Slave Old Man

by Patrick Chamoiseau

  My convulsive palm wears away the moss. I feel forms beneath my fingers. Incised shapes. Circles. Lines. Patterns of squares. Meanderings spelling something. I scrape what surface I can reach. The Stone is engraved all over. Vulture heads. Broad-cast sowings of dots and interlaced lines. Frog’s-feet and labyrinths. Human and animal forms subjected to invisible forces. Tortoise-necks and frigate-bird-heads. Lines and spirals, double crosses, triangles and crosshatchings. My eyes halt at these forms but there I divine fundamental words, sacred gestures and conjurations. Not one crumb of the Stone has remained virgin. The whole hums in all directions like a tattoo on living scales. The engravers succeeded one another for times-without-times. Neither the same peoples, nor the same tools, nor the same intentions. A ouélélé-tumult of myths and Geneses. I plumb them with a finger sensitive as a blind man’s.

  The Stone is Amerindian. These people had inhabited this country for an et-cetera of time, and carved stones this way in the Great Woods. I had learned of their extermination. Old Caribs had taught me about plants, fish without venom, and companion roots. They had unfolded (for me, who cared so little) the narratives of their people: the times before-time, the first times, the lost times—a long thread of words that attempted to fulfill the universe. They had clung to floating gestures and fallen words. They had evoked for me the lands that surrounded this one, and so many other auspicious peoples in homelands more vast. They had murmured to me hopes and despairs, unreal laments, mummified liturgies, useless memories, knowledges undone. I had wanted them to teach me how to survive right where I was, but they discoursed on their past being, at the center of all things. I had not listened. Youth. Here, now, I hear all that again. The Stone does not speak to me; its dreams materialize in my mind the speech of those dying ones I had forsaken. The Stone is many peoples. Peoples of whom only it remains. Their only memory, repository of a thousand memories. Their only word, great with all words. Cry of their cries. The ultimate matter of these existences.

  Boulder of heady intoxication. These vanished ones live in me by means of the Stone. A chaos of millions of souls. They tell stories, sing, laugh. Some want to support me, others to question me. Festive presences, emotional, fragile, quick; others, behind the pride of something sacred, more menacing. I perceive feminine graces, artful in drawing near me. I wander in the tumult of a cartload of impossibles. Dumbfounded. I no longer feel the wounds hacking up my body. I have reached a rib of alliance between life and death, victory and defeat, time and immobility, space and nothingness. I embrace the Stone as a refuge-being. I press it against me. I want to dissolve myself there and let nothing of my flesh survive. That is when I see the monster again.

  It had come up the ravine. Had stopped. A few yards from me. Looking at me. I lean back on the Stone, rejoining the torment of my leg, the fire of my wounds. But I want to see it. My back against the Stone, I am soothed. Pièce désespoir: no despair. No longing for a death in the fangs of my executioner. No, I desire only to see this creature that has tormented me during this run, the meaning of which I do not understand. The animal has gone where I have gone. It is a part of this. The monster observes me as well. Believing strongly in itself. Then, it advances. Gaze on fixed point. It is stained with mud, sweat, and crumpled petals. Vermicelles-diable are knotted to its paws. It drags them like medusa hair. Its coat is now too difficult to see. Mosses, orchid pistils, pineapple plant fibers have grafted themselves into its fur. It resembles those idols on which sacrificial materials have transmuted into unspeakable, unnameable things. It approaches me like an inanimate mass, very dense, opaque. I perceive nothing of it, either in waves or sounds. The chantey of the Stone is within me. It fills me with an évohé* of life.

  *

  The being was powerful. Too powerful. The monster had followed the trail cautiously. Its old ferocity, its taste for wars and perils, had reached a virulent pitch. As the trail had changed, this ferocity had crept back to its cradle. Like a brute of the first ages returning to its underground cave. The trail was no longer a field of forces or lights. It had become intoxication. Mixture of ether and horizons. An endless vertigo that annihilated the ground. The monster was following this furrow without really knowing how. Nothing of its ferocity was now in play. It advanced toward this mystery like a shepherd’s dog.

  *

  It comes within two yards of me. It stares at me in an indescribable way. I have the impression that it’s planting itself on the edge of a precipice. It takes another step. Then another that leaves it at a dead set. The monster awaits I don’t know what. My tourniquet has come apart. My blood bubbles up around the broken bone. The smell of my wound awakens none of the executioner’s zeal. The dog is an indecipherable block. I don’t know what to do. No strength left to raise an arm, grasp a branch, try again to split its skull. A faint idea occurs to me. Grab a sharp flint and cut its throat as it leaps. My frozen fingers fumble the dirt. I am not afraid. I do not really want to fight. I am possessed by an indestructible life.

