Slave Old Man

by Patrick Chamoiseau

  *

  The Unnameable petrified me and I petrified it. I had reached an innermost depth of despair. Dying there like-that from a foul blow! The shadow I had repressed arose before me. The Unnameable is neither male nor female. The Unnameable has no beginning and the Unnameable has no end. The Unnameable appears to bear its double reflected in a sky scrap and earthly mirrors, and it can swallow itself and be born again at the same time. She has witnessed the birth of the most ancient gods, and he inhabits them all. The sun follows the curve of its flanks and the night nests in its very slithering. She is of water, he is of clay, and she is a drinker of rainbows. Medicine of life, medicine of death, the Unnameable is: sum of all fertilities and all sterilities. I had seen the deaths its bite would engender, those bodies swollen by a carbonaceous chemistry, those faces destroyed by massive suffocation. No tree grew on those graves, but the grass was delicate there and sensitive to the winds; it quivered with more divinations than the shells of seven-year-old conchs, and more than one gravedigger had had to toss in lime slices and pure coconut water. These remembrances buffeted my mind. Each of those images delivered its load of ambiguities into my fresh new vision.

  My becalmed mind still swept along sea swells of former turmoils; they had the slackness of failed memories. I found once more in some corner of my soul the quietude that had flowed through me when I emerged from the hole. That appeasement was offered me. I settled in there again. All fear faded from my body. I was deep and dark and clear as the spring where I’d thought to die. I became a slip of cool breeze over savanna sand. An electric energy harboring the little-bird lament of the tall trees. I even believed my skin would change color like that of anole lizards. I was surprised by my transformations in front of the atrocious Nameless. It was coming to terms with me, and its dread was dissolving in the embellie of my emanations. I felt the pouches of its venom drain and its grip on the fern stalk relax. A conceited strength filled me; I felt, as the faster of us, like seizing her by the neck and crushing the vertebrae in my fist. I felt, as the faster of us, like sending him flying with a slap. I could do that. But I simply pulled away in a smooth move. She vanished on the spot. I feared he might abruptly reappear around my feet. I rolled over and over et-cetera of times. Then, I returned to my race, sending flying the shivering of crabs that had completely covered me. It was time, for the monster was nigh.

  I took care, during my run, to baffle its sense of smell. I rubbed up against cinnamon bark. I smeared myself with the fourmis-santi stink ants that populate the liane douce—a wild potato vine—as well as big termite mounds, living on dead roots. I used vetiver leaves, manicou-possum nests, warm muds that smelled mysterious. While crying I’m sure, I handled the three leaves of l’injonction-diablesse, which convey invisibility. I knotted signs of escape to limp branches. Hand flung over my shoulder, I waved off any blinding spells. In fact, all leaves were good for me; I was hoping to dissolve into this forestine soul. Now I heard the animal’s run in a different way. It had never slowed its balan, had never known fatigue. Its rhythm remained intact like a mechanical thing. I sensed in it a fury more ferocious than at the start. Doubtless because the dog had drawn closer to me. The impacts no longer resounded in a somber way; they crossed the leaf litter with precision. I who believed in nothing, I felt faith in everything: in these trees with tresses of melancholy vines, in these pale orchids on immodest roots, in these keeping-quiet birds nesting bracketed in low tree-forks, in these furtive presences that quickened the shadows. I invoked protection like a little lost child. I must have cried a long time, the run flinging my tears onto ancient dews. I mourned the misfortune of this dog that would destroy me, but I wept as well over this rediscovered life intoxicating my legs, this old heart burning the energy of a thousand years of living every second. I mourned this freshness discovered in my flesh, this magic in my eyes that enchanted the world, this mouth where tastes exploded, the sensitivity in my hands and the rest of my body. I had appetite and I was already dead. And I wept for all of that, without sadness or suffering, with all the less restraint—as I saw it—because crying was living and dying at the same time.

  I saw clearly, but was advancing more slowly. Was it fatigue or the accumulation of obstacles? Detouring around tree trunks. Shoving aside bushes. Breaking the moorings of the lianas and the jackstraws of dead branches. My wounds were beyond counting. Clawed. Grji-grazed. Skinned. Froixé-bruised. Swollen. Zié boy, half-blind eye. Blesses, hidden-hurts. I was covered in bright blood and scabs. I saw clearly and that clarity encumbered me. I rather missed my initial blind run. But this light had come to me to confront the monster. It was the wish and the will of life. Running, the mastiff was more alive and lively than I. Its hunger for killing, a good deal stiffer than my longing to live. It galloped, I felt, in the obscure grace that had allowed me to penetrate the zayon-wilderness better than a spectral Dorlis. Ne plus courir, me battre. Not to run anymore, to fight. Fight it. This resolve dismayed me. Excited me as well—truly unexpected.

