Slave Old Man

by Patrick Chamoiseau

  Suddenly, in a sulfurous sault, the mastiff landed outside the hole. Full on some soft soil swaddled in roots. I saw it laid out long on the uncertain turf. Its paws were whipping up a blackish scum. Its jaws snapped at the void. Suddenly, it grew calm, exhausted. Its body now expressed nothing but breathlessness. Gradually, its respiration slowed while yet remaining deep-drawn. It looked at me. I went round the hole to be across from the animal. Its eyes followed me. We were soon face-to-face, separated by ten yards of turbid matter. The fantastic spring loosed bubbles of sulfur to burst at the surface. The clear water welled up beneath the cracked crusts to spread wide like magical oil. Luminous patches celebrated its sheen. The monster sprawled out, eyes firmly affixed on mine. I was horrified. I knew it was enmired in the muck. I saw its body gently sinking. Even though it was caught there, I was horrified. Probably because of that gaze free from all fear. It stared at me: bloodcurdling curiosity. Its problem was not the marshy trap, it was me. And that scared me. Despite its sudden calm and breathlessness, its energy came through intact.

  I knelt down to see it better. I set my eyes to stare and bared my teeth. Had to impress it. Suggest to it (myself as well) that I did not fear it, that I could take or spare its life. We stayed like that in a time without length. Eyes in eyes. It, ever calmer; me, petrified by my show of valiance, plus a cacarelle. The Great Woods were moving around me. Became a great blur. I was floating in a dizzy whirl of aggravations. The spring (with its muds, its virgin waters, its hundred-thousand-years-old sulfur) was joining forces with that vision, increasing its giddiness. I found myself laid out in the leaf litter, my gaze level with my enemy’s eyes. Eyes in eyes. No blinking. Hold on. Hold raide. I appointed myself a hunter, transformed the other into prey. It (I felt this) kept itself opaque; me, my awareness became clouded. The miasmas of the spring must have been poisoning me. So were the monster’s eyes, open onto holes-without-end. The animal was stronger than I was. I heard knocking in my chest. My heart wanted to crack open my ribs. I shivered. I moaned. The monster howled. I jumped up flap, and fled at top speed. I had lost my bet.

  The monster leaped toward terra firma. It knew instinctively where that was. It landed heavily on the edge of the bank. Crawled along a deep furrow. It was managing to get out. I returned frantic to where it was heading. There, I saw it one more time before me. Frothing muzzle. Gaze sans-maman. I felt myself weaken. It was creeping toward me as if not fearing me. The muck and dead leaves transformed its skull. It seemed a subterranean crab churning the earth. I struck with every strength. Biwoua. Biwoua. My legs, plunged in the sludge, were tipping me off-balance. My wobbly blows were not slowing the terrible advance. I thought the Unnameable was back, so closely did that reptile ramping blend with the viscous soil. A cold resolve was expelling it from the spring. Gazing straight at me, its eyes soon overwhelmed my mind. I lost the courage to strike. Feeble, I aimed blows it deflected with its muzzle. The vise of its jaws gripped my club. I fell to my knees in the slime. I could do nothing. My resistance was giving it leverage to advance more quickly. Pulling on my club was hauling it toward the shore. I gave up. Rolling over, I ran away. Fear severed the suction around my ankles.

  Running. I shot my body through the undergrowth, battered myself against tree trunks, got twisted by branches. I was truly throwing myself. It was all leaps, jumps, rolling downhill, sudden somersaults. I was a tête-folle nègre, crazy-head beyond control. My legs shot off like wild arrows. My arms flailed the air in impossible flight. I went zigzagging, zinzolant. I even thought I went tourner-virer, whirly-turning, which worsened my shit-fit. This panic ceased at the sudden snap. Crac. A stump. My ankle. The tip-over. I wound up demolished on the ground. Numbness, then raide throbbing. A sunburst of pain. I tried to get up. I fell back again. An andièt-sa—hateful-clit-hole—swallowed me into its darkness.

