Baldeosingh The Ten Incarnations of Adam Avatar

1. Auflage 2005
ISBN: 978-1-84523-225-2
Verlag: Peepal Tree Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 400 Seiten

'Tell me if I am mad,' Adam Avatar, a copper-skinned man with startling green eyes, asks Dr. Surendra Sankar, a psychiatrist in Trinidad. Aged forty-nine, there is some urgency in his request, since he fears that, very shortly, when he reaches his fiftieth birthday, he will die at the hands of his nemesis, the Shadowman. Adam believes he is nearly five hundred years old and has gone through nine previous incarnations, including living as a fifteenth century Amerindian, a Spanish conquistador, a Portuguese slaver and a Yoruba slave, a female pirate and a female stickfighter in nineteenth century Trinidad. Not unreasonably, Dr. Sankar reaches for his pad to prescribe drugs used to control delusional states. As the consultations continue, Dr. Sankar's professional expertise is tested to the full. On the one hand, his patient appears to behave with impeccable rationality, on the other, the accounts Avatar brings of his previous lives suggest buried traumas of the most worrying kind. And when Avatar's narratives of the experiences of his past selves are revealed to have an authenticity that cannot be explained away, Dr Sankar's perplexity grows. Kevin Baldeosingh brings a powerful narrative drive to this unfolding mystery, a Joycean variety of historical Englishes to the accounts of Avatar's lives and a vivid and persuasive grasp of each historical period. But the novel also asks uncomfortable questions about the nature of power, the relationship between abuser and abused and the malleability of the person in different social environments. Set in Haiti, Jamaica, Barbados, Guyana and Trinidad, 'The Ten Incarnations of Adam Avatar' is an epic account of the New World experience and a provocative enquiry into the nature of history and what it means to be a Caribbean person.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Baldeosingh, Kevin

Leseproben

Chapter Two: Conquistador

In the year 2000, I went to Vatican City. I had been there before, in the mid-sixteenth century, to deliver a document to the then Pope. It was that document that I went to retrieve almost four hundred and fifty years later. I spoke to Cardinal Vittorio di Medici, one of the keepers of the Vatican records. He did not speak French or English or Portuguese and his Spanish, though adequate, was hesitant. But we were able to communicate quite well in Latin, for he had received a classical education just as I had when I was a Spanish conquistador and, three centuries later, a West Indian planter. It was appropriate, given what I wanted from him. Cardinal di Medici was quite old, in his eighties, with a courteous manner and the thin face of a lifelong scholar. I told him what I wanted and he said it would take some days to locate the records. Even though I was from a small, unknown island and had no Catholic connections – I didn’t even get an introductory letter from the Trinidadian archbishop – he gave me every consideration as a fellow historian. I left the name of my hotel with him and he promised he would call as soon as he had located the document.

I spent the day walking through Rome. Despite the throngs of people, it seemed to me almost as though time had stopped, for the city has changed far less than my Caribbean islands. When I had been there four centuries before, the mix of old and new – the crumbled Coliseum, the new dome of St. Peter’s cathedral – had stayed in my mind. Now the layers of history were less marked: Rome was old and very old, with muscled stone statues gazing over gray cobbles once trod by Roman sandals, but its new parts hid like a shame – even the glass of my hotel windows was set behind wooden shutters and there were many poor people begging outside the Vatican. Rome made me feel like a ghost, because of the gap of history that yawned in my islands. But perhaps that was because I remembered in my islands what other West Indians could see only trivially in street signs and a few colonial buildings. It is good to know the past; it is bad to live there. Since I began recording my past, this is a lesson I have had to keep reminding myself of.

Cardinal di Medici called me on the third day. He regretted to inform me that the document I requested was under seal and could not be viewed by anyone save Vatican officials. I asked him to pull the file and I would present him with something that would convince him at least to show me the document. In fact, I said, I was sure that what I would show him would persuade him to give me a photocopy of every page of the document. He was doubtful, but agreed to meet with me in one hour.

For the next thirty minutes, I lay in my hotel bed, not quite sleeping, recalling the self of my selves I most wished to forget: becoming, once again, Adam Colón de Espanola. And, when I felt that dark ghost risen in me like an anti-Christ, I arose and went to the writing desk where I had already laid out pen and paper. I wrote steadily for one minute in a dead language. I then folded the single page into my jacket pocket and went downstairs and caught a taxi to the Vatican. I shivered all the way there and the driver asked me if I had the ague.

I must have still looked ill when I met the Cardinal, for an expression of concern crossed his face and he asked if I wished to have some water. I shook my head and pulled the sheet of paper out of my pocket and handed it to him. He looked at it, not understanding at first, then his eyes widened. For a second, I cursed my taste for melodrama: suppose the old man had a heart attack? But he merely muttered a hasty ‘Scusi’ and left the room. I sat in the comfortable chair and waited. I knew what he had gone to do.

