Slave Old Man

by Patrick Chamoiseau

  This relief runs through his body with a trembling like a sudden embellie-blossoming of sunshine. But another feeling grips him. That of the beast, straining terrible toward him. He feels it. It is there. It’s coming yes. To launch itself on him. Biting. Jaws. Cracking of bones. Bleedings. Slaverings and swallowings. Huh. He imagines the cruel approach through the ageless tropical forest. Huh. He thinks he sees the cocoa-brown eyes. The sans-manman fangs. Fer.* Fer. The old man who had been a slave begins to call out, héler. And even to rhéler-anmoué, shout-for-help. In a reflex of lost faith, of blood under pressure, of a bon-ange in eclipse, he removes the blindfold. And this reflex has the astonishing perfection of a warrior’s flourish.

  5. Solar

  After all the years we have been crossing, without seeing our own footprints, here at last comes the time to trace back the names.* They have gone to ground on the heights; haul them into the daylight of today, yet without naming them. The mystery of the name is a valiant spur to dig deep in reclamation! When you trace swiftly from the source, and well before encountering your carnivals and your car-gluts of nowadays, you run raide into this lump of lava, which chills.

  Fertile cement of the bones,

  Secret socle of creations

  and re-creations.

  Touch,

  folio V

  The light was wounding. Un fer. The shadow inhabiting him spun around on the axis of a coming-apart. Panic-stricken. The old man found himself in the leaf litter. His pupils were just glowing embers. They were searing his skull; he attempted to tear them out. The shadow within him tried to protect itself. It charged like a seventh wave* entering a tumultuous outer harbor, then swept back in a macayage-puddle-muddle. He felt spellbound by desire; coco-cock turgescent, balls loaded, eleventy dazzling décharges, cum from seminated seminating suns, lunar spangles of semen. A shaming la-honte took hold: hug his nudity, bury old fears, cover up this anguish. Light was leading flocks from one pasture to another in him. It was scattering innocences. Great guilelessness was crumbling under lucidities like lesions. Densities were disuniting; a gaggle of times he felt multiplied and reduced. The rest is impossible to describe in this tongue; let ancient sounds and languages be brought to me, an array of vocal qualities, tonal sheaves and effervescent liaisons: I am a construction site for new geneses. Yes, light was leading migrations in him.

  Taking advantage of this light that was demolishing his equilibria, sooty flashes tried to overwhelm him. They seemed to arrive from everywhere: furrows of earths, zinzole-zigzags of talkings, siwawa-abundances of peoples, big bouquets of persons. For the first time since he had confronted it, the roiling magma seemed to gain the advantage. Yet light was in him, openly pillaging, chilling. Unknown architectures reared up trembling, then strewed themselves around in thundering downfalls. A meshing of lights-and-darks hemmed in his mind. Feelings of giddiness. The old man who had been a slave managed to get onto his knees, and-then to hoist himself quaking, back flat against a trunk, and-then to totter, and-then to attempt returning to his footrace. He was running under the urgency of agony. Every step triggered l’avalasse-cloudbursts of brightenings and smoke-gray flows. But he was advancing. He was managing to advance. He believed that speed would reestablish the lost equilibrium. Light poked fire through his now transparent eyelids: he had lost them, and his pupils were exposed to the unbearable glare. He ran on, or he tried to, in any case he had, in a balan-élan through the Great Woods, the blind sensation of advancing. But the earth gave way. A manman-big hole. Deep. The old man who had been a slave was engulfed in a trice.

