She holds out her hand to him. “Adieu, Hugues; I’ll be very good. And you too, be very careful. Don’t forget that you’re carrying my entire family in your uniform.”
He bows, and brushes her exceedingly slender fingers with his lips. She raises the jade crab to her own.
He leaves.
I. RARA AND MÉMÉ
An ardent red sun is sinking in the orange sky. In shadowy lairs, life wakes up and springs forth.
With brief lengthening bounds a band of kangaroos races down to the river. As it passes by, Tiparu the armadillo rolls up in his carapace and Kiwi, the flightless bird, emerges momentarily from his vague dream. Between the forked mango-trees, beneath the crows of the giant acacias, flying squirrels deploy their parachutes, launch forth and chase one another with shrill whistles. Immense flowers with variegated corollas embalm the atmosphere, some of them fluttering into the air: emerald, ruby and sapphire butterflies. Multicolored parrots chatter hectically.
Above the surface of the water peep the blue-green eyes and spoon-like beaks of water-moles. Pippi-kuink is in a fearful mood. As if he were conscious of his own strangeness he hides his frolics, his games and his amours.
Neither duck nor rat I deign to be,
I lay eggs have hair, a beak, four paws,
In the soft mud I plead my cause,
I amaze all and all amaze me.
Modest and awkward, the ornithorhynchi5 emerge one by one from the reeds, their tails quivering, encouraging one another, conscientiously dragging their little bellies over the sand.
Two bursts of laughter frighten them. They swerve, capsize, stumble, get up again, limping furiously toward the protective water. Terror! Two giants bar their way. Already reassured, however, they pause. They raise themselves up on their hind legs, agitating their forepaws, sniffing and hissing, overwhelming Rara and Mémé with amicable but slightly undignified quacking sounds.
Slender statuettes, the two children are hand in hand. Light phormium loincloths scarcely cover their arched hips. Their bare limbs, the color of ripe apricot, have the flexibility of young wild beasts. Necklaces of red pandanus seeds and sea-shells hang down over their bronzed torsos, where blue designs, carefully tattooed, inscribe the nobility of their origin. Other complex blue webs ornament their foreheads and cheeks. Crowns of white flowers are posed on their shocks of black hair. A puerile gaiety sparkles in their symmetrical features, and from their delicately-shaped lips, between sharp white teeth, flows the most beautiful youthful and inextinguishable laughter.
With his harpoon, made with a sharp stone solidly encased in a straight stem, Rara scratches the sand in front of the most adventurous of the amphibians, which understands the game and tries madly to grab it. Already, however, the rest of the band is jostling around Mémé, who is sitting down. In a broad latanier leaf she has brought a provision of snails, slugs and mud-worms, and is distributing them. From time to time she pauses, teases them, pretending to bargain; they nibble her angrily, sitting up on their backsides, protesting with hectic hissing sounds. Then, once again, their beak-like mouths extended, clapping desirously, they consume the food greedily.
In water and on land, Pippi-kuink run, run.
In water and on land, Pippi-kuink guzzle, guzzle.
In the battle for the provender, the less nimble lose their equilibrium, falling on their backs. There are frenetic wrigglings, which extract further laughter from the children. The stout Pippi, the father of the tribe, squanders thrusts of his hips in vain trying to regain his stance. Rara tickles his belly with the tip of his harpoon. The offended Pippi bites the stem, choking with rage. Around him, his offspring complain noisily to the gods.
Finally, Mémé’s bare foot comes to the patriarch’s aid. He completes his reestablishment and draws away, very dignified, wagging his tail. All his fellows follow him. Mémé’s hands are empty, in any case. The unexpected fall of a calabash hastens the stampede. In the crown of a coconut-palm, white-maned monkeys are carefully stripping the nuts and peppering the runaways with the peel.
Hand-in-hand once again, Rara and Mémé, a song on their lips, walk along the stream. Its flow is clear and noisy, between banks covered in medeoloides lilies. Under their feet, water-snakes and tiny turtles swarm. Fantastic tree-ferns, clumps of mulberries and guavas frame them with their prodigious verdure. Sleek blue dragonflies glide over the water, brushing them and taking flight.
