The Children of the Crab

by André Lichtenberger

  Raramémé’s petulance has evaporated. They approach the white gods, squeeze their hands and sing a muted alternating melody. Rara initiates, and Mémé takes up the refrain. Jealous demons make their abode here, which it is dangerous to disturb. Raramémé rarely apologize; it is not an unconsidered curiosity that is driving them. Over a distance, the call of the Great Ancestor has reached them. They are obeying, bringing the pale gods who are of the same blood.

  A bizarre granitic pyramid looms up, like a prehistoric monolith. The children kneel at its base, cupping their hands. An unintelligible murmur emerges from their lips. A particularly redoubtable spirit must reside here. Raramémé turn round, pointing at their two companions, prostrating themselves more urgently.

  Dr. Boujade conjectures: “I think our guides are asking the local Cerberuses for permission for us to pass.”

  “May it be granted!” says Madame de Vesnage, with a smile. And with the same gesture as the children, she extends her waxy palm toward the unknown gods, rings gleaming on her excessively thin fingers.

  Raramémé get up, clicking their tongues. The affair is arranged. All is well. Forward ho! The rocky walls diminish. An almost desolate plateau, where the wind is bitter, is quickly crossed. The direction of a trickling stream of water indicates that the dividing line has been crossed. The excursionists accompany it, descending a series of terraces alongside it.

  The vegetation is reborn. Here is the tall bracken again, and then the immense forest, overflowing with life, essences and odors. Under its vault, the air is embalmed, becoming deliciously lukewarm again.

  The young woman feels a little tired. In the shelter of giant coconut-palms, in the midst of hibiscus bushes dotted with scarlet corollas and gardenias powdered with snow, a spring wells up, surrounded by divans of verdure.

  “Shall we spend the night here?”

  It is agreed. The children have understood, and approve the plan. They help the officer and the doctor prepare the bivouac. Dr. Boujade takes from his pocket the ardent little god enclosed therein, and causes the lightning to spring forth whose flame devours twigs. Raramémé clap their hands. Kouang blinks, approaches, crouches down and offers his formidable palms to the fire.

  The children and the ape have collected oranges, mangoes and walnuts. Combined with the provisions brought in bags, it is a frugal but adequate supper. Beyond the crowns of the trees, the stars twinkle. The birds have gone to sleep. There is no longer anything but the furtive sounds and the immense sigh of the living forest.

  Enveloped in a plaid blanket, the young woman is stretched out on a clump of moss and foliage. Slightly torpid, she contemplates the silhouettes of the two men sitting beside the fire, who are chatting in low voices while smoking. To one side, Kouang’s mass is folded up.

  Close to her, nestled together, Raramémé are twittering softly. It is not a conversation. It is the new song that they have picked up while following the trail, and which is springing necessarily from their lips.

  They are finally coming, with those who had to come. It has been a long time, but that is not their fault. Kroum has spoken, Kroum is alive.

  Suddenly, Rara gets up, places his slender finger on his breast, then on Mémé’s, goes to touch the officer’s wrist, and the amulet suspended from the young woman’s. He sits down again and explains to Laurette in a coaxing voice: “You and him. And me and her. Tomorrow, the four. And the Ancestor. Kroum is alive.”

  What does he mean?

  The young woman asks Dr. Boujade. He is still perplexed. “It seems to be a matter of some family festival. Not being a member of the clan, I’m afraid of being indiscreet.”

  Laurette reassures him: “We invited you.”

  And then the silence, the great silence, thickens again. From the suave night, divine powers of appeasement well up. Through the dome of foliage the softness of the stars radiates, and the serenity of centuries streams.

  A poor petty bloody rag ceases her solitary suffering. The immense collective pity embraces her, bandages her, coddles her. The shadow is warm with spare tenderness, caressing hands, smiling lips. A paternal benediction floats, reassures, protects, envelops. Everything menacing is far away, impotent. All is well. There is nothing true but acceptance. From the abysms of space and time, gleams emerge.