  *

  The mastiff had not understood what had happened. It had been right on track. The trail had become un-believable. The scents were thinning out beneath the array of forces in motion. Waves that scintillated, invisible. Shrill sounds, chopped into a complex rhythm and then flowing in discordant sonorous sheets. The mastiff was receiving a real rush of mantras face-on. Its lolling tongue was capturing tastes impossible to know. They awakened chessboards of reveries. The animal took the taste of salt copper then bayberry salve then a rock crystal dissolved in hydromel.* It took a country savanna-liking for guavas then fern seed. It believed it was following a crowd bathed in pollens of exodus, beings of all natures, all odors, all fears, all wills and wants. It sped up: the prey was getting closer. It was there, moving like a pluie-fifine-drizzle. The mastiff snarled in surprise. The trail opened immense as a cyclone wind. Whirling in gold and fire. The mastiff thought it had caught up with a giant. The creature pursued was a ball-of-powers. This perplexed the animal: the trail became a maze of mirrors and brutal reversals full of smells in disorderly flight. As if the being—or beings—pursued were heading back toward it. At a fine clip. A light authority, sure of itself. The mastiff suddenly felt hunted. Its course became that of an anxious animal. A quiver ran through it. Unpleasant. It tried to move away from the magnificent wake, curve around to better pounce from behind on what was bearing down on it, but the ground vanished. Water. A hole of water pulled the dog down.

  It went down deep. The animal, which had crossed rivers and floods, tackled inlets of demented seas, able to cleave difficult currents and explore underwater ravines, knowing water without fearing it, did not understand into what phenomenon it had fallen.

  It was a sinkhole.

  It was made of water rock fire earth wind and roots. A lively bowel primed for digestion. A dangerous door: la-porte. The mastiff felt threatened. It let loose. Battles. Jumps. Sucking-snappings. It needed to bound toward the odors of good earth floating all around. It was leaping with a hint of despair. In the air was when it saw or, rather, sensed, smelled its prey. Its eyes were clogged with vegetal matter. It glimpsed a shape. Radiating an in-credible force. A crystal of light. This being landed a blow. Weak. Then another. Without using the intensity shining within. If that potential were to mobilize, the mastiff knew it was lost. So it shot its muzzle out at the being. In vain. The shape became a vivid reddish glare. Then a dark pulsation. Fearing a counterattack, the mastiff leaped up several times until it fell upon a sliver of stable mud bank. The animal began to crawl. And there again, it saw, in its murky vision, the formidable being loom ahead. A prism of lunar clarities and with darkness replete. The being had changed into pure energy. The mastiff crept toward this splendor. Attracted by it. Blows landed on the dog but so feebly that they must not have come from the marvel to which it was crawling. Yet the marvel was striking the blows. Probably in ritual defiance. The animal was discovering a worthy adversary. This reawakened the flesh-eating ferocity that exploded inside it in moments of peril. It clamped its jaws on what was hitting it. The thing resisted, then fell apart in its fangs. The mastiff hauled itself over to solid ground where it could stand up. Ready to go wild. But the splendid being was gone. The mastiff thought it had been a hallucination. Yet the trail was there. Quickly recovered. Flamboyant. Quite close. The mastiff shook itself; then, with most prudent paws, padded along it.

  *

  I woke up flap. Pain. It was flaring out from my ankle. I sat up over my leg and thought myself dying. It was broken. A horrible angle. A point of magic whiteness stuck out of a wound. My bone. Blood was frothing fleecily to the top of my thigh. This sight fed my suffering. With scraps of shirt, I tied myself a tourniquet at my knee. I had to pop my leg back into position. I did so shrieking. Quickly. Agony. Deadly dizziness. With two dry sticks I made myself splints. Immobilizing the break in a wrap-tight of little vines. Then I crawled away fast as I could. Twisted earthworm, all tangled up, pitiful. Foundering in a feeling of danger. The monster was coming toward me. It had escaped the trap of the spring and was heading for me. Without running. It approached slowly. With caution or certainty. It knew I was at its me
rcy.

  6. The Stone

  Cette pierre est une roche: this stone is a rock. It grew big in the sea depths, like a greened cannonball.

  It rolled into the Atlantic fault where the unknown thing pulsates, it shifted the continental plates, it made us quake from the quaking of our red lands, and it’s true, it gave birth to the dog.

  This béké would be named La Roche, or Laroche, depending on the fickle mood of the ferns of Balata. Is he the same one who made talk with Longoué? Be that as it may, I predict that he knew Oriamé l’Africaine,* and Marie Celat who tells stories. And now they enter this story here to raise the great wind* of the crests.

