The Children of the Crab

by André Lichtenberger

  But the crab ought not to perish, nor should the blood of the Ancestor dry out. Those who had to come have come—and in them, Raramémé have not only found powerful friends, but what they need to raise them up by a degree in existence. You are the most miserable of the miserable if you live enclosed in yourself. Already, Rara lived in Mémé, Mémé lived in Rara; now they also live in Houga, who is Hugues, and above all in Lauritea, who is Laurette. Thus is formed a new organism, which is much more perfect. To the young woman, without Mémé being jealous, Rara has given his brown forehead, on which she so gladly places her lips. To Houga, Mémé has given her velvety cheeks, which he brushes every evening with a kiss. They are no longer two little savages, a socialite and a French officer, brought together by a whim of chance; they are that original creature, that close, rich and intimate association Raramémé-Hougalauritea

  It is something like a fraternity of four, in which the little brethren have for the older ones the caress of a cat purring around its master, the unreserved adoration of a faithful dog toward its chosen one, whose gesture determines thought, morality, life and death.

  The fortunate isle is full of beasts, flowers, stones and waters that are amicable. Nevertheless, Raramémé were unable escape the fear of invisible or furtive demons that crawl, float and glide, surrounding the living with traps and threats. Now they no longer fear them. United with the white gods, they form a permanent conjuration against which the worst spells will run aground. Fortified by Lauritea’s matinal kiss, they can brave all the ambushes of the day. Enriched by her evening kiss, what revenants can trouble their dreams?

  With their friendship, they have associated Kouang.

  At first, the Hairy One kept his distance from the strangers, manifesting distrust toward them. His formidable stature, the rolling of his eyes and the grinding of his teeth did not fail to cause the sailors some anxiety. Perhaps, but for the Commandant’s formal orders, given to the crew on Monsieur Boujade’s insistence, he would have been shot.

  “You tell me, old chap, whether the fellow has a limp…in the church back home, there’s a Devil who resembles him like a foster-brother.”

  Thanks to the chief, Kouang has been respected. Joking has even succeeded malevolence; attempts have even been made to domesticate him by offering him biscuits, sugar or a glass of eau-de-vie, but Kouang, whom no threatening gesture seems to excite, has remained insensitive to all flattery. Lancosme has expressed his resentment at seeing his advances disdained to his comrades in picturesque terms: “What do you expect, lads? That ape only keeps company with toffs—you and me aren’t distinguished enough.”

  Indeed, Hugues and Laurette are the only ones who have won the monster’s familiarity. Perhaps, in the first days after Raramémé adopted them, he felt an obscure jealousy. Hugues has kept watch on watch him, his hand on his revolver, after seeing the giant’s eyes light up with an ambiguous gleam while fixed on the young woman with the two children laying around her. The first impulse of fear having passed, however, Laurette has allowed the children to lead her to him and has placed her gentle hand on his rough shoulder.

  Through the hairy pelt, the caress penetrated into the lair of the heart. Beneath the enormous bushy eyebrows, at the base of the embryonic brow, on the two sides of that which is not a muzzle, the two eyes contemplated the young woman strangely, with a sadness so penetrating that, seized by a sudden anguish, she was unable to help murmuring: “Oh, Hugues, can you believe that he’s only an ape?”

  So Laurette does not behave with Kouang as with a domestic animal, but rather as if he were a distant relative, poor, unhappy and simple-minded, speaking an unknown language, but to who one shows all the more respect because impenetrable sensitivities are contained within him, easy to offend. “Come on, Doctor, admit that he’s much closer to us than a Boche.”

  Dr. Boujade often shares, along with Kouang and Raramémé, the two cousins’ strolls in the flowery island. Oh, what a rage would shake the bones of Dr, Klagenmeyer, in the grave where they have been assembled, if he discovered that the prodigious anthropopithecus that he extracted from the equatorial forest has become a subject of observation for a foreign scientist! How his fury would increase if he were able to suspect that to the fantasist in question, a demi-crackpot, having no notion of the methods of German science, the unique phenomenon only suggests crazy revelations, worthy of H. G. Wells or Restif de la Bretonne.

