Cemetery of Swallows (14 page)

In fact, Mallock didn't have to force himself to praise the cuisine. The meats served, with their natural taste of grass and milk, were nothing less than exceptional, as was the way they were prepared. Mister Blue devoured a huge piece of lamb, as succulent as it was delicious. For his part, Mallock enjoyed an enormous rib-eye steak, more tender than the filet, but with the flavor and rareness of a back steak. The chef joined them for dessert and was showered with compliments.

Confronted by the enthusiasm of his compatriots, Jeanjean broke out in a smile again. He set his past aside and let his eyes shine. They talked about the different kinds of meat to be found on the island and the ways of preparing them. Mallock, who had quickly won the chef's esteem by his display of culinary competence, thought it was finally possible to bring up the subject of Darbier. He did so by asking a question that was logical and, he thought, neither polemical nor indiscreet.

“What about Tobias Darbier? Which meat did he prefer?”

The response was as surprising as it was sudden. As if he had a flock of parasites under his skin, Jansac's face undulated and turned vague.

He rose and stammered:

“I have to go now.”

At the back of the restaurant two hefty men in civilian clothing were watching them from a distance. The “chef” added, pronouncing each syllable very distinctly:

“Be careful, very careful.”

Three seconds later, Jeanjean was back in his kitchen. The subject was far more delicate than Mallock had imagined. Without pursuing the matter, the two Frenchmen paid the bill and left to look for the witch.

 

A rain squall. On both sides of the road, the green jungle was exhaling odors of mossy rot. Mister Blue's minivan was navigating blind on this liquid mirror, drawing its own rails of mercury on it. In the drainage channels, the dead-drunk soil was puking up its excess ocean water in the form of slick, ochre-colored mud. All around them, in the vegetation, thousands of greedy mouths were swallowing the water.

Mallock and his guide met two or three jungle-taxis coming in the opposite direction. The rain was beating down on the minivan, making a tremendous racket. Inside, the two men remained silent, concentrated on the vehicle's trajectory, mute and appalled by their insignificance and nature's omnipotence, its discreet but crushing superiority over man.

In La Cumbre, the car took a red-mud track that led to La Toca. When it was no longer wide enough, at least for a car, the two men got out. Without anything to cover themselves, they courageously plunged into a nowhere of wet grass, passing through the green humps of the hills and the intoxicating odors of humus and licorice.

Mallock and Jean-Daniel were now walking on old mule-paths, following in the footsteps of the
marrons
, the fugitive slaves of the last century who tried to escape the cruelty of their masters. Each of them had seen one of those near him mutilated by the little white tyrants who cut off the noses or ears of their slaves with a machete to prevent them from committing suicide or running away. The masters concealed these bloody appendages somewhere in their sumptuous homes and returned them to the families only at the moment of their death. The poor creatures thought they would never find peace if all the parts of their bodies were not buried in the same place.

A dozen children emerged from the rain. There were smiles on their faces. In their hands they carried plastic bags full of pieces of amber caught in their gangue of coal and sand. Mister Blue greeted them with a nod of his head. They recognized him and understood that they would make no deals with him that day, or with the foreigner accompanying him. In this case, the latter was a Mallock concentrating on not falling on his face.

His blond hair was dripping wet. The next day, if he was still alive, if he had not slipped into the bottom of a ditch, he would leave for Paris with Julie's brother on a stretcher, and without the slightest new lead.

Good Lord! What the hell was he doing there?

They walked for almost an hour. The sky had disappeared. The earth, the world, reality itself, seemed to be liquefying, while swarms of bare-chested children ran around them. The children ran ahead of them on the steep trail, then waited for them farther on. At every step, Mister Blue's and Mallock's feet sank into the mud without ever slipping. Finally, Mister Blue stopped at the edge of a large, strange hole and a little hill of lignite. He grabbed a piece of wood and began to strike a big, concave boulder with all his strength. Then he sat down on a rock and waited in the rain. Mallock did the same without asking any questions. He was simply done in by fatigue and the strange turn his investigation had taken.

Usually it was he, and he alone, who decided to stray into intuition, when he really needed it to resolve a difficult inquiry. Recently, on the contrary, it was events that had constantly led him further toward the strange.