  What are you, ungraspable images of dreams, surged from what millenarian gulfs, what limbos, what worlds beyond, ornamented with I know not what radiation?

  One might think that they are shrunken visages of light. They are pitiful and amicable. They do not resemble anything on earth, but are ineffably reassuring. They are new. They are the same.

  Are they not, in an old house on the other side of the world, grouped around a cradle? Are they not murmuring forgotten things that have returned? A subtle mist drowns hem, blurs them, dissimulates their features, attenuates their words, which, one divines, are so soft...

  They pass by, return, hide away.

  Oh! what a shiver, in sensing them approach again. Have they no names? No, undoubtedly...

  No? Truly? Oh! that one, leaning over, whose blue eyes suddenly shine, illuminating the white forehead, in which the energetic and cheerful mouth is slightly parted....

  Laurette utters a plaint of inarticulate joy, holds out her arms, stammers: “The Uncle of the Crabs...”

  The children shiver, raise their heads. She makes an instinctive gesture, summoning them. They get up, approach, touch the face of the sleeper with their little hands, and nestle beside her, cheek to cheek.

  She goes back to sleep, surrounded by the warmth of the two small bodies, which have the scent of the forest and gazelles.

  En route, at dawn! En route! Scarcely has the sun winked between the black trunks than Raramémé are on their feet, shaking themselves, pawing the ground, twittering, running around.

  There is a fury of movement in them, the delight of a bloodhound on a fresh trail. If the others took heed of them they would leave right away, immediately, without breakfast, without packing up their things.

  Be bold... Be quick...

  Laurette shares their impatience, scolding the slowness of her companions. “Come on, Doctor, aren’t you ready? Remember that dawdling might perhaps cause to miss prodigious surprises.”

  Finally, the bags are buckled. Without hesitation, heads in the air, at a rapid pace, Raramémé set off. Laurette, nimbly, is at their heels. Her cheeks are rosy, her eyes shining. She is bounding. One might think that the children’s excitement has infected her.

  Hugues scolds her gently: “Calm down—you’re going to make yourself ill.”

  She reassures him: “Have no fear. The god that our little friends have evoked is within me. And in addition, I sense that we’re getting close to our goal.”

  The forest is reduced and thins out. Raramémé sniff the air and make signs. There it is—the odor of the sea. It insinuates itself, sharpens. Incessantly, the children chirp, turn round, gesticulate.

  There is no doubt. They are getting close.

  The curtain of the final trees has been passed. Here is a grassy plateau. The great breeze of the Pacific lashes their faces. In front of the excursionists there is a gentle slope, and then a promontory rises up above the immense swell of the waves. It is only covered by meager brushwood, patched here and there by a few clumps of bushes crowned by trees.

  Raramémé stop momentarily, breathe deeply, sniff, mutter to one another, and, making signs bidding their companions to wait for them, begin describing curves, zigzags, circuits and interchanges. Their fingers extend feverishly, clench, wander from their faces to the breasts, and their lips emit a jerky chant:

  Ho? Ha? Hey hey!

  This way? That way?

  They’re going…see?

  To you…to me?

  Oh! your ear is twitching!

  Tell me, nose, are you itching?

  Halt! Let’s run…there’s a sound

  My eye, your eye, look around...

  Boldly, jump high!

&n
bsp; The unknown is nigh!

  Now I know the score,

  It’s not there any more

  Everything is troubled!

  The dark is redoubled.

  But way over there,

  In the far somewhere,

  Did something shimmer

  Is there a glimmer?

  It’s him! The Ancestor!

  Greetings, great quester!

  Be bold, still!

  Hurrah, we will!

  Raramémé, their eyes bright with joy, return to the young woman at a run, each of them grabbing one of her hands. Quickly, quickly, they run down the slope with her. The men have difficulty keeping up.

  “Gently, kids!” Monsieur Boujade complains.

