HONKY IN THE WOODPILE Page 17

  Underfoot, solidity. Oh, fantastic! Stumbling, I felt my way up the beach, trying to avoid the sharp shells and rocks and broken glass that littered it, ducking my head so the boats would screen me. The small houses were like flat sketches painted on a theatre back-drop.

  Suddenly two figures emerged from concealment and threw a fishing-net over me and dragged me helpless to the ground.

  TWENTY-THREE

  I was far too weak to resist. I couldn’t even think of a reason why they should have been waiting for me. Also I didn’t want to. They trussed me up like a turkey, pushed a long pole through the net when I was good and tangled, and carried me on their shoulders up the dark winding alleys that led to the geraba. The drumming grew louder by the second.

  Obviously, not everyone was at the geraba; it wasn’t big enough, to start with. I saw curtains at doorways lift as people peered out to watch me go by, but not a word was spoken until we reached the tiny plaza, and here were a lot of people, maybe a hundred, sitting in dark huddles, listening. One of them rose and spoke to the men carrying me.

  “It’s the right man?”

  “Yes, definitely.”

  “Then he was right and she was wrong.”

  “Yes.”

  My skin crawled. I could make a very educated guess about the identity of “he” and “she”…

  Up to the door, and the man in front knocked, and it opened on a scene I’d hoped never to see again: a ceremony of pocomania in full blast. The drumming was suddenly so loud it hurt my ears. Stamping and chanting, too. Deafening me.

  Or… No, correction: not pocomania. The badoan counterpart of it. Diego had told me the proper name, but I’d forgotten it. No, I hadn’t—it was something like “garage”…

  Got to pull myself together!

  They dumped me on the floor just as I remembered the word was garaxí and I looked around. There was very little light, coming only from smoky kerosene lamps. Men and women, gleaming with sweat, sat on the long wooden pews that lined the walls, and a mass of writhing dancers crammed together on the floor, moaning with their eyes half-closed, forgetful of the world, shortly to be forgetful of their own bodies if the spirits of the gods entered them. The place stank, too—of lamp fumes, perspiration, urine, sickly incense, greasy fried food that the congregation had brought to sustain them during the night-long ritual.

  And at the far end, lit by candles on the altar where before had been the photograph of Don Amedeo, the most sacred object of all, which Diego had told me no outsider ever saw unless one were stolen and put on show in a museum; even he had not seen one since he was twelve years old.

  Don Sábado himself.

  Or, if you like, El Cristo Negro, or Papa Mogué, or Papa Legba, or Damballah, or any other name that fits: the coal-black god who in a score of avatars has held his own against the white man’s Jesus sometimes for centuries, and may yet win.

  Nine feet tall, carved of a single log, his eyes of mother-of-pearl, his teeth bared in a snarl, a spear in one hand, a sword in the other—having no need of a shield, just as was said of El Cristo Negro when he led the storming of Brascoso—his penis eighteen inches long, erect against his belly, his knees a trifle bent ready to hurl him at his enemies, in his full ceremonial regalia of necklaces, bracelets, head-dress…

  And a wrist-watch on a shiny chrome strap.

  I was so fascinated, I almost didn’t notice when the old man with one eye came chortling to greet my captors. He was transformed. No longer in a torn shirt and grimy jeans, he was resplendent in paint, feathers, flowers and gilt chains.

  He snatched at a lamp and bent close to me as I tried to stand up. Around, those few people who had been distracted by my entrance shushed one another and turned to watch.

  “It is the man!” he cried in triumph, spittle flying from his loose old lips and dotting my face. “It’s the very man! Haiii…!”

  A vast cry which I’d never have believed his scrawny frame capable of uttering. At once the drums fell silent. The dancers swayed so that friends rushed to stop them falling, or else remembered themselves with a look of amazement and blinked dazedly as though between sleep and waking.

  “I told you!” the old man cried. “I told you I would call back the man who profaned the geraba!”

