Here Paddy describes an expedition in 1939 from Baleni made on the last day of peace.
The summer months [of 1939] succeeded each other all too fast and the evil omens multiplied; the storks that gathered from every roof and chimney to join the ragged south-bound armada were leaving a doomed Europe. To forget and to exorcize for a day the growing assembly of trouble, we set off, on the second day of September, for a mushroom-gathering picnic in a wood about ten miles away, some in an old open carriage, some on horseback; through the sunlit vineyards where the grapes were almost ready to be harvested and pressed, and out into the open country. The clearings in the wood, when we arrived, were studded with our quarry. Alighting and dismounting, we scattered in a competitive frenzy, reassembling soon with our baskets full to the brim. In the glade of this mysterious wood, with the tethered horses grazing and swishing their tails under the oak branches, the picnic spun itself out. Soon it was late in the afternoon and the great demijohn was empty and the old Polish coachman was fidgeting the horses back into the shafts and fastening the traces. The ones on horseback set off by a different way, racing each other across the mown slopes of the vast hayfields and galloping in noisy and wine-sprung zigzags through the ricks and down a wide valley and up again through another oak-spinney to the road where the carriage, trailing a long plume of dust, was trotting more sedately home. We reined in and fell into a walk alongside.
The track followed the crest of a high ridge with the dales of Moldavia flowing away on either hand. We were moving through illimitable sweeps of still air. Touched with pink on their under sides by the declining sun, which also combed the tall stubble with gold, one or two thin shoals of mackerel cloud hung motionless in the enormous sky. Whale-shaped shadows expanded along the valleys below, and the spinneys were sending long loops of shade downhill. The air was so still that the smoke from Matila Ghyka’s cigar hung in a riband in the wake of our cavalcade; and how clearly the bells of the flocks, which were streaming down in haloes of golden dust to the wells and the brushwood folds a few ravines away, floated to our ears. Homing peasants waved their hats in greeting, and someone out of sight was singing one of those beautiful and rather forlorn country songs they call a doina. A blurred line along the sky a league away marked the itinerary of the deserting storks. Those in the carriage below, were snowed under by picnic things, mushroom baskets and bunches of anemones picked in the wood. It was a moment of peace and tranquillity and we rode on in silence towards the still far-off samovar and the oil lamps and heaven knew what bad news. The silence was suddenly broken by an eager exclamation from Matila.
‘Oh, look!’ he cried. One hand steadied the basket of mushrooms on his lap, the other pointed at the sky into which he was peering. High overhead some water-birds, astray from the delta, perhaps, or from some near-by fen, were flying in a phalanx. (I shall have to improvise names and details here, for precise memory and ornithological knowledge both fail me. But the gist and the spirit are exact.)
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it’s rather rare; the xiphorhyncus paludinensis minor, the glaivionette, or Lesser Swamp Swordbill—Wendischer Schmrtvogel in German, glodnic in Moldavian dialect; I believe the Wallachians call it spadună de baltă. Varieties are dotted about all over the world but always in very small numbers. They live in floating nests and have a very shrill ascending note in the mating season.’ He whistled softly once or twice. ‘Their eggs are a ravishing colour, a lovely lapis lazuli with little primrose speckles. They have been identified with the Stymphalian birds that Hercules killed, and there’s a mention of them in Lucian’s Dialogues and in Pliny the Elder, and, I think in Oppian . . . The ancient Nubians revered them as minor gods and there’s supposed to be one on a bas-relief at Cyrene; there’s certainly a flight of them in the background of a Journey of the Magi by Sassetta—he probably saw them in the reeds of Lake Trasimene, where they still breed; and the chiefs of two tribes on the Zambezi wear robes of their tail feathers for the new moon ceremonies. Some people,’ he continued, with a slight change of key, ‘find them too fishy. It’s not true, as I learnt years ago near Bordeaux. On a spit, over a very slow fire—of hornbeam twigs, if possible—with frequent basting and plenty of saffron, glaivionette á la landaise can be delicious . . . Alas: I’ve only eaten it once . . .’
His dark eyes, a-kindle with memory, watched the birds out of sight across the dying sky, and we all burst out laughing. The cosmic approach . . . It had been a happy day, as we had hoped, and it had to last us for a long time, for the next day’s news scattered this little society for ever.
