The Ten Incarnations of Adam Avatar (63 page)

I see seasoned travellers, in suits or in jeans and windcheaters over round-necked T-shirts, luggage always in muted colours, shoe-polish black, charcoal grey, navy-blue, never battered-looking, these international individuals noteworthy because of their self-assurance in a foreign place or the ease with which they leave a familiar land. I always wonder if they are immortals. My ease is not the ease of a person who has travelled far in space but of one who has travelled far in time. These travellers' blasé air comes from the knowledge of many cultures, and from the authority conferred by wealth. Their untaut skin or childhood scars always testify that they are not as I am. There must be other immortals, of course – probability demands it. But not necessarily in my portion of the planet, since probability also dictates that there would be only a few of us.

Trinidad is as like an airport as any country can be. It is quite familiar, but always new. From Piarco International to my home in the central flatlands, I drive along the highway, past long uneven fields, the cupping hand of the Northern Range always on the periphery. I am always very aware of particular things: houses, wooden or concrete, the pylons marching off into the distance, the power lines seeming to fling themselves up, down, straight above me as the car speeds over the asphalt. Also, and especially, the flora: the tall bamboo, the rose-mango and horse-mango and julie-mango trees, the flamboyant and breadfruit trees, and the sugar-cane swaying in unending hopeful fields.

I look at the land through five-hundred-year-old eyes, and I see how humankind has mastered savage Nature. There the macata, the red hibiscus, the oleander and the African rose. The delicate fringes of the mimosa hang among the thick spikes of aloes, the thorned green flesh of the cactus. But the people here, born without memory, do not see as I do. They are come from nearly all corners of the Earth, striding out of the reaches of history, but old and young amnesiac alike. Ancient Africa and India and China, old Europe, new America. So they do not walk upon the island like people aware of their mastery. Yet there is a rhythm to their movements that belongs only to here. This place, less than three hundred human years old, discovers the distinct faces of its various pasts vanishing, blending. The advantage of human mortality is quickness of spirit, and adaptability to circumstances. That is why the whole Caribbean, but Trinidad in particular, is an outpost of the human future. But these same qualities can work against the race, unless measured by wisdom and history. And, though I have lived for so long and experienced so much, I still am not sure that either of those things really exist.

Outside, the rain is falling. I have turned out all the lights, save that of the standing lamp beside the armchair I am sitting in, so the living-room has become a shadowed cave. This is appropriate, given the first line of the block of typescript resting in my lap. The sound of the rain is comforting. I can hear the different sounds the drops make as they hit the different surfaces outside: the hard patter on the roof, the sibilant threading through the leaves of the trees, and the sharp splatter on the concrete driveway. I even have a sense of the raindrops dripping down the window-pane behind me. Inside my house, warm and dry, I feel protected. But I know that this is an illusion. I look at the manuscript and feel the weight of past events hurtling towards me as inevitably as an asteroid heading toward the Earth. And I sense, more intimately, the one who has followed me through the centuries.

I look around the room. It is that of a scholar: two huge bookshelves stand against facing walls; files and papers are piled on the carpet beside the sofa in the centre of the room; a computer with a reading-lamp beside it rests on the dining table where I never eat my meals. I get up, clutching the manuscript, and move away from the window. I do not think mere burglar-proofing can stop the man – or the thing – I know will be coming tonight to kill me. As a professional thinker, I have constructed my life with the tools of my mind. Now I have to save it the same way.

There is a mirror in a polished mahogany frame hanging on the far wall of the living room. I put the manuscript down beside my computer and walk across the room. The shadows of the room become longer when I switch on the wall lamp. I am forty-nine years old, but I look no more than thirty: Since I actually passed thirty years, I have always received compliments on my youthful appearance (which is how you know that you are now considered old). In any case, I look a lot better for my age than anyone thinks. That is why I am now considering destroying the typescript, my notebooks, and all the documents so painstakingly gathered over the past century. For what would happen if people knew how old I truly am? Wouldn't they flock to my doorstep, seeking the answers to life? Or, more likely, seeking for me to confirm what they already believe? And their pilgrimages would all be in vain. They would be coming to me for wisdom, for answers to all life's deepest questions, and they would expect such answers to comfort them. But not only do I have no such answers, but the little knowledge I have gathered in my five centuries provide little comfort. And, if I am gone, they will invent their own answers or call me mad or make me a god. I do not wish any of those choices to be my legacy.

So let me state this plainly, so there can be no misunderstanding: I am not a wise man. I have observed in all my lives that people call a man ‘wise', not when he has great knowledge or unusual skills, but when he tells them what they want to hear. It is because ordinary people live such short lives, and because they have no natural sense of history beyond their grandparents, they tend to view old knowledge as superior to new knowledge. Thus, although they don't always think that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, people are almost always convinced that lawns were much lusher thirty, a hundred, or a thousand years ago. I know better.

I sit in my house and, if I so desire, I can reach out to hundreds or even thousands of other human beings. There is the postbox, the telephone, the computer. I live with more possibilities in this life than I did in all my previous lives put together. I have made the fullest use possible of my mind and my heart, at least as far as the limitations of being immortal have allowed. Because it is mortality that defines human existence, and I am diminished because I cannot share this unique sensibility with my fellow travellers on this planet in space. The Shadowman has saved me from this ultimate despair over the centuries, but in this century I can justify my immortal existence only by giving others hope that the world does move forward. Otherwise, all is futility.

