The Ten Incarnations of Adam Avatar (16 page)

‘Very well,' he said, finally. ‘What else do you want to know?'

The rest of that session was spent discussing Mr. Avatar's relationship with his mother. That relationship seemed standard, but I felt there was something he was not telling me. He appeared to have no especial anger or resentment, save over certain social issues, but I felt that he was skilled at concealing his true emotions. I put him on Thorazine, making sure he took the dose in my office. I prescribed 75 mgs twice a day. This was somewhat higher than I would normally have prescribed for someone of his age and demeanour, but the psychotic tendencies revealed in his second story had me concerned.

Before he left, he handed me a third account. ‘I wasn't a very admirable person in some of my lives,' he said, in a warning tone.

When the pilot announced that we were over Portugal, I slid up the window shade and peered down. The landscape below was oddly familiar: gently undulating plains and low tablelands, sliced in two by the twisted silver blade of the Tejo river; to the north the land heaved itself in a series of huge plateaus cut by deep valleys. The Minho Province, watered by the Lima and Cávado rivers, consists of deep gorges and flat-floored valleys stepping down by low hills to the Atlantic Ocean. The natural amphitheatre so formed backs a narrow beach from which, five centuries before, some of the world's boldest explorers had sailed to India and Africa. I had sailed in the white wake of those explorers and so the landscape was well-known to me: the oddness lay in never having seen it from the sky.

I had taken a flight from Rome, through Barcelona, to Lisbon. As the plane banked to land at the Portela airport, I continued peering through the window. It occurred to me that memory is the most significant, yet the most unreliable, aspect of our minds. It is the seat of our sense of self, for what does that sense arise from if not the memory of being the same person today that we were yesterday? So I – whatever ‘I' means in my context – was in a situation even more untenable than that of the person who lives the normal threescore and ten. The average human being finds it difficult or impossible to remember the details of their life five, ten, let alone twenty years before. Often, even major events are inaccurately recalled, especially if those events are painful: the human psyche is conditioned to forget trauma.

Since my own memory spans hundreds of years, this characteristic of forgetfulness – or perhaps “selectiveness” would be a more accurate term – seems present in me to an exaggerated degree. Thus, even though I have read the Confession I myself wrote so long ago, it awakens nothing but a few scattered, albeit clear, images. The sense of familiarity is overwhelming but, even in the midst of total recall, my mind still tries to expunge those memories –those acts – which insist that Adam Colon is part of who I am.
Quem me dera!
I thought, as though the landscape itself had made me shift into my once-native tongue. ‘How I wish!' But I was too old for wishes and too old to forget. It is not time's passage that is the issue: nearly all my other pasts I remember clearly; but Adam Colon's, and the life I lived next after I died, remain wrapped in the darkest of shrouds. Yet it is those two early lives I would soonest forget that I have the best records of: Colon's written confession, and the captain's log of Antam Gonçalves.

I checked into my hotel and lay on the bed listening to the hum of the air-conditioning. But I could not sleep. I went for a walk. Lisbon, like Rome, was built on seven hills. But one does not get the sense of great events here; it seems to be a normal Mediterranean city, with its arches and many small restaurants – a place that has always been provincial rather than a seat of empire. And everywhere there were signs of decay: cracked pavements and unrepaired houses and untrimmed hedges. I walked aimlessly –
ao Deus daró
, as they say here – for a long time along the wide streets, remembering old places. Some had changed less than I expected. On the Mar del Polhaís's wrinkled waters float fibreglass yachts instead of wooden sailing ships, but its lineaments remain all too familiar. Late in the afternoon, I went to a library where I found a listing of prominent citizens and a map. I had planned to go to Algarve the next day, but I felt I could not wait. I went back to my hotel and rented a car. By nightfall, I was standing outside the estate of my ‘descendants' who carry my ancient name, although their blood is not my blood. Four centuries after making their fortune from the slave trade, I noted as I climbed the vine-covered wall, the Gonçalves are still among the wealthiest families in Portugal.

