Ancient of Days

by Michael Bishop

  “It would sell for a lot more if I could reveal the identity of the artists—if, in fact, I could document their identities.”

  “But I am not interested in ‘mopping up.’ ”

  “What are you interested in?”

  “Secure futures for these last five people. After them, no more. After me, no more. RuthClaire and I want enough money to look after them here on Montaraz, enough to see to their remaining needs.”

  “Your own work sells. Let me represent that, Adam. We’d all make money, and you wouldn’t even have to mention your last five habiline relations.”

  Adam explained that although their recent travels had stimulated a lot of creative activity, it had also denied them enough time to finish many of these new works. Further, RuthClaire’s latest paintings—the series entitled Souls that she’d completed in Atlanta—had not yet found an audience. Gallery directors declined to show them. If RuthClaire rented space in malls or department stores to counteract the gallery boycott, the public ignored them. Newspaper critics lambasted them as dull, flat, colorless, repetitive, picayune in concept, and uninspired, particularly in light of their grandiose overall title. Even more dismaying, one critic who hated what he called “decadent decal work for the AmeriCred porcelain-plate scam” had cited the acrylic paintings Souls as evidence of the “steep falling off” of RuthClaire’s talent since Footsteps on the Path to Man. Indeed, you could argue that these unpopular and much-belittled paintings had ruined RuthClaire’s marketability. Adam’s work continued to sell, but his artist wife had run headlong into an immovable brick wall. That was one of the reasons they’d summoned Caroline and me to Montaraz.

  “They’re good,” I said. “It’s just that nobody sees.”

  “For a time, you didn’t see. And maybe they aren’t good, Mister Paul. Maybe it’s only an accident of light that redeems them from mediocrity.”

  “To be truthful, my appreciation of them came and went—just like the light. It’s easy to understand why she’s having trouble selling them.”

  “Okay. But that’s why we require money.” He began walking again, his hands clasped in the small of his furry back.

  I took two long strides to catch up with him. “When do I meet these habiline artists, Adam? When do I see their work?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Where?”

  In the early starlight, he grinned at me. “On the middle finger, Mister Paul. On the bird we shoot at Miami.” He turned, trotted toward the water, and threw himself out into the surf with a splash whose falling canopy of droplets iridesced like the bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war.

  After shedding my jacket and kicking off my sandals, I followed Adam into the water. As I had hoped, it was warm without being strength-sapping. My habiline host was dog-paddling about the inlet, sometimes rolling to his back like a sea otter, sometimes treading water with the lackadaisical finning motion of a manatee. I sidled up using an easy breaststroke. He dog-paddled again, but stayed near so we could talk.

  “From what you told Blair in that interview, you’ve abandoned Christianity for a new-fangled theory of the interrelatedness of biological systems.” I blew salt water away from my mouth.

  “Nonbiological, too.”

  “Where did it all come from, Adam?”

  “It’s Batesonian, for a man named Gregory Bateson.” He circled me.

  “Familiar, I guess, but I don’t really know him.”

  “You can’t know him. He died the year my ego was beginning to crystallize out of the Edenic anonymity of my youth.”

  “I don’t know his work. Have you uncritically adopted Bateson’s metaphysics? Jettisoned your time-tested religion for some kind of trendy Californian nonsense with pseudo-scientific underpinnings?”

  “I adopt nothing uncritically, Mister Paul, and if you don’t know Bateson’s work, you understand nothing about its underpinnings, which are beautifully evolutionary.”

  “I was worried about RuthClaire.”

  “Why? I love her.”

  “I’m sure you do, but it’s hard for me to believe she’s going to be crazy about a ‘religion’ based on the evolutionary interrelatedness of biological—and nonbiological—systems. She’s a traditionalist, but you’ve name-called traditional faiths like hers as egotistical and neurotic.”

  He treaded water in front of me. “But I’m egotistical and neurotic. So was the young man who killed our son. I am trying to discover meaning, Mister Paul, also to cure myself of neurosis. Everyone should wish to cure themselves.”

  “T. P.’s murder sent you down this path?”

  “Yes. You heard the eulogies I spoke. I hurt. RuthClaire hurt. Maybe the family of Craig Puddicombe hurt. My choice was to seek consolation in the orthodox hereafter or find my place in the great systemic neurosis that devoured our son and so begin to heal myself from the inside: my gift to him.”

