The Ten Incarnations of Adam Avatar (56 page)

I became very fit, fitter even than when I had been Guiakan. Li had me running between five to eight miles three times a week. We spent hours in stretching exercises, till I was able to press my palms to the ground, bend back from a standing position into a crab-back, and even do a split. And he had me sitting with cross-legs every night staring at a candle-flame, trying not to think of anything except that flame.

I could not see what any of this had to do with learning to be a better stickfighter, and I told Li so. He said, ‘When you better fighter than me, talk. Till then, shut up.'

No man had ever talked to me like that. But Li was a man I couldn beat even when he was unarmed and I was holding a bois. I shut up. We never used the bois. ‘Stick good, you no good,' Li told me. After we breathed, we did an exercise Li called
chi sao
, which he said meant ‘sticky hands'. We stood facing each other, touching wrists, one hand inside, one out. We then rotated our arms back and forth, trying to get the other off-balance. Later, when I had become skilled enough to keep my balance, we practised striking and defence. The trick was to remain aware of your opponent's motion so you could tell when he was about to strike. Li was so good at
lop sao
(grabbing the hand) and
pak sao
(slapping block) that I never once hit him in this exercise. He said there was a force in everything called
chi
and the secret to being a good fighter was to develop your own
chi
and become aware of the
chi
in other people and things. I thought this sounded like nonsense, till the day I saw Li break three one-inch planks with his bare hand.

I asked him how old
gung fu
was. He said the first forms were learned many thousand of years ago, and pointed to some East Indian labourers cutting sugar-cane in the distant fields. ‘From them,' he said. I was surprised. The East Indians seemed too thin and weak to be warriors. But was true that they worked better in the cane-fields than even the Chinese. ‘Shao Lin monks learn and...' He made a widening gesture.

‘But why fighting is part of your religion?' I asked, though as soon as I asked I remembered Adam Colon and thought it was a foolish question. Li's answer, though, came like a light bursting in my head. He said, ‘Only when you master body, only then can master soul.'

I knew then that Fate had sent Li to help me finally defeat the Shadowman.

I thought I was progressing at a very slow rate. Was months before I was good enough at the slapping game to make Li miss (he only did so deliberately the first times) and many more months before I could block him even once in
chi sao
. But Li said I was doing well (‘For woman'), and I saw for myself that my anticipation and reflexes had improved greatly. One day, after a particularly hard
chi sao
session where I actually managed to block most of his blows, Li took up the long-abandoned bois and said, ‘Now we start real training.'

Many more months passed. Li swinging the bois at my head, I duck and straighten, duck and straighten, picking up the pace, then breaking the rhythm so I get clubbed on the head and collapse. Swinging the bois at my stomach, a two-step back, just out of range but ready for quick counter. ‘Footwork, secret to every win,' Li says. I already knew about staying on the balls of my feet. Practise shuffling – easy, because of my dancing. Shuffle to the side to avoid a thrust, shuffle forward to get inside a swing, and counter. Li also taught me how to place my feet as I moved.

It was at this stage we encountered the wall. Li showed me a high kick. Good to block if bois out of position, or to surprise opponent. So I kick high, expertly, and for the first time Li looked impressed. But, as soon as I kicked, a strange upset feeling came upon me. I turned away and vomited into the grass. Memory broke over me like a huge, battering wave. I remembered my life as Adam Chardonbois. I remembered fucking my own Mammy.

I could not train again that day. And I asked Li to stay the night with me. I needed to be reminded that I was a woman.

I never learn to kickbox. Li kept nagging me. ‘You woman, big advantage if you use leg.' But I could not. Every time I tried, every time my body began to move in the way of
le savate
, I became Adam Chardonbois. And I hated my previous self, was repelled by that life even more than by my life as Adam Colon, where I at least came to regret all that I had done. Li could not understand why I had stopped learning.

Finally, one night in bed I asked him what he believed happened to our souls when we died.

He said, ‘How you die depend on how you live. Live good, become one with Tao.'

‘What is the Tao?' I asked.

