Ancient of Days (42 page)

After breakfast, Brian declared it was time for the habilines to hold free elections.

“For what?” RuthClaire asked. “Five people don’t need a president.”

“To see what they want to be called!” Nollinger replied. “As Alistair Patrick Blair himself pointed out, even the scientific community will be bound by their decision. Let’s round them up so we can propose alternatives to
Homo habilis
and
Homo zarakalensis
and have them vote.”

“Adam,” RuthClaire said, “this is preposterous.”

But Adam had entered into the spirit of Brian’s early-morning madness. “I like it because it
is
preposterous. And because Dr. Nollinger recognizes the egotistical absurdity of his eminent colleague’s campaign for
Homo zarakalensis
.”

“Does it have to be a Latin term?” I asked.

“The habilines are the sole arbiters,” Brian said. “It can be anything they want.”

The habilines were sitting on the rosewood log beside the village
houngfor
. When Hector came into the clearing a moment later, Adam escorted him to a place on the log beside Erzulie. Every member of the Rutherford Remnant was on hand, and Brian, speaking alternately in English and French, explained the significance of this morning’s election.

“Adam, stop him,” RuthClaire said. “You’re betraying your own kind.”

“Only if you suppose Erzulie and the others incapable of deciding what they wish to be called. I give them more credit.”

“So do I,” said Brian. He looked at me. “Any suggestions, Mr. Loyd?”

“Well, they’re about the size of a singing group. How about the Ink Spots?”

Brian translated this for the habilines.
“Les Taches de l’encre?”

“Lord!” RuthClaire shook her fists at shoulder level and stormed off into a hut to escape an outbreak of silliness that she regarded as low and pernicious.

“That really dates you,” Caroline told me. “Criminy, the Ink Spots!”

“How about the Jackson Five? Is that any better?”

“Singing-group names,” Adam said, deadpan, “are disqualifyingly frivolous.”

“Then how about the Dodgers?” I said. “The Rutherford’s Port Dodgers?”

“The Society for Self-Perpetuating Anachronism?” Caroline said.

“
Homo nollingeri?
” Brian said.

“The Survivors?”

“Friends of the Earth?”

“Adam Montaraz and the Voodoo Vagabonds?”

“Old and Young Republicans?”

“Stop,” Adam said. “I have a final proposal,
Les Gens
. I now demand the choices be put and the vote recorded.”

Les Gens
—the People—won hands down. (Well, hands up.) And no one charged ballot stuffing or any other election fraud.

“It’s not that original,” Brian said after the count. “But it does have the force of tradition behind it.”

“Exactly,” Adam said. “Now RuthClaire can write Dr. Blair and tell him of my people’s decision.” He went into Erzulie’s hut to tell her. A moment later, the sounds of RuthClaire and Adam’s argument drifted out to all eight of us in the clearing.

I was frightened. Exploring caves, even in the company of a knowledgeable guide, strikes me as the physical equivalent of exploring the teeming darkness of the id. You have no idea what you will find. And there is no guarantee that once you confront this darkness, you will find the strength to overcome it and reemerge a saner person than you first went in. There is no guarantee that you will reemerge at all.

“Come on, Paul,” Caroline said. “The People do it all the time. Hector, who’s blind, has been doing it for years.”

“It might help to be blind.”

Still dressed as Baron Samedi, Adam led us away from the
houngfor
, from the village itself. We climbed through a dense course of bushes and scrub pines to a strip of open terrace. This terrace was only thirty or forty feet wide and ended in an upslope barricade of sablier trees. This tree takes its name from that of a tusked hog found on Haiti—for the tree, too, has tusks, an array of evil spines on its trunk and lower branches. RuthClaire explained that you seldom find the sablier so plentiful and closely spaced at the higher elevations, but that this stand was the result of deliberate plantings undertaken by the habilines to hide the cave mouths farther up the mountain. Until such hedges were outlawed as threats to the public safety, in fact, property-owning Haitians had often used sablier trees to fence their homes and gardens. Innocent passers-by, as well as would-be thieves, had sometimes suffered puncture wounds, lacerations, lost eyes, and even death upon unexpectedly running into a phalanx of sablier spines.

“Doesn’t a barricade like that call attention to itself?” Caroline asked, gesturing at the prickly wall.