Gradually, the foliage thins out and becomes stunted. The waves hasten, breaking and foaming. There is a barrier of rocks through which, in the distant past, the waters laboriously scoured a passage. The broken flanks of the cliff are ablaze with red orpiment and the ardent greens of malachite. The children are up to their knees in water.
Between their calves, among the large gray shrimp, are the golden and steely flashes of fish.
The gorge narrows. The torrent rumbles more deafeningly. There is a chilly odor. In the shadows, glittering stones alternate with holes full of darkness. Here and there, in the fissures, bats are mewling. A cavern yawns, in which colossal bones are whitening. Piously, Rara raises his fingers to his lips, and salutes with his open palm the remains of the giant birds that were kings before the humans, and whose spirits it is appropriate to appease. Mémé reproduces exactly the same gestures.
The gorge is already broadening out again. A sheet of orange sky is revealed, and also, high up, the bleakness of the basalt, on which a mast is erected. A striped flag is fluttering there.
While continuing to paddle, Rara and Mémé honor the divine sign, and sing their tribute:
The livid gods are feared by the light of day,
The water spat them out and took them away.
They will come back from the distant blue;
Where their feet once trod, the earth is taboo.
Above the chant of their childish lips, however, rises the murmurous growl of the sea. The last expanses of the wall crumble. Liberated, the stream spreads out nonchalantly over the golden sand, where it is united with the caressing waves.
The virgin wind, which nothing except for vast albatrosses and gigantic frigate birds has breathed in for thousands of kilometers, blows over bronzed faces. A wide open bay is limited by two rocky points. To the left, in the background, a peak is outlined, surmounted by a thick column of smoke. Rara’s index-finger points to it.
“The spirit of Hakarou is agitated.”
“May Hakarou be blessed,” Mémé replies.
The black heads of coral protrude here and there from the steep shoreline. Beyond the most distant, a brown islet, unexpectedly emerged, launches two waterspouts toward the sky and sinks, leaving behind a wake of foam.
The children shout, in chorus:
Good hunting to you, Harka the whale
Good hunting to you, thank you for your gift.
To us of your scraps, Harka the whale,
Good hunting to you, spit out your spindrift.
When Harka idles close to the shore, the fish take fright and are abundant on the reef—but the tide is still too high. The children sit down on the golden sand, amid the wrack, the coral debris and the shells. Mémé curls up against Rara’s side, leans her head on his shoulder and says, coaxingly: “Tell the story of things again.”
And Rara, having stuck his harpoon in the sand, condescendingly intones the Polynesian genesis.
The tradition is deposited in Mémé’s mind exactly as it is in his, but in order that the revered images that come from the ancestors shall not be effaced, it is good that the words, hymned according to the rituals, should project them into the light. From the boy’s lips spring formulas inculcated by the sages. Mémé accompanies them with gestures, finishes the sentences or repeats the conclusions as a chorus. It is a cantilena for two voices that are only one, since Rara and Mémé are only two halves of Raramémé.
Once, there was Atua, the Eternal Night.6 But Rahuo became bored, and, from the soft and diffuse Entity, by means of the great fish-hook, pulled out Oaleya, the fortunate island. He
seated it solidly in the waters, set plants upon it, filled it with animals and pinned the sun and moon in the sky to illuminate it. In the beginning, their movements were hasty and disordered, but the subtle Mawi fixed them with the jawbone of his grandfather, in such a way that thereafter, the sun, as it went down, caused the moon to rise, and their march became slow and regular.
Higher up is placed the reservoir of the rains, and higher still the winds. Even higher are the redoubtable spirits, after that the light, and then the ultimate sky, in which Rahuo, king of the gods, is resident.
Rara pauses. Golden sand runs through his brown fingers. Mémé articulates the response: “But the gods are everywhere.”
Rara nods his chin, throws back is head and resumes.
The gods are everywhere. They fill the earth, and that which is underneath, and the waters, and the skies. Some are visible, others invisible. Some are good and others evil. The wise know words that attract them, repel them, conciliate them, constrain them, or even kill them. Killing them all would be the safest thing, but that cannot be done; so it is necessary to charm them with incantations and appease them with sacrifices.
