Mémé’s foot is dangling in an irregular pool whose bottom is invisible. Toward the transparent surface, the tip of a thong extends from far below. It is twisting, undulating, making sly progress; now another becomes discernible, similarly sliding. Rara whispers something in Mémé’s ear. She remains lying down, nonchalantly, looking out of the corners of her eyes, negligently playing with hr amber ear-lobes. His lips taut, harpoon in hand, Rara climbs up on the rock, reaches an overhanging point and leans over. Three or four hideous serpents are extending avidly toward the tempting flesh: it is him!
A filthy bag inflates at the mouth of a cavern. Horrible eyes embellish the head-cum-belly. All of it moves with an atrocious flexibility and nightmarish velocity Rara throws his right arm back, balances his harpoon, hurls it with all the forces of his muscles, and, with a cry of triumph, hauls on the phormium cord. A monstrous star-flower emerges, bristling with pustules and helmeted with a tangle of vipers. The tentacles hiss, slap, twist and cling, struggling. One of them coils around Rara’s arm, sticks there, and its thousand suckers pump his blood with powerful suction. Two others attempt to bind is legs. But Mémé has leapt upon the beast; her two nimble fists have already gripped the viscous pocket, twisting it victoriously. Sagging and blind, the mass of jasper flesh is in its death-throes, with frightful palpitations, on the coral platform. The two children take one another by the hand, and execute a mocking dance around it.
Glonsk slides and winds,
Glonsk sucks and binds.
Suck this, suck that, Glonsk is there,
On the ocean bed
His belly-head
Extends and takes
With his eight snakes
That swarm and seek
And coil and streak;
Beware, your lusts,
My harpoon thrusts,
Whistles, hisses, lashes, cracks
Mine the stone and mine the ax.
Die, Glonsk of the snaky gyve!
Have no fear! Kroum is alive!
With all the might of their young lungs, the brown children repeat the centuries-old call over and over again: “Kroum is alive! Kroum is alive!”
And now, just as their young forms were once outlined on the surface of the waves, when Rahuo, the Great Crab, took existence from the eternal night and inscribed his image thereupon, so, to the call of their race, the blue crabs wake up, moving in their holes, clicking their pincers and running at the oblique trot of their eight legs. In a matter of seconds, the entire rocky promontory has come to life. There is a host of steely carapaces rolling, gliding, bumping into one another, climbing over one another. Some are smaller than snails, others larger than giant tortoises. Some are smooth and polished, mirroring the final rays of the setting sun; others are rough and rugged. Some are covered with fleeces of moss from which beards and wigs hang. All of them assemble around the children, beside the dead octopus, jostling in a rattling circle.
Waving their arms rhythmically, they intone a hymn:
Click, clock
Crock, knock
In the deep
Are we asleep?
Something’s died
Let’s climb outside;
Blood will revive,
Kroum is alive!7
Click, clock
Knock, block
In my claws
Everything scores
Rips and cries
Cuts and dies;
Blood will arrive,
Kroum is alive!
Click, clock,
Block, mock
Shall we go
Back down below?
To take our pride
Away to hide;
Blood will survive!
Kroum is alive!
In each verse, at the moment when Raramémé utter the chorus, the entire horde raises its pincers, clicking the two halves together, bulging eyes gleaming.
The children fall silent and make the authorizing gesture: “Go!” Within a matter of seconds, the jostling wave has broken over the carcass. Mandibles grasp the hard flesh, ripping it apart, scattering it and swallowing it.
But the spirit of the sea, resting in the deep abysses that it has hollowed out, has become fat and swollen again. Here it comes, with an enormous soft murmur, from far away, rising up and licking the coral, soaking it with saliva and covering it up.
The children have returned to the beach of golden sand, and collapse there lazily. A great peace hangs in the limpid evening air.
A roseate breath bubbles beneath the smoke of Hakarou. The sea purrs. On the edge of the coconut palms, the last trills of the songbirds die away. Breezes pass by. The nocturnal phantoms are doubtless preparing to make their rounds. With their open palms, the children ward off the jealousy of the dead.