  So then I stopped, battered in my breathing. I seized a dead branch. Long. Heavy. Sharpened from a break. I had it well in hand. Ho, surprise the animal. I was hoping that the odors I had loaded on would cloud its tracking, that it would not know I was coming back in its direction. C’est revenais que je revenais: I was coming back with a vengeance. I was running the other way to meet it. My run became light-footed. It became coconut oil and silk-cotton fluff. I was not thinking about anything. An un-usual plenitude bore me along. The decision to fight reintroduced certainties and hopes. It honed to the verge of madness my desire to survive. The race backward exalted this desire into a rage to conquer. Not a hatred, not a resentment, only a will-to-destroy what was threatening me. Loads of times I had, on buoyant bois-flot rafts, faced high waves to deliver barrels or casks of sugar to merchants’ ships. Heading into the waves, negotiating them exact, using their opposing unleashed energies to head up and across. An ancient intoxication found again there, intact in the depths of those Great Woods. My boutou-bludgeon in hand, I’d wound up a hunter. Back to me came attack cries on bright savannas. Many bled-out elephants and wild beasts roaring. Tracking crocodiles in exhausted mires. Dances for the courage of the brave. A blogodo-hullabaloo of peoples and very angry gods. A dementia of four million years illuminated by towering flames. I was going back toward the monster. I no longer saw any of the earlier impediments. I felt myself a warrior.

  I stopped flap. It was there. It was approaching, carried along by its momentum. It must have been running like that for heaps of hours, tied to the threads of my odor. I set my back against a trunk, got a firm grip on my club. The inhaled air had lost all oxygen. My eyes were now red and my body was in poisoned-she-cat convulsions. My arms had gone rigid. I felt rage and sainted fright. Only one blow would be possible. Fracture its face. Bash in the jaw so it breaks a vertebra. A single vertebra snapped; my body, saved. Strike with decision, not with strength but as a block of energy and with unerring aim. I made ready to do so; I imagined myself doing this; I assured myself I could do this. I took the time to breathe deep, slowing the anxiety of my lungs begging for air. I took the time to get used to my all-worked-up muscles. Air entered me like a sea breeze, a motherly nursery rhyme nestled in a rocking chair, a banjo strum at the pink of a dawning day. I exhaled—at length and slowly—my confusions and fears. That made my vigilance giddy. I was ready. Bandé-aroused to the uttermost. And relaxed as well.

  The mastiff was approaching. Appalling, the power of its paws. My doubts came rolling back like a widespread tide. The paws’ impacts were clearer, like twacks on a drum. They punched in the earth. And their rapidity was beyond comprehension. That speed would make it invisible. I would not see even a wisp of its smoke. I feared lacking time to launch my blow. Fesser pile: thrash fast. Strike true. I adjusted to the dog’s gallop, gauged its approach, suited my blow to the bellwethering of its paws. My doubts flowed back. Spindrift. Relief. Deep breath. I felt armed once again. I was going to sic the
disaster of a lightning bolt on it. I was there with it. Here I am, there you are. But (. . . A-a! . . .) the sound of the paws ceased. Bang flap! and period. The monster had stopped short to stand still.

  *

  The Master had no idea what to do anymore. He heard his dog running in the distance. He knew it was on the right track. By going in that direction, he hoped to find the animal again, or be found by it. So, the Master walked straight ahead. But he was burdened by the gravest of solitudes. It let go of the trees to settle weightily on his shoulders. His steps were heavy. His steps were slow. His steps were guilty. He did not know whether it was fatigue or truly the mystery of those trees that was torturing him so. Nothing evil there. The Master perceived instead a virginity outside of morality, something primordial that had been offended, and that had been lost to people from that time on.