  “Is it really an either-or situation?”

  “Maybe not. But first things first.”

  “How does what you believe now differ from Bateson’s world view?”

  “He sees Mind and Megapattern. I see those things, but also continue to postulate God. It’s a matter of hopeful, nonneurotic faith.”

  “Sez you.”

  This tickled him. “Yes, sez me.” Both his palms struck the water, launching fusillades of spray right into my eyes. I yelled, clutched my face, and then blindly grabbed for him. He’d already dived out of reach, though, and was sea-ottering through the inlet toward the web of its sandy fingers. Once there, he scrambled onto the beach. Gasping, I waded ashore a minute or two later to join him on the ever-darkening strand.

  “Do you mean you’ve jettisoned your favorite theologians for Charlie Darwin and Gregory Bateson? Adam, I don’t know what to say. It’s beginning to look as if we’re brothers under the skin, after all: rational pagans, both.”

  “But I am not a pagan.”

  “No?”

  “I don’t deny the divinity of RuthClaire’s Savior. I don’t deny the possibility of historical revelation. Not at all, not at all. It’s only that the New Testament revelation came at a time and a place inaccessible to my earliest people. I know of another revelation more topical and timely. For me, anyway. For me.”

  “What?” He’d completely lost me.

  “Tomorrow, Mister Paul. Let’s go back to the cottage.”

  So we did, stopping once for me to retrieve my sandals and jacket, and when we entered the house, I heard Adam’s recorded voice saying, “. . . no great hope that the human species will ever adopt a holistic faith. . . .” The rest I blotted out. Caroline was still hard at work, and I was still resentfully horny.

  I awoke with my lust unslaked. Caroline wasn’t in bed. I dressed and went looking for her. Neither she nor the Montarazes had waited for me. They’d gone down to the bay for an early swim. Their voices—or, at least, RuthClaire’s and Caroline’s—piped cheerfully on the balmy morning breeze. My resentment increased. Last night, Caroline had refused to stop work to accompany me to the water’s edge, but rising an hour or so ahead of me—after retiring an hour or so later—was apparently no obstacle to her enjoyment of the beach. I banged into the L-shaped porch overlooking the inlet and made an eyeshield of my hands. Pressing them against the screen, I peered down at the revelers.

  Adam, as a concession to the gals’ southern sensibilities, wore a black monokini, while both his wife and mine had outfitted in modest one-piece maillot suits, Caroline’s turquoise-and-navy, RuthClaire’s blood-orange. Arm in arm, they danced into, and scampered away from, the lacy charges of the surf. The hilarity of this game had them struggling to stay upright.

  “Shit,” I murmured.

  Something on the porch moved. I nearly jumped out of my sandals. One hand went to my heart, the other groped for a support to which to cling. I found the nearest wooden stud bracing the screen and held on to that.

  Looking at me from the far end of the porch was a wizened creature wearing a pastel-blue chemise
and a grubby white head scarf. She sat on an upturned box with her gnarled hands between her legs and her bare toes playing the planks like so many soundless piano keys. I assumed her female only because of her clothing. For a moment, in fact, I had thought this person might be Adam in drag, joking with me. But Adam was cavorting with RuthClaire and Caroline beside Caicos Bay, and my visitor seemed years older than the habiline. A habiline too, she scrutinized me with beady, alien eyes.

  “Good morning,” I said. “I’m Paul Loyd, a friend of Adam’s.” I jerked a thumb in the direction of the surf-teasing trio.

  Her eyes remained on me, more watchful than curious.

  “Why not tell me your name?” I said.

  “Ga gapag,” she said.

  This expression meant nothing to me, but I was surprised she had spoken at all. Until his operation at Emory, Adam had been incapable of speech. True, he had never lacked the ability to vocalize, but uttering recognizable phonemes had had to wait for surgery. This woman’s “Ga gapag,” by contrast, represented something vaguely like intelligible human speech: a Creole habiline dialect, a primitive patois.

  “Gaga pag,” I tried to echo her. “Is that your name?”

  She shook her head.

  “You’re part of the Rutherford Remnant, aren’t you?”