  He had fallen into one of those old wellsprings that nourish the deep-woods. Drowning. Icy-icy water. He encountered once again the nightmares of the slave-ship holds. The abysses. The windless sea. The salt. The waves. Gape-jawed sharks. The water. The water. He was going to drown at the bottom of a spring. He sensed its intense vitality. It came from afar, companion of chalky densities and clayey pits, carrying along a way-back dream of sulfur and phosphorus. It remembered marine fossils, stellar alluvia. It had seen tabernacles of gypsum and iridescent caverns carved in basalt. It shared complicities with beaches and volcanoes, the singsongs of the sky murmured by the rains, the poetry of the isles in the advent of a grandiose era. Subsidences had deflected it, and erratic faults had shunted it (for twenty-two thousand years) into underground evasions. A few blind roots had sucked its substance and been nourished. Thus had the spring kept itself at the surface, nibbling the earth without gushing from the soil, digesting it slowly, enough to call forth a trouble of a marsh. Like an eye of water, an absorbent maw beneath the undulation of blissful ferns. The tall trees suckled there; they defied the sun with an insolent verdancy that the thorns of the dry season could never beat down. The old man who had been a slave told himself he would die there, at the fondoc of that fountainhead like many another nègre marron no doubt, swallowed by the woods and never glimpsed again, gaunt, near a chicken coop. He smiled: dying in the living entrails of a spring older than he was. Hmm. It tasted like storms, all savory from the alcohol of silty rivers. It seemed irradiated by coal and sky, by volatile essences and extinct sediments, anise-flavored roots and flowers with the scent of angelica. He felt imbued with purity. He drank of this splendor that was already flooding his lungs: he desired it so much. The sun that had blinded him had lost nothing of its glare as jagged as a manioc grater. But, at the bottom of the spring, the glare had gone black. Intense like certain women. And the spring itself, as he was drowning, was turning black. It was invading him black. An obscure clarity seized him as he gulped to find himself some air. He understood what death was: this dizziness of course, this endless sinking, but also this spurt of primitive matter where one will come apart. He tried to shout a help! of sorrow and pain. Oxygen tragedy. He tried to coo with pleasure, so happy to see the end of his suffering. He was dying. Finir-battre. Battle over. White earth. Warm mud. The tormenting light was now in alliance with the shadows that had possessed him, and he experienced the last feeling of falling. To such a point that words fail me. The beyond-words and the beyond-reach-of-writing of song and of crying out, there where I mourn (so poor) my impossible desire. The old man who had been a slave was leaving swept away by the ultimate mystery. Vanquished.

  A hiccup. Where all light and all shadow dissolve, there is an envoyer-monter: Go! An elemental will-to-live. The old man who had been a slave began to struggle. His chest became a blacksmith’s bellows. His feet fumbled for a convulsive foothold on the sightless roots that crisscrossed the spring. He found something to push off against. He shot out of the hole to inhale air. He fell back and sank far into a sludge of mercury. He rebounded, grabbed a gulp of air. Then another. And another. With each surfacing, he filled himself with a bit more desire to live. He leapt, body arced, catapulted. Shrieking to shreds.

  His hand closed around a limp vine. He used it to free himself from the marshy suction. He crawled over the flimsy layer of leaf litter. Saved. Ethereal contentment flooded through him until he caught sight of the crabs. He had fallen into a mystery of tangled crabs. Frights of legs and carapaces. Ancient mantous poilus: big hairy wine-purple mangrove crabs. Swarmings of huge lurid red claws. In fact everything was red. Light had taken the upper hand in scarlet voltes that filled him with strength. He kept his eyelids serrées-clouées: nailed-tight-shut. He crept as far as he could from the lunatic crabs and the mortuary spring that was singing a dawn. A manman-root (rolled up about itself like an autistic goddess) became his refuge. There, he began to laugh, with the alcoholic laughter of those torn from tombs after old misunderstandings. Body saved.

  He laughed like this. Comme pipiri chantant: like the gray kingbird singing pipiri! at daybreak. Roasting coffee at first light. The smell of a good coal stove. Trembling water on opening petals. The sacred sweating on a barrel of aged rum. He laughed like that, and the energy of his laughter pounded his body. He was surprised to feel nothing of the tumult that had possessed him. Calming down, his heart had followed
the curves of a tranquil breeze, flowing-river-strong, yet peaceful. His muscles, unstiffened, had paused in the soft comfort of shelter. An evangelical feeling never known before. So, he had the desire, the courage, to open his eyes, or rather, to move his eyelids. He still saw red. He saw troubled. He saw doubled. Light was strong but no longer as violent. It came from the outside, doubtless from the inside, shining upon him sweetly. The things around him were formless, moving, as if seen through very clear water. I opened my eyes wide to see better, and the world was born without any veil of modesty. A vegetal whole in an imperious evening dew. I . . . The leaves were many, green in infinite ways, as well as ochre, yellow, maroon, crinkled, dazzling, indulging themselves in sacred disorder. I . . . The vines sought out the ground to mix themselves up some more, try rooting, sprouting buds. I could lift up my eyes and see these trees that had appeared so terrifying to me in their great-robes of the night. I could gaze on them at last.