  They have to slow down to force their way through the waist-high grass, which is becoming thicker, and then to go uphill for a hundred meters. A thicket surges forth to the height of a man. Kouang plunged into it, clearing a path...

  A clearing...

  An exclamation of surprise escapes all their mouths simultaneously.

  Beneath the parasol of swaying coconut-palms, the skeleton of a hut is completing the process of crumbling away. It is not the one of the savages’ huts. It is more reminiscent of a traditional peasant’s cabin in one of our provinces—but everything is antiquated and falling apart. It no longer has a roof. The ruined walls are covered with climbing plants.

  What does this unexpected apparition signify? Has some European been shipwrecked…?

  “Let’s go in,” the captain says. “Perhaps there’s a clue...”

  He takes a step forward.

  The children interpose themselves, however, stopping him. No, no, this is not the objective. Laurette joins them.

  “Soon, Hugues. First, let’s allow our little guides to take us where they wish.”

  Raramémé have taken their friend’s hands again. Now they are passing through a final hedge of brushwood. There is a mound in front of them, which, at the highest point of the bluff, overlooks the ocean. The basalt there seems to be bare. But what seizes and stupefies all gazes is the prodigious thing that stands upon it.

  Ineptly and primitively constructed, a coral cross extends its arms over a small elongated swelling.

  “A grave! A European grave!”

  The men take off their hats. Madame de Vesnage puts her fingers to her forehead and her breast. The children watch her. With a careful awkwardness, they imitate her gesture, crouching down on their heels, swaying back and forth, and intoning a guttural chant:

  Tick, tock,

  Clock, shock,

  Blood will arrive!

  Kroum is alive!

  Rahuo is the crab and the great Name

  Atua sleeps in the blue sky

  The crab is born of the sea’s sigh

  From blue waves the Ancestor came

  And here are those who had to come

  To the summons of Rahuo’s drum.

  Tick, tock,

  Clock, shock

  Blood has arrived,

  Kroum is alive!

  Three times the two brown children get up, and then prostrate themselves, placing their foreheads on the coral slab.

  The newcomers draw nearer to the cross, examining it anxiously. And all of a sudden, simultaneously, Hugues and Laurette bend down, uttering an exclamation: “The sign!”

  In spite of the corrosion of time, there can be no mistake. Here, a careful artist has inscribed the same emblem that is engraved on the children’s breasts, which Hugues bears on his wrist and which is suspended from Laurette’s: a great crab, of the blue crab species of Polynesia, is minutely carved into the calcareous substance.

  “What does it…?” stammers the young woman—but the words expire on her lips. Above the totem, other imprints are hollowed out, also recognizable, and perhaps even more unexpected. They are two letters of the European alphabet. There is an L and a V.

  “Hugues,” says Laurette, going pale. “An L... A V...”

  What mad thought goes through their minds? The crab... An L... A V...

  As pale as his cousin, the officer, the officer passes his hand over his forehead.

  “Laurette, I beg you, don’t get overexcited...”

  The young woman’s eyes are searching avidly. She utters a cry, and kneels down. At the foot of the cross, fragments of coral and rock are heaped up. Something is shining in the interstices.

  In a matter of seconds, a wooden box encircled by iron is disengaged. It is an object of European manufacture, very old. Half-effaced ornaments are in the style of the eighteenth century. On the lid there is a metal plate, which reproduces the two letters L and V. From one of the carved metal projections, a key is suspended. It no longer turns in the rusted keyhole, but pressure suffices to make the old lock yield. The lid is raised.

  The interior is lined with leather. No damp has penetrated. Laurette’s tremulous fingers feel an antique fabric of silk brocade, and unfold it. It is a uniform, with a small épée. The cross of Saint Louis is attacked to the jacket. The young woman’s teeth chatter. There must be something more...

  Rara and Mémé are still swaying back and forth, continuing to sing:

  The crab is born of the sea’s frame

  From blue waves the Ancestor came

  And here are those who had to come

  To the summons of Rahuo’s drum.