It is the habit of most people to continually look backward. I have lived five hundred years and so I know that the good old days weren't all that good, the golden age was golden only for a select few, and ancient wisdom was in many ways ancient foolishness. Even up to a hundred years ago, most of the people I knew did not live beyond forty years. So even I, immortal, never lived to an unusual age in any one of my lives. Now I see all around me active persons in their sixth and seventh decades of life. I hear debates about the rights of women, children and even animals: ideas absurd, or even unthought-of, mere centuries ago. I remember my life as Guaikan: pleasant, simple, circular. There were satisfactions then that I can never experience again. But there were also limits that I do not want to experience again. We Tainos lived by instinct, never able to break Nature's yoke. The Europeans lifted that yoke from themselves, and in so doing broke other people's backs. But what happened in the past five centuries has been happening since men trod the Earth. It is human nature, and only in the past five centuries have human beings truly begun to master their worst selves; and that evolving mastery marches in step to our mastery of red Nature.

I remember through all my lives, even up to the first half of this century, how wretched most children were, how many died before they ever experienced all that life can offer. To witness that, and to remember witnessing that, causes me more sorrow than any other aspect of my lives. Immortality may seem a most desirable gift, but it does not confer happiness. Since my rebirth in the middle of this century, child death rates more than halved, malnutrition is down by one-third, the number of children out of primary school has dropped from more than half to less than a quarter. Poverty has fallen more in this lifetime of mines than in all of my past lives put together. We have now reached a stage where it would take less than one percent of global income and two to three percent of the national incomes of all save the poorest countries to completely eliminate poverty in less than one generation.

In previous centuries, humankind lacked both the knowledge and the moral will to create Paradise. Now we have the knowledge, but the moral will still presents the major obstacle. This is history's only constant. And that is my challenge: to strengthen humankind's moral will by my existence.

Now that I have recalled all my pasts, I understand more about the world than any normal human being. But the questions that have plagued me all through my lives remain unanswered: Does my immortality have a purpose? And, if so, why has the Shadowman frustrated it every time my streams of memory and experience flowed into consciousness?

I suppose, if the historians knew about me, they would also flock to discover the truth about the past. But historical facts are important only insofar as they reveal the actual experience and needs of humankind. I have written three historical novels. Most of my university colleagues were not happy about them, though none told me so to my face. ‘As a professional historian, one would have expected more facts and less invention from Dr. Avatar,' said one in a panel discussion that I did not attend. ‘Mr. Avatar follows in the tradition of V.S. Naipaul in being a servant to the coloniser,' wrote another in a review. Yet my novels were not novels, but autobiography. The reason I was criticized is because there are so few competent historians.

History, you see, is the most intellectually demanding of all the humanities. A competent historian must be clerk, detective, novelist, anthropologist, linguist, biologist, philosopher, politician, economist. Or, maybe, a five-hundred-year-old man. That is why there are so few great historians. And, because of the paucity of information about the past, it is relatively easy for historians to bend facts – or lie outright – to serve ideology. Ethnocentrists – demagogues thinly disguised as ideologues – invariably do this. Their religious agenda, whether Christian, Muslim or Hindu, is to prove that there once existed a perfect society which man's disobedience to God has corrupted. Their inseparable political agenda is to limit or remove other people's freedom of choice. But, whether religious or secular, the lies of these historians are based upon the same absurd premise: that events that happened hundreds or thousands of years ago, in completely different cultures, can affect the self-image of people now.

But people's perception of history does not naturally extend beyond three generations. And even that is no longer true in the modern Western world, because of the rapid pace of change. People have always lived in the present, picking the bones of tradition from the past, because their survival demands it. My own experience over the centuries attests to this. Ecology, biology, economics and politics will trump history every time. History is relevant only insofar as it affects these paradigms but, as I say, few historians are competent to make the connections. Perhaps even I am not competent to do so, because I am too close to my own history. What I do know is that I could have changed the course of the world. Immortality is a great power. But the Shadowman has always prevented me from using that power.

So I cannot claim either wisdom or historical understanding. In setting down this record, I have done nothing more than tell about my lives and my times. It is for better minds than my own to draw conclusions. Whatever conclusions I make here are entirely personal. Nor do I make any claim to superiority, save that which the accident of immortality has conferred upon me.

Will my denial be sufficient to avoid the label of saviour? Until this life, I have always considered my own existence proof of a Supreme Being. In this I have applied a logic no different from that of any mortal person, though it may be argued that my reincarnations gave me added reason to believe in such a Being. Even now, I do not reject the possibility. But it is now my explanation of last, not first, resort. I have more faith in humanity than the gods. I was raised by two strong, intelligent women: my mother Adaku, once my precious stepdaughter; and my grandmother Emily, once my beloved wife. They had faith but, with all they had seen, they knew better than to be dogmatic. Emily, who is still the best-read woman I have ever known, died in 1984. She knew that I must be brought up to be both open-minded and curious, and that the earlier I regained my memories, the better would be my chances of defeating the Shadowman. By that time, I had remembered almost everything about my past.

When, at puberty, I began having dreams of my past lives, both my mother and grandmother told me some of the truths about my nature. Both of them had married by then, but they never told their husbands about me. Adaku married when I was three years of age, and I always considered my step-father, whose name was Prakash Akal, to be my real father. He was a very witty, laid-back man, a lawyer, who absolutely worshipped my mother. Emily re-married when I was fourteen, to a man fifteen years her senior, named Reginald Keene. Mr. Keene was a gentleman in the original sense of the word, far more cultured than most other white West Indians. He read Latin and Greek and could quote long passages of Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth by heart. He shaved every day and always wore long-sleeved cotton shirts of pale colours. He was always dignified and courteous. I remember the scent of his cologne and the deep resonance of his voice, hardly cracked by age even in his last days. I loved him because, although I was a boy and he an old man, he always spoke to me as though I were his equal. He was both my grandfather and my best friend until he died eleven years later, just after Emily passed away.