My third incarnation was named after my great-great-grand-father, a Portuguese sailor who is recorded in history for capturing ten Africans near Cape Bojador and bringing them to the New World where he sold them for a tidy profit. Thus began the Atlantic slave trade, which over the next four hundred years was to see over twenty million people taken from humankind's cradle and brought to the Americas. I was one of the pioneers of that industry.

I made my way to the mausoleum. The logbook is there, as I had known it would be. But how I knew I do not know. I returned to the hotel. Over the next five days I read what I had written so long ago, remembering what I would have preferred to forget. By now I was thinking in my old language and one phrase played its refrain in the back of my mind as I read:
Ir a Rome e ñao ver a Papa
– ‘to go to Rome and not see the Pope', or, in other words, to not accomplish your mission.

The log records only the last voyage I made; and from this I have translated only extracts. More than this I do not need to tell, nor do I wish to.

July 5 
— We have left Lisbon in good weather. The wind is strong at our back and the sky is clear. It is strange to think that this is my last voyage. I do not consider myself an old man, although I am nearly fifty years of age. My eyes are still as keen, my limbs still as strong, as when I was a callow youth. But in the past few years a sense of foreboding has grown upon me, I know not why. It is not the vasty deep: I have travelled these green-gray waters, as well-known to me as my own eyes in the mirror, too often to fear King Neptune now. Was I only 14 years of age when my father first took me on this voyage? It seems impossible that so much time has passed since I was a mere cabin-boy. But so it is, and I feel as though I should know every wave, every wrinkle, of this ocean, as though the
Saõ Kush
had cut a permanent path through the heaving waters. But the sea has no memory.

Still, it is aboard my ship that I feel most at home: there is familiarity in the rocking of the boards beneath my feet, the bronze ringing of the bell on every half-hour, the smells of brine and tar, the feel of the spray on my face and the taste of salt upon my lips. Why has this never occurred to me before? I have always considered Portugal my home: the craggy face of Mt. Larouco is more familiar than my own; I have travelled the gorges and valleys of the inland, slept beneath the graceful pine trees, sailed the inland sea of Mar del Polha. And yet I feel no true connection to the land. Since gaining manhood, I have spent at least as much time in the colony of Brazil and on the island of Hispaniola as I have in Portugal. Indeed, had I to choose, Hispaniola is the place I feel most familiar with. I suppose this is because it is an island and I have always the sense of the sea being near. But, on my past three trips, my foreboding has flowered into nightmares. The dreams are different, but one thing is the same: a huge black man is chasing me. He has never caught me, but each time I dream, he draws closer. I only know that he is huge and black: more than this I cannot see. A terror grows upon me every time I have this dream. I feel that when the man catches me, I shall die. Maria, to whom I have not told this conviction, says these dreams are a portent: that the trade which has supported us in such fine style for the past fifteen years is becoming too dangerous. I do not know if this is so; I do know that I cannot live with this terror each time I go out to sea. I have begun to lose weight and, when I returned from my last trip to Brazil, I saw the first gray hairs in my beard. Perhaps the stresses of sailing to a savage land every year have become too great. It must be so, for once I returned to land, the dreams stopped.

So I have decided to retire. I have already bought a small farm in Algarve, where I will live out my days with my wife Maria growing carobs, almond and figs. My uncle will keep the house where my father and his father are buried in the Gonçalves tomb and where my bones shall eventually be interred. This last voyage will give me the funds I need to pay off the moneylenders. After that, we will not need to work: I estimate that twenty-five Negroes will be sufficient to cultivate the groves. We will live almost like nobles. I take great pride in this thought. I admit that I would have preferred to buy a capitanio in Brazil, become a
donatório
, and plant cotton and sugar-cane. But Maria does not want to live in the bush, as she puts it. Also, we have decided to adopt two children, a boy and a girl. Both we will buy from two young women, living in a town twenty miles away, who will give birth by the middle of next year. The men are
cavaleiros vitaos
and their wives are strong and healthy. They will be glad for the ducats and already have other children so they will not miss these. Maria insists that we raise our adopted babies in a civilised country so that their common blood will not come to the fore. I do not mind. The farm will be idyllic, and Maria deserves the company of her husband before death claims her (or me). I am a sailor. But the sea, without memory, cannot be home. I will learn to put down roots in the land.