A Brûler Zin
from The Traveller’s Tree
This passage comes from Paddy’s first book The Traveller’s Tree. It describes a journey round the islands of the Caribbean in 1947, which Paddy undertook with Costa, the Greek photographer, whose photographs illustrate the book, and his future wife Joan. The ‘Brûler Zin’ is a voodoo ceremony which took place on the island of Haiti, where Voodoo first emerged and where it is still a potent force.
A Brûler Zin, the most important ceremony in Voodoo, was being solemnized to celebrate the initiation as Hounci-Canzos of two neophytes from Curaçao. In order to attend the rite, they had crossed the Caribbean Sea in one of the schooners plying between the Greater Antilles and the Spanish Main: a journey which suggests that there is more connection between the secret Negro sects in the islands than is generally supposed.
The tonnelle lay behind a large bread-fruit tree in the heart of a populous quarter near the tramlines and rum shops. The drummers were plainly virtuosi, and the twenty white-clad houncis danced with the cohesion of a corps de ballet. Everything was disciplined and organized to the smallest detail. The ceremony had been going some time when we arrived, but, though there were about a hundred people in the tonnelle, the mud floor was only occupied by the Houngan, the mambo, the houncis and the various postulants and acolytes of the peristyle.
The candidates, meanwhile, for whom the impending Brûler Zin was the last act of initiation, were invisible inside the Rada houmfor. Their six rigorous days of preparation were nearly ended. The first step of this preparation is confession and absolution in a church, followed by a second plenary confession to the Houngan, who repeats it aloud to his personal Lwa. Two days are then spent in rest and meditation and certain specific ablutions, and then there is another compulsory period in church. Next, as all this week is aimed at making the candidate a fitting vessel for the visitation of the Lwas, the Houngan and the mambo conduct a ceremony in honour of Aizan-Véléquété, the Lwa of purification and exorcism. After further ritual lustrations, the candidates are enveloped in sheets so that only their faces are exposed, and then stretched out on mats in the houmfor with their heads resting on pillows of stone. Here, living on a liquid mixture of maize and mushrooms and herbs, they remain in the darkness for four days of silence and prayer. Sacrifices and unctions and a kind of baptism punctuate this symbolic death, and the Houngan removes their souls and places them in a head pot. The vigil was about to finish.
The swordsman and his two standard-bearers were engaged in a prolonged dance of salutation. The swordsman, the Laplace, wove a path among the houncis, leaping and turning, and twisting a cutlass in the air, while two girls, slowly waving their red and blue silk banners on which eagles were embroidered in sequins, danced on his left and right. They remained together throughout the evening, moving and turning perfectly in line, rhythmically prostrating themselves and recovering in unison, and making the elegant pirouette-salute to all the staff and to the congregation.
At one moment the houncis were dancing in two lines, at another round the pillar, falling rhythmically to the ground in a circle and kissing the ground, so that the radiation of their white figures formed a white corolla; rising again with the dust grey on their lips and foreheads, chanting, all the time, to the clatter of the drums. The mambo appeared laden with their long necklaces of coloured beads, which they knelt in turn to receive. She arranged them so that they crossed
in saltire on their breasts and backs. Libations were spilt, and a magic ring of white maize-fiour drawn round the pillar, encompassed, in a circle about a yard in diameter, by the white cognizances of each great Lwa. The drums fell silent, and the initiates sank to their knees in a compact group and bowed their heads. In the universal hush the Houngan softly intoned a long series of prayers in French. [. . .]
Next, beginning with Legba, comes the invocation of the Lwas, a prolonged rubaiyat that grows more cabalistic in suggestion, until the names of the Lwas cease, to be replaced by a monody of pure sound from which all apparent significance has been purged: ‘Lade immennou daguinin soilade aguignaminsou . . . Oh! Oh! Oh! . . . Pingolo Pingolo roi montré nous la prié qui minnin africain . . . Wanguinan Wannimé . . . En hen mandioment en hen . . .’ It seems that only a minimum of these words are of African origin, and their meaning is totally obscure. Nobody knows where or how they originated; whether they evolved in Haiti, or whether they are a memory of some hermetic language of the priests in Africa. Softly towards the end of these orisons the drums began to throb, first a tentative tap, then another, then half a dozen, until, after a pause, all the voices and drums had struck up again louder than ever, and the houncis were shuffling and revolving their way through a yanvalou. They danced slowly into the temple and the doors were closed. The peristyle was bare for a while of all but the drummers.