Busily, they proceed with their toilette, scrubbing one another, grooming one another and pampering one another. They have washed their bodies carefully and rubbed them with fine sand and handful of odorous herbs. With the aid of long thorns they part and smooth their hair. With agile fingers, Rara arranges Mémé’s hair into symmetrical bangs. He polishes her cheeks and shoulders with a clump of juicy fucus. She carefully cleans his teeth, ears and fingernails, whose asperities she pares away with incisive thrusts.
They are so absorbed in their task that they pay no attention to the strange form that has just surged from the forest and is descending in their direction with an uneven gait. In Oaleya the happy, an individual does not rise up in hatred against his fellows. The gulfs between species, insurmountable elsewhere, are not hollowed out. Kour, the coral, is both stone and beast. Raina, the sea-anemone, is both flower and cephalopod. The plant Pakoa devours insects. Kiwi, the hairy bird, has no wings. Hapi, the squirrel, is akin to a bird. Pippi-kuink, the duck-billed mole, suckles young that hatch from eggs. Tiparu the armadillo is both tortoise and rat.
In Oaleya the fortunate, what is the hairy giant who is advancing on two feet, supporting his limping tread with a crutch?
He is undoubtedly an ape, more formidable that the most formidable in Africa or Malaysia. The colossal width of his torso, the length of his arms and its gait—his entire appearance—is reminiscent of the gorillas and the orangutans. He is a bear in the power of his neck and spine, the thickness of his limbs and its fleece, the growl rumbling in his torso.
Is he not entirely human, though? There is no muzzle, but a flat nose. Beneath the surmounting thatch, the commencement of a brow must lodge an embryo of thought. His legs are not terminated by hands or paws, but by human feet, save for the claws that terminate the toes.
And now that they have perceived the children, the eyes, previously unexpressive, light up.
Herr Klagenmeyer, if you saw the fame radiating there, how would you classify your former captive?
At the sound of his heavy, limping step, the children turn their heads, clap their hands and bound toward the newcomer like young domesticated dogs, leaping up to greet him.
“Kouang! It’s the Hairy One.”
They surround the hirsute mass with their capers, tugging at his arms, hanging on to his legs, climbing on to his back. The monster lets himself fall to the ground, groaning. Now they are rolling around with him, heads over heels. They get up again with volleys of laughter, grabbing handfuls of coarse hair, pinching him, manhandling him, climbing over him. A single excessively heavy blow from the gigantic limbs could crush the children, a flick could tear them into shreds, but the individual allows the teasing to proceed, with a faint purr. Astride the nape of his neck, Rara twists a crown of seaweed around his temples. Mémé offers him a calabash of fresh water, into which she has squeezed the juice of an orange. He drinks it without lapping, holding the vessel in his fingers, the palms of which are pink, like those of negroes.
The suave shadows fall. There is no longer anything in the sleeping woods but the sparse ululation of night-birds. With shrill whistles, silky bats are chasing one another. The glimmer of the volcano becomes redder beneath the pitch-black dome. But
what murmurous apocalyptic drone, drawing nearer, is filling the atmosphere with a thunderous hum? Kouang, shrugging off the children, who fall backwards, comes to his feet with a single bound, Mouth open, breathless, his hair bristling, he challenges the unknown raptor, whose wingspan surpasses that of a condor...
Indifferently, the seaplane flies over the shore, changes course, and goes back out to sea. In a few seconds, it is no more than a black dot in the red stripe of the twilight.
Rara and Mémé have risen to their feet and, palms open, are saluting the spirit that is floating over the waters, among so many others—for it is the hour when souls, breaths and germs agitate tumultuously in the fortunate isle. Alongside the visible life, an entire invisible life quivers. Only the insane dare plunge themselves into adventure there. The wise are wary, and at least take care to swathe themselves in efficacious talismans that do not permit them to be confronted.