  That was it. That was surely it. These places had known damnation. It was there. Prowling around him. He imagined that it was emanating from him. And plaguing him. He did not understand. He had fought so hard to clear this land, beat back the savages, attend to those nègres, present to barbarities the beauty of plantations and the sugar sciences. His life had been nothing but courage and suffering, work and exhaustion, fevered thoughts and heartfelt anxieties. And yet, in spite of these fatigues, the Master slept quite badly. He detected in himself tumultuous shames foreign to the courages he deployed or his heroics as a mighty builder. He had ascribed that to the original sin revealed by his Book, but the Masses had brought no peace. Nor had the confessions. The feeling of shame remained coiled on the inexpressible, the unpronounceable, on the invisible and the unavowable—of which he knew nothing. He was proud of himself but that pride, in certain hours, came apart like the finery of a mountebank. He was there, alone among those trees, and those places, and the heroism of the personal chronicle he kept no longer carried much weight. He had handled—it was written down—the conquering tall-sailed ships. He had popped off bombards against Carib* rages. He had buried, beneath conch shells, friends and brothers. He had blasted parrots, smoked the fat of manatees, gulped down the raw eggs of thrushes that ran along the sands. He had wept under exile and fever, worn-out memories and lost letters. He had planted pétun,* indigo, and then cannamelle.* He had modified ships to carry nègres. He had sold them. He had bought them. He had given them the best of his race. He had raised the highest walls of stone, dispensaries of marble and gothic vaults where grandeurs slumber. And founded the white cities in the mirror of harbors. And planned ports on the tresses of mulatto women. He had cleared the smoking lands, tamed the rivers vomited by the volcano,* pushed back the snakes that interfered with the dreams of the little angels on fountains. He had made Great Houses of shadowy light and clay, raised mills, set up sugar works. Mapped out the useful routes and the signs at crossroads. He had explored the secrets of alcohols and the sweetness of life (with a very pale woman, with a very white arm, beneath a wide-brimmed hat with bobbing lace). He had won, over mangroves and steep slopes, the blest offering of the most fertile fields. He had never wept, or doubted the divine right that sanctified his actions. . . . And yet ooo solitude! . . . This silence grew as he grew older. This lonely poison in the shadow of his victories. This fate that undid his steps. What he had said of the Great Woods in order to kill off marooning possessed him as well. These Great Woods that knew the Before, that harbored the communion host of an innocence gone by, and which still trembled with primal forces—these woods moved him now. They had fascinated the runaway nègres. Those had taken refuge there as in a ventre-manman, a mother’s womb. They wanted to die there rather than fall in a field furrow. Those escapees looked upon the trees as if contemplating a cathedral. They showed them ceremonial respect. And the trees talked to them. He, the Master, had festooned the trees with wickednesses: Nests of zombies, nests of devils, nests of fevers, nests of vanishments! Those baboules, those lies were churning themselves up unexpectedly in him. The Master felt it now. The Great Woods were powerful. They stripped you bare, through force or misfortune, à nu rêche: harsh-naked. Within their shadows, the Master saw himself sunk in shame. He was afraid. His pioneering impulse stalled. His conqueror’s stride faltered. He ought not to turn around. Or look around. Or stare at the stakes of light descending from the sky. He ought to cling to his dog. Follow it until death. This dog alone would allow him to survive. So the Master walked all along a penitence.

  He was thinking of the old slave. That most faithful among the faithful, who had devoted the best part of his life to him. Betrayal. He did not understand this flight. The old slave had seen him born, had even shown him signs of affection. Had taught him the training of horses, initiated him into the secrets of yellow fruits and fighting cocks. The vieux-nègre had never spoken to him, perhaps smiled sometimes, settled for being there, like a solid grounding from pioneering days. The Master no longer knew whether his father had bought him from the clutches of a slaver, or if he’d come up on this Plantation. He had none of the strangeness of nègres-bossales born in Africa, or the ordinariness of native nègres-créoles. He had always been there. He was called Fafa, or Old-Syrup, no one really knew why. He’d neither had a wife nor given a child. Had never followed the priest’s sermons, or sought baptism or the Host, or worn dilapidated boots or shabby hats. At Father’s death—the Master suddenly remembered—the old slave had not attended the singing at the wake. He had dug the grave without the sorrow-spectacle of the house slaves. When the Madame was in her death throes (la Madame-Maîtresse, a very charitable old Norman lady, who used to take good care of her nègres), the old-fellow had not slumbered out below the Great House, or wailed the lamentations that saddened the cabins when she gave up the ghost. Evidence: the Master saw nothing of him, in intimate memories, but a face of papaya and boredom,* a large mute shadow half out of this world, a big silent beast. Yet, no hatred in him. Or menace. Or danger. But no acceptance. That was it. The vieux-nègre had not accepted what was done with him. Ever. And yet one had given him everything, graces and favors. He had not been a slave, no, but an old companion. Yes, even that, a very old companion. One had loved him. Betrayal! It was a betrayal.

