Difference between revisions of "La Temps des Passions"

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Like a tightrope. Or a noose. Each morning as she woke, Lorna Mulrooney could feel the hands of local tradition squeezing more tightly around her throat. Often she woke soaked in sweat, always she woke to a background buzz of fear that resonated deep in her heart.

This rousing fear was the fear of nightmares: insistent, unidentified, unidentifiable. An intangible, shapeless dread. It bred in the thick green light of the leaf-lit jungle, even here in the clearing of the village, it bred in the jungle smell of leaf-litter, the ammonia of a million insects, the persistent stench of animal and vegetable decay. Every morning she struggled through its veil.

Full, waking, alert fear was a different beast. It was clear, close and precise. It was in the unspoken threat of everyone around her. Nine months she had been here now. And in those nine months, the childish fear of the unknown had not diminished by as much as a breath but the adult fear of known dangers had grown as fast as maggots in a corpse.

But still she stayed. Her original mission to bring Jesus to these wild villagers in the dense depths of the island was long discarded. These people already knew about Christianity. They had embraced it so completely that it was now their own, a thing in its own right. Every scripture she had read, every psalm she had sung, had been read and sung and danced back to her with new twists and new turns, interpretations that had made her own pastel-coloured faith seem a mere shadow of the vibrant, shocking and mocking primary colours of this jungle church under the canopy of the sky.

She stayed because the little she knew about medicine had seemed to be useful. But now the doubts about even this were settling on her daily, like ash from a volcano. And she stayed because they had allowed her to stay. There was no society more closed than this – and they had allowed her to co-exist with them.

She stayed because of the extremities of light and dark, heat and chill.She stayed because she was hooked.

Turning out of the cot and on to the tarpaulin groundsheet of the tent, she lit the stump of candle and woke her six-year-old daughter, Amy. In the cotton night-dresses that somehow still survived, they knelt, side by side in the guttering light of the candle and made their prayers.

But Lorna knew her god was not here. No almighty of the meek dare nuzzle amidst the brimstone passion of these Zephaniah peoples. No New Testament compassion among these worshippers. Here was all blood and revenge and slaughter. Here was a God of passion and fear.

Her words murmured the rituals of a lesser god. Deep inside, her heart trembled to the passion of a greater faith.

DOS

There is an art to never looking anyone in the eye. It’s an apparition of deference. It’s more about retaining one’s own integrity than it is about acknowledgement of a superior. The people in the jungle never look outsiders in the eye. Outsiders are other people, with strange and dangerous ways, they come to kill, to flog, to maim, to control, to train, to teach – but never to share.

Lorna Mulrooney had learned the style of not looking, but she had not learned the art. For her to look down or away was true recognition of her lowly place in the village hierarchy. And so it is with this deference that she and Amy leave their tent and, slightly stooped, walk almost crabwise towards the centre of the village and to breakfast.

Approaching the Culinierre, they crouch low, hold their bowls upwards and turn their bodies away. Always there is a pause. The Culinierre will look around the assembled villagers for a nod or a shake of their heads, seeking consent as to whether these outsiders should be fed. Almost always now, the pause is following by the slop of the breakfast stew into the wooden bowls.

Rarely do Lorna and the girl go hungry. At first it had been different. Within the first month their supply of dried food had been used up. Now a small tin of hardtack was all they had in their tent and if they had to skip a meal they went hungry. The hardtack was their last link with the rest of the world, a link that in an emergency would feed them for perhaps three days.

The slop of the food into the wooden bowls and they crouch their way a respectful distance from the Culinierre before sitting on the ground and spooning heaped mouthfuls of the banana and meat.

There is murmuring all around and the soft clunk of wooden spoons on wooden bowls as the village comes awake and gathers, in small groups, to meet the new day with food. There is less tension in the air than when they first arrived, stumbling into the village, having lost the pastor who was leading the mission.

A tiny but rambling village, no more than a couple of dozen shacks, or huts or sheds. A mish-mash of brick and stone and rough-cut planks. Roofs of corrugated tin, some even of palm leaves still, some a mix of both where thatch has been patched with tin or tin patched with thatch.

They eat, and they wash their bowls and they wash themselves at the river. Amy wanders among the children, almost at one with their ways of play. She is happy to help the other children as they skin and gut a boar or a monkey to be cooked later. She gathers berries and leaves with them.

Lorna busies herself with unasked tasks, straightening logs for the fire, carrying ashes from the fire to the shit pits. Sometimes a villager will give her a troublesome baby to entertain, or she will find herself with all four of village’s infants when there is a major task at hand.

And the days slip by – and little by little, Lorna steps closer to the heart of the community, despite her strangeness, she feels herself drawn to the passion, the heart, the embrace of these people who live as if in another century. Somewhere, sometimes close, exasperatingly always out of reach, there is waiting the embrace of fear and passion, of love and dread.

TRES

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She was washing clothes on the riverbank. The slop, scrub, slop, scrub on the rock making its own infintesimal echo through the valley. Scrubbing cotton on rock, feeling the chill mountain waters around her ankles, cooling in the afternoon heat.

The shadow that fell across her, across the bank and across half of the river, could only have been Medicinierre. The acrid smell, the length and blackness of the shadow. Afraid to look up, she stopped her washing and waited.

The Medicinierre were the heart of the people. Young men and women called to the service would be decorated in head-dresses of bright parrot plumage, dressed in bright cloaks, beads and buttons, tiny bells sewn into the seams of their trousers. The celebrations that attended the callings would go on for two, three days, with singing and dancing.

And then these curates would go into the smokehouse. A span of the moon they would stay there. Four weeks inside the smoke-choked hell-on-Earth. And when they came out they were no longer young men and women, they were Medicinierre. One hand dyed red, smoke-blackened faces and arms. The plumage, the clothes all smoke-black. Never again would they wash, they had become wed to the afterlife, the otherlife. Always walking one step in the world of the peoples, one step in the world of the demons. They were the bridge and through them flowed the power.

She waited. Head lowered. Eyes lowered.

“You are Mulrooney.”

“Yes.”

“Of John Mulrooney.”

“Yes.”

“The child is whelp of Mulrooney.”

“Yes.”

A streaked red hand entered her field of vision. She felt the Medicinierre bend closer.

“This is for you.”

The red fist turned slowly, turned and opened like a corpse flower awakening in the touch of the morning sun. In the palm of the hand, a small round trinket, a coin. Although she had only heard stories, she knew instantly the embossed hands and claws of a Règle de Trois.