Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

RuthClaire said, “Papa Doc, the first Duvalier, sometimes wore top hat, horn rims, and tails. ‘I am the revolution and the flag,’ he said. He also liked to present himself as a champion of the people’s folk religion, vaudun , which they continue to practice hand in glove with Roman Catholicism. Duvalier exploited this unorthodox dualism. In the Port-au-Prince newspapers, he declared himself Christ’s chosen leader, and he made a habit of appearing on his reviewing stand as Baron Samedi. He wanted his identification with Haiti to be total. He wanted the respect, love, and fear of every Haitian, intellectuals and peasants alike.”

“Certainly their fear,” said Adam.

“So now you’re dressed as Baron Samedi,” I said. “You’re emulating Papa Doc, who almost everyone agrees was a paranoid megalomaniac. Pardon me if I see that as a nasty little imposture.”

Adam turned to look at me. “Baron Samedi—Lord Saturday—was here long before Duvalier. So were we habilines, les nains noirs of the original Rutherford estate. I am not copying the paranoid Papa Doc. I am honoring a Haitian religious tradition.”

“Wouldn’t superstition be a better word?”

“ Pa conay ,” Adam said, Creole for “I don’t know.” “Do you call something a superstition if it works?”

That shut me up. If throwing spilled salt over your left shoulder neutralizes the bad luck supposedly assured by having spilled it, do you call that act superstitious? At the moment, I had no idea. I looked down at the habiline woman Erzulie. Maybe she knew. She looked up at me from under the band of her head scarf and the ridge of her brow. A coquettish glimmer pirouetted in her eyes, reflecting the sea on our right. Then her tiny Tupperware container bumped me in the chest, and she offered me a pinch of rapadou . The lumpy brown stuff repulsed me. I turned my head.

The road climbed, as it sliced tentatively inland. Caroline and RuthClaire talked, but Adam, Erzulie, and I sat like hostages with gags in our mouths. After another twenty minutes, RuthClaire swung the Jeep into a foliage-capped side road that was mostly gravel and eroded channels. It ended about a hundred twisty yards from the main road. “Here we are.” She jammed the Jeep into park, and we all got out, pilgrims on a hidden path to mystery. No one on the main road would ever see us. Indeed, I was trying to figure out how RuthClaire had spotted the turnoff. Creepers netted the rocky ground, and eerily hairy lianas dangled from the trees—a stand of mahogany, I thought—in profligate loops and slings. The coffee plantations of Austin-Antilles lay far behind us to the south, far enough behind us to suggest our isolation and remoteness. A feeling of claustrophobic uncertainty sped my pulse and opened my sweat glands.

Erzulie, barefoot, plunged into the wall of foliage without any further ado, but Adam called her back. We had to unload and fasten on our backpacks, which contained canned goods, cooking utensils, water bottles, bedding, fresh clothes, and all our recording and photographic equipment. RuthClaire had even brought some art supplies for the habilines. I could hardly blame her—they rarely received Federal Express or United Parcel Service deliveries. Everyone wore a backpack but Erzulie. Adam—his carry-frame in place, his top hat at a jaunty angle, his walking stick a foot taller than he—reminded me less of a voodoo spirit than of a Victorian chimney sweep. Into what sooty recesses of Montaraz did he intend to lead us?

Actually, Erzulie did the leading. By sore-footed necessity, I brought up the rear. As a result, I could never even see the chemise-clad habiline. She was always thirty or forty yards ahead. To prevent me from being outdistanced and abandoned, Caroline had to lag well behind RuthClaire and Adam, occasionally signaling for rest stops. I had thought myself in better shape. Discovering the truth about my physical condition was a new source of resentment and chagrin.

I began to think that Caroline and the others had set out to humiliate me, not only on this fatiguing hike but earlier that morning at the beach cottage. How many jokes had they told about me? How many laughs had they milked from silly speculation about my response to Erzulie’s presence on the porch? Was it possible that the three of them—Adam, RuthClaire and Caroline—constituted a clandestine ménage à trois ?

“Paul, you’re as red as a beet,” Caroline said. “Stop right there.” She poured some water onto her neckerchief and wiped my forehead and temples. For a moment, I let her. I was too tired to resist. RuthClaire and Adam came back on the unmarked trail to see what was happening. Their faces had outline but no definition. Their features were amorphous blurs against a revolving backdrop of emerald and turquoise. One of them asked me if I wanted to lie down with my head propped against a sleeping bag.

“No. You’ll dump crickets on me—crickets, red wigglers, a tub full of dirt.”

“He’s out of it,” RuthClaire said. “He needs to lie down.”

I grabbed the wet neckerchief out of Caroline’s hand and flung it at a nearby tree. “Bitch! Two-timing bitch!”

“She’s trying to cool you off,” RuthClaire told me. “You’ve gotten overheated. It’s not your fault. We didn’t give you time to get used to it. It’s too much too soon.”

“I’m Adam and you’re Eve,” I said. “Who are these other people? I’ve never seen them before.”

“Lie down, Paul. You’re delirious.”

“I’m delightful. I’m delicious. I’m delovely.”

Caroline, whose name I couldn’t then recall, turned away, and a dwarf in a blue dress and a white scarf limped out of the higher woods to peer into my nostrils from below. A cockatoo screamed, or a blood vessel in my temple hissed. I waved the dwarf in the chemise out of the way and sat down next to the tree. I was breathing hard, and I was angry. My new wife had disappeared. My old wife was kneeling in front of me. Beside her crouched a chimney sweep trying to unbutton my collar. (Did my chimney need cleaning?) His fingers poked me in the throat. I knocked his hand aside. As soon as I did that, though, a lid of some kind slid over the sky, blotting out sound and color alike. During this extended eclipse, my temples went in and out, as if my brain were struggling to breathe in a suffocating darkness.

Then a familiar female voice said, “The bastard’s still in love with you.”

Although the voice was familiar, I didn’t recognize it. I may not have even heard it. I may have simply imagined it….

I awoke sitting in the same spot. The light dappling the forest floor betrayed the fact that my delirium had lasted two or three hours. Noon had come and gone. Erzulie hunkered at my side with a thermos cap of orange juice. Seeing her, and no one else, panicked me. My wife, my ex-wife, and my ex’s husband had absconded, leaving me alone in an obscure upland glade with a wizened hominid woman whose name, Erzulie, was also that of a major voodoo goddess of the Haitian religion. Erzulie Freda, an imaginative yoking of the eternal female and the Virgin Mary. Why was this queer little person staring at me as if I had upset the balance between divinity and the material world?

“ Bwah ,” she said. “ Bwah! ”

That was pidgin French, wasn’t it? Bois . Didn’t that mean “wood”? Well, of course, there was a wood all around us, trees and shrubbery and vines. What could be more obvious? But when Erzulie said, “ Bwah! ” again, touching the thermos cap to my bottom lip, she was commanding me to drink. I slurped the orange juice greedily, grateful for its cold sweetness and for a brief reprieve from my panic. Then the panic came back.