  Contemptuously, she everted her bottom lip. The pink flesh curled back on her receding chin like a fan. Chimpanzees perform a similar trick when bored or irritated. Then her face returned to normal, and she looked away as if I had committed an asinine social blunder.

  “Wait here,” I said, angry. “Just wait here.”

  My command to the haughty gnome was superfluous; she sat stolidly on her upturned crate, “obeying” me only because she had already decided to remain where she was. I yanked open the screen door, descended a set of treated wooden stairs, and put my foot on the first island in a miniature archipelago of stepping stones. Then I floundered through a cut between two shapeless dunes and stumbled down the beach to my wife and our hosts.

  Caroline, seeing me, broke free of RuthClaire and Adam. With a gait at once coltlike and feminine, she ran toward me on tiptoes. “Paul!” Her smile wiped out every other lovely natural sight on my horizon—diamond-blue water, glittering sand, even a gliding formation of brown pelicans at the mouth of the bay. She put her cool hands on my shoulders and kissed the bridge of my nose. I returned only a miserly peck.

  “Why the hell didn’t you get me up, too?”

  “Sleeping, you looked about five years old. How could I wake up a tuckered five-year-old?”

  I made an irritated head gesture at the cottage. “There’s a rude little enana negra up there. One of Adam’s kind. You left me the rude little biddy to wake up to.”

  Adam appeared at Caroline’s shoulder, RuthClaire behind him. “I did not expect her so early. You were alone in the house when we came down here. Not for anything, Mister Paul, would I have caused you discomfort.”

  “She scared the bejesus out of me.”

  “I’ll bet you frightened her, too,” Caroline said.

  “A platoon of marines with a howitzer might frighten her. Me, she found about as scary as a sick ladybug.”

  “That’s Erzulie,” Adam said. “My grandmother on my father’s side.”

  “Erzulie?”

  “Her vaudun name. I do not remember how we called her when I was a boy with no ego. Probably, we had no spoken name for her at all.”

  “She speaks. She said, ‘Gaga pag.’ Something like that.”

  “She meant, ‘Pa capab.’ That’s Creole for ‘Pas capable.’ It means ‘No can do.’ That’s about all the language she has. She says it seldom because, besides speak, there is not too much she cannot do. Unlike me, she has never grown an ego. And so she avoids identifying what she does not possess with the imperfect label of her vaudun name.”

  “If you can follow that,” RuthClaire said, laughing. “What’s she doing here?”

  “She is an artist,” Adam said. “Also, she wished to act as our guide. Now you’re awake—and now Erzulie is here—we can eat our breakfasts and go.”

  We returned to the cottage. Although Caroline kept her hand in mine, I felt subtly betrayed and so declined to answer her friendly squeezes with squeezes of my own. By the time we reached the cottage, then, she was casting me puzzled looks, squinting for a sign of affection or thaw. I liked that. It served her right. Who the hell enjoyed being told that he resembled a tuckered five-year-old? I had had adult games in mind, but Caroline burnt my hedonistic ambition on the altar of the Protestant work ethic.

  We had fresh eggs from the market in Rutherford’s Port. Although I cooked a reproachfully splendid breakfast, Erzulie spurned my platter of fried eggs. Standing at a counter in the kitchen, she drank her eggs raw from a ceramic cup. For a chaser, she downed a jelly jar of native clairin, or crude rum. When we left the cottage in the rented Jeep, she carried in the back seat a Tupperware container of rapadou, a coarse brown sugar that many Haitians use as a sweetener and a staple food item. Like a mountain woman taking snuff, she put pinches of this sugar between her gums and her rotted teeth and sucked at them as we followed the coastal road around the island’s middle finger.

  Everyone else had put on jeans and rugged shoes, but Adam wore the same frock coat and top hat he’d worn to the double funeral at Paradise Farm. Horn-rimmed glasses with no lenses adorned his dark face. (Once, Adam had worn real glasses to read with, but since his operation at Emory, he relied on contacts, and today he was wearing them beneath the phony horn-rimmed glasses.) Sitting beside RuthClaire in the front seat, he had a walking stick between his legs and an unlit cigar in one hand. He clutched the brim of his top hat to keep it from blowing off. Occasionally, though not often, we passed a straw-hatted laborer or a child-toting mother, who, startled, gaped at the Jeep—but especially at Adam—as if seeing a disquieting revenant from the island’s past.

