Michael Bishop: Ancient of Days

We spent all day exploring them. I took so many pictures that my forefinger began to throb. Hector led us through the main rotunda and the most accessible galleries, but Adam, more nimble, took me places that I hadn’t already visited: chatières , rock chimneys, lofty crawlways. I saw ritual statuary, painted symbols, and weird faces cut out of the dead ends of labyrinthine tunnels. On at least six occasions, through different corridors of stone, we emerged to rest our eyes and clear our minds. Then we plunged back into darkness, to wriggle our way to deeper grottoes and worse bouts of vertigo. It was a daylong dream, this activity: a nightmare at tropical noon.

By the time Brian Nollinger and the two women returned, I was long since exhausted. Stars had begun to wink through the twilight sky over Prix-des-Yeux, and all I wanted to do was sleep. Adam wouldn’t let me. So I was standing bruised and bone-weary beside the houngfor when the marketing party came into camp with their duffles and baskets and trussed chickens, laughing ruefully through their own weariness, happy to have completed their journey.

Toussaint and Dégrasse fed the marketgoers, and Adam urged them to finish eating so that—in his self-appointed role as Lord Saturday—he could initiate the service that would allow Caroline and me to experience the full mystery and power of the vaudun gods. Only then, after all, would we be able to go back to Atlanta with a real appreciation of the spiritual forces that had sustained Les Gens in their Caribbean exile.

It was totally dark when Caroline, Brian, and I entered the sacred peristyle of the habilines. In his top hat and tails, Adam led us in. RuthClaire awaited us in the palm-thatched tonnelle with Erzulie, Toussaint, Dégrasse, and Alberoi. Even Hector was there, sitting cross-legged in a corner next to a series of stylized cornmeal designs that Alberoi had laid during the day. The three younger habilines occupied the low platform on which the vaudun drums rested, while RuthClaire and Erzulie walked about sprinkling water on the ground from flip-top metal pitchers like the creamers you might see in a roadside cafe in Alabama or Georgia: an odd, improvisatory touch.

Only Brian, Caroline, and I would be “couched” tonight, “put down on the floor” as potential communicants with the Yagaza gods. This service was expressly for us. We wore white baptismal gowns similar to the cambric robes in which the habilines had first introduced themselves. RuthClaire and Caroline had bought our garments in Rutherford’s Port, and they were spotless when we donned them, as immaculate as new wedding gowns. Candles in globelike pots burned at various places about the temple, reminding me again of the tacky accoutrements at a cheap stateside restaurant. Brian kept saying he wished just to observe, not to participate, but Adam forcibly rejoined that no one who came to Prix-des-Yeux could do so as an observer, that participation in its life and rituals was a requisite for staying.

Erzulie lit two tall red tapers in cast-iron holders at either end of the drum platform. Then she centered herself in front of the platform and nodded at Adam. Behind her, Toussaint began to tap out a light beat on the tallest of the drums; he was seated on a rickety stool that permitted him to lean forward over their taut skins. Alberoi picked up this beat on the set known as mama , largest of the ceremonial drums, and Dégrasse began to counterpoint these rhythms on the drums called boula , smallest of the three kinds. Although their beat was hypnotic, the drummers played with a curious delicacy, as if fearful of waking the birds. The faintness of the rhythms, even in the houngfor , mocked their purpose, that is, to induce a trance in us communicants. And then I realized that, to keep from revealing their presence and whereabouts to any hostiles on the mountain, the habilines must always conduct their vaudun service so.

“Lie down by the poteau mitan ,” Adam said, “like so many nesting spoons.”

Spoons don’t nest, I thought. Spoonbills maybe, but not spoons.

Nollinger and my wife were not so literal in their thinking. They knelt by the center post, then assumed clumsy fetal curls facing it. Nollinger was first, with Caroline cupping her body into his and touching her chin to his shoulder blade. I lay down behind her in the same posture, grateful that Brian hadn’t tried to come between us in this matter. I pressed my groin into Caroline’s buttocks. Our robes were no longer immaculate, our first contact with the ground having soiled them.

Hector and the habiline drummers began to chant—faintly, in a guttural singsong that counterpointed or mimicked the rhythms of the Arada-Dahomey drums. The sound reminded me of Adam’s singing before he’d learned to speak, but rougher and more ritualized. Caroline shuddered. I shuddered with her. My place on the floor kept me from seeing much, but the tonnelle ceiling and the upper portions of the wall were visible to me, and down one of the peristyle posts came gliding the couleuvre that had linked Adam and Erzulie on our first evening in camp. I wanted to stand. A paralysis of fear or fatigue had gripped me, though, and I could merely watch. The guttural chanting of the habiline choir veered into spooky falsetto registers.

Like a spry gnome, Erzulie danced, her bare feet slapping the floor near the center post. The python kept flowing down its own post behind the drum platform, its bronze and garnet body shimmering in the candlelight. A chicken began to cluck: two chickens. Erzulie’s hand came into my view, swinging a chicken by its bound legs. Adam, who appeared above us near the poteau mitan , took this flapping fowl from her and bit off its head. He spat the head out, along with a mouthful of feathers, and gouts leapt from the decapitated bird’s neck, fountaining in a gaudy, queasy-making rain. Our white cambric gowns were spattered, and the stench of hot blood filled our nostrils, as did the fainter scent of flowing serpent.

“O great loa ,” Adam chanted, “your horses await your mounting. They invite you to ride.” He dropped the headless chicken, which beat the ground with impotent, reflexive wing flaps. “O loa , come!”

The second chicken, which Erzulie thrust aloft, cackled hysterically. It, too, smelt blood, sensing that a like fate lay in store for it. And Erzulie beheaded it as quickly and surely as Adam had executed the other. Blood parachuted away from her like streamers from a crimson Roman candle. I shut my eyes and covered my mouth and nose with my palm. Caroline leaned against me as tense as a vibrating metal pole. When I pushed my groin against her again—to reassure us both—my cock was now a shriveled nub. What, exactly, was mystical about this ceremony? So far, it was an abomination and a horror, and I wanted out.

Drumbeats, chanting, dancing.

Opening my eyes and peering down the length of Caroline’s body, I saw that the couleuvre had reached the ground. Only an arm’s length from Caroline’s feet, it lay loosely coiled at the base of the wall. Having unhinged its lower jaw, it was methodically swallowing—with terrible, wavelike gulps—a headless chicken that, a moment past, had lain next to the center post. That damn serpent, I thought, is gagging down its dinner feathers and all. I shut my eyes again.

Drumbeats, chanting, dancing. Adam danced barefoot with the barefoot Erzulie. The drummers on the platform—or, at least, Dégrasse and Alberoi—undulated behind their instruments like revelers in a stalled conga line. Even Hector had got to his feet. He bounced up and down behind us, stutter-stepping between the vevés that Alberoi had designed. I could feel him moving, just as I did everyone. The drumbeats, the chanting, and the dancing pulsed in my temples like angry blood. Brian groaned, and Caroline’s head popped back so quickly that she split my bottom lip.