This trip was the culmination of the strange, its metaphor.

The hole in question was one of the last amber mines Jean-Daniel had worked. In it he employed Dominicans whose whole production he had agreed to purchase. From this earthen mouth, barely supported by timbers and braces, one of these men emerged. Jean-Daniel moved forward to help him climb up the last few yards. And there, at the edge of what they called a mine, under the sticky, cold rain, the two men began to laugh and talk.

Mallock decided to take advantage of this pause to roll up his pants as far as the knee. By capillary action, water and mud were rising higher and higher: it was time to stop the inundation, even if he had to go back to Bermuda shorts.

A few minutes later, the group plunged back into the jungle, with the children behind and the miner in front. Seeing the new direction the adults were taking, the youngest children started to show signs of nervousness, which turned into fear when they arrived at the top of the next hill. Below it stretched a vast mangrove swamp.

Jean-Daniel briefly explained to Mallock that beyond this area of mud and brackish water there was another, higher hill studded with giant palm trees. It was there that they were to meet the old woman. When Mallock turned around one last time before beginning the final descent, all the children had disappeared.

Mister Blue, in a toneless voice, said:

“Let's hurry.”

No time for politeness. Jean-Daniel was no longer the same man. His face was a solemn mask, and the water outlined on it a sheen of superstitious fear. Mallock would never have thought Mister Blue could be intimidated by anything, whatever it was, and especially not by an old woman on a hill. In Mallock, his guide's concern was transformed into an increased interest in this expedition. Perhaps his day had not been wasted after all, if what was waiting for him way up there was capable of disturbing a guy like his companion.

When they arrived at the bottom of the hill, the two men were confronted by a new apparition: two splendid Blacks with gray, almost transparent eyes who had risen up out of the rotten vegetation of the mangrove swamp. Identical twins with muscular bodies covered with clay, licorice-colored hair, and ageless faces. Jean-Daniel, with water running down his face, explained to his friend that these two ebony statues were the sons of Niyashiika, the name given to the old woman by the island's inhabitants.

“One of them speaks French, but I don't know which one.”

No one was allowed go any further, except Mallock, whom the magician had agreed to meet.

“Good luck. Set your prejudices aside and take advantage of this interview,” Mister Blue advised him, addressing him for the first time with the familiar
tu
. “I've been around enough to know how right Shakespeare was.”

He turned on his heel and went off down the path to the mine.

Without turning around, he called through the rain: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Mallock smiled, caught his breath, turned around, and bravely entered the heart of the jungle in the muddy water of the mangrove swamp.

Mangroves drunk on blood, defunct rivers, plants interlaced in a single marshy nightmare, the swamp was cluttered with drowned birds, aerial roots, and giant crustaceans.

Niyashiika's sons walked in front, up to their mid-thighs in water, without even turning around to see if the foreigner was able to follow them. Mallock, who was not reassured, said to himself that he'd never been so wet in all his life. Even completely immersed in the water, he would have felt dryer. He followed the twins step by step, because he saw that the route they were following, full of turns and reverses, was not a matter of chance.

They took an infinitely long time to emerge from the swamp.

Without the slightest pause, they began to scale the hill. Water was running down it in serpentine rivulets. The three men climbed on all fours, taking care to keep their balance. Mallock used his hands as claws, sinking them into the grass and holding on to it. When they arrived at the summit, they finally sat down on the fallen trunk of a coconut tree. The twins put giant palm leaves on their heads to serve as umbrellas, and one of them explained, in perfect French:

“We have confidence in the fossil man, and Zagiõ compared you to a piece of amber still stuck in the sadness of its coal. He also spoke of the generous orangutan that you are. He mentioned uprightness and good will as well. So our mother asked us to come to get you at the mine and to answer you, if you really want to ask questions.”

The violence of the rain had caused the palm leaf he'd put on his head to slip off; he replaced it and waited.

Mallock was astonished by what the twins had said. He was dying to know more about this woman. But why was there so much mystery and so much fear surrounding her? He hesitated to speak, as if the expression of his ignorance might be seen as blasphemous, or a crippling sign of weakness . . .

He finally said:

“Please don't hold it against me, but I've never heard of Niyashiika.”