In the distance, over the southern headland, the spirits of the dead are palpitating. For three days they have remained languid, prowling around perishable bodies; then, obedient to Rahuo’s order, they have been definitively torn away and are shivering as they await the typhoon that will carry them away. In the meantime, when night falls, they wander around the island, rustling in the foliage, drinking from springs, drifting over the marshes, leaning over sleepers.
Friend, do not becoming imprudently drowsy near stagnant water; escaping from your lips; your breath risks being captured by the spirits of the dead. You will wake up demented, or will not wake up at all.
If you have eaten the liver of a shark, if a heart of brass lodges in your breast, if old sage Manga-Yaponi has furnished you with the most powerful charms, that is the only moment when you might take the risk. Light a fire, throw flowers and cut grass on it according to the rites, pronounce the formulas that the ages whisper in the ear tremulously; the tamed gods will be constrained to come, and perhaps, from inconceivable gulfs, that which remains of the dead. That is the moment at which you might be able to communicate with those who were, and who perhaps still are, at least to a tiny degree.
That is the moment at which you might be able to communicate with those who will be—and who already are, for nothing upon the earth is born or disappears; everything exists eternally. The eternal homogeneity circles around you, indefinitely. The humans of today are only the passing faces of the humanity that, like the legendary serpent, is indefinitely swallowing its own tail.
On the northern edge of the pool of Taroa, the souls of the children that you will bring into the world are quivering invisibly, as well as those of their children and their great-grandchildren. Like impalpable moths, furtive dragonflies, iridescent bubbles, smokes, breaths, dusts and pollens, they float at the whim of breezes, swirl and steal away.
Husband, with your head crowned with gardenias, if you have built your hut, if you desire a newborn to open its eyes to you in Oaleya and perpetuate your totem, go hand-in-hand with your wife, kneel down beside Taroa and accomplish the vigil of souls. If it pleases Rahuo, your watch will not be sterile.
At this hour, the men and women gather around old Manga-Yaponi, crouching outside his hut, and they collect the precepts of his wisdom, the magic words and the talismans that his great age and experience have accumulated within him. For at this hour, attracted by the fire of dry bracken that he has lit, and which he maintains incessantly, mingling fetishes and aromatic herbs therein, all the spirits have come to flutter amid the flames.
The air that surrounds him is charged with the spiritual and the divine, as the spring breeze is charge with the perfume of roses. Skillfully, no matter how far they have come or how subtle they are, the old man captures the spirits, inhales them, distills them, digests them; and from his lips run torrents of precious honey. He proffers science, history, wisdom, healing and curses. Any question formulated falls into him as into an inexhaustible well of knowledge. He draws inestimable advice from it, perpetually. He grips the ungraspable, feels the impalpable.
Through his voice, the gods and the ancestors speak. Of the invisible he makes the visible; that which is no more is renewed, thanks to him. Perhaps other islands exist in the sea. There might be as many as ten of them, and perhaps more, but they are miry, miserable and diffuse regions; their substance is scarcely more tangible than that of the clouds that assemble in the sky and disperse there. If humans live there, they drag out a poor and incomplete existence.
Oaleya is the navel of the world, the center of existence. To tell the truth, it alone exists fully. People are only entirely alive while their feet are upon it; they begin to die as soon as they move away from it. At the moment when they pass over the horizon, they dissolve once again into the soft and uncertain Entity in which everything was before Rahuo became bored and created the world in which everything remains that his gesture has not withered.
Thus, the destiny of Oaleya and the Oyas that live there has earned them the jealousy of all the gods. It is not impossible to take them by surprise, to dupe them or disarm them with artful incantations, but Oaleya, which was born of the caprice of Rahuo, will return to mud at the caprice of his whim. In the bosom of universal being, it is only a very tiny thing. Around it, death prowls with a thousand face; within it, it nourishes death.
Once, the people of Oyas were innumerable. They are still innumerable today, for what brain is sufficiently robust to count them? But when Manga-Yaponi’s hair was black, the men and women of the tribe, squatting in the evening, covered all the terrain that extends from the chief’s hut to the great hibiscus thickets. Today, half that area is sufficient to contain them all. Some poison is undoubtedly undermining the strength of the Oyas, exhausting and rarefying them.