  A rustle of astonishment shook the congregation. Even the doziest of the dancers were startled wide awake and scrambled for a clear sight of me. The drummers stood up on their chairs for a better view. Five or six brawny young men, two carrying fish-gutting knives, shouldered their way towards me and assembled in a menacing half-circle.

  “We shall do to him what must be done also to the wicked woman who let him enter the geraba!” the old man yelled. “Death to them both! Death!”

  He glared around. “Where is she? Has she run to hide? I’ll seek her out as I sought this one. Elspeta!”

  So that was the name of the zachea.

  “I’m here!” she called, and everyone glanced towards the altar. There she was, holding an incongruous paper sack labelled “Ideal Brand Bar-B-Q Brix”. Still, it wasn’t any more out of place than the wrist-watch on the idol.

  She set it down, then advanced through the crowd, slapping aside hands eager to push and hurry her onward. She was transformed as completely as the old man—in a sense, more so. Not just because she was nearly naked, her tiny breasts painted with streaks of yellow and green, a skirt around her loins of palm-leaves and dyed plaited straw, and nothing else except a comb of fishes’ teeth in her hair… but because she was a Power among these people. Even as some of them made to drag her along at the old man’s bidding, others half-bowed and made way for her.

  “Get him out of that net!” she rapped as she entered the vacant space around me. “Cut him out if you have to, but turn him loose.” With a sort of curtsy to me. “Señor, welcome back to Cayachupo; I have been expecting you. I apologize for this stupidity, but that old fool thinks he has called you back because you profaned this geraba, while I know you have come here to seek sanctuary from the Sabatanos who daily profane the very honor of our Lord.”

  Giving another curtsy, much deeper, she made the Criné sign.

  “Bitch!” the old man roared, and launched into a diatribe I couldn’t follow, very fast and thickly accented, full of African words. The crowd, very dense, swayed back and forth. I saw an old woman take a swig from a bottle of caxa, spilling some on her huge bosom, but one of the young men with knives ordered her to put it away because this was serious business.

  Arms folded, Elspeta waited until the old man finished, to the accompaniment of a mutter of agreement—I had some of my wits back now, and noticed that it came almost exclusively from the older folk. I sensed a division into conservative and progressive factions.

  “Hah!” the girl said at last, and replied slowly, with good diction, as though for my benefit. “You say letting this man come here weakened the magic?”

  “Yes! Yes!”—from the old folk again.

  “If it’s been made so weak, how was it powerful enough to call him back? He’s not badoano, not even Madrugadan.”

  The old man gaped, while she sneered and went on, “How can you claim to have called him here when you don’t even know who he is? But I do!”

  Had I told her my name? I couldn’t recall doing so.

  “This,” she declared, “is the man the Sabatanos could not keep in jail!”

  The Madrugadan grapevine must be fantastic!

  There was an instant of dead silence, followed by a murmur of astonishment and incredulity. Now even the oldest people sitting in the pews rose and tried to get a better look at me.

  “I apologize again, señor,” Elspeta said. “This damned fool! He only cares about his power, and the only way he knows to keep it is to kiss the feet of the Sabatanos. He’s supposed to be our watchman”—curiously, she used the pure Castilian word, sereno, which also means dew—“but all he thinks of is his own family, not the rest of the people!”

  There was a grumble of
agreement on her side this time, from the younger folk. Abruptly one of the men with knives decided to act on her instructions, thrust his knife through his belt, and made to untangle me from the net.

  “No, no!” the old man shrieked, and thought of a good debating point in his favor. “If he got out of a Sabatano jail can’t he get out of a fishing-net by himself?”

  He crowed with laughter and slapped his skinny old thigh. His supporters echoed him. It was like an instant town’s meeting.

  But the young man who had put away his knife said hesitantly, “Are you really the man we have heard about?”

  “Yes!” One of his companions. “I want to know the truth! Are you really that—uh—that Carfu?”

  “Yes, I am!”

  “You certainly can’t deny that he was the man who came here with Don José,” Elspeta said.