“Only from the air,” RuthClaire said. “And the only people on Montaraz with helicopters or light aircraft are Austin-Antilles hires. They don’t overfly Pointe d’Inagua very often because they’ve already got most of the good coffee-growing land tied up, anyway. It’s a little weird, a sablier hedge this high, but it’s not so strange as to invite inspection trips. It just keeps tourists and local curiosity-seekers at bay.”

Hector was with us. He stared unseeingly at the wall, a look of fond contentment on his runneled face. He walked unassisted, without even a stick to help him feel his way, and his sure-footed strides amazed me. How, though, would he negotiate this murderous barricade? How, for that matter, would we?

Adam read my mind. “For Hector and the others, going into the sabliers is like Br’er Rabbit being thrown into the briar patch. Come.” He and the old man set off across the terrace, climbing boldly toward the trees. Brian, RuthClaire, Caroline, and I followed, glancing about as if Tontons Macoutes might show at any moment to gun us down.

Hector led us through the barricade. His uncanny second sight allowed him to duck into an opening of spiny boughs that funneled us into another corridor requiring a sideways twist to enter. Each time Hector sensed, or remembered, the next array of spikes ready to stab him, his head bobbed to avoid it. And so we tiptoed behind him, bobbing and feinting as the person in front of us did, trusting that each feint replicated one already performed by Hector. I felt like an upright slug trying to defer my vivisection in a forest of jumbled razor blades.

At last we got through. The pine- and hardwood-studded mountain still loomed over us, but to its right gleamed a wedge of glittering blue from Inagua Bay, a peaceful triangular sail on the water, and the red-tile roof of a solitary villa next to the sea. The clarity of these images—after our claustrophobic hike from the coastal road to Prix-des-Yeux and from Prix-des-Yeux to this overlook—stunned me.

“Find an entrance to the caves,” Adam challenged us.

We stumbled along a dark-soiled cut between the sabliers and the lichen-coated rock formations above. Hector and Adam stood at the far end of this cut waiting for us to pass their test. I began to weary of it.

Turning, I said, “How long are we supposed to look?”

Adam was alone on the spot where he had been standing. Hector had vanished. Had he fallen through a metaphoric trap door into the maw of the mountain? I scrambled down the cut to Adam to try to solve the mystery.

Beside the habiline grew three or four blasted-looking bushes. They had clumped together so it was hard to tell their number. One stuck out and downward from the wall of the gravel-littered cut. Even though the slope of the mountain and the curve of the gully protected this bush from the wind, its inner branches were languidly waving, like sea anemones in a gentle current. I stuck my arm into the bush.

The air that struck my flesh was cool—refrigerated-feeling. This was undoubtedly Hector’s point of entry into the underworld.

“Here,” I said. “Right here.”

“Go on, then,” Adam encouraged me.

I waded into the tangled bushes, stooped to get my head beneath the bush growing out of the wall, and sat down to keep from scratching my face on its branches. Now my legs dangled invisibly beneath me, my upper body enmeshed in brambles like a fly in the pod of a carnivorous plant. RuthClaire, Caroline, and Brian approached me, their faces visible through the interlocking twigs of my prison.

“Drop,” Adam said. “Drop on down.”

“I’m not sure I want to be first.”

“You won’t be,” RuthClaire said. “Hector’s already down there.”

“Wait!” Caroline knelt and shoved a Nikon into my hands. “Hang on to that, Paul. It’s expensive.”

“I know that. Who the hell do you think bought it?” But I gripped the camera more tightly and edged forward until my rump had nothing under it to support it. Like Alice, I fell—into obsidian blackness. Then my feet hit rock and went out from under me, and I was sitting again, albeit painfully. I’d jarred my coccyx, and I could see nothing at all. A hand touched my forehead and then discreetly withdrew.

“Hector? Hector, is that you?”

A hand grabbed my shirt and got me off my tail to a hunched standing position. It was indeed Hector. He was blind—but, down here, so much less blind than I, or anyone else, that his clairvoyance made him king. I feared that if I stood, I’d bump my head.

“That’s not the way to do it,” RuthClaire called from above. “You’re supposed to slide down.” Her words echoed through the catacombs.

Caroline shouted, “Paul, are you okay?”

“I think I’ve loosened the bolt that holds my ass on, kid. Otherwise, yeah, I’m all right.” It gratified me to note that my ex had scolded me, while Caroline had asked after my health. Maybe at some level of its operation, the world was running smoothly.