  *

  The Master was lost. He no longer heard his dog. He did not know in what quarter to seek it. He was advancing toward something impossible to put right. The old man had perhaps cut the animal’s throat. The Master put that quickly out of mind for it was impossible. That dog was a Beast-of-war. And slaughter. It was used to the ways of these nègres. Besting it was not of this world. And yet, the Master was afraid. This silence and this quandary worried him. He walked straight ahead praying that his dog had kept going in this direction. But he felt lost past all return. He told himself that these woods would swallow him up, that their murmurings would soon lead to damnations, that gargoyles would be born of the shadows to sing to him of his shame. The Master had not ceased weeping. Without much knowing why or wherefore, he had cried like a little child. No one could see him, so his rank and manners were tumbling from the highest sky, and his tears flowed freely. He attempted to make them mean something. He was crying, he told himself, for those who were not crying, over what had not moved him, over what he had not seen, over caresses impossible to give, over the paltriness of the foundations he had believed imposing. He was crying over the triumphant failure that had been his life. At times, he pulled himself together. Declared himself the victim of moody hallucinations. Certain plants possessed venomous juices. Those resins must be poisoning him. He kept telling himself that, but he knew his distress came from within and knew how forcefully these magnificent trees fostered revelations.

  *

  I seek me that weapon. Then admit this is only a reflex of my flesh. Which I can shed. So then, I open my fingers. I return my forearms to the welcome of my knees. I apply myself to breathing as on certain evenings before my cabin—after the rain—when I felt good. Plowing back those times so rare when I felt good. Little moist moments, gentled heart on its own, hush-there mouth, and sweet breeze. But the commotion of the Stone reappeared in me, violent and symphonic. It reawakened the agitations that have possessed me. A dance of inner celebration breaks out. Exploding sheaves of birds. Flights of tattered butterflies in ecstasy. Risings to the rhythm of the drums. Orders to the rain. Loving injunctions to fertile females. Submissions to the sun. Miseries of possessions in the circle of flames. Effronteries in the offering of silks on a belly. Numbers chatting where the water rejoins its bed. Destructions of limits. . . . Celebrations! Celebrations! I am pleased, lord of dances, by this ebullient disharmony. By this modest immoderation. Yet all this takes place within an infinitely tiny part of me. What I call “me” can also dwell in an infinitesimal part of what I perceive. Or receive. I am neither active nor passive. Neither in volition nor in coma. A non-ordinary state, at the other end of this world but with which I can live this world, this broken leg, this poor wrinkled body, this pitiless monster tensed in front of me. Without knowing why, I want to offer myself a name. Assign myself a name as at the hour of the baptisms ordered by the Master. I find nothing. There are so many names in me. So many possible names. My name, my Great-name, ought to be
able to cry them all. Sound them all. Count them all. Burn them all. Render them all justice. But that is not possible. Nothing is possible for me anymore. Everything is beyond necessary and possible for me. Beyond justifiable. No Territory* is mine, or language, or History, or Truth is mine, but all that is mine at the same time, to the limit of each pure term, to the far reach of their concerted melodies. I am a man.

  I believe I am weeping but weeping makes no sense. I believe I still feel a pang, or even a shiver of fear when the monster comes closer to me. But all that is only a reflex of flesh. Insane muscle memories. Fixed feeling in my bones. My bones. What will they say about me? Like those peoples sheltering in a stone, I will end up as a few lost bones in the depths of these Great Woods. I see them already, those bones, architecture of my mind, substance of my births and deaths. Some will make dust, others rocks. Some will sculpt themselves shapeless, others will dream of crystal and singing flutes. Some will form a shell over the mystery of a pearl, others will go the invariable way of circles unbegun and reluctant to end. But that is not important: my saliva tastes like dawn. The monster, they say, drew nearer. Fetid muzzle. The man was not even surprised when the enormous face reached his own.