  “Ah!” I broke in. “Do you know what I did tonight to Don José Moril? Stripped him naked and dumped him on a busy street in Brascoso. They must be laughing at him still.”

  “Lies, lies!” the old man insisted at the top of his voice. “If he claims to be this Curfew, he must prove it. And can he? Look at him, nearly naked!”

  But when I discarded my trousers to swim here, I’d saved my passport and tucked it in my trunks. I produced it, and with an air of relief Elspeta seized it and flipped it open.

  And her face fell. Mutely she turned it so that I could see the trouble. It had been so completely soaked, the ink in which my name was handwritten had dissolved into a blue smear.

  Of course, the photograph—but what did a photograph prove? If only the British typed the bearer’s name in their passports!

  “Hah!” the old man screamed in delight. “Then that leaves one way and only one way to tell if he’s speaking the truth. You know what it is—we all know!”

  There was an electric silence. I felt sweat tickling me like insects. This place was like a sauna bath.

  Very slowly Elspeta shook her head.

  “So you have no trust in our old ways!” the old man cried. “Or else you have no trust in him!” He kicked at my nearer leg with knobbly bare toes. He had triumphed for the time being, and he was reveling in it. Mouthing the word with relish, he concluded, “Yoma-xi!”

  I haven’t really cared much whether there’s a god or not for a good many years. But at that moment I found myself wishing desperately that there might be. Not Jehovah, not Allah, not the Trinity, but Don Sábado whose professed followers, bearing his name, had betrayed his people into the grip of a crueler tyranny than the one they’d rebelled against almost a century and a half ago.

  It was a long time to bear a grudge. I hoped it still rankled.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  They freed me from the net and led me to the steps before the altar, where I waited, mouth dry and belly tighter than a drum-head. Savoring his ascendancy, the old man bustled to and fro organizing his preparations and issuing orders. The drummers began to play again, a slow hypnotic beat, and almost absent-mindedly people swayed in time with it.

  Elspeta found her way to my side and murmured, “Señor, if only your papers had been clear…! These people want to believe, most of them, because they hate the Sabatanos so, and the garzos who control them. They are cruel, ruthless; they take what they want, they take what girls they want, one dare not resist. And among those we hate worst is Don José. His father came from Aragon, you know, but was adopted as a Sabatano by the family that owns most of our island.”

  “I was told your people hated more the soldiers of Juan Bautiz’,” I said equally softly. Having a nice abstract general problem to think about helped distract me from the growing terror that chilled me despite the hot clammy air of the geraba.

  “Some do, that is true, but mostly the old people to whom anything new is frightening. Not I, nor most of the young folk. We learned that the Sabatanos would not let anyone be kind to us, the poor, when they burned the clinic of Don Fierro. I was there. I saw Don José driving back with a gun the neighbors who wanted to rescue things from the fire… But no matter. Señor, do you understand about yoma-xi?”

  I swallowed enormously. “I… I’ve heard about it, that’s all.”

  “I have used it. All my life. My mother gave it to me first when I was six, just a little drop to begin with, then more, until now I can take as much as she—and more than him!” With a scowl at the old man. “It is alarming, one must admit, but you need not be afraid of it if you understand it. It is the path by which the gods speak to men, and naturally the gods always tell the truth, although their thoughts are not like ours. Do not try to resist them. They are very powerful.”

  She was talking as calmly and reasonably as an intelligent acidhead preparing a friend for a first trip. I was very grateful.

  Meantime, in the middle of a ring of curious watchers, the old man had produced and was now opening a carved wooden box. I watched him, wondering whether I was to be given a powder, a liquid, or what.

  But he kept the interior of the box hidden from me with his body. He reached out a palm, and someone put a piece of bread in it.

  “No!” Elspeta said loudly at my side.

  The old man flinched and looked guilty. She strode down the step and seized his shoulder, twisting him around. I saw he had a bottle in his hand, uncorked, an ordinary bottle of the kind caxa was sold in, and another like it remained in the box.