  If his sojourn in Oaleya is, indeed, filling Monsieur Boujade with an increasing passionate delight, it is not because he has found there a new opportunity to measure, massacre, dissect, vivisect, classify, govern and exploit. It is simply that the spectacle it offers is exciting in his elongated cranium his impenitent faculty of imagination, and causing the most bizarre hypotheses to take root there.

  His Marseillais mannerisms, his despotic frowns and the trumpeting of his speech, as well as the few worlds of the Oya language he has assimilated—much more rapidly than Monsieur Pittagol—have rapidly revealed his magical abilities to the indigenes. He is able, by means of talismans that are unique to him, to chase away the deadliest spirits and to summon the most helpful. Without suction, by the simple application of piquant water and a bandage, he has cured an inflamed open wound in Tapo-Harus’ thigh. A purgation had dispelled the hydras that were battling in the belly of Wang-toa. A potion has reduced Rongo-mai to silence, who was shaking Mairea’s chest with a hacking cough. Titi-Hai had been making Moilea limp for a week; the new sorcerer has expelled him in a night. Touga had taken the spirit of Haï-Pou far from his head; the white sage has brought it back from the escarpments of the promontory where it was already wandering.

  Thanks to his art, and thanks to the forbearance of the indigenes, who facilitate his investigations, Monsieur Boujade has entered into their intimacy in a matter of days.

  A companion of the young folk in the fortunate isle, under the escort of the ape and the savage children, he never wearies of roaming the valleys, the hills, the meadows, the woods and the steep gorges, accumulating observations, framing ludicrous hypotheses...

  Emerging from the coconut grove, he perceives Hugues and Laurette sitting on the sand. The young woman is mischievously teasing Pippi-kuink, his spouse and their twins; lying beside her, Raramémé are alternately crunching raw crayfish, which are exquisite, and caramels, which make them grimace at first. A short distance away, the monstrous Kouang is considering them pensively.

  Monsieur Boujade takes his camera from its case and aims it at the group.

  At the sound of his approach, the young woman raises her head; she threatens the intruder with her finger. “Well Doctor, aren’t you going to apologize for the indiscretion?”

  “I apologize, Madame, but I’ll take advantage of it. A pretty social snapshot for the Excelsior.”

  The click of the shutter has fixed the scene. Intrigued, Rara approaches the fat man with a soft tread.

  “It interests you, young clown? Look at the little beast.

  The boy handles the apparatus, turns it over and over, sniffs it, searches it with his fingers, touches his forehead and returns the magic box to the god. It is another of the spells that are so abundant in the white men’s hands. It does not smell good, nor is it pretty, or pleasant to eat. Better that Mémé does not touch it, in case something bad emerges from it.

  The young woman indicates to the doctor a mountain of fruits and berries beside her. “Come and share the meal that I owe to my providers.”

  The fat man settles down jovially. “Who could refuse the opportunity to break bread—I mean, to suck mangoes and nibble guavas—in the company of a pretty lady, a hero of the Great War, a pithecanthropus and two young cannibals?”

  Madame de Vesnage is busy rolling one of Pippi-kuink’s offspring in the sand before the placid eyes of its parents. It wriggles furiously, hissing nasally with all its might, trying to bite. The indignation experienced by the young woman permits her victim to recover its aplomb and escape, clicking its beak.


  “Two young cannibals! Doctor! Is it really our little companions that you mean? Don’t forget that, via the crab, they’re my distant cousins...”

  “Madame,” says the Doctor, gallantly, “from you, everything is precious to me, even a bite. As for your young relatives, I’d prefer to think that they prefer coconuts, but I’ll confide to you in a whisper that the destiny of our recently-promoted legionnaire has been a troubling revelation to me. Monsieur Bedeau-Conflans testified his astonishment to me the other day that he had not seem him again, with his breast ornamented with the glorious insignia. Alas, certain calcined and freshly-gnawed bones that I picked up at the foot of our sentry-mast incline me strongly to believe that he terminated his career in the bellies of his compatriots.

