skin grew sensitive to the acrid breath of winds bruised beneath the leaves, to the velvety touch of the dewdrops that clung to him, delighted to be visited after century-times of solitude. His skin became porous, then it became powdery, then it must have gone away because he thought he came apart in an effervescence amid which only his bones supported him. In time, the Great Woods wrapped-him-up-tight. Forced him to be still. Stillness was, there, a plunge into the abyss and an elevation. It taught him the nausea of mummies and of people who are brought back to life, the confused panic of those walled up alive, and the exquisite bitterness of the martyr’s coma. Abruptly, this hold on him let go as if at the entrance to a cradling clearing. Then he ran with all his might, jumping at random over imaginary tree trunks, swerving aside at random, lying down at random, leaping at random, advancing according to the laws of a dance that allowed him, all unknowing, to avoid a thousand obstacles before a green hand grabbed him once again. It took him a while to realize this: a magnetic prescience let him be a bole, a moss, a branch, a spring, a tree. He flowed within their traceries. He no longer felt their shocks, or else passed through them like a cloud of pollen. He felt as if he were a shadow, then a breath, then a fire, then opaque flesh that restored to him—brutal—the world’s horde of sensations.

  Soon, he was not conscious of anything. His body no longer perceived itself. Persevering in his flight, he pinched his limbs, touched a wound, brought a lick of fresh blood to his lips and was reassured to find it tasty. That was not enough to put him back together. He experienced the distress of ruins that had once been sumptuous cathedrals. The Master claimed that the runaways he had not managed to catch had dissolved into the Great Woods. This fugitive felt he had become water within the water of the patient leaves. He had no fear whatsoever, pièce pensée—not a jot of thought: nothing, save the motionless onrush of that dark mass that lived inside him and surrounded him. So then he strove to go faster, jump high, run raide, fly far, meld all this together through speed. It seemed to have no effect. He thought he was dying, losing his struggle against life’s miseries, and expected to emerge from the cold glue of a nightmare, but patting his face gave that the lie: he was indeed bien éveillé, bien réveillé—wide awake, well awakened. Then he muttered the word éveil, éveil léveil: awakening, awakening th’awakening, opening his eyes wide without fear of seeing them burst by a branch. Éveil léveil. He saw nothing. Felt nothing. Only this motionless aspirating movement. Éveil léveil he feared he was dead, buried by mistake in a nail barrel,* and some old reflexes returned. He was forced to listen to himself in unknown zones, to isolate the sound of his heart, more powerful than ever. He perceived the giddy whirl of his blood that he had slowed down all his life. He experienced, as if torn, the sensation of every bit of his body, every unknown organ, every forgotten function. He apprehended the circulating sun that united and drove them. His run had propelled his flesh to its ultimate limit and his formerly separate organs, reacting en masse, passing beyond all distress, kept on going, leaving him panting with innocence in a hazy awareness of himself he had never known before.

  Plenitude. His perception encompassed the darkness around him. He recovered the feeling of dis-placing himself, changing position; he avoided the trees with calm authority, and moved through the undergrowth with ease and a fine air about him. He chose no direction, sought nothing in the hopeless darkness. Fearing a return to his starting point, he conjured up for himself an awl of light emerging inside him and toward which he swiftly donna-descendre, began to descend. This fixed point gave him the illusion of orientation and its immediately beneficial reassurance.

  He apprehended his aroundings differently. The desolate darkness revealed to him the texture of humus, the tangled ages, the regal waters, the pensive strength of tree trunks, the verve of the sap hidden in this vegetation. All this was enhanced by a profusion reflecting great energy. This élan sustained him from that moment on.

  Suddenly, the light was different. Painful. Daybreak had arrived. Gluey luminescence came down the tall trees. A foggy dawn suffused their trunks and drowned the underwood with milty mist. He saw a tortuous—bloodied—vision—but shut his eyes and ran more vigorously, overcoming obstacles like a rush of water. No time to drink from the springs, where his heels sank in deep. He had no desire to drink there: water seemed to impregnate him. Immanent, it slaked his thirst from within. Now and then he half opened his eyes and found himself lashed by ever-more intense light. His eyelids burned him; he kept them shut tight. He thus avoided discovering those great unknown trees in any way other than through the obscure alliance now familiar from those initial hours. He tore off a strip of his livery to make a blindfold. His race toward the luminous point spiraling within him continued like that. Inside. All out.