  They were all immense. Each one nurtured the intangible in a mystery. They harvested light high, high up, and smuggled it to their feet as phantasmal contraband. Their branches sealed alliances of shadows and glowing openings. The vault of vegetation, braced against the earth, dispatched its trunks straight and wild toward the sustenance of the sky. Living trees, dead feet, green twigs, barren branches, parasitic plant hair, buds and rotting spots, seeds and broken blossoms, earthly night solar light—bound themselves together in one momentum. Plant life and death went on with this same ardor, in complementary but undifferentiated cycles. So then I, who had envied their impassive postures, I recognized them, I tried to name them, create them, re-create them. Here are the Acajous, armored in grayish bark, whose powder has often closed my wounds; here are their woody flowers where parrots peck at the garlic taste of their flesh. Here are the Rose Laurels, long nervous foliage, hirsute, whitish, so stimulating in teas; I’d used it to soothe my eczema. Here are the Courbarils—the West Indian locusts—with deep red heartwood whose miracle is revealed in the hubs of varnish distilleries. Oh, the Guaiacums, lignum-vitaes, more raide than rocks, soul of musky resin so good for my gout. Mahoganis-ti-feuilles, Mahoganis-gwan-feuilles, Small- and Great-leaved Mahoganies, yes it’s you. Ho, yellow-flower Acomas, filtering the bitter breath that is eternity. Here are the redwood Carapates, clothed in the rugged black of which carpenters dream. Here are the Filaos, casuarinas discouraging to the ax, and the Pieds-fromagers, silk-cotton trees that rustle with danses-zombis and la-prière-blackbirds. Here are Mahots-cochon, and the Pied-bois-marbri snakewood tree, nurses of love, here are the Mauricifs, the dog cherries that tanners destroy, and the gloomy Sandbox trees casting shadows without leaves and whose seedpods explode. Here are the Balata bully-trees, and the immense Gum trees destined for drivée, ocean drifting; here are the Calabash-trees and the Bois-flots—balsa “float-wood”—and the Bamboo clumps that take seventy years to ruminate a flower. . . . They were all there, Bois-rivières, Pains-d’épices, Génipas, and if I did not see them, I could feel them coming up. Here are the Breadfruit trees planted by the Maroons, and the Avocado trees that mark their trails; here are the Acacias bearers of knowledge; there are the three Ebony trees* that anchor the axes of a strange saga. There they are, trees that the light clothes in secrets, or those that wrap themselves in a halo of fait-noir: darkness. All came out of the earth with the same force, as from a staved-in belly. I wanted to wallow in this earth giving rise to so many strengths. My need for these strengths made the trees beauties. And this beauty allied both the earth and the sky, and the night and the day. I covered myself with humus, then volcanic-ash tuff brought up beneath my scrabbling fingers. My body was discovering the appetite of roots, the gluttonous solitude of earthworms. My hands excavated clutches of black soil I rubbed on my body. A swarming escorted me: snails, wood lice, and hawkmoth caterpillars, ants and millipedes. . . . I was eating earth. It dissolved warm on my tongue with an aroma of caverns and salt. The earth endowed me with a feeling of puissance well beyond life and death. And the earth initiated me into constancies I recognized as august and everlasting.

  I was seated. I shook my head to tear myself from the hypnosis of the tall trees. Crouching, I listened better to the fabulous silence. The sounds of the monster had not returned. But it was coming toward me with all speed. I had this intuition. If I did not move, it too would plunge into the well-spring marsh. I had the idea of waiting there like that, so it would stay the course and drown itself in the thousand-year-old trap. I grabbed a dead branch, good for cracking its skull. Then, I listened again. A fracture in the silence. Its steps. Yes, I heard its steps. Impossible to know if they were near or far. The trees scattered the impacts. Sepulchral echoes that chilled my heart. At the same time, I realized the crabs had rejoined me. The mantous were plaguing my toes with their gros-mordant pincers. The red crabs wanted to bury me in a bloodred pus disgorged by the leaf mold. I swept away their front lines; this was like pushing back water. With scratching legs, embittered claws, they came on to replenish the devastated horde. I decided to move away from the spring, reduced to hoping that the mastiff would tumble in anyway. I was about to prendre-courir, take to my heels, when—hoo!—I set eyes on the Unnameable.