  “I wouldn’t even be surprised if, by a logical process whose detail I can’t work out, it was the very distinction of which he was the object that precipitated the treatment in question. Believe, furthermore, that it is indispensable in these latitudes to renounce any paltry prejudice you might perhaps be nursing with regard to anthropophagy. That custom has for its bases a legitimate horror of wastage, a sentiment of filial piety toward the remains of our ancestors and an appetite for perfection analogous to our scholarly hunger. It is by consumption that we assimilate most surely the wisdom and virtues of our peers. Having no books to devour here, one can at least devoir the distinguished personalities whose genius might have written them, and whose exploits might have filled their pages...”

  Arresting the young woman’s protests with a gesture, the Doctor concluded: “Moreover, I wouldn’t be surprised if those respectable customs were in their decadence. Here, as elsewhere, pitiless progress is besmirching the most sacred traditions. It might be that in this region, the anthropophagic doctrine is as outmoded as that of Action Française in a Parisian brain of the 20th century.19

  Lazily extended amid the seaweed, the young woman is playing distractedly with the hair and necklaces of Mémé, lying alongside her. Her gaze is following the frolics of the parrots in the glistening foliage. She murmurs: “Where are we, Doctor? Isn’t this the mot paradoxical place on the planet?”

  “Perhaps, Madame. Unless it is only here that there is wisdom and truth, while the rest of the world is plagued by delirium. In sum, Madame, if universal history is exact, it does not seem that the excessive individualism into which Nature has finally lapsed has not produced such fine results that we have the right to treat other hypotheses with disdain. It’s exciting, Madame, to discover here a sketch of what she was once able, momentarily, to dream.

  “Evidently, from primitive protoplasm to present specialization, a path has been followed, but I’ve never been able to envisage without horror the sum of tortures and carnage at the price of which the distinction of species and the sovereignty of humankind has been effected. Oh, how revolting I always find the cruel imperialism of Noah, who refused to take in the Ark, doubtless because they ate too much, the sympathetic mammoths and other megatheria of the antediluvian era, and thus broke—the rascal—a few infinitely precious links in the great chain of being, which became so difficult to reconstitute!

  “It’s too late now to retrace our steps, alas—but Nature has amused herself by conserving here, as if in a secret casket, a sketch of what might have been. If the world had evolved like Oaleya, where an animal can be both mole and duck, or a rat and tortoise, where coral is stone and flower, where an octopus is a star, where plants can be carnivorous and eat insects, we would not have seen unpleasant fissures hollowed out between species and individuals. The human species would not be so haughty in the titanic arrogance that makes it such an unsociable newcomer. More compassionate toward its poor relatives, it would at least have refrained from dissociating itself so much—and perhaps it would not be in the process of sinking into an atrocious regression.

  “Oh, Madame, how sweet and how bitter it is for me to imagine that, if the system of Oaleya had prevailed, there would far more between you and me than the dream of fraternity that haunts our most impenitent humanitarians: the affinity that units the bees in a hive. You would be the rose and I the thorn on a single bush! But I fear that I might appear to you to be rambling. Forgive me, then, for leaving you to your young relatives and to our slightly-more-distant Hairy cousin. Inconvenient spirits are treacherously assailing Madame Nebitoua of the birds of paradise. In vain my colleagues Touritou and Patakuk are combating them with spitting, suction and other ingenious treatments. My sorcery is requisite to the rescue. I must go to the consultation...”

  Slowly, hand in hand, Hugues and Laurette are walking along the beach. Kouang has moved away to search for the more substantial nourishments that are indispensable to him, which the thickets around the black pool contain. Only Raramémé are accompanying their friends. The tide is out. In the partly-uncovered submarine forests and palaces of coral, surprising fauna and flora of the waters remain captive.

  “Let’s go to the rock-pools, Hugues,” Laurette proposes, “as we used to do.”

  They scale the rocky plateau, leaning curiously over the transparent pools in which mollusks scintillate, scaly rockets dart, or disquieting tresses undulate, from which heady saline odors rise up.