  They stalk la trace, to give voice in this night.

  Memory of the bones,

  sole trace signaling

  lives and deeds long gone.

  Touch,

  folio VI

  My leg was heavy. Sometimes, it became light. Numb. Then fires would stir it up. I had to stop slithering to writhe in pain. I was making progress rather quickly in spite of everything. I would slide under the arms of the roots, through the hollows in the fern banks, in the fabulous humus that almost covered me over. I longed to disappear into it. To bury myself as well. I envied these roots penetrating, far, into the soil. They plunged underground the better to reach the sky. I strove to empty my mind the better to resemble them. Forward. Forward.

  My hands clutched everything, scooping out earth, tearing leaves from low branches. With the strength of my wrists, je m’envoyais-aller, I got myself going. My shoulders and arms were working; the rest was simply surrendered to exhausted sufferings. I possessed, on the other hand, an extreme lucidity. My mind had deployed like a mango tree in bloom. It inhaled the storm of a sky laden like black earth. I was separated from my body; from time to time, whipping pains reminded me of its—distant—presence. The collapse opened within me by the wound had gone away; it no longer frightened me. I tended to it as to a familiar yaws sore. My crawling continued to distance me from my body. I was dragging it as an undone chrysalis. I was going toward another world.

  The air had turned heavy, more humid, hot as hell’s armpits. The shade rose from the roots and stagnated halfway up the trunks. Solar brilliance blazed in the forest canopy, then sifted luminescence down on the curves of shadows. I was haloed by sky-blue mists. I was cold. I discovered orchids and a fern flower. The fern flower. I had never seen one. It only appears, Word has it, at midnight on Fridays, for thirty-three seconds, and is of a clair-de-rouge redshine that can illuminate its surroundings. There, I found it to be of a yellowish blue threaded with steel green. A sumptuous creature. A prodigy of minute equilibria and poise. The fern flower. There it was. Able to grant invisibility, to defuse any quimbois-spells. It could in falling reveal the sanctuary of a béké’s treasure, or enrich those who carry it for seven days seven times in a row in the heaviness of their hearts. It could baffle for life anyone who trod on it. What sign was this? Another extraordinary circus from my crazy-head? I tried to pick it. My hand hovered forever at the edge of its sepals. My fingers shook. I had always disdained flowers, neither picked nor offered nor sniffed them. My glances had ignored them, but there, I was moved less by pretty words than by the flower itself. A sunny embellie. I withdrew my hand, moved off with regret, catching myself staring at it as I hauled my body through the fog without finish and the glacial shade. I was happy to have seen it. Or to have believed that I had.

  I did not see the Stone right away. I had advanced as quickly as possible. The feeling of danger prodded me on. I had slipped into whatever was darkest, narrowest, the most tortuous; I had wallowed in decomposition to derail the tracking of my executioner. I had tackled the immense roots of an unknown tree, its ebony foliage leaving not-a-chance to the powdery lights, which fell there as into an abyss, while the surrounding duskiness was foundering against it. I’d had to hoist myself up, and-then let glide, and hoist myself again over a root, and fall again in a forever way. The ground went sloping. I was able to speed up without taking a solibo-tumble.* I clung to the riots of lianas and vermicelles-diable.* I went down down down. I even feared (so steep was the slant) slipping again toward the maw of a spring. But the bottom of a ravine welcomed me.

  A ravine of wonderment.

  Regent of eternity.

  Center of luminous shades.

  Foliage was its sky, journeys of stars pierced by shimmering brilliancies. Everything seemed alive and dead to the hilt. I had entered the most intense stillness of these Great Woods. My mind grew calm, or rather, loosed itself a little more from my body. The fear of death invaded me. I called upon my now familiar pains, unbearable but as human as the fatigue of a lifetime. My sufferings, ooo my flesh!