  The point vanished when he heard a brutal growling pitched high.

  Far away.

  Not a yowling, but a jaggedy howl.

  The mastiff was hunting him.

  Fini bat . . . Battle’s over! he thought.

  He sped up but was dismayed at losing his point of light. So, then, he bent his spirit toward the earth. He listened, all ears, to the pretend silence of the soil, teeming with hay mushrooms, the burrowing of roots, the dense panting uh-huhs of boulders, the limpid light of scattered streams like copper-bright sighs. He listened some more, desperate, then finally heard. Thumps. Muffled thumps. Bitunk. Bitunk. Bitunk. The pounding of the monster’s paws pursuing him. They almost matched the rhythm of his heart. Then he accelerated to make those rhythms one, so that he might use this sound sent to run him down as a guide for keeping his distance. Fini bat . . . , he thought again, mulling things over.

  4. Lunar

  A single disordered sweep of lianas, strangler figs, tiring bamboos, brown mahoganies, which drag the past along as far as the Pont de l’Alma. The acomas of the heights still sow along the slope, to meet the sea-foams and burn-beaten lands, the scrawny acomas down below, their children, which neither astonish nor strike fear. Here rises not one tree’s cry like a solitary mourner, but look: the surge of those vehement masses swells, where you must clear a way along the Trace.*

  Mirror brightness of the bones,

  organic night total

  of every promise of living.

  Touch,

  folio IV

  The Master has never seen this. He releases the howling mastiff. At the end of the thick rope, he follows it along the skirt of the tall trees. And there, among the twisted roots, the lace of ferns, the monster does not know in which direction to dash. The old man a pris disparaître: has done disappear. The Master himself, expert in the tracks left by runaways, searches for a tiny rumple in the thousand-year-old tropical silva. Nothing. The slave old man appears not to have passed this way. Or slipped by that way. The mastiff and the Master walk along the edge of the tall trees (their almost human murmurings brush lightly past like old folks’ breath) until break of day. Mechanical, attentive, the mastiff advances: sniffs, fine-tunes its ears, stretches its neck and quivers its spine. It seems to be taking its time before bounding away. It finally finds the track (a sour rustling in the innocence of the virgin raziés) but does not hurtle off as usual. With the wary step of a molocoye-tortoise, it pulls the Master beneath the greenish shadows; he must soon dismount and follow on foot. The chestnut horse stays behind alone, leafy, covered with shade and vines, terrorized by murmurs none of its instincts seem to recognize.

 
The mastiff becomes a reptile in the venerable wilderness. As for the Master, weighed down by his musketoons, he has to blaze a path with a cutlass. Although the blade opens an imperious breach for him, he must brush away the netting of the bird-eating tarantulas. The long curtains of leaves give way beneath the blade and spring back, splashing him with sap. Soon he must release the mastiff, reel in the rope, wind it around his waist. The animal ventures alone beneath the dark vault. The Master strains his ears toward its velvet tread. Then, he hears it run. The Master tries to follow it closely, convinced the slave is ensnared in a knot of prickles, but then must abandon the fantasy: the mastiff is penetrating the interior at a long-distance pace. The trail carries the dog far, au fondoc dépassé: beyond the back-of-beyond. The Master speeds up some more, then tires. He keeps in his ear the hammering of those paws, reverberating off the tall trees like the echoes in conch shells. He advances on alone, connected to the percussions of the racing animal. Oala: from that moment on, the Master feels uneasy, his bon-ange* upset. It dawns on him that the trees are truly murmuring. Not at him, but these murmurings worry him, so deeply is he registering them in the very clearing of his skull. Without admitting it to himself or truly understanding this, the Master believes he can no longer go back. He believes himself obliged to advance forever into this everlasting half-light. The Master feels alone.