Then Brian Nollinger cried, “Hang on, Mr. Loyd, we’re coming!” Adam came first, then RuthClaire, Caroline, and Brian. They slid down a natural ramp two feet over from where I’d been sitting, and this body-worn slide deposited them next to Hector and me without fracturing either their feet or their tailbones.

“I am very sorry you hurt your butt,” Adam said, touching my arm. “On this walk-through, we will avoid the most treacherous galleries, the coves and crawlways that speleologists call horrors: no wriggle rooms, rock bridges, or
chatières
, Mister Paul.”

“
Chatières
?”

“Cat holes,” RuthClaire said. “You can guess what those are.”

“En avant,” Adam said. He shone his battery lamp into the depths of the tunnel. Its beam lit the glassy black walls of the cavern and a high rugged arch beyond which ran a wall gleaming as if basted with coal oil. We walked toward that wall.

In its center, maybe fifty feet away, writhed a statue—its writhing a trick of the light, the oily dampness, and the sinuous lines of the sculpture itself—of a hominid creature like a habiline. It was carven from a dark, banded rock. Its contorted face had smooth hollows for eyes but an angry mouth and a flat nose with flared wings and nostrils. Its face seemed at once that of both a protohuman and a rabid canine. Its hands were fists, and its arms were raised to embrace or assault whoever approached. It boasted an erection as big and shiny as a Coca-Cola bottle, and testicles as distended and uneven as parallel drippings of candle wax. An agony of love, hunger, and rage emanated from the figure, which RuthClaire said was supposed to represent
Homo habilis primus
: the primeval habiline, the father of its species.

“Who did it?” Caroline asked. “Hector?”

Adam said, “No, not Hector. Even he can’t remember who shaped it, or how our ancestors set it here, but for as long as any of us can recall, it has stood at the base of this wall, at the mouth of this gallery: a memorial and a numen.”

“A numen?” Caroline handed me a flash attachment. I plugged it into the Nikon and took a series of photographs of the statue.

“A presiding spirit,” Brian told Caroline. “The creative energy of the caves and of the habilines.”

“Abraxas, if you like,” RuthClaire said.

I looked at her in the wavering light of Adam’s lamp. “What?”

“Not the art gallery,” she said.

“Then what?”

“In Christian Gnosticism, Abraxas was the god of day and night. The long, bitter day of Adam’s people is nearly over. Down here, it’s already given way to night.”

“We must move,” Adam said. “To stay too long is to tire the eyes so they begin to play tricks. You’ll see statues where none exist, wall paintings where none have been painted. Huge figures at a distance will seem tiny figures in a nearby niche. Tiny statues nearby will seem colossi viewed from across a chamber of humbling bigness. Please, let’s move on.”

We obeyed, and what Adam predicted would happen, happened. The longer we stayed underground the less reliable our perceptions of what he was showing us. Today I have a photographic record of our trip through the Montaraz catacombs, but these photos cannot communicate the impact of beholding such powerful art in its hallucinatory natural setting. Even my panoramas of the largest subterranean vaults cannot evoke the feel—the claustrophobic awe—of standing in those places and drinking in the glory of what the habilines had done. Once sundered from the context of the caves, the art loses meaning as well as immediacy. Like the Upper Paleolithic artists who painted the deep galleries of Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain, Adam’s people had decorated their grottoes, corridors, and rotundas for complicated religio-historical purposes—rites of initiation and socialization—that would fail of fulfillment anywhere else. You had to be there for the art to have context, and the art had to have context for its beholders to internalize the sacredness and force of what they saw. That the caves eventually deceive the eye and disorient the body only adds to their importance in shaping the experience of the initiates. What, then, either “correctly” or “incorrectly,” did we see?

With Adam as guide, and with Brian and RuthClaire as additional torchbearers (they had flashlights), we saw all we could see without crawling, rappelling, or sprouting wings and flying. Here on Montaraz, a school of habiline Michelangelos had rendered the entire history of their species in red, black, yellow, and glowing-white symbols. This chronicle began with a parade of East African animals migrating in discrete herds along the wall leading away from the primeval habiline; it concluded with a procession of gunrunning boats, cruiseships, and propeller-driven pot planes along the way leading back to this anguished figure.