Among all the islands with which Rahuo’s whim has strewn the great water, Oaleya is the most privileged, but there are three others almost as spacious, or four, or perhaps ten; bold minds think that there might even be more, but that is improbable. Oaleya shines by comparison with them like the sun by comparison with the palest of the stars. So, in great pirogues, the chiefs brought all the superb Oyas there: men and women, the people of the crab, the people of the armadillo, the people of the kangaroo and the people of the octopus...
Outside of Oaleya the Fortunate, where the Oyas are, only miserable tribes exist, half-human, half-animal, without blazons, clinging to their reefs as best they can, like limpets.
From the soft Entity that surrounds everything that is, anything might surge. All kinds of apparitions emerge therefrom, to be reabsorbed again. There are famous ones that sometimes possess human form, the pallor of the surf, the mastery of the lightning and the most disconcerting magic. Their coming presages great cataclysms, which it is appropriate to welcome with resignation, for they are unavoidable, and they pass. Everything about them is taboo, including their slightest signs and traces. Toward the mast that dominates the bluff—where the blue, red and dirty white flutter—four thin bronze arms are raised, and childish voice shout:
Fear the livid gods who bring dismay
The water spat them out and took them away.
They will come back from the distant blue;
Where their feet have trod, the earth is taboo.
Mémé repeats, with a fearful expression: “They will come back.”
“They will come back,” Rara confirms. “But what does it matter?” he adds, proudly. “We are children of the crab.”
Along the edge of the swaying coconut-palms, a young man and a young woman are walking, their foreheads crowned with tiaras, and there little fingers linked. Yesterday, they were living amid the tribe. Now they are going to construct their hut of woven leaves. They extend their open hands toward the children: “Blessed is the crab.”
Raramémé reply, in chorus: “Blessed the armadillo.”
According to the blood from which they have emerged, and the dispositions testified by their minds, young Oyas, in their fourth spring, are marked with the sea-urchin, the armadillo, the crab, the bird of paradise, the kiwi or one of the other animals of the elect. Thus is fixed their parentage and their character. Tupo and Maila are children of the armadillo, which places them in an honorable rank, but Raramémé are children of the crab, as the glorious blue totem inscribed on their breasts attests; thus their blood is the most divine, for Rahuo is also the Great Crab—and instead of being separated in two intelligences, their soul is one.
With a slightly disdainful compassion, their eyes follow the young couple who are drawing away. By Rara’s side, Mémé whispers, with pride and self-satisfaction: “Only those born united are truly united.”
Indeed, it is in vain that others seek one another, coming together and contracting temporary bonds in the fashion of beasts. Two intelligences subsist in them. They are two lives, consecrated to two destinies. To the children of the crab it is given to be one in two bodies.
Before being marked, Raramémé had but one cradle in a single huge shell, and were nourished by the same teats. The sign that was conferred upon them by Manga-Yaponi, the old sage, only consecrated the manifest election of Rahuo. They have two heads, but one brain. If Rara coughs, Mémé feels a pain in her chest. When she goes away, he suffers an amputation. They wake up simultaneously, are hungry, thirsty and go to sleep simultaneously. They will extend their lips to the Black Flower simultaneously. By virtue of a special politeness, Rara has given Mémé his right arm, which is so strong; Mémé has given Rara the gentle little warm beast that beats beneath her left breast; but that is just a game. All of Rara is Mémé; all of Mémé is Rara. There is Raramémé.
In the times when the gods were less jealous of Oyas, the crab clan was very numerous. Today, there are only the two children, so they are tenderly venerated by their people. It is only the people of the octopus that continue to separate from them the old hatred that once made enemies of Kroum, the armored king with the strong claws and the sly Glonsk, the pulpy carcass with the viscous arms. The people of Kroum and the people of Glonsk never sit down to eat together.
It is because of the atavistic malediction in question that the squinting Mao, when he perceives the children as he crosses the strand, makes a detour to avoid contact with them. They have spotted him, however, and mock him: “Good hunting, octopus—look out for jellyfish!”
Of all the prey of the sea, the jellyfish, its carcass crystalline and opaline in the sunlight, is the most disdained.