The young man gave what he thought was an explanation.

“Our mother is the child of the union of a Yanomami shaman and a fairy. She was brought to this place by the winds and the waters. Here she has moved the axis of the world every day. Fifty years have passed. She has become an
ayahuasquera
. Now she speaks to the spirits of the universe. And she questions the cosmic serpent as an equal.”

A shadow passed over the shiny Bakelite of his face.

“If she gave birth to us, my brother and me, it was to become still stronger, to add to the telluric powers of the shamans that of the mothers. That is what I had to say; it is said.”

He stopped speaking and stood up, leaving his brother sitting alone on the tree trunk. Then he signaled to Mallock to follow him and started climbing the last few yards to the summit. In front of the door of a crude, dilapidated wooden house, he left the superintendent with his perplexity and the black mud that was running down his white calves.

 

Amédée wondered how he could have let himself be led so far from his lair just to interview a witch. But that was not the last of his questions. When Niyashiika appeared on her doorstep, his perplexity changed into a mixture of anger and hilarity. What stood in front of him, a little, old black thing, all stunted, clearly had no chance of being able to help him in any way at all. If one of them could help the other, it was he, by giving her a little bit of money and something to eat. The woman's destitution, like the dilapidation of her makeshift home, was absolute.

However, an atmospheric phenomenon aroused doubt in Mallock's Cartesian mind. Without any possible explanation, within a few seconds the rain stopped and the sun came out. Niyashiika's amber-colored eyes lit up like strange embers and then became brown again and concealed themselves behind their lids. She looked down to watch where she was going and went back into her cabin without paying any further attention to her visitor. After a moment's hesitation, Mallock followed her. Behind him, the rain began again, transforming the hut's bare doorframe into a curtain of glass shards.

On the dirt floor, three hens, a cock, and about a hundred chicks were turning in circles. They, too, were amber-colored, some of them streaked with gold, others with coal-black. Between the cabin's planks an ambiguous sunlight penetrated, forming sharp-edged halos with the dust. Kitchen utensils and a few colored plastic bowls hung from the corrugated metal ceiling.

Without asking his preference, the old woman started making what Mallock at first took to be coffee. A wood fire. Socks used as a filter. Multiple metal bowls used to decant several times the liquid thus obtained. Probably to produce a homogenous beverage. At each stage, she added powder, sugar, and murky water in which roots and herbs were steeping.

Mallock would have opted for a good whiskey. But he had nothing to say about it. So he warily drank the liquid. It was hot and peppery and, in fact, had an aftertaste of coffee. The old woman signaled to him to follow her outdoors.

Her white hair combed back into a tight bun was resplendent in the sun.

Her face was surprising.

She did not resemble the people in this area; she looked more like an Indian. And the more Mallock observed her, the more he realized that she had a strange beauty. Without his actually being aware of it, reality was being deformed all around him, disappearing and then reappearing a hundred times more clear, as if he had always been myopic and had finally been given a pair of glasses to correct his sight.

Then the old woman started to talk to him, volubly, without stopping to take a breath. In a monotone and in a language close to Spanish, with a few German, French, and English words, and others more guttural. She said that a “double dragon” lived inside us. That it was from its multiplication that we are born. And that it was this twisted ladder, this spiral staircase, that connected, from all eternity, the earth and the sky. With an index finger covered with bark, she drew on the ground a double serpent, the symbol of twins, a double helix, a sketch of DNA. She said that Manuel's dragon was pure, that his ladder was made of glass. She said Mallock had to save Manuel, and for that reason he had to share his most elevated hallucinations, the ones produced by the
ayahuasca
of Oba, the final drug. She said she had spoken to Darbier's “Quetzalcoatl” and to Manuel's, that she had been forced to use her science to go back up the whole sequence of their rebirths. She said that Tobias Darbier, the creator of black voodoo, was called Don Pedro, himself the reincarnation of a Carib chief, a cannibal, a soul-eater, Solote-Soum-Ba. She also said he had been “Damballah-Flangbo,” the one who each night transmitted his orders to Lucifer. Finally, she said that she had given Mallock the drug, and that he was soon going to have to die. “Just time enough to smile at me,” she simpered, her eyes blazing.