Ancient of Days (38 page)

ADAM:
Only a little.

RUTHCLAIRE
(
her one and only interjection
): Thank God.

ADAM:
Before my ego crystallized, here on this island, I was an unconscious animist and also a lip-servicing Catholic. The magic all around me overwhelmed the dogmas of the Roman church. Then, in the late seventies, my ego began to take shape—in response, I am sure, to economic and political realities. At last, soon after the murders off the Cuban coast, my ego was precipitated from the terrible pressures of exile and refugee-ism. I became neurotically self-aware.

BLAIR:
Neurotically?

ADAM:
Even as you and everyone else alive in your world. To survive today, as “reality” is presently constituted, one must have a competitive neuroticism. So I surrendered to ego development in order to survive. I became an “I.”

BLAIR:
And your spiritual longings?

ADAM:
Much that my new “I” heard in your world was disparaging of my personhood. I was an animal. I had no soul. On the boat from Mariel Bay to Key West, the passengers were not physically cruel to me; the opposite, rather. They patted my back, laughed at my funnies, and treated me like a friendly performing dog. The “I” that my once-innocent self had become—well, it realized that in their private estimation, I was . . . soulless. I was excommunicated from real human fellowship because of my unhappy lack of this attribute.

BLAIR:
Quite a tortuous chain of reasoning for a brand-new ego, Adam.

ADAM:
Yes, but in my brand-newness I was very stupid. I made the mistake of appropriating these misinformed people’s concept of the soul. I began to think of it as an item separable from the body. Like, perhaps, a pocket watch. I wanted such a pocket watch. A pocket watch, after all, may very well survive the death of its owner. It can exist without that person. It can continue to keep its time in a drawer. But it isn’t coequal with its dead owner, and ultimately it, too, will perish. Nevertheless, I wanted this kind of soul, the sort that nearly everybody else mistakenly believes they possess—if, of course, they are “religious.” Having that kind of soul, I thought, would bring my crystallized ego into fellowship with those of the human beings around me.

BLAIR:
But you learned better?

ADAM:
I learned better than they, sir. If you wish to touch your soul, place your hands on your own body. I had known this as a creature without ego here on Montaraz, but in becoming an aggressive “I” to make my way in civilization, I forgot. The soul is not a pocket watch. It is inseparable from the live body. It does not reside in a pocket. It lives throughout the body’s systems. A dead body does not possess one. It’s dead, in fact, because its soul has been disrupted.

BLAIR:
No immortality, then?

ADAM:
The fatal disruption of the personality would seem to preclude it, Dr. Blair. But only rigidly crystallized egos despair on this account. A self that understands its subtle ties to the systems around it—family, plants, animals, water, air—knows that healthy living matters more than the egotistical lingering of personality after death. God’s grace is on those who know this.

CAROLINE:
Not everyone would find that comforting, Adam.

ADAM:
Well, it is the neuroticism of the developed ego that prevents them. It is the unfortunate psychic investment they’ve made in something called “salvation.” They’ve paid in too much for too long to withdraw from this investment. Or maybe they deeply love others who have paid in too much for too long. It’s a hard thing. I have much sympathy for all such travelers on the path to spirituality.

BLAIR:
Does your spiritual journey recapitulate that of humanity as a whole?

ADAM:
Only in the long view. I have no great hope that the human species will adopt a holistic faith without imposing a lethal rigidity upon it. And maybe, Dr. Blair, the interplay among current faiths, the tensions and slacknesses even yet linking them, is itself a holistic system with certain virtues. I don’t know. A nonneurotic human species would be a species nearly unimaginable. You would have to think up a new taxonomic designation, Dr. Blair.

BLAIR:
Perhaps not. Maybe the one we have now would finally begin to imply something other than self-congratulation. What about your “freshly emergent concept of God”? You deny the immortality of the soul apart from the problematically immortal body, and yet still believe in a transcendent deity?

ADAM:
Yes, I do. Perhaps, though, it is unimportant. I weary of talking. Do you hear how my voice rasps?

BLAIR:
Quickly, then, just a hint of your formulation.