Addendum:
I have reread my first entry for this voyage and find myself almost wondering who has written such lines in my own hand? In the twenty-seven years that I have been captain of my own ship, my log has never consisted of more than observations of weather & cargo. Retirement has strange effects. But let it stand: a captain's last log should have some poetry to it.

July 10 
— The weather continues fine and we are making approximately four knots per hour. I have spent approx. 15,000 Castilian ducats on the trading cargo for this last trip – hatchets, billhooks, knives, toguache wares, amber and glass beads, needles, cloaks, mirrors, and even bells and trumpets. I have always viewed these goods as the truest measure of the barbarism of the Africans: that they willingly, even enthusiastically, sell their countrymen for such trinkets. Not that I am complaining: the price of Negro slaves has risen nicely since my grandfather first began including Negroes as a regular part of his cargo. In retrospect, I think I can view my career as a very successful one, in terms of profit and otherwise. I calculate that I have transported over 11,000 slaves since I got my own ship. As a trader, I have been far more successful than my father or my father's father, though it was my father's trading voyages that helped build relations between Portugal and Congo: the king of Congo had exchanged ambassadors with our king and, I hear, was even learning catechisms. But my father lacked vision, for although he concentrated on the African-Brazil route, Negroes were never the major part of his cargo. He was interested mainly in the usual items – gold, ivory, hides, timber, palm oil and so on. Even when, twenty years ago, the Dutch broke the Portuguese monopoly on the supply of slaves to Spain, my father did not see this as a sign of the great profit to be made.

It was I who personally approached King Philip to suggest to him that such a trade, properly organized, would both help make the colonies more profitable and seal his place in Heaven by spreading the message of Christ to all nations. It was I who made the effort to explore the interior of this vast land, even taking the trouble to learn the native dialects. We already knew we could not break the Spanish stronghold in the Mediterranean, and I felt there were already too many Portuguese explorers in the East. So I concentrated on Africa at a time when few traders were interested in that vast continent. But I do not measure my success only by profit. I often think that those Africans who survived the crossing to the New World should consider themselves far more fortunate than those left behind in their savage homeland where, save for the Congo, the message of Christ is completely unknown. At least the slaves have a chance to save their souls: no longer will they be Akan, Asante, Mandingo, Fuluni, Fon or Mbundu – I must confess that there is a certain music to their names – but true Christians. What matters the mortification of the body if the soul gain eternal life?

Thus, I have in my fifty years done sufficient good for my country, myself and God. Maria is right: it is time to retire and enjoy the fruits of my labour, spend more time in prayer and contemplation, and raise children to inherit my wealth. Yet I will be glad when this trip is completed: the nightmares have begun again. The black man chases me, as always. But last night's dream had an added terror – a small detail but one which (as is often the case in dreams) terrified me out of all measure: he carried a silver spike in his hand. When I awoke, I was sweating and my heart pounding as if I had indeed been running many miles. And, strangely, a name for this phantom of my mind has come to me: the Shadowman.

July 11 
— The wind is light today. I have ordered the drabbler laced to the bonnet. We are on course and making good time. I want this trip to be over as soon as possible. Ship's crew is thirty – ten below the normal complement. And two of them are physicians – I am hoping the investment in the extra physician will be repaid in fewer deaths among the Negroes. I want to make my biggest profit on this trip but, now that we are underway, I somewhat regret not hiring the full number of men. I feel the need for the added manpower, especially since we shall have about 150 more slaves than usual on this trip. At the same time, I do not think I should submit to my nervousness. It is only the nightmares that are causing me to feel this way. Sailing is a proud tradition and I am a master of my craft: I must remember this.