  My eyes still looked up. As if in imploration. As if in adoration. The leaves of the tall trees, liquefied by the mists and the pinpoints of radiance, stretched over the ravine in an opaque and entrancing halo thronging with stunned-looking insects. Bêtes-à-diable.* Butterflies. Spiders. Yellow-tailed dragonflies. Touffaille-swarms of flies and Yen-yen midges. Clusters of bats distorted the wild potato vines. At times, gray trembler songbirds, down from the heights, would suddenly appear in a tizzy, then rush back up to melt away in the light. I thought I recognized the water-loving Cra-cra, the ringed kingfisher; Carouges, shiny cowbirds, nestled under maternal leaves; Siffleurs de montagne, rufous-throated solitaires; Colibris-madère, purple-throated caribs, a hummingbird whose plumage, at certain angles, flashed lightning. I was covered by a cloth of silence, comforted by languid ferns. I crawled along the ravine. It grew narrower. Abruptly I could go no farther.

  A mass was blocking my way.

  *

  It could have been a tree but it climbs toward no brightness. No foliage augments it. The thing is compressed, compact, dense with itself, related more to the earth. I think I am standing before a root, but the mass is uniform, mossy, without the ruggedness of centuries-old bark. I don’t feel that it’s lifeless. I’m scared. Believing myself before a legendary monster, a Seven-headed Beast or Dragon of initiatory fears. My uneasy mind loads this mass with all kinds of emanations and interprets them in a way not good. I dread the return of the agonizing visions of my initial escape. Nothing suddenly appears. I lean back against the thing, breathless, wondering how to get around it.

  Immense, it disappears into the undergrowth. I clear brush along the side to make my way. Its flanks are embedded in the walls of the ravine. I am caught-there. Impossible to climb over: my leg, my so-heavy body, the worn-out of my arms. I collapse against it like an empty guano sack. Neither sadness, nor dis-courage, nor despair. I am empty, run ragged, used up. My skin smooths against the ancient moss and feels life in the venerable block. Its density. Unfathomable thicknesses. It is—I understand this now—a bombe-volcan sent soaring in very ancient times. A stone. I touch it. Cold. Warm. Vibrant in the faraway of its heart. The ages have covered it with a true shivery skin beneath my feverish fingers. No doubt I have fallen mad: I believe myself slumped against a living stone. I feel it; my palm crumbles the substances; the stone warms up, fissuring the shell of a cemeterial solitude. The stone is friendly. I open my arms to hug it, or to cling to it like a laminated lamina, and I close my eyes.

  Borne by a mellow languor. Marigot-marsh of fatigues. A kind of drowsiness. I dreamed. Without really knowing of what. Images. Sounds. Gestures. Siwawa-abundance of bats with folded wings. Solar frogs at the dawn of time. I have open eyes, but the dream goes on. It’s the Stone. La Pierre qui rêve: the Stone that dreams. Whackings. Gougings. Ritual breaths. Sacrifice-agonies. Hammered-gold platelets deifying nostrils. Grottoes peopled with cotton forms of humans with eyes of Job’s tears.* White vases harassed by an intimate rust. Three-pointed stones instructed in the three last mysteries. Sculpted conch shells set out as guardians. Jars sealed on pensive skeletons. . . . These volutes scroll in my mind. They superimpose themselves on other undulations. I think I see groups of men in anxious migrations, crossing deltas, braving high seas in
hollowed-out trees, rebounding on chaplets of islands. They swallow live shellfish and treat the shells as jewelry, they arrow-spear waliwa, rock grouper, or trap chatrou-octopus in woven-willow jaws. When the welcoming shores rise above underwater drop-offs, they plant manioc-bois, dig up roots, and smoke-dry agoutis, iguanas, and beautiful birds. They are from the Grandes-terres and the islands. They have seen the world with smaller seas, and their footsteps have trod the stone of the abysses of these times. They leave the way one shatters a destiny, travel along the trail of the straying gods and the paradises their legends keep alive. But they encounter only wars and hatreds, the furious waves of their own madness washing over the follies gone before.

  The Stone dreams. It beguiles me with its dreams. I press myself against it, with greedy hands. My mind abandons its marks. It is possible that I speak to it, that I myself am talking to a stone. Or dreaming with it. Yes, our dreams intermingle, a tie-up of seas, savannas, Grandes-terres and isles, attacks and wars, dark ship’s holds and migrant wanderings over a hundred thousand times a thousand years. A coming together of exiles and gods, failures and conquests, bondage and death. All that—a grandiose hail!—whirls in a movement of life: life alive on this earth. The Earth. We are all the Earth.