  The Master did not understand above all this energy that seemed to bear him up. Such an old fellow. The mastiff usually caught up with runaways much quicker than this. But the vieux-nègre seemed to run faster than the mastiff. Hard to believe. Such an old fellow. Faster than the mastiff. The Master believed himself faced with a miracle and this increased the mystery of these woods that, gently, more and more, were revealing the silences of his soul. The Master, surprised, discovered water flooding his eyes. An age-old water. Salt water. A slightly bitter water.

  *

  The monster had stopped. In some place behind the trees. It knew I was there. It knew I was waiting for it. Its killer’s instinct detected my presence. I did not move. Time went by some more. I heard nothing. My arms tried to tremble: my imagination was beginning to head out to sea. I was seeing the monster slip behind the tree where I was posted. Yes, it’s there on the other side of the trunk. Slinking slowly around it to break my l’en-bas-butt. Despite myself, I turned my head, changed position. Again I imagined it on the other side. And even coming from high up. I did not know what to do or which way to turn. My eyes on alert watched in every direction. I ran to shelter beneath a different pied-bois to better cover the surrounding area. Peace. Shade, sunniness, leafiness. Nothing else. So then I listened. Ears pricked up. Nose-holes open. Trying to distinguish the rustle of the wild-beast body against raspy lower branches. Listening hard. Crossing the silence. Hearing. There was as if a pounding of water. A floundering. I understood on the spot: the wellspring! . . . The mastiff was at the fondoc of the marshy eye and it was floundering! It was well and truly drowning! Clawing to death the crumbling banks! Bogging itself down! Coming back up to get bogged down again! . . . My arms to the sky: Hosanna . . . O Gloria! . . .

  I rushed toward the spring. I reached it swiftly. I saw the dog. It was frightful.
Covered with mud gobs. Covered with leaves. Covered with debris. Barely growling, it was struggling in the moving trap. An evil boiling. Its bidime-big paws were collapsing the edges, flinging up vines: a mushy soup of muzzle, mired-up eyes, suffocations, tohubohu-churning the most ancient of muds. This would disappear for seven—nine seconds to resurface with cas-et-fracas, disturbance-and-turbulence. What I saw was dreadful. It looked like a zombie trying to escape a prison of exorcisms. I did not know how to get closer, or dare get close enough to strike its spine. Get its drowning going. Yet I approached, without really thinking about it. The ground gave way, spongy, soft, sucking, famished. In up to my kneecaps, I was still far from the hellish bouillon. So I retreated. I followed the rim of the hole, hoping for a small tongue of solid ground. But my prey was foaming in the mitan-middle of the spring. Inaccessible. Oala, immediately the monster s’envoya-monter, shot-itself-up. A big-mother fish-leap. I saw it whole, arced in the air in the wink of an eye before falling back heavy into the bouillon hole. This dive splattered me with miraculous mud. The enemy was at my mercy. I was crazy-circling around.

  I approached on my belly so as not to sink in. But in that position, impossible to strike. So I returned to the edge. I found a low branch to cling to. That way, I got out over the bouillon. And I struck. Biwoua. One-handed. Biwoua. With my fears, my hatreds, my rage and my longing to live. The mastiff howled like a Seven-headed Beast. Never heard a catastrophe like that. A calamity of tonsillar sounds and muddy smotherings. It bounded again. Its eyes snapped up mine while it was in the air. It discovered me with curiosity. Twisting even beyond belief, it shot its manman-muzzle out at me. I saw its fangs gleam amid the formidable foaming. I struck it again. Biwoua. Right on a rib, but this was tickling the trunk of a silk-cotton tree. My position allowed no room for a backswing. I returned instanter to the rim of the hole, resigned to keeping watch on this agony from a distance. And striking the monster should it happen to emerge. My blows had increased its furies tenfold. Its leaps and tortions were more fearsome. A mite despairing. My eyes bulged: I had never seen such an infernal debacle.