“Where are Erzulie’s and the others’ paintings?” Caroline asked.
“In Prix-des-Yeux,” Adam said. “Mister Paul could have photographed them this morning, but we became involved in our free election for a species name. It’s best to visit caves early in the day so that nightfall does not catch us belowground. When we get back, you can see the paintings in Erzulie’s hut.”
“How could they compare to these?” Brian made a sweeping gesture.
“Why should they?” RuthClaire said. “They’re altogether different.”
“Not really,” Adam said. “Hector and Erzulie did some of the cave paintings—farther on—of the Duvalier persecution: bogeymen with rifles, our young ones thrown from cliffs, and so forth.”
“I understand their doing so,” Brian said. “Hector and Erzulie were alive during that very bad time. But this stuff—” he pointed at a two-dimensional scene of a habiline hunting party chasing a pack of jackals off a kill—“well, none of the Rutherford Remnant could have experienced it. None of your cave painters ever lived in Africa. Even more obvious is the fact that none of them lived there two million years ago.”
“Very true,” Adam said.
“So how did they render the entire history of their people in this unbelievably glorious way?”
“Vaudun,” RuthClaire said.
“I beg your pardon.”
“Voodoo and revelation,” RuthClaire told Brian. “All the way back in the 1870s, local houngans and mambos began putting Les Gens in touch with their species’ collective unconscious. Adam figures that the earliest of these paintings date from then. Later, some of the habilines became priests or priestesses themselves. Erzulie’s a current example. In a less thoroughgoing way, so’s my Adam. He always dresses like Papa Guedé—Baron Samedi, if you prefer—when he comes up here, to insure a sympathetic continuity between the dead habilines of Africa and those on Montaraz who spiritually rediscovered them through voodoo.”
“That’s what Adam was doing last night,” I said. “What Adam and Erzulie were doing, I mean. With the snake.”
“Exactly,” RuthClaire said. “Getting in touch with their habiline past. And a trip through these caves can do the same in a way that brings all the rite’s participants closer together. The first cave painters probably began their work believing it would help their people survive by educating and unifying them. It would give them a sense of the sacred. Sadly, the twentieth century has been pretty efficient at destroying the sacred. And how could the cave painters know that a man named Papa Doc would turn into their Stalin, their Hitler, their Pol Pot? They’d never heard of any of these butchers.”
“Voodoo and revelation,” Brian said. “What did you mean by revelation?”
Adam’s lamp lit him from beneath, giving him the look of a disembodied floating head. “That God revealed himself to early Homo habilis as he later revealed himself to the Hebrews. Even as we approach extinction, we know we were favored by the earliest manifestation of God to a hominid species yet on record—even if it is on record only with us. We know we have our own Christ.”
“Your own Christ?”
“Not a prehistoric Jesus of Nazareth,” Adam told Brian. “But God in a form of flesh that any habiline would regard as holy: our own Christ.”
Somehow, our sensoriums overloaded with data, we groped our way to the surface and then back down the mountain to Prix-des-Yeux. Hector remained behind in the pitch-black darkness of the caves. He, after all, was their curator.
In the village, Adam took Caroline and me into the hut that Alberoi was sharing with Erzulie. Its interior was larger than its haphazard outer walls and carpentering had led me to think possible. Alberoi knelt toward the rear of the shanty beneath a hole in the roof through which fell a dusty column of sunlight. Was he sick? I thought for a moment that a stomach cramp had taken him, that he had assumed this hangdog posture to vomit—but then I realized that he was hovering over a small sheet of canvas tacked to a piece of plywood lying flat on the floor. With the edge of a rusted spoon, he applied paint to the canvas: the artist in his studio. Indeed, the hole in the roof served him as a skylight. A rain-warped hatch cover rested on one end of this opening, waiting for the hut’s occupant to grab its handle and slide it into place. In the event of rain, that act would offer a bit of protection. Mostly, though, it would plunge the hut’s interior into leaky gloom.
Speaking hesitant but well-accented French, Adam told Alberoi that we’d come to see his and the others’ paintings. The habiline backed off his canvas and squatted with his spine to the wall and his eyes cutting between RuthClaire and me. He still had his spoon. The pigment on it was a crimson acrylic, as if he had been sneaking tastes from a forbidden bowl of strawberry Jell-O: a naughty boy caught red-handed. We stepped around the room’s clutter—including a large crate resting on a foundation of bricks, a strip of oilcloth covering it—to see what Alberoi had been painting. Fortunately, he was fairly far along in the work, and I could tell a good deal about his talent.
He had talent. The painting was a colorful market scene in the “naive” style that had dominated David Blau’s Haitian exhibit at Abraxas: accessible, representational art. Its human figures had an affinity with the human-habiline figures on the walls of Hector’s caves, but its setting was modern. I recognized the market as the market in Rutherford’s Port. Vegetable stalls, milling people in bright clothes, a pair of buses with baskets tied to their roofs, groups of native musicians soliciting money from tourists. What drew my eye faster than these elements, however, was the grinning, dawdling giraffe in the midst of the crowd, none of whose members regarded its presence as a cause for either alarm or celebration. The giraffe belonged to the scene as surely as did the buses or the women in market garb. Delighted, Adam actually laughed aloud.
“Very good, Alberoi. Excellent.”
“A giraffe?” Caroline said.
“He knows my secret,” Adam said, as if that explained anything. “Do you think you could sell a painting like this, Mister Paul?”
“Sure. With no trouble at all.”
“Then come see the others.” He led me to the crate up on bricks—like a teenager’s engineless jalopy, I thought—and when we were out of his way, Alberoi crept back to his painting, laid the spoon aside, and took up a fine-tipped brush from a tray of acrylics. With this brush, he stippled in the mountain shrubbery behind the market. His concentration was intense. The rest of us might as well have been in Miami Beach.
Adam lifted the oilcloth covering the crate, which thin plywood dividers sectioned into a dozen compartments. Its cover off, the crate looked like a makeshift filing cabinet. Each compartment held canvases, some rolled, some stretched taut on narrow frames. We pulled the paintings from the crate and examined them. Almost all were in the bright naive style of the market scene that Alberoi was finishing. Several were portraits—or self-portraits—of Prix-des-Yeux people, the best being those of Erzulie and Dégrasse, as if the artists preferred the female countenance to the male. Three or four of the paintings, in stark contrast to the majority, radiated a gray or muddy-blue pessimism rather than a gaudy Caribbean joy, but their subjects were Tontons Macoutes or demons from local voodoo lore. Flipping past these, I saw several moderately realistic renderings of such loa as Damballa, Petro Simbi, and Ogou Achade, who is famous for being able to drink a great deal without becoming drunk. Unlike the demons, the loa were presented positively—in citrus-fruit colors and broad but enigmatic smiles. I liked what I saw.