‘Tao is,' he said, and his answer actually made complete sense to me.

‘And if you live bad?'

He shrugged. ‘You reborn. Get chance to live good again.'

I thought for a long time. Then, for the first time, I told another person the story of my lives. I do not know if he believed me. But he remembered the Shadowman from the gayelle. In the end, all he said was, ‘I teach you
ju jitsu
instead.'

So, after many years, I returned to fight in the gayelle. Most people had forgotten I had ever been a stickfighter. Trinidadians have short memories. They knew me now as Miss Legba the Jamette, the ‘Miss' because I own mi own business, the ‘Jamette' because I still wine mi body every Carnival. Some a the fresh young women challenge me, but I beat them easy – ‘easy' meaning I didn buss dey head. When I challenge the men, a familiar murmur of surprise went round the gayelle. The drums pause, and even the flame from the flambeaux seem to stop waving in the night breeze. No men step forward. I say, ‘Any man who beat me in less than three minutes, I kiss him. Any man who beat me in one minute, I fuck him.'

The first few who take up the challenge was drunk. Them went fast. Then came a real stickfighter, a feller name Catfish. He dance round the gayelle, bois over he head, watching mi all the while in mi eye. He was sure he was going to put prick inside me that night. Li was watching from the side, no expression on he face at all.

When Catfish attack, was the first time I really feel the difference Li training make. The drums, the singing, the crowd – all fade. Was just Catfish and me. Even before he swing, I knew he was coming with a overhead swing. I step to the side, turning my shoulder, and he bois slashed empty air and spat on the ground, and my bois swing round smooth like butter and tap him behind he ear. Catfish fall and didn get up. The crowd draw its breath, Catfish remain sprawl on the ground, then everybody start to cheer.

Three more men fight me. But only Li get to fuck me that night.

I didn't stickfight too many times again. Whenever the government tried to outlaw the masquerade, there was always rioting and the stickfighters often beat the police. So they tried to stop the stickfights by banning the drum and by passing laws that no group of over ten men could carry sticks. We got around the ban against drums by beating bamboo instead. Li was one of the first to show the drummers how to cut and dry the bamboo stems. I remembered that none of the islands had bamboo when I was first born, as Guiakan, and even as Adam Colon.

Stickfighting became less popular, and I think it was partly my beating the men which caused this. Instead of physical fights, battles now occurred in song. Men who use to sing the kalindas started singing women's carisos. But very often the most insulting songs had to be sung in code, using patois or
double entendre
or puns. I made sure to have several such singers in Mammy's Tent as often as possible. But people only got to know by word-of-mouth, so the police would not come to spy on us. My code word was ‘kaluptein', which means to conceal. ‘Kaluptein cariso', or ‘calypso' as it came to be called, soon became the most popular songs in the island.

I still stickfight in private, with men who wanted to bed me. And I still continued training with Li. We did a lot of
ju jitsu
and he taught me to use the
kendo
sticks and the
nunchaku
. The first time I beat him in sparring was a sad day. I did not beat him because my skill had improved so greatly. But he was forty years old and had begun to slow down, whereas I looked and moved exactly as I had at twenty-two. Li left Trinidad shortly after this, for he had heard that the Boxers in China were planning to overthrow the government there.

I, too, eventually left Trinidad. For talk had started again about me being an obeah woman. My appearance had changed. My skin had become a lighter brown, my hair was now a mass of curls. People also started to notice that I was not aging. It was not even as my previous lives, where I generally looked to be in my thirties even when I was almost fifty. Perhaps because of Li's training, I looked, at forty, like a woman half my age. And I realized that had the Shadowman not killed me at fifty in my former lives, I might have had to stage my own deaths or just disappear.

Before I left, I dug up the skeleton of my previous self and, high on the hills of Belmont, under a spreading mango tree, I re-buried my diary and the wedding rings.

