“Why?” Caroline asked.
“Because it’s making it easier for him to forget what happened to Paul. I could use that kind of help myself.”
“Can’t you do this, too?”
“I’m afraid to. And I’m not a habiline.”
“Do you have to be? Isn’t simply being human enough? It was enough for you and Adam to marry.”
“Well,” RuthClaire said, “he’s human, but I… I’m not a habiline. It’s like time’s arrow, I guess—a one-way street. So I’m frightened and envious.”
“If you were an anthropologist,” Brian began, “you could…”
“What?”
“Try to identify with the habilines. Take part in their ceremonies. Translate the nonverbal images Adam and this woman are trading into an impressionistic history of human origins. You can see what that would mean. You can see why I’m badgering you to let me try it. It might revolutionize our whole species’ self-concept, our fundamental notions of who and what we are.”
I said, “You never let up, do you, Brian?”
Here, Adam leaned his head back and let go such a piercing cry that all four of us ducked away from it. Then Adam’s eyes sprang open. So did Erzulie’s. The couleuvre, Damballa’s living avatar on Montaraz, slipped the knots that it had tied around Erzulie’s waist and Adam’s torso and crawled away from them. Caroline leapt aside to let it pass.
The snake knew where it was going, namely, up onto a crude wooden dais beyond the poteau mitan. There, the habilines had arranged the three sets of Arada-Dahomey drums traditionally played during a vaudun ceremony. The python, taking its time, gripped the base of one of the tall asotor drums and flowed up it to the leather drumhead. Here the serpent balanced, as if on a fulcrum, until it could bridge the chasm between the drum and one of the posts supporting the houngfor’s outer wall. Still calmly flowing, the great bronze-and-garnet snake reached the top of the truncated wall, and, as its weight shifted from the drum to the rafter of the peristyle, the entire temple shook. To prevent the houngfor from collapsing on me, I stepped outside. Soon, though, Damballa came to rest on the flimsy rafter, and the temple stopped swaying.
Adam and Erzulie awakened. They had ceased to be loa—had become themselves again. Adam pulled Erzulie up, and the two groggy habilines turned to face us with a reluctance, or an apathy, that was palpable. The reality of this moment, no matter how strange, could not compete with the colorful intensity of their possession by the Haitian gods. Adam’s pupils were huge, as if he had imbibed light with which to illumine the visions of his trance. He stumbled toward RuthClaire before finding both his balance and his place in our small consensus world.
“Are you all right?” RuthClaire asked, catching him.
He was looking at Brian Nollinger. His pupils had contracted to the size of microdots. Something inside him, I thought, wanted to squeeze Nollinger utterly out of his sight.
“I was,” he said, his guttural voice scarcely audible. “I was.”
The five of us remained in Prix-des-Yeux for three days. We let Brian Nollinger stay because he had found us and would have little trouble finding us again. Too, he earnestly reiterated his promise not to divulge the location of the habiline village, if Adam would consent to his doing a respectful ethnographic study of the Rutherford Remnant. Adam consented, but his lack of enthusiasm suggested that he viewed Brian’s plea as a subtle form of blackmail. If he’d withheld consent, Nollinger could have avenged himself by returning to Rutherford’s Port and telling what he knew. Then Adam’s people would have had to move. Tearing down their houngfor and their huts would have posed no real problem, but on an island as small as Montaraz, finding an equally well-camouflaged site for a new village would have. So Adam let the blackmailer stay.
His decision irked me. Caroline’s offering the Montarazes unsolicited testimonials on Brian’s behalf didn’t sit well with me, either. What stake did she have in his staying with us? Why did she so value his talents—wholly untested talents—as an ethnographer? Why did she recall him with such fondness, when he’d deserted their earlier relationship without so much as a flippant ta-ta? I tried to find reasons. He was younger than I. His brief career in the Caribbean, begun out of something like Byronic desperation, gave him an irresistibly romantic air. Or, the least happy of all my conjectures, Caroline still loved him. She’d married me on the rebound, albeit a long one, and Brian’s reappearance in her life had come to her as a godsend.
Self-doubt. Paranoia. An absence of charity. I owned all these negative attributes. I kept thinking about what RuthClaire had jokingly said about killing Nollinger. The surreal tropical setting of Prix-des-Yeux had deprived me of all adult perspective. I was a teenager again, and the fact that I was living an oblique Lost Race fiction out of Bulwer-Lytton and H. Rider Haggard simply heightened my adolescent self-doubt. And the Lost Race whose culture Brian hoped to observe, whose art my new wife and I had come all the way from Atlanta to see, and whose survival the Montarazes wanted to insure? Well, on the afternoon of the day of our arrival, we met these unusual people one at a time over a period of about two hours.
At Adam’s bidding, Erzulie left Prix-des-Yeux, hiked into the dense shrubbery uphill from the huts, and returned in half an hour with one of her habiline compatriots. Then, after mutually awkward pantomimic greetings, Erzulie accompanied her charge back up the mountain to fetch the next. Each habiline came dressed in a togalike garment that varied not at all in style or color from person to person. With the appearance of the third habiline, I realized that Erzulie’s relatives were all wearing the same garment. An ochre stain on its hem gave the game away. Although the motto “one size fits all” was not strictly true (the smallest of the four members of the Rutherford Remnant had to gather the toga’s skirts and carry them across one arm), they pretended otherwise. In the absence of visitors, they obviously wore no clothes at all. Hence these serial debuts.
Erzulie’s head scarf and chemise were dictated solely by her current status as a go-between, a role that she must often have played with the superstitious islanders grubbing out their livings farther down the mountain. Older and more worldly-wise than most of her conspecifics, she could pass herself off as a deaf-mute mambo or vaudun priestess. The Haitians might suspect she was a habiline, but to regard her as a witch—rather than a deceitful weredemon or a quasi-human survivor of Sayyid Sa’īd’s slave market—conferred a degree of safety on their dealings with her. Cigouaves and habilines, after all, you should report to the Tontons Macoutes, and the fewer contacts with those guys the better. You could trust a four-foot-tall witch a lot further than you could a six-foot-tall cop with mirrorshades and a Springfield rifle.
In any event, Erzulie—both mambo and goddess—introduced us to her people.
The first of the four habilines was a grizzled old man with a broad flap of flesh for a nose and eyes the hue of cloudy gin. He was blind. Adam told us his name was Hector, but, as with all the names that Adam gave us, I felt sure he’d invented it as a convenience for the rest of us. Although blind, Hector oriented himself to every rock and blossom in the landscape as if he could see. Once, when a butterfly with iridescent moiré patterns and peacock eyes on its wings tumbled past us, Hector moved his head as if to follow its flight. RuthClaire conjectured that an acute sensitivity to air currents and minuscule temperature changes had allowed him to perform this trick.