It took him fifteen minutes to return. When he did, he carried my sheet of paper in his left hand and, in his right, a sheaf of stiff brown pages that I still recognized across the gulf of centuries. In the Cardinal’s gaze I saw a mixture of fear and hope.

‘It is impossible,’ he said.

‘Impossible,’ I agreed.

He held out my sheet in a quivering hand. ‘The words are the same. The handwriting seems the same!’

I nodded.

He said, ‘And the word? The word the author says a seeker must speak?’

‘Guiakan,’ I said.

The sheet dropped onto his lap. He picked it back up, as though it were a page of flame.

‘How can this be?’ he asked, in the plaintive voice of the child that lives in every true scholar.

‘I do not know, Pater,’ I said. ‘That is why I need your help.’

‘I cannot give you these,’ he said, clutching the sheaf to his chest as though he feared I might grab them and run. ‘It is now even more important that the Church keeps it safe.’

‘I know. But a copy would be invaluable to me.’

He looked uncertainly at the single sheet I had given him. ‘But you know...’

I smiled without humour. ‘I think I know,’ I said.

He watched me for a few moments, seeing the strain that had been etched into my face . ‘Yes,’ he said finally. ‘Yes.’

He rang a bell and a young man, dressed in a dark business suit, appeared. He handed the Cardinal some stapled pages and the Cardinal handed them to me. The young man left as efficiently as he had come.

‘Graci,’ I murmured, my eyebrows raised.

The Cardinal smiled, bringing a sudden brightness to his ascetic features. ‘I thought you might be persuasive. I am not sure why.’

I nodded and got up to leave. The Cardinal suddenly looked anxious. ‘You will let me know what you discover?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Soon?’ he said, and now I heard in his voice the old man that he was. I was to see my fiftieth year, in this life, in eleven months. In five centuries of existence, I had never lived past the age of fifty. ‘Before the new year comes,’ I promised.

I held out my hand. He grasped it with both of his. ‘God has given you a great gift,’ he said.

‘Has He?’ I asked, and left.

* * *

Seville,
Spain
August, 1559
To: His Holiness, Pope Paul III, descendant of St. Peter.

The following document is the Last Confession of Adam Colón de Espanola and a record of the atrocities he committed against the Indians of New Spain and several of His Holiness’s priests. I believe his Confession to be the whole truth and have myself witnessed the miracle whereof he speaks.
Fr. Bartolomé de Las Casas.

Holy Father:

I was born into Hell and did not know it. Hell is a beautiful place, lush with green forests where the sounds of the birds fill the air like angels singing without words. Mountains rise to a sky as blue as God’s eye and, even in that season when the rains fall every day, it is a renewal and a reminder of the Almighty’s abiding grace.

In this land so full of Nature’s bounty, brown men and women and children troop in their hundreds to serve their Spanish masters. The hills have been scarred by our mines, in which the Indians toil ceaselessly to find the precious metals that we colonists live for. So the land seems like an ant hill, with the constant files of brown human beings working until they are broken by our iron will for gold. There are only hundreds now; there were thousands when I was a boy. They died from many causes: the pox, the hard labour, the inadequate food, our sport. But, in the end, they all died from only one cause: Spanish greed. And I am as culpable as any colonist – indeed, more so. If there are now only hundreds where once there were thousands, I have been a deliberate instrument of that depredation. It is no exaggeration to say that, until my thirty-second year, no single man killed or tortured more Indians in these islands than I. Whatever action I have taken in those ten years I spent in the wilderness can never compensate for my atrocities. The Bible says God forgives those who truly repent. Perhaps. But, blasphemous as it may be to say so, God can do nothing to punish me. I do not forgive myself, and I have lived in Hell all my earthly life. This Confession serves as evidence of my repentance but, more importantly, it records what evil men may do in the name of God. If this testament can, in some small way, help ensure that such evil never occurs again, then I will die having served some useful purpose on this earthly sphere. Even so, it were better had I never been born. But God’s ways are a mystery to mortal men, and even to myself, who may not entirely fit that description. (But more of that in time.) So given the great gift God has bestowed upon me, I can only assume that even a sorry creature such as myself must play some role in His Divine plan.

Of my situation: I have spent the past fourteen years in His Majesty’s dungeons awaiting trial. My cell is unlit and infested with vermin. I have been fed nothing but mouldy bread, though the cockroaches and spiders which share my cell have supplemented that monotonous diet. As Your Holiness knows, heretics often spend several years awaiting trial after the first hearing. I find the extraordinary delay in my case curious, however. The murderer of a priest would, I thought, be tried and executed summarily. I can only suppose that the delay was deliberate: to ensure that I suffer for as long as possible before dying. Also, a Court of the Inquisition meant that everything I said would be recorded and, despite the famed secrecy which surrounds the Court, there are many who would be uneasy at the thought of my words being written down anywhere. When the Inquisitor heard of my remarkable...