  The Unnameable was there, in the shadows, coiled on a fern at a level with my neck. Already tense, poised to attack in a whoosh! of scales. Hissing. Fangs bared. I was frozen, I mean stricken-blue-petrified. Time unrolled like a dropped spool of thread. I had the approaching threat of the mastiff, and jaws without a name poised to bite. I was between two deaths. I had, all my life, feared the slithering Unnameable. Some folks had quested of me the laying-on of a palm over Nameless bites. I had that way saved lives with a hand moist with fear, its only virtue the scald-chill of relentless primal fright: la-peur. Dark. Powerful. Sacred. In spite of the so-many years they spend deep in the fields, in the back corners of the sugar works, beneath the distillery casks, no Nameless had ever attacked me, no more than they ever struck at the smooth foreheads of stones. But here, this one was preparing to kill me. I sensed the unwholesome aura of its alarm. It stretched out toward my awakened flesh. My fear amplified its terror. Its venom had gathered at the base of its fangs, its crimson glands at the ready. I had gone cold-stiff: that had saved me. Now my blood was panicking again. Sweat varnished my brow. Terror was welding us together in a silent vrac-jumble. Our identical emanations were finding an equilibrium. This probably protected me. I had to stay like that. Pas bouger, mon nègre: stock-still, my man. Pas foubin, mon bougre: no fooling around, you bugger. No letting your heart fumble its fear. No letting the oncoming monster rip a shiver from me. Stay-here, with this Unnameable swifter and stronger than you are. If it injects me with venom, even spurts it over my damaged skin, I’ll be done for. Pas bouger. Behind, the monster drawing near sent me a severe desire to run away: Courir. Pas bouger. Courir. Pas bouger. I did not know what to do. I thought I saw my death oh so clearly. Saw it even amid this tearing apart.

  *

  The monster had snatched up the trail at the edge of the Great Woods. An enigmatic odor, changing as it gained access to the knotted heart of the jungle. Thin at first like sighs of dry wood, it had opened into unbelievable perfumes. The monster had detected cemetery-mustiness, coming-undone flesh, disinterred sweats. It had no trouble following this odorous crisis thick as a rope and smelling so much like flesh both dead and alive that the monster had felt its speed increase.

  Then the trail had changed again. It had mingled with stale vegetal aromas like a lace of liquor with endless variations. The mastiff had sensed fears from more than twenty thousand years. Genetic torments. Boiling bubbles of terror. This multiplied its impact on the ground tenfold. The trail had morphed into the astringency of wormwood, then almond, then camphor, which had asserted itself over the rain-forest fug. The trail soon had little left that was human. The mastiff’s nostrils caught intrusions of pumice stone and battered basalt. For a moment it had thought itself pursuing an aigle-malfini—a broad-winged hawk—because of
a whiff of fluorined rain. Then had thought itself hunting a phantom ship haunting Brittany* that tormented a master wrecker dreaming of boarding her. The mastiff had thought it was tracking the rank wolf of the great snows, or the ear-shredding mountain bear. It had thought of the Norman black ram for which one heated up a thirteenth silver bullet in a casket of mandragora. It had picked up on the musk of those weasels that rout gypsy caravans. Or that of the badgers pursued by master-scholars eager to mush their brains into anti-epileptic medicines. Up had come miasmas from cat bones* disinterred at night for their ability to turn everything invisible. At times, the monster had thought it was crossing those cornfields where each ripe kernel bore the image of a virgin and above which storms would melt away. It had had the feeling of running toward a sea where jellyfish swamped corals with their viscous suicides. Only the imperial continuity of the trail had allowed the monster never to go astray: the track varied infinitely without breaking and the dog had learned that was the thing, that was what it had to hunt, even when this hunt was like sticking its muzzle into the wake of a dusk and a dancing dawn. The monster stayed right on track. Its eyes (if that’s what they were) never blinked.