ADAM:
It sounds like a paradox. Perhaps it is. I hold that God possesses both a fundamental timelessness—that he exists outside the operations of time—and also a complete and necessary temporality, permitting him to direct and change within the stream of time. There’s a hint, then, of my theology.

BLAIR:
But isn’t that like saying that a man both has a head and doesn’t have a head? Or that a certain person happens to be both a Haitian citizen and not a Haitian citizen? It’s self-contradictory.

ADAM:
Only because our temporality makes the issue seem baldly either-or. (
Adam’s voice had gotten thicker and thicker. He cleared his throat
.)

No more for now, please. I think I would like to take a swim.

CAROLINE:
We’ll wrap it up with that, then. Thank you, Dr. Blair. Thank you, Adam. It’s been a strange but stimulating journey.

*

This interview was never resumed. Blair wanted to question Adam further. Indeed, he wanted to mount an impromptu expedition to the island’s various peninsulas, to traipse about among the pines and wild avocados in search of Adam’s “secret republic.” But late that afternoon, an advisor arrived from Rutherford’s Port to tell him that the American Geographic Foundation had added to his tour three new lectures and tomorrow he must fly to Miami from Cap-Haïtien. Storming about the bungalow, Blair cursed his advisor and impugned the good name of the director of American Geographic. Finally, though, he subsided, confessing that without this tour much important work at Lake Kiboko would go undone. After collecting his suitcases for the trip to town, he came back into the living room to bid us all goodbye, as downcast and jet-lagged a figure as I could imagine. He was truly disheartened to have to go.

Abruptly, his mood changed. Grinning, he knelt beside one of his leather bags and undid the straps on a bulging side pocket. From this pouch he extracted a magazine. “Adam, would you and RuthClaire autograph this for me? I’m not ordinarily a souvenir collector—fossils are the only souvenirs a man in my line requires—but I’d like to frame this for my office in the National Museum in Marakoi.”

It was the
Newsweek
with the infamous Maria-Katherine Kander photograph of Adam and RuthClaire. Only Blair, of all the people in the room, failed to detect the palpable air of embarrassment that had congealed about us. Even his advisor, a young black man in an expensive western suit, flinched. Adam, although not embarrassed or offended, understood that Blair had discomfited his wife and his guests. He took the magazine and initialed it with a ballpoint pen. Blair beamed. He nodded at RuthClaire to encourage Adam to pass the magazine to her. With some reluctance, Adam did so. She accepted with her head down and a crimson flush on her brow and cheeks.

“Nothing to be ashamed of,” said Blair, buoyant again. “You’ve got quite a respectable little body there.”

“Thank you,” RuthClaire said. (Blair was a father figure, and you never upbraided Daddy for bad manners or an absence of tact. That would be unmannerly, that would be tactless.) But when she signed her portrait, she wrote her name in an angry vertical loop that partly effaced her two-dimensional nakedness. Then she shoved the magazine back into Blair’s chest. It trembled there at the end of her outstretched arm.

A cloudlet of confusion passed over Blair’s face. He took the magazine, regarded it as if it had been vandalized (maybe it had), and, kneeling again, slid it regretfully into the side pouch of his carry-on bag. No one spoke. When he stood again, his expression was abashed and apologetic.

“Body shame’s one of the saddest consequences of western civilization,” he said. “Of course, the commercial exploitation of nudity is a reprehensible thing, too. It’s a prurient outgrowth of that same unhealthy body shame.”

I was sure that this was an astute analysis of something, but a something sadly peripheral to our joint embarrassment.

“Sir,” said the young Zarakali to Blair, “it’s time to go.”

The Great Man agreed. He shook hands with Adam and me, embraced Caroline, and, when she failed to respond to his attempt to hug her, too, kissed RuthClaire on the forehead. Then all of us but RuthClaire trailed Blair and his aide outside and waved them goodbye. Their enclosed four-wheel-drive vehicle spun through the sand, at last obtaining purchase on the road to Rutherford’s Port. Inside again, we found RuthClaire standing in the middle of the living room with her hands limp at her sides and tears flowing down her face. Adam took her in his arms and held her.