  As swift as doradoes, Raramémé caper and gambol, holding out their hands, guiding their steps all the way to a rocky point swathed in seaweed. The young people allow themselves to collapse there, facing the sparkling splendor of the setting sun. Around them, the children continue to bustle. Mémé proudly deposits sea-urchins, starfish and sea-cucumbers at their feet. Harpoon in hand, Rara lies in wait for fish, strikes and hauls them out repeatedly, of every size and shape. A viscous and iridescent host soon accumulates, quivering, at the feet of the young officer and is companion.

  The fishing over, Raramémé approach their friends. The boy places his finger on the amulet of the crab dangling from the young woman’s wrist. He makes a long speech. Mémé repeats the final lines in a singsong voice. The whole rigmarole is utterly unintelligible. Nevertheless, Hugues and Laurette recognize one word therein, which designates the strange link that unites the savage children. With an understanding expression, both nod their heads in approval.

  “Kroum, yes, Kroum.”

  Then Rara claps his hands—and heir pearly teeth shine between their lips. They are overjoyed that the white gods are deigning to participate in their fraternal ceremony. Crocking at their feet, in the serenity of the evening, they prelude the canticle of the race:

  Tick, tock,

  Knock, shock...

  And now, from dark holes and deep pools, over the unctuous mosses and the black and hairy rocks, in all direction, pincers and feet surge forth, carapaces and round eyes, shiny and keen. The immense army of blue crabs comes running, concentrating, falling and fighting over the provender that is offered to them. Alarmed at first, seized by disgust, the young people watch the improbable feast with amazement. Raramémé sing, softly:

  Click, clock,

  Block, mock...

  In a matter of minutes, the flesh is torn apart and swallowed. Then Raramémé clap their hands, intoning one last time the leitmotiv:

  Let’s take our pride

  Away to hide;

  Blood will revive,

  Kroum is alive!

  Around them, the blue crabs get up, brandishing their pincers, allowing them to fall back rhythmically, and then draw away, trotting sideways.

  Bewildered, the young couple follow them with their eyes. It is a dream. Have they not always had it? Far away, very far away, on the Basque coast, at the foot of the cliffs of Ilbarritz, under the aegis of the distant uncle, have they not bound themselves in an infantile alliance with the deformed people whose image haunts his notebooks? A baroque sensation takes hold of them, as if, in spite of everything, this prodigious spectacle were not entirely new to them, as if it were awaking atavistic correspondences in them, at a vast distance...

  Laurette grips her cousin’s hand, digging her fingernails into it.

&nb
sp; “Hugues, Hugues, doesn’t it seem to you that once, already, somewhere…? Who are we?”

  In low voices, Raramémé are conversing in an animated fashion—which is to say that each of them, alternately, is forming syllables that the other repeats, mutedly, as if to amplifying them. Something grave must be agitating between them.

  From time to time they fall silent, seemingly looking within themselves, in pursuit of something. Rara makes a sweeping gesture in the direction of the island, which goes beyond the coconut palms. Mémé clucks and imitates him. They turn toward the dear gods, and with precipitate words, explain something very important to them. The boy’s finger repeatedly brushes the fetishistic bracelet, while the girl’s points to the design on the officer’s wrist.

  To what extent their speech expresses an idea that it is necessary to grasp, or merely constitutes a kind of collective birdsong, would be very difficult for the young people to discern. They only recognize a few syllables scattered here and there in the undulating chant. One name recurs—that of Kroum—and another that signifies the ancestor, the father. Those names the children articulate with increasing frequency, insistently, and with a sort of anxiety—which, there is no doubt about it, degenerates into interrogation...

  To calm him down, Laurette draws the boy toward her, and repeats to him in an amicable tone: Yes, Rara, yes, Kroum…yes, the Ancestor.”

  A radiance of delight lights up in the children’s eyes. They clap their hands, jumping for joy, expanding in a dizzying flood of speech.

  Laurette smiles. “Do you understand any of this, Hugues?”

  Hugues shakes his head. “I think you’ve just made our friends a promise.”

  “I don’t know what,” Laurette says, “but it will be necessary to keep it. You’ll help me...”