  *

  The monster did not believe its eyes. Its prey was mingling with a stone teeming with a myriad of peoples, voices, sufferings, outcries. Unknown peoples were celebrating an awakening. The being seemed like lightning shooting through the Stone. An un-shining energy. It did not project itself anywhere. It did not affect the reigning eternity. An incandescence pulled-in to its very core. The monster drew still closer. It perceived things that its mind could not envisage. It soon dismissed its own memories. It put aside the mass of its instincts where its behaviors were dozing. It gave itself over to what it was receiving. It looked on in the way one watches, from the height of a chasm, the dusk of a star, or the great-work of its birth. It was not too sure. The monster went even closer to the being and, without much knowing why, with all the conviction available to it, began to lick it. The monster did not lick blood, or flesh, or the sweat of flesh. It garnered little taste. It was licking. That was the only gesture he was given.

  *

  The dog reappeared. The Master did not even start with pleasure. The animal came toward him and the Master did not know him. He had loosed a killer; returning to him was an enormous animal, too serene and too quiet. The Master knelt down and hugged him. He held him tight the way one clasps a corpse to bring it back to life. But the mastiff had changed. His eyes were lively. His eyes were shining. His musculature was still, almost soft. Then, the Master wept for the monster he had lost.

  He followed the animal heading back down to the Plantation. A melancholy fell upon the Master. It made pleasant those woods abandoned with an irremediable step. He did not feel he was returning empty-handed, having lost a nègre or been made mock of by an ingrate of a Maroon. He was returning bearing something he could not name. His fatigue had disappeared; the shame and fear had melted away. The tears had dried on his face but above all, within him. In him, now, other spaces were bestirring themselves, spaces where he would never go, perhaps, but where one day no doubt, in a future generation, hopefully in the full radiance of their purity and legitimate strength, his children would venture, as one confronts a first misgiving.

  7. The Bones

  Today the laboring in the cane fields pushes their rusted nudity all the way to the dark green of the heights. What was retreat, trembling, furor of being and smoke of charcoaled wood gives way little by little to fertilizer. The histories, the stories, the doubles, become fewer, come together. The times are given one to the other. Yet who returns to the slope of the morne and digs in the earth?

  Shapeless shape of the bones,

  invincible intention of the creative will.

  Touch,

  folio VII

  The bones were found in the backwoods. Vieux-nègres very often come to show me l’antan, time-gone-by. The Marqueur de Paroles*—Word Scratcher—is for them a guardian of the past. Governor of memories. Giver of nostalgias for times and epochs, certainties and identities. They’ve offered me antique objects; showed me things of some age; proposed their lives to me for writing down and their exploits for the telling. The one who spoke to me of the Stone was a vieux-nègre-bois, an old man of the forest. He secretly rummaged up the refuse all-around in the béké woods. I’d met him in the town of Morne-Rouge,* during a pilgrimage I never miss. I love that bombe populaire—a throng of festive (and fervent) humanity—around the church and the steps of the calvary. I love those folks in their Sunday best who let their chains drift with the street* and sell any-and-everything. I had never paid attention to the religious aspect of this holiday. I am not fond of crowds, yet this encounter respected and nourished my solitudes. I had drunk three-caterpillar absinthe* with the vieux-nègre-bois. He had talked about my books—which he had never read and never would. Had congratulated me for that antan restored to the country. I was at the time finishing a work* about a neighborhood in Fort-de-France, a poor epic that was taking me forever-and-ever and leaving me all at sea. I was explaining this to him (probably to alleviate boredom) when he spoke to me about a stone.

  A Caribbean stone.

  He had found it and no one else but he would be able to find it. It was ancienne au dépassé, he said: older than timeless. It was too magique to critique, he said. Magnifique sympathique. He proposed that I should see it. I was a bit interested in the Caribs. Some knowledgeable friends used to offer me information useful to my little projects. I was set on finding out how a vanished people could inhabit us, in what way and what mystery. But all of them—really serious anthropologists, devotees of science—turned down the adventure into this poetic muck. They willingly left it to me. I did not agree to go see the Stone. Or else, I went there with him but he did not find it anywhere. Or else, one of my brothers went there and saw it in my place. Or else no one saw it, except that vieux-nègre-bois who probably talked too long to me about it. Unless it was my brother.

  A volcanic rock. Imagining it astonishing. Covered with Amerindian signs. Guapoïdes. Saladoïdes. Calviny. Cayo. Suazey. Galibis. Every epoch jostling there together. I would have come upon it in some surprise. I had seen one in the forest of Montravail, in the commune of Sainte-Luce, but this one was doubtless in no way comparable. The Stone was supposedly in a deep ravine, way off on its own. Doubtless a ceremonial site. The vieux-nègre-bois spoke (to me or I don’t know whom) of another discovery. He had looked carefully around the Stone, doubtless seeking some of those treasures that harass our dreams. And he had found bones. Human bones. He showed me a sliver wrapped in oiled paper along with an old rosary. I saw it. I looked at it. I touched it in spite of his warnings about evil spells. He himself said he didn’t know why he was keeping that bone splinter. He had promoted it to a garde-corps de chance, a good-luck bodyguard. A relic to ward off misfortune.

