Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [238]
The beat of the drumming changed, and a new hub of interest began turning in the crowd, a circle opening round a huge black woman, whose face was a mask of caked white clay. Eyes slitted, she rolled her hips in a billowing motion, her skirts held high and tight against her buttocks and her thighs. Arnaud was riveted to her movement, just as all those who stood encircling her were, but it was something deeper than sex, a still more primal power.
“Maman Maig’,” the doctor breathed, as if confirming something to himself, and at his words Arnaud recognized the midwife in this undulant figure who both was and was not her. The circle stretched into an oval and another dancer was admitted, dressed all in white with a white headcloth. By comparison her movement was pale and ghostly, like the tossing of an empty sheet in the wind. Her skin was white also—Claudine, Arnaud realized, in different clothes . . .
At the very moment of his recognition, she shrieked and tore at her head with both hands. Her cry was that of a damned soul or someone being flayed alive. The thought came to Arnaud that all he saw—the thrust of torch flames and insistent drums and guttural chanting and the grotesquely seductive dance—was part and parcel of the Hell he had imagined in the church and which, in her episodes of madness, he imagined Claudine to inhabit. Hell made immanent. All that these same people had performed in the church was sham, and what it covered up was this. He lunged in Claudine’s direction, but the doctor caught him up and he let himself be detained, mouth agape, watching: Claudine had toppled backward and lay in the crook of Maman Maig’s great fleshy elbow as if floating on a wave of the night sea, while certain congregants stroked her hands (“They will not harm her,” the doctor was saying) and still others whispered in her ears to calm her or inspire her. In Maman Maig’s free hand a gourd wrapped in bead strands rattled—once, twice, again, and Claudine rolled forward on her heels, regained her balance and took a stiff step forward as the people scattered away from her.
“They will not harm her,” the doctor repeated. “You see how they respect her.”
“But what can this be?” Arnaud hissed. He had seen her so before in her fits of madness: stiff angular posture and glittering eye and movements trembling with a terrible rigor. He felt now that the doctor was correct. They had not harmed her. Rather they were helping her, in ways he’d not been able to divine.
“What can it mean?” he said, as his breath sighed out of him.
“I do not know,” the doctor murmured. “Only that, by their belief, Claudine is herself no longer—one of their gods has entered in her place.”
“The Devil!” Arnaud said, cold to the core despite his words’ heat. The echo of her scream still pierced him like a frozen blade. “You mean she is possessed by a demon.” In his confusion he remembered the story of Christ driving demons from the man they rode into a herd of pigs, and at the same moment wondered if he’d damned himself to the same end by taking the sacrament unshriven. Over the cliff with the swine into the pit . . . Hair stood up on his neck and arms, but he felt the doctor touching his forearm and calming. He watched his wife, moving with a step unlike her own, addressing the congregants who swirled about her with a fierce authority.
“I would not say as much as that,” he heard the doctor saying. “It may be that they do not imagine angels and demons in the way that we do. I know that when one of their spirits descends, they don’t imagine it comes for ill.”
Some few days later, riding south to Gonaives, the doctor revisited the scene in his reflections