That is a little sad, but it is not appropriate to be excessively afflicted by it. Before humans, very probably, the Moas, the great birds, were kings of the island. They have disappeared. The Oyas will likewise disappear. Perhaps, in their place, the pale gods will reign, or even the kangaroos. Or Rahuo might dissolve things completely; everything might return to the sea, and only Kroum will survive. That does not matter much. It is appropriate that everyone, unless they are mad, should await their destiny cheerfully.
In the meantime, of course, it is permissible for us to anticipate it. It might even be excellent. For, although the point is somewhat lacking in precision, it is quite plausible that somewhere, Rahuo has forged another blessed isle. Not much is known about it, except that out there, perhaps, other bodies might exist whose stomachs are larger and limbs more robust than those of the Oyas. There is reason to think that instead of floating, the playthings of typhoons, the souls of great chiefs and those who have been able to equip themselves with the most efficacious charms will succeed in joining them, in being reincarnated there, thus to taste once again, more ardently, the pleasures of love, of feasting and all the rest...
It therefore happens sometimes that not only those who are tormented by evil demons, but those animated by hardy—albeit somewhat presumptuous—souls seek the Black Flower prematurely; they have more chance of succeeding in their hazardous migration, being more robust, more able to struggle hard against the jealous powers, and perhaps able to capture younger and healthier forms, in order to lodge therein.
Minniloa, with the petals the color of night, flourishes under the great thickets of lataniers near the southern banks of Taroa. It is there that the sick and the old go painfully in quest of it, and sometimes, buoyantly, the amorous and reckless young hunters who brave the adventure. It is preferable that you gather it on the night that follows the full moon. You take it in the morning to Manga-Yaponi, the wise old man. All day, he pounds and kneads it in a calabash with other herbs, turtle-blood and the juice of certain mollusks, while pronouncing the formulas of which he has the secret. In the evening, he warms the mixture on the fire before which the tribe is assembled. At his command, the deadly principles complete their incorporation within it.
Take up the cup; empty it. Now you will sink into the great s
leep and, the next day, your body will lie inert forever, unless the red ants have already covered it with their bandage. What will become of your soul? That is the mystery. If you miss your chance, weary of waiting in vain on the southern promontory, it will wander indefinitely through the woods, at random, and its plaints will frighten the living forever...
The night, the immense tropical night, has expanded. In the black sky, dense clusters of stars are ablaze in the infinite. The sea is similarly flamboyant. In myriads and myriads, the zoophytes have lit their fires. The entire surface of the calm waters is phosphorescent. Harmonious life is sweating, respiring, humming and radiating everywhere. Surrounded by the kiss of the ocean, languid beneath that of the stars, Oaleya is sleeping divinely.
With a dull moan, Kouang raises his head. His ears prick, catching a distant purr. It is not a storm. The volcano Hakarou is not angry. What demons are amusing themselves aping the thunder?
The children have woken up too, listening to the rumor. They mutter in unison: “May the passing gods be blessed,” but they do not have the strength to raise their palms toward the unknown and fall asleep again.
Similar to the heavy waves that are breaking in the hollows of the cliffs, the distant rumble continues to purr. Is there not a glimmer on the horizon other than that of the stars, the sky or the sea? Houang’s chops crease in a grimace of anger. With one of his muscular arms he takes hold of Rara; with the other he grabs Mémé, and he carries them away.
In a few strides he is at the entrance to the grotto, and crosses the threshold. His nostrils are soothed by the familiar odor of seaweed, dry grass and bat guano in the refuge he has chosen. He deposits the two light bodies on the armfuls of wrack and forage that he has piled up. Rara’s head lodges itself flirtatiously on Mémé’s bosom, where the palpitating creature that she has given to him resides, and Mémé takes possession of Rara’s arm, which is hers. Their even respiration is confused with the murmur of eternal life.
The Children of the Crab Page 3