I went to British Guiana, on the continent. The population there was just like Trinidad's, but the land was entirely different. In Trinidad, even if you were in the central plains, you always knew that beyond the horizon, or over the high green hills, lay the open sea. Was not so in Guiana, with its huge rivers and waterlogged plains and vast arching sky. I set up a small huckster's shop in Georgetown. The people mistrusted me at first, because they could not tell whether I was Negro, East Indian, Amerindian or Portuguese. But when they found out that I came from Trinidad, they became friendlier. They knew Trinidad was a decadent place. I kept to myself, continued training, and read books. In other words – and it had taken me four hundred years before I could write the next sentence – I lived out my life quietly.

One month before I turned fifty years of age, I travelled into the interior. Before I left, I converted all my assets into gold, jewellery, and rare stamps and I buried them. I did not trust Guyanese bankers. I went by myself to the interior, by boat. Was like travelling back in time, beyond even my own centuries-old past, into an era that was ancient before man even walked the earth. The river flowed through walled forests supremely indifferent to my small presence. Waterfalls cascaded from the sky over rocky banks in a fury of water. I rowed, untiring, till I came to the endless plains. And there, at the edge of the forest, hidden in the womb of the world, I waited. I had no hope that the Shadowman would not find me. He had, after all, once tracked me in the middle of the unmapped ocean. But ours was not a battle to be witnessed by mortals.

On the morning of my fiftieth year, I came out of my lean-to to find him waiting for me. He wore the same brown tunic, the same strap sandals. The silver spike was in his hand. I was not afraid. I had spent the last thirty years of my life preparing for this moment. But neither was I stupid. The instant I saw him, I drew a pistol from the back of my belt and fired six bullets at his head. But, in an eyeblink, he crossed his banded forearms in front of his face, and the bullets ricocheted away.

He came at me then like a rhinoceros and I stood, concentrating, waiting, then at the right moment turned, grabbing his massive arm, and tossed him over my hip. He hit the ground, rolled, coming smoothly to his sandalled feet, by which time my bois was in my hands. He attacked again, and I hit him in the stomach and head, but still he kept coming. I sidestepped his rush, hit him in the back of the knee with my bois. He went down, but before I could hit him again he kicked my legs out from under me. I fell, and he leaped towards me and I could have kicked him under the chin, breaking his neck, but instead I rolled out of his way. He grabbed my foot, and still I couldn't kick but hit his shaven skull with my bois, which broke in two. We both regained our feet at the same time, and I used the two pieces of bois in my hands like kendo sticks, hitting him head and body like unstopped lightning. The Shadowman staggered back, and I dropped my sticks and drew my knife from its scabbard and leapt at him. But he was not as stunned as I thought, and he caught me and fell back to the ground, leg against my torso, flinging me over and away.

I flipped in the air as Li had taught me and landed in a crouch, facing away from him. I heard his rapid footsteps swishing through the grass behind me and my body knew what to do: dive forward on my hands, double back-kick to the groin then spin with the knife out, cutting his throat in the slash as he folded over. But my mind froze and my body stopped, and I felt the now-familiar blow to the back of my neck, and I fell into the bitter grass and hard darkness and soft light.

Adam's eighth account left me, initially, in a quandary. He loved his mother, and had loved his father even more. His self-portrayal as a female stickfighter contradicted almost all my previous assumptions. After some thought, I concluded that this was useful. It was the assumptions that remained uncontradicted that were the key to his mental state.

‘I think I was wrong,' I told him at the very start of our next session.

‘How so?' he asked. His response was not eager, but a little surprised.

‘You did not seem to have any particular issues with your parents in this account.'

‘Oh.'

‘What I found interesting, though, is that you portray yourself as a female, and that it is guilt over your seventh life that leads to your defeat by the Shadowman.'

‘Why is that interesting?'

‘I believe you have serious conflicts with your homosexuality. You can try to deny it, Adam, but it is reflected in nearly all the stories. There are also psychologically traumatic incidents in all the stories. I had been assuming that the trauma you undoubtedly experienced had been inflicted upon you. But I think now that it is you who inflicted trauma upon someone else, and have been consumed with guilt about it ever since.'