  “Why the getup?” I shouted from the back seat. (Erzulie was between Caroline and me, sucking her rapadou.)

  “It has religious significance,” Adam said over his shoulder.

  “Religious significance?”

  “He’s dressed like Baron Samedi, a voodoo spirit,” RuthClaire said. “Some of the Haitians call this traditional spirit Papa Guedé, a ribald authority figure associated with death and cemeteries.”

  “Oh, good,” I said. “What’s the point?”

  “It’s religious and ceremonial,” Adam snapped, as if he had already explained this and I was being willfully obtuse.

  “Instead of another funeral, aren’t we going to the secret habiline republic?”

  “That republic’s dying,” RuthClaire said. “It’s been dying for more than twenty years. You’re privileged to be visiting it, but just remember that visiting it is a lot like attending a magnificent funeral mass. So humor Adam in this, okay?”

  “I’m here because you guys asked me to be here. Don’t get testy if I can’t help wondering aloud what the hell’s going on.”

  “Paul,” Caroline admonished me.

  On the dark, fertile slope to our left were the terraces of one of Austin-Antilles Corporation’s coffee plantations. The regularly spaced shrubs, most more than thirty feet tall, loomed over us like fragrant emerald geysers. Their white flowers stirred in the breeze, as did their bountiful crimson clusters of cherries—in this spot, if nowhere else, ready for harvest: coffee, coffee everywhere, but not a cup to drink. I realized that for breakfast RuthClaire had brewed a pot of tea while Erzulie had opted for rum. I needed a cup of coffee. I needed something.

  RuthClaire said, “Papa Doc, the first Duvalier, sometimes wore top hat, horn rims, and tails. ‘I am the revolution and the flag,’ he said. He also liked to present himself as a champion of the people’s folk religion, vaudun, which they continue to practice hand in glove with Roman Catholicism. Duvalier exploited this unorthodox dualism. In the Port-au-Prince newspapers, he declared himself Christ’s chosen leader, and he made a habit of app
earing on his reviewing stand as Baron Samedi. He wanted his identification with Haiti to be total. He wanted the respect, love, and fear of every Haitian, intellectuals and peasants alike.”

  “Certainly their fear,” said Adam.

  “So now you’re dressed as Baron Samedi,” I said. “You’re emulating Papa Doc, who almost everyone agrees was a paranoid megalomaniac. Pardon me if I see that as a nasty little imposture.”

  Adam turned to look at me. “Baron Samedi—Lord Saturday—was here long before Duvalier. So were we habilines, les nains noirs of the original Rutherford estate. I am not copying the paranoid Papa Doc. I am honoring a Haitian religious tradition.”

  “Wouldn’t superstition be a better word?”

  “Pa conay,” Adam said, Creole for “I don’t know.” “Do you call something a superstition if it works?”

  That shut me up. If throwing spilled salt over your left shoulder neutralizes the bad luck supposedly assured by having spilled it, do you call that act superstitious? At the moment, I had no idea. I looked down at the habiline woman Erzulie. Maybe she knew. She looked up at me from under the band of her head scarf and the ridge of her brow. A coquettish glimmer pirouetted in her eyes, reflecting the sea on our right. Then her tiny Tupperware container bumped me in the chest, and she offered me a pinch of rapadou. The lumpy brown stuff repulsed me. I turned my head.

  The road climbed, as it sliced tentatively inland. Caroline and RuthClaire talked, but Adam, Erzulie, and I sat like hostages with gags in our mouths. After another twenty minutes, RuthClaire swung the Jeep into a foliage-capped side road that was mostly gravel and eroded channels. It ended about a hundred twisty yards from the main road. “Here we are.” She jammed the Jeep into park, and we all got out, pilgrims on a hidden path to mystery. No one on the main road would ever see us. Indeed, I was trying to figure out how RuthClaire had spotted the turnoff. Creepers netted the rocky ground, and eerily hairy lianas dangled from the trees—a stand of mahogany, I thought—in profligate loops and slings. The coffee plantations of Austin-Antilles lay far behind us to the south, far enough behind us to suggest our isolation and remoteness. A feeling of claustrophobic uncertainty sped my pulse and opened my sweat glands.