Wade Davis - The Serpent and the Rainbow

And then, those who go through a near-death experience and survive share one thing in common: they all retain a distinct awareness that at one point their immaterial aspect returned to its physical body. It was at this moment, many remember, that they regained consciousness. In hospital patients, this often occurs instantaneously, coinciding with a particular resuscitative procedure. A cardiac patient responded to electric shock: “She [the nurse] picked up them shocker things … I seen my body flop like that … it seemed like I was up here and it grabbed me and my body, and forced it back, pushed it back.” Another experience ended with the sudden arrival of a loved one. The patient explained, “I was up at the ceiling…. Then when someone in the family came to the door and called … I was instantaneously back in my body.”

This, of course, is what Clairvius Narcisse remembers happening. One moment he was floating above his tomb, and then he heard someone call out. But for Narcisse, the voice did not come from a loved one, and when he returned to his body it was not in a hospital bed, it was in a coffin. And for him, the ordeal was only about to begin.

“EVEN AS YOU SEE ME, I passed beneath the earth,” Marcel confided as we shared another drink in his small bedroom at the Eagle Bar. “It was the same powder that I gave you. It can cause one hundred and one ailments. Mine was a disease of heat. I sweated even in the ocean. It cooked my blood until my veins ran dry, and then it stole the breath from my lungs.” He was describing for me his own exposure to the poison.

There was some kind of disturbance in one of the rooms, and Marcel got up from the bed and slipped back into the bar. His place looked good. There was a new sign out front and a fresh coat of paint on most of the rooms. Rachel reached forward to fill my glass.

“Some party,” I said. The rum warmed my tongue and the back of my throat. Both of us were still damp with sweat. Marcel had been happy that we had come to see him as soon as I returned to Haiti, and when he’d found out that the powder had worked his excitement had spilled over into a celebration. One of his women had unlocked the Wurlitzer, and the place had become pretty wild. Marcel and Rachel had danced a mad salsa while I’d been swung around by the women and some of the men, and with the pounding jukebox and the sweltering summer heat, sweat had soon greased the concrete floor. Now things had settled down, but there was still a licentious air to the place, stronger than usual.

“Is it strange to be back?” Rachel asked me.

“I don’t think so.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s difficult to say. Sometimes when you travel a lot, the landscapes pile up so fast that you lose all sense of place.”

“And faces?”

“Yes.”

Rachel started fooling with the heel of one of the cheap shoes she always wore. “You know they say Marcel paid fifteen thousand dollars to get cured,” she said.

“Where’d he get that kind of money?”

“There used to be money. He worked the docks. Some kind of racket with the tourist boats. Marcel was a big Ton Ton and he had some position in the port.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Then he went too far. Too many beatings, too many in jail.”

“Where’d you pick up all this?”

“My uncle, mostly. He was the prefect.”

“I see.”

“Nobody thought that he’d live. They passed the powder, and for three days they thought he was dead. There was even a wake. His face was all bloated, and his belly swelled up, and my uncle said that if you pricked his skin, you didn’t find blood, you got water.”

Marcel returned bearing a noxious-looking bottle containing a thick, viscid liquid. “You see,” he said, “it still lives. This was my blood. When they sent the powder all the animals came into me and laid eggs. A cockroach came from my nose, and I passed two lizards from behind.”

“There was nothing you could do?”

“No. If your force is strong you can resist a coup l’aire, but the powder is different. If you’re wrong it gets you, if you’re right it gets you.”

“But how can they direct it at you alone?”

“The bones. It’s only the soul from the graveyard that has that power. That’s why the bones are so dangerous.”

“But you survived.”

“I passed through the hands of thirteen houngan. They drained all the bad blood from my foot. I am still not well. Look at my face. I live only because of the strength of the spirit that calls for me.”

Marcel recounted how there had been many treatments, but only the last had saved him. It had been administered by a mambo, a priestess in the Artibonite. On the critical night she bound his jaw, placed cotton in the nostrils, and dressed him in the clothing of the dead. His feet were tied, as were his hands, and he was laid in a narrow trough dug into the ground of the hounfour. A white sheet covered his entire body. A pierre tonnerre and the skulls of a human and a dog were placed on top of the sheet, the sucker of a banana plant beside him. Seven candles cradled in orange peels surrounded the “grave,” and calabashes rested by his head, on his abdomen, and at his feet. These three offerings, Marcel suggested, represented the sacred concepts of the crossroad, the cemetery, and Grans Bwa, the spirit of the forest. The mambo straddled the grave, and in a high-pitched wail she invoked Guede, the spirit of the dead. She took a living chicken and passed it slowly over his body, then broke each of the bird’s limbs to extract the death spirit from the corresponding limbs of the patient. Next she took the head of the chicken in her mouth and bit it off that she might touch Marcel with its blood. Marcel then felt the contents of the calabashes massaged into his skin, water splashed on his face, and hot oil and wax from the lamps applied to his chest. He heard the crack of the breaking water jar, and felt the pieces of hardened clay fall into the grave. Finally, still lying immobile in the ground, he counted seven handfuls of earth taken from the crossroads, the cemetery, and the forest landing on his shroud. The mambo’s sharp cry ordered him from the ground, and as the others hurriedly pushed in the loose dirt, two men tore Marcel from the grave. He was anointed again in blood, and spent the night in the sanctity of the temple.

“The blood bought back my life,” Marcel concluded. “The banana never grew.”

“But who did this to you?” I asked.

“I had enemies. One always does when one advances.”

“The secret society?”

“No.” He glanced toward Rachel. “The people.”

“But you were judged.”

“Yes. No. In principle, yes.”

“What does that mean?”

“The plate needs the spoon and the spoon needs the plate. It is the houngan’s secret.”

I enjoyed seeing Marcel again, and his own story had been an unexpected revelation, but I didn’t plan on doing any more business with him, at least not right away. There were several things on my mind when I returned that July, following my two months back in the States. My sponsors wanted more collections of the poison. Kline, in particular, was worried that Marcel Pierre, prodded by my brash tactics, might simply have rounded up the half-dozen most toxic ingredients at hand and improvised a preparation. I didn’t share his doubts, for not only did I trust Marcel and find our evidence convincing, I also noted that the principal ingredients in his powder were the same as those in the “trap” that had brought down Clairvius Narcisse, according to his cousin. Besides, the pharmacological point had been reasonably established in lab tests.