After half an hour of this emptiness, the door was thrown open and the swordsman and standard-bearers, waving their emblems, sprang down the steps in a single flying arc. The others streamed after them, howling, rather than singing, at the top of their voices. The procession, ceremoniously carrying little cauldrons, bottles, iron pegs, bundles of firewood and sheaves of green branches, began to revolve round the pillar at breakneck speed. The mambo danced at the rear of this saraband, waving flurried trusses of live white chickens above her head. Some of the dancers continued their round, while the others drove sets of iron pegs into the ground, sloping inwards to form primitive tripods, at three points round the pillar. Fires were kindled and flames were soon leaping up. The green branches were spread out all round them in a rustic carpet. Pouring liquids into the flames, the mambo flourished the clucking fowls along the proffered limbs of the houncis, and ceremoniously waved them to the four cardinal points: ‘A table,’ ‘Dabord,’ ‘Olandé,’ and ‘Adonai’—east, west, north, and south. When the birds had pecked at the scattered maize in token of their willingness to be offered up—an omen which was greeted by jubilant shouts of Ah! Bobo! Ah! Bobo!’—they were consigned to the various officers of the tonnelle, who crouched with them beside the fires, over which the earthenware cauldrons—the zins—had now been placed on the tripods.
The method of sacrifice is swift and inhumane. Simultaneously all the chickens’ tongues were torn out, and their legs and their wings were broken; then, with a dexterous and violent movement, their heads were wrenched off. The sacrificers were soon up to their elbows in blood as the chickens, with savage expertness, were pulled to pieces. Blood was poured into the cauldrons. Tufts of the neck feathers and the gutted and dismembered carcases soon followed them. The battery of tom-toms continued without a break, the drummers leaning forward at each roll with their long heckling snarl. The cauldrons and the flames, the flying feathers, the blood, the ring of serious black faces in the firelight above the carpet of green leaves, were a wild and disquieting sight. If a goat, a dog or a bull is to be sacrificed, scent is first poured all over the victim, and it is dressed in ritual trappings. It is suspended in the air by its four outstretched legs; the priest castrates it and severs its windpipe with two deft cutlass-blows. It was impossible not to wonder what the sacrificial technique had been in the obsolete Mondongo human offerings. The modern observances of the Zobops and the Vlinbindingues were an even more irresistible theme for conjecture.
The door of the temple had again opened, and the gyrating swords and flags were leading into the open a procession which advanced with unnatural slowness. Surrounded by an escort of houncis, an object like an enormous white slug with an immense hump was crawling out of the shadows of the houmfor. As it worked its way towards us, guided by the houncis, it still remained problematical. It was, one finally realized, a white cloth with a man inside it. But how could he be twisted into that extraordinary shape? The houncis, crawling along beside it on all fours, were holding the edge of the sheet to the ground, so that not an inch of the person inside it could be seen. It drew level with the fires and stopped. The mambo fumbled with one corner of the cloth, the edge was slipped up a couple of inches, and two clasped hands were revealed, one black, the other dark brown, and both, I noticed, left hands. One man must have been crawling on his hands and knees, while a second, kneeling behind him with his body hunched over his arched back, stretched down across his shoulders to clasp the hands of his mount for support. The mambo pushed the black hand back under the cloth and rubbed the pink palm of the other with oil. She reached into a cauldron and scooped out a handful of hot maize-flour, and, working it with grimaces of pain into a paste, she moulded it to a cylinder and pressed it into the pink palm, forcibly closing the fingers over it and thrusting it back under the sheet. The boiling maize on the oil must have been almost unendurable. A tremor, accompanied by a long gasp, ran along the white shape, which slowly resumed its circuit. When it came round again, the other hand was subjected to the same ordeal. On the next two journeys, feet were in turn extricated and held for a moment in the flames. The white mass slithered, like some legless mammal, unwieldily up the steps and vanished inside the houmfor. The second candidate appeared and the operation was repeated. When he was in the temple and lying once more on the floor beside the other candidate, the dancing and the invocations began again. The huddling mambo emptied flasks of oil into the zins, and scattered a pool of rum all round the fires which at once burst into a blaze. The houncis, falling to their knees, plunged their hands into the flames. The cauldrons cracked and disintegrated with the heat, the boiling oil was mingled with the rum and a great flame leapt into the air. The remains of the sacrifice were ceremoniously buried and a rhythmic stamping dance took place over the grave.