  There is something more. There is a large portfolio, in crimson morocco leather, marked with the same initials—but this time, beneath them, a coat of arms has been imprinted in the leather: arms that Hugues and Laurette recognize at first glance. They are inscribed on the bezel of the ring that the officer is wearing on his little finger, and on the antique brooch that the young woman is wearing at her neck. In the distant family dwelling in the Basque country, they subsist on parchments that lie dormant in the bottom of drawers, on pieces of silverware, on fragments of faience plates and chipped glassware.

  By virtue of what fantastic combination of circumstances do they mark the grave and remains of a dead man?

  Who, then, is the dead man?

  Who?

  Crazy as the coincidence is, Hugues and Laurette have put a name to him, even before the trembling young woman has succeeded in unfolding the yellowed sheets of paper that she had just taken out of their envelope. Large 18th-century handwriting covers them—the same handwriting that sprawls over so many notebooks piled out back there, in the antiquated cupboards that smell of lavender, with collections of drawings, maps, a few desiccated animal-skins, and seashells.

  “The Uncle...”

  Hugues and Laurette sit down side by side. Piously, they open and read the testament of Luc de Vesnage, captain of the king’s armies, Chevalier de Saint Louis, companion of Monsieur de La Pérouse, presumed to have died with him, but whose remains and last will are here:

  Oaleya, in the Pacific Ocean

  At the antipodes of so-called civilized Europe

  There is little chance that this document will fall into the hands of any human being capable of deciphering it. That is, in any case, the most sincere of my wishes. If I am writing it, therefore, it is more for the satisfaction of my mind than any other purpose. I wish with all my might that vivifying putrefaction, in which even the rocks that will cover them will end up, will simultaneously dilute and absorb all the other traces of my existence.

  It pleases me, however, before returning to dissolve in the great All, to make use of the means that civilization once conferred upon me to record a few reflections and consign the testimony of my gratitude to this privileged region of the globe, where, for more than thirty-three years—my whim has kept a meticulous calendar of the seasons and the days—I have enjoyed a felicity of which I had never previously glimpsed any image on the earth.

  It was on the fourteenth of January 1782 that the frigate Astrolabe, bearing the flag of Monsieur de La Pérouse, was constrained by some slight damage to drop anchor off the coast of this island, which the indigenes call Oaleya. I had succeed
ed in joining the expedition in order to complete the research in natural history that has been the great curiosity of my life, and also to see at close range the primitive populations of which Messieurs Cook and Bougainville have reported so many admirable things. The extreme disgust that a half-century of experience had led me to conceive for the mass of ignominies that we designate by the name of civilization caused me to attach an exceptional price to the second category of studies.

  It required some time for me to convince myself that hazard had served me better than could reasonably have hoped. And if I were not an atheist, I would recognize the hand of God in the extraordinary combination of circumstances that has led me to the only place in the world where the dream that has haunted me for so many years has been realized.

  Having consigned contemporary Europe to execration, quarreled with all the members of my family, abjured all the prejudices of my class, my spirit only found some appeasement in the sublime discourses in which Monsieur Rousseau, Monsieur Raynal20 and Monsieur de Migurac,21 the gentleman philosopher, and a few other men of genius have demonstrated to us that, low as humankind has fallen, it was not fatally avowed to evil, and that only lamentable errors had precipitated it into Gehenna.

  I nourished the obstinate hope that perhaps, somewhere, preferably at the antipodes, innocent populations, protected from our corruption by distance and by circumstances, were still living in the primitive purity of humanity. An inextinguishable thirst burned in me to join their school.

  A few days sufficed to convince me that the naïve simplicity of the Oyas considerably surpassed what my most ambitious dreams had imagined. My project was, therefore, quickly conceived. Having secretly conveyed to land a small number of objects to which my memory was attached or which I feared that my weakness as a civilized man might render it uncomfortable for me to do without, I waited with an impatience that I concealed until the eve of the departure.