  I often went back to be near that stone. In dreams. Above those bones. In dreams. After distressing days my dreams go marooning. In these dreams, I lean back against the Stone. I contemplate the jumbled heap of bones. Who could that have been? A Carib. Doubtless. A Carib shaman who would have lived there, who would have engraved his memorial accounts and sunk himself into old age. Or the bones of a man wounded in initiatory fervor come to die in the sanctuary. My mind drifted like that around the Caribs. I imagined the bones. I saw them as eerie. Fossilized. No skull. A femur.

  The clavicles. Some vertebrae. A few small formless bits. Porous things. And a broken tibia the vieux-nègre-bois had mentioned, or maybe it was my brother. Those bones were loaded. A mute cry with no way out. I felt this yet could not express it. What did they have to tell me? And why was I returning to them so often in these dreams? We have so few intact memories. They have worn away, drifting in tangles, and have never been indexed: there was a reason for those bones to trouble me. They could have been from anyone among us. Amerindian. Nègre. Béké. Kouli.* Chinese. They spoke an e
ntire epoch, but one open in its uncertain totality. I should not have touched that relic.

  One day, imagining the broken tibia, I thought of the nègres marrons. That ravine was a fine refuge for a runaway slave. My nègre marron would have gone through the Great Woods, would have been wounded, would have come to die right over that stone. I felt what he would have experienced in that place, so far from everything, by that stone with those carvings that beggared all imagination. Roye, alas! I should not have touched that garde-corps charm. I was the victim of an obsession, the most distressing, exhausting, and familiar one, the sole escape from which is Writing. To write. I thus realized that one day I would write a story, this story, molded from the great silences of our mingled stories, our intermingled memories. About an old man slave running through the Great Woods, not toward freedom: toward the immense testimony of his bones. The infinite renaissance of his bones in a new genesis. I should not have touched anything. I will try to model my vieux-bougre through a folktale parlance and a runner’s wind. A parlance that would have its say while I show it silent. A parlance that would mix the muteness of his tongue with the dominative blows that crushed his speaking. A language without high or low, absolute in its will, open in its principle. My old-fellow-slave would set out compact and hardened; would open like great wind. O I shouldn’t have.

  I conserve the un-intelligible in the Stone and the bones. Obsession. The vieux-nègre-bois is my accomplice, his garde-corps envelops me. As for my brother, he is waiting for me to write a Caribbean tale. He has some word-bits he slips me sometimes. I urge him to write them up himself. He doesn’t dare. Writing is raide, he says. I grant him that too quickly. But I had penetrated to the depths of the land. Counted. Indexed. Touched on healthy admirations. Hauled out lost imaginations, the yet-to-comes and the at-present of forgotten times. I now knew we were hurtling toward life, full in the heart of our bones, facing the Great Woods of the world busy binding itself together. Great Woods of the peoples who bond as brothers, Territoires qui font Terre: Territories that make Terra, tongues that hail harmonies. We are all, like my runaway old-fellow, pursued by a monster. To escape our old certainties. Our so-careful moorings. Our cherished reflexes clock-timed into systems. Our sumptuous Truths. In a heady rush toward the unforeseeable to-be-constructed that opens its dangers to us. Confronting this chaos, tackling this task, understanding this intention and following it through. Such Writing is raide. The old slave had left me his bones, meaning: cartload of memories-histories-stories and eras gathered together. I imagined his last struggle, his ultimate huh of effort. That broken leg had dispelled his illusion about his run, pointing out (with a fearsome point) the clearing of his mind. They were warrior’s bones, says my so-genial brother. Of a warrior unconcerned with conquest or domination. Who would have been on the run toward another life. Of sharing and transformative exchanges. Of the world’s humanization in its wholeness. Doubtless possible. But my good fellow could also have quite simply run. A lovely run, completely meaningful in its very simple beauty, and thus open when touched by infinity. Very often, with the dream of that stone, musing on that tibia, I free myself from my militant concerns. I take the measure of the matter of bones. Neither dream, nor delirium, nor fanciful fiction: a vast detour that goes even to extremes to return to the combats of my age, bearing the unknown tablets of a new poetry. Brother, I shouldn’t have, but I touched the bones.