Over Adam’s head, RuthClaire said, “Paulie’s dead because of that damn photo, and I thanked that stupid old coot for telling me I’ve got ‘quite a respectable little body.’ I thanked the son of a bitch!”

That evening, near twilight, Adam and I took a walk along the secluded beach below the cottage. Caroline and I had argued because although I had wanted to walk with her, she had insisted on starting the transcription and editing of the tapes. Her holiday would only begin, she declared, when she had accomplished this work. She could not relax with it hanging over her head, and I was selfish to pressure her to go for a skinnydip while the task remained undone. Damn Calvinist, I had thought—for, Blair’s little lecture about western “body shame” notwithstanding, I wanted nothing quite so much as to hold my unclad flesh against Caroline’s in the gently lapping waters of Caicos Bay.

Instead, my companion was Adam Montaraz, now naked. I shuffled along beside him in sandals, loose ebony swim trunks, and a short-sleeved terrycloth jacket. Shells crunched beneath our feet, and stars began to glimmer overhead.

“You told Blair you’re the last of your kind, but RuthClaire’s letter said there were habiline artists here. That’s why I came—to look at their work, maybe even to represent it in Atlanta. What the hell’s going on, Adam?”

“I lied to Dr. Blair.”

“Why?”

“To protect the remnant that survives: five persons, Mister Paul—only five.”

“But if I go back to Atlanta touting their work as the glory of an innate habiline aesthetic impulse, this place’ll be overrun again. You’ll have blown their cover for good. The art will prove they’re here, and bingo! another influx of bounty hunters.”

Adam halted. “Not if you represent their paintings as the work of dead Haitian artists, each item you put up for bid as a discovery from their estates. You needn’t even identify the artists as habilines. Haitian art has many aficionados in los Estados Unidos. Sell it as Haitian art—nothing more, nothing less.”

“It would sell for a lot more if I could reveal the identity of the artists—if, in fact, I could document their identities.”

“But I am not interested in ‘mopping up.’ ”

“What are you interested in?”

“Secure futures for these last five people. After them, no more. After me, no more. RuthClaire and I want enough money to look after them here on Montaraz, enough to see to their remaining needs.”

“Your own work sells. Let me represent that, Adam. We’d all make money, and you wouldn’t even have to mention your last five habiline relations.”

Adam explained that although their recent travels had stimulated a lot of creative activity, it had also denied them enough time to finish many of these new works. Further, RuthClaire’s latest paintings—the series entitled
Souls
that she’d completed in Atlanta—had not yet found an audience. Gallery directors declined to show them. If RuthClaire rented space in malls or department stores to counteract the gallery boycott, the public ignored them. Newspaper critics lambasted them as dull, flat, colorless, repetitive, picayune in concept, and uninspired, particularly in light of their grandiose overall title. Even more dismaying, one critic who hated what he called “decadent decal work for the AmeriCred porcelain-plate scam” had cited the acrylic paintings
Souls
as evidence of the “steep falling off” of RuthClaire’s talent since
Footsteps on the Path to Man
. Indeed, you could argue that these unpopular and much-belittled paintings had ruined RuthClaire’s marketability. Adam’s work continued to sell, but his artist wife had run headlong into an immovable brick wall. That was one of the reasons they’d summoned Caroline and me to Montaraz.

“They’re good,” I said. “It’s just that nobody sees.”

“For a time, you didn’t see. And maybe they aren’t good, Mister Paul. Maybe it’s only an accident of light that redeems them from mediocrity.”

“To be truthful, my appreciation of them came and went—just like the light. It’s easy to understand why she’s having trouble selling them.”

“Okay. But that’s why we require money.” He began walking again, his hands clasped in the small of his furry back.

I took two long strides to catch up with him. “When do I meet these habiline artists, Adam? When do I see their work?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Where?”

In the early starlight, he grinned at me. “On the middle finger, Mister Paul. On the bird we shoot at Miami.” He turned, trotted toward the water, and threw himself out into the surf with a splash whose falling canopy of droplets iridesced like the bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war.