  *

  The old man rediscovers a primordial darkness. Revealed by the blindfold, it is not comparable to the darkness at the beginning of his flight. This night neither envelopes the trees nor flows from the sky. He knows it is released inside him as he runs. He senses its growing épaissi, its thickeningness, like a patterning of the balan-rhythm of his running. It seems to allow him to exist a little closer to the center of his being. His skin is skimming up the promise of the coming sun. Infinite variations solicit his dermis: the earthy aura of the tall trees; the increasing keenness of a shaft of light; the oceanic armpit of a ravine; the mummified silence where ferns exhale the odor of eternal death and stubborn life. For the moment, he has no sensation of going up or down. Suspended within himself, he travels through a sensory topography that molds itself to his body. His eyes whirl, crazy beneath their lids and the cloth blindfold. He pays strict attention now to the noise of the animal’s paws; then, as he races on, he loses contact. Or rather, he registers it differently, among the cadences rushing from his heels. The trees seem to change. Doubtless more ancient. Seriously silent. Sometimes disapproving. The old man feels himself penetrating into the cavern of ages. No one seems ever to have trod upon that place. The impression of entering a sanctuary becomes intoxicating; an untold authority asserts itself over the darkness within which (and with which) he runs. He understands the sensation that so overwhelms him: A-a, sé kouri an fondoc syèl . . . Oh, it’s running right in the sky, he thinks, weeping. And he opens his arms in a cross, each finger an avid root, sentient leaves.

  His mind warps. Slowly. He glimpses forms: troubled, troubling, all threatening. Impossible to identify. They come from nothingness. They flow toward him. There is this. There is that. They are legion, of all sorts without kinds or categories. And-then there are looks without eyelids, scattered in clouds where amniotic showers are brewing. And-then maws gaping open like gates without doors. And-then left hands netted in the grip of a language. And-then upraised-arms and musician lips. There are nine hairy waves of terrors. And-then suffering fleshes he feels he might know. He thinks he is gone-crazy and tries to tear off his blindfold. But the prospect of dawn’s dazzlement restrains him, as does the idea of opening his eyes upon those unknown trees. He quickens his pace, provoking an onslaught of hallucinations. Clacking-paks. Rolled-rollings. Moans stuffed under wicker baskets and agonies that shatter mirrors. Bright vitalities and the languors of gentle counting-rhymes. Flounderings of hatred. Rains of bloodlettings and seed. Broken shells, religious shames, how many women’s emotions, enormous milky breasts, murky not-very-manly desires, how many delicious sins and infectious innocences. How many intimate collapses, including even the worst heartbreak-coeurs-cassés. All this frightens him, without being unfamiliar.

  Suddenly, a somber ouélélé-hubbub; it’s also a sound in the Creole tongue; it’s also the drifting of a lot of languages; he recognizes a voice; the swing of a wake-wailing; warbling registers of unclear words from which he plucks their exemplary energy; it’s sharply, at times brightly black, directly rooted in unbelievable valor. It brays a vital commandment inside him. A call of life. A call to life. He feels in fine fettle. The visions multiply; he clings to this green vigor that seems like a voice to him. It is human human human. Virile and maternal. It appears to spring from a close atmosphere of silence and death. Elle trouble I’existant: it stirs up his being and existence. He believes that this voice arises from the storytellers known during his enslavement: these men, arising one after another, indefatigable, forging a way of speaking that no one understands but which baptizes everyone. He no longer remembers their appearance, they were that insignificant. But irises of their language stem up now from the most extinguished part of him. The mastiff on his heels is showing him his own unknowns.