  “Ah, you’re afraid!” Elspeta exclaimed, fists on hips. “Instead of giving him the weak drink, that anybody can taste without harm, you’re planning to give him the strong one that only a trained zacheo can take, to poison him and destroy his mind!”

  My spine crawled. She must be talking about the stuff the Sabatanos used to get rid of political opponents.

  “What makes you think you know better than me?” the old man countered feebly.

  “I don’t. But I know which of these two drinks to use—and so do you!”

  There were murmurs of anger from the congregation as the news spread, and I saw that even some of his own supporters were frowning at the dirty trick.

  “Give me that bread!” Elspeta ordered, and when he did not surrender it she snatched it from him. Uncorking the other bottle, she sniffed it, then set the bread to its neck and moistened it very slightly with the contents, in exactly the way a nurse would wet a surgical swab with alcohol.

  With abrupt formality she held it out to me.

  “Eat this, señor. Since you are telling the truth you have nothing to fear.”

  Don Sábado, are you listening?

  I took it boldly and crammed it into my mouth. It smelled just a little of caxa, and if I concentrated I fancied I could detect a hint of bitterness, but it was almost imperceptible. Presumably this was a tincture, made by steeping bruised leaves and stems in alcohol and pressing out their juice. If this mere drop she’d given me was guaranteed to make me tell the truth, then yoma-xi must be among the world’s most powerful drugs, way up there with LSD. Still, I’d always believed that so many “primitive” human beings had been tackling the world from a non-scientific standpoint for so long, they were bound sooner or later to hit on things that worked—like curare and rauwolfia. So it wasn’t surprising.

  Despite the dryness of my mouth I finally managed to swallow. There were nods on all sides, as though so far I was conducting myself well. A chant began without orders from anyone; an old woman hummed in rhythm with the drums and others automatically joined in.

  “It takes time to work,” Elspeta said, eyes fixed on me. “As much as twenty minutes or half an hour. Copy me, and it will come more quickly. The sooner begun, the sooner finished.”

  She moved her legs and feet in a simple dance-step, and I did the same, at first awkwardly, then when I got the beat in my bones with perfect ease, and then again with some difficulty because I grew progressively more aware of the weight of my limbs. So far, though, nothing extraordinary; this felt like a regular reaction to pot. The beat of the drums quickened, but I was able to keep up wit
h them. My arms and legs would have been feeling like sandbags anyhow, I reasoned, after my long swim.

  Had she cheated the old man after all? Had she given me such a small dose that I wouldn’t feel the full effects?

  No.

  I was getting something. With a start and a shock I discovered I was no longer before the altar, but right down the west end of the building, dancing like a man insane, flailing so wildly people were keeping their distance from me for fear of being struck. How had I managed that? Surely I should have stayed near the altar. I turned back towards it, towards the statue of Don Sábado, and noticed that the roof and walls were pulsing gently in and out as though we were inside the lung of a gigantic animal.

  Oh, no! A wave of terror engulfed me. I tried to cry out that Elspeta had made a mistake, that she’d given me the strong drink after all, the one that only a zacheo could withstand, but there was such a rush of blood in my ears that I couldn’t even hear the words I wanted to utter forming inside my head.

  Funny I should be able to dance so frantically when I knew very well I was exhausted—

  Explosion.

  A dark cell with a chain-ring on the wall stone auction-block a black man shot dead in Trafalgar Square missionaries with guns enforcing the gospel of love a Boer with an electric soldering-iron the fetid hold of a ship packed with black bodies elbow to elbow length of pipe going crack on a white hand holding a knife “how much am I bid for this healthy buck?” beams of light sweeping a dirty beach haggling with Tuareg traders to get the best price for the surplus children “you’re fighting a losing battle” on this sight in century XVIII baby with flies drinking at its eyes Badoan el más auténtico!!! “there may not be another chance” Sharpeville “don’t go to my country because last time I was beaten up on the street” Gandhi Lumumba Malcolm King Small “that’s him I thought so” they immediately celebrated a mass hunted by (my own people) Moril Porfiroso Gilbert…