Mao turns his head away, spits sideways, and points two fingers at the jeering pair to curse then. They laugh more uproariously and ward off his curses by turning their golden palms toward the sun.
But the sun is slowly sinking toward the horizon. The gulfs have sucked in the salty waters. The jagged coral is outlined in all directions. In their lattices and festoons the swarming life of the sea remains captive.
Sometimes wading waist-deep in the water, sometimes leaping from rock o rock, sometimes swimming a few lengths, Raramémé have reached the great reef, and proceed with the collection of sometimes-baroque mollusks, crustaceans and juicy algae.
In the thickets of the fortunate isle there are fruits, roots and other living things to maintain their life, but the children of the crab are fonder of the iodized and salty seeds of the sea than the impoverished and insipid seeds born of that morsel of dried-out sea, the land.
With a cry of triumph, Rara hauls out a jack mackerel that he has just harpooned. Mémé runs up to grab the tail and tear it with beautiful teeth. To tease her, Rara holds it over her head. She lets go, falls backwards, disappears into the water, reappears some distance away, shakes her soaked tresses, laughs, shouts, and dives repeatedly in pursuit of frightened turtles. Fifty meters away, however, a fin cleaves the surface of the torpid waves.
Mémé utters the warning cry: “Harrah!”
Flapping his arms and legs, Rara sends foam flying and regains the shore, swimming precipitately. He hoists himself out briskly, and, streaming, mocks the shark, tempted and disappointed. Mémé complains tenderly: “My arm hurts.” As he landed, Rara has scratched himself on the spurs of the coral. She puts her lips on the wound in order to extract the evil spirit, only pausing to insult the shark—which continues prowling—with all the wrath of her puerile mouth, from which Rara’s blood trickles in a thin thread.
Raramémé search the great reef, the scrupulous millenarian work of madrepores, with their subtle noses, their sharp eyes and their agile hands. Between the emergent calcareous slabs, magical submarine palaces conceal a prodigious pullulation of creatures, forms and seeds. In mysterious forests with perspectives of indefinite shadow
s and bizarrely-contorted trees, pink, mauve and blood-colored branches proliferate, where indescribable foliages hang down and float, in which paradoxical fish and improbable crustaceans nest. Among the tresses, plumes, manes, spokes and clouds, stars scintillate, some of which are flowers and others beasts. Countless mollusks—jewels with infinitely various spirals, delicate, baroque or obscene marvels—yawn or crawl, radiant with all the colors of the rainbow.
Pincers and antennas extend from the orifices of lairs, where carapaces twitch. Predators lie flat, in ambush, and leap forth. Some of them are all head and mouth; others all stomach. Some are bristling with spikes, like chestnuts, others so flat that they are invisible in profile. Some are as dazzling as sapphires or emeralds, others confounded with the sand, stones and mosses. They project spears, saws, tentacles, fins, tails, horns, or the most deformed and inexplicable excrescences. Here and there, flying-fish with scarlet wings take flight fearfully, and fall back with a splash, fluttering desperately.
It is the fecund and inexhaustible flourishing of the sea, in which today’s harvest is renewed and tomorrow’s is growing. Only a few hundred kilometers from the fortunate isle, bottomless abysses are hollowed out in the ocean, closed to human curiosity. The animals and plants that our eyes have seen are excluded therefrom. A sealed, secret, inaccessible matrix, where what will be is perhaps slowly marinating below what is. In the air, the volcano Hakarou is scattering his heavy swirls. Of the millenarian collaboration of the madrepores and the central fire, that fugitive parcel, Oaleya the fortunate, was born. Perhaps, scarcely ten thousand years ago, it was still asleep in the gulfs. Perhaps, in another ten thousand years, it might sink again, or—who can tell?—might cleave the sky with a snowy peak.
The children sprawl on a bed of wrack. Their hunger appeased, they are no longer swallowing any but a few choice delicacies. By means of a long fish-bone, Mémé extracts a violet slug from its speckled shell and offers it to Rara. Rara offers her a couple of fat oysters, whose greenish flesh surrounds an opal cushion. But his dark eyes light up...
The Children of the Crab Page 2