Soon afterwards the first crisis of possession occurred. Shaking off the usual initial paroxysm, a bulky hounci-canzo rose from the ground in a metamorphosis whose symptoms resembled an amorous delirium. Gabbling and leering, she careered unsteadily round the tonnelle, rubbing her loins against every person and object that she encountered, in an erotic simulacrum. Her fellow houncis seized her and began to force her arms into the sleeves of an old morning coat several sizes too small for her. For a Ghédé had been recognized, and these myrmidons of Death all wear the Baron’s livery. A houncibossale swiftly appeared with a collection of headgear, and, in spite of the Ghédé‘s shouts and her jerks to free herself, they contrived to hold her while a broken bowler hat was crammed over her ears. A battered trilby was thrust on top of it, and on the very summit of this pagoda, an ancient top-hat. A great pair of black glasses was hastily straddled across her nose, and the moment she was released the Ghédé flew galloping round the tonnelle once more, screeching and laughing and firing a child’s cap-pistol into the air. The drums thundered, and the drummers roared and snarled over their cylinders like three jaguars. As she cavorted past us, we could see that her eyes were turned back in the revulsion that had become so familiar. Soon another Lwa descended, and by the first light at least half a dozen dancers had fallen and died and risen again, each of them possessed and transformed into members of this ghoulish horde—Baron Cimetière, Général Criminel, Capitaine Zombi and the rest, whose rites are celebrated with cracking whips and gunpowder and the wielding of colossal bamboo phalli—until the peristyle seemed to be filled with the top-hats, coat-tails and goggles, the shrieks and the cantrips of a troop of demented and nymphomaniac scarecrows.
GLOSSARY
Baron Samedi: the immensely powerful and magical Lwa of the Dead.
Ghédé: the most benevolen
t of the Lwas of the Dead, powerful in healing, protector of children, a great jester.
Houmfor: strictly, the inner sanctuary of a site where Voodoo is practised. More generally, it is understood to mean the whole site.
Houncr: accepted devotee at a houmfor. Those not fully initiated are called hounci-bossale, and do the more menial tasks. Those who wish to be fully trained have to undergo the severe canzo initiation—ordeal by fire—becoming hounci-canzos.
Houngan, Mambo: fully initiated voodoo priest and priestess respectively.
Lwa: voodoo deity: that is, the power of a divine archetype, who manifests him or herself in taking possession of a devotee.
Yanvalou: favourite voodoo dance. The name means supplication.
Monastic Life
from A Time to Keep Silence
In his introduction to A Time to Keep Silence, Paddy admits that his main reason for wanting to stay at the Abbey of Saint-Wandrille in Normandy in 1948 was that he needed ‘somewhere quiet and cheap to stay while I continued work on a book that I was writing’—that book being The Traveller’s Tree.
The singing of grace continued for several minutes; and, when we sat down, I found myself between two visiting priests, their birettas folded flat beside their plates on the long guest-table in the middle of the refectory, just below the Abbot’s dais. Down the walls of this immense hall the tables of the monks were ranged in two unbroken lines, and behind them a row of Romanesque pilasters, with interlocking and engaged Norman arches, formed a shallow arcade. The place had an aura of immense antiquity. Grey stone walls soared to a Gothic timber roof, and, above the Abbot’s table, a giant crucifix was suspended. As the monks tucked their napkins into their collars with a simultaneous and uniform gesture, an unearthly voice began to speak in Latin from the shadows overhead and, peering towards it, I caught sight, at the far end of the refectory, of a pillared bay twenty feet up which projected like a martin’s nest, accessible only by some hidden stairway. This hanging pulpit framed the head and shoulders of a monk, reading from a desk by the light of a lamp which hollowed a glowing alcove out of the penumbra. Loud-speakers relayed his sing-song voice. Meanwhile, the guest-master and a host of aproned monks waited at the tables, putting tureens of vegetable soup before us and dropping into our plates two boiled eggs, which were followed by a dish of potatoes and lentils, then by an endive salad, and finally by discs of camembert, to be eaten with excellent bread from the Abbey bakery. Every now and then a monk left his place, and knelt for a few minutes before the Abbot’s table. At a sign from the Abbot, he would rise, make a deep bow, and withdraw . . . Inspired probably by Victorian oleographs of monastic life, I had expected a prodigious flow of red wine. The metal jugs on our tables contained, alas, only water.
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