  The hallucinations surge back through this force, which is sovereign like a primal voice in some biblical land. The hallucinations make images. He sees a lady with black skin, an arresting gaze, wearing silky foam that opens a corolla of petals about her body; she transports souls in an oxcart, rope-hauled over a single shoulder; her steps affright the dust and she limps on the goat’s hooves deforming her ankles. He sees, clustered on three acacias, sad-eyed children who grow enormous enough to crush their perches. He sees awkward horses on the horror of three-hooves.* He sees lively stoppin’-coffins kicking up the dickens at the four-corners of thirteenth roads. He sees devils in silk-cotton trees* in commerce with three lovely livid chabines decked out in curl papers or seaweed braids. He sees Agiferrant,* that colonial settler of a moon, bearer of a mango tree shaped like a double cross. He sees a Kakouin-sorcerer who opens for him the route to routs. He sees zombies with tree heads, or else no arms or legs, or else with big tits. He sees some bons-anges who have lost their way. He sees some guardians of treasure* whose nostrils send clay bits flying. He sees the Ti-cochons-sianes* devoid of any family in the pig race. He sees blocks of blood that scatter into shrieks. He sees the dream* about pigeon peas, and the one about the tooth, and the dream about midnight, and the one about the bread-loaf heel. He sees the Pamoisés* with their crooked thumbs. He sees the spirits one can hire to do dubious things. He sees some Dorlis* counting up the grains in a calabash of white sand. He sees la Bête à Man Ibè.* He sees phosphorescent froth, then the forgotten shore, familiar, laden with a musty odor of savanna and tall, disillusioned trees in countless numbers. He notices a yesteryear of childhood in some very bygone songs; and some liturgies; and some initiations celebrated with beer and sesame oil in lonely languages. He sees the grottoes of knowledge where the great masks sleep, and the nez-bec beak-nose dancing the seven sequences of a sixty-year cycle. He sees the lumbering dances of seedtime, the showers of rice and the hands crowded with green boughs. He sees the living masks in the pact of plumes, and the spark that reveals their song. He sees the guardians of poison and maleficent forces, Okindly quaffers. He sees woven textures of memories where clay carves births amid the raffia grass. He sees in thin strips of cloth the infinite interlacings where the wind knows how to sing. He sees the vertigo of uneven swerves in the art of forgotten embroideresses, the thronging gaps of lights, the couplings of fulls and empties in the labyrinthic nuanced colors of ochres and saffron. He sees the meanders, the netting and the signs leading wanderings in the velvety raffia. He sees the bird that offered cotton, the fish that gave the spindle, and the spider that revealed weaving. He perceives the drums that go back in time. There are women’s voices nursing twins on shards of pottery. He sees the calabash-spoon, and the millet pestles, and sacred cups borne on a donkey’s back. He sees the androgynous couple on the cradle of the world
. He sees sovereign shapes, sculpted in the great-dark of myths, set in a total time, patinated with drippings from sacrifices. He sees himself blown through by sea blasts, makes himself gibier-volant, a bird, then finds himself on coral beds, buffeted by shark jaws, weighed down by chains, and drifting around the en-bas—the deep-down—of the most somber of seas. He sees himself as bone powder transforming into seaweed and rusty chain links. He sees skulls sheltering translucid fish. He sees the dawn of an old sun and the outcries of precious lands. He sees himself in chips of stars so shattered they melt down to a tenuous gleam. He falls. As is. Laid low.

  His awakening is a startlement. A fear. The old man feels he fell like that for plenty hours. The mastiff has doubtless caught up and is standing over him. He balls himself up, rolls into a root, thrashing like a castaway in the foam of drownings. No growling. No wild animal odor. He calms his body. His heart fills the universe with its extreme beating. His breath pumps steam like a forge. It sears his throat. He stays like that for an unknowable time, less exhausted in body than devastated by that experience. Packed tight within him, those visions get ready to pounce again. He doesn’t dare move.

  Nothing stirs thereabouts. The trees chew a cud of eternity. The too-fermented air sediments a thin sticky skin onto him. He hears a whistling. Then another. Then still another, worn away by the distance. It petrifies him. The Unnameable. The Unnameable. He no longer knows if the deadly fangs are moving toward him, or if they spring from his fevered mind. He waits. Forcing himself to calm down. Seeking that mortuary calm perfectly polished over so many years. He feels at home in his body. His muscles twitch from tumultuous energy. Alive, as if intoxicated. A last bit of courage comes to him. He begins to listen. And it is then—exact—that the fear surges back. Not-even-imaginable disruptive force. He no longer hears the animal’s paws. Nothing. Except the omniscient prayer of the tall trees, the breathing of the brushwood, the quaking of the insects. The germinations bound to the immutable silence. The monster has stopped running. He is no doubt already there. In position. Ready to racher-rip out his throat. The old man who had been a slave feels lost once again. Cacarelle-shitting. Wilting heart. But he does not move. He stays still as mangrove-water. He is listening, straining to the utmost. Listening comme cela s’écrit, to the letter: impeccably. Nothing. The animal tracking does not echo anywhere. The old man feels a relief that makes no sense: perhaps the monster has given up.