The Saint on the Spanish Main (32 page)

He found plenty of material to study—so
much, in
fact, that instead of being frustrated by a paucity of
information he was almost discouraged by its abundance.
He had
assumed, like any average man, that voodoo was
a primitive cult that
would have a correspondingly
simple theology and ritual: he soon discovered
that it
was astonishingly complex and formalized. Obviously
he wasn’t
going to master it all in one short day’s study.
However, that wasn’t
necessarily the objective. He
didn’t have to write a thesis on it, or even
pass an ex
amination. He was only looking for something, any
thing,
that would give him a clue to what Theron
Netlord was seeking.

He browsed through books until one o’clock, went
out to lunch, and returned to read some more. The
trou
ble was that he didn’t know
what he was looking for. All he could do was expose himself to as many ideas as
pos
sible, and hope that the same
one would catch his atten
tion as
must have caught Netlord’s.

And when the answer did strike him, it was so
far-fetched
and monstrous that he could not believe he
was on the right
track. He thought it would make an
interesting plot for a story, but he
could not accept it for
himself. He felt an exasperating lack of
accomplishment
with
the library closed for the day and he had to drive back up again to Kenscoff.

He headed straight for the bar of the Ch
â
telet des
Fleurs and the long
relaxing drink that he had looked
forward to all the way up. The waiter who was on duty
brought him a note with it.

Dear Mr.
Templar,

I’m sorry your visit yesterday had to be so
short. If it
wouldn’t bore you too much, I should enjoy another meeting.
Could you come to dinner tonight? Just send word by
the
bearer.

Sincerely,

Theron Netlord

Simon glanced up.

“Is someone still waiting for an
answer?”
“Yes, sir. Outside.”

The Saint pulled out his pen and scribbled at
the foot
of the note:

Thanks. I’ll be with you about 7.

S.T.

He decided, practically in the same instant in
which
the irresponsible impulse occurred to him, against sign
ing himself
with the little haloed stick figure which he had made famous. As he handed the
note back to the
waiter he reflected that, in the circumstances, his mere
acceptance
was bravado enough.

4

There were drums beating somewhere in the
hills, faint and far-off, calling and answering each other from different
directions, their sound wandering and echoing through the night so that it was
impossible ever to be
certain just where a particular tattoo had
come from. It
reached inside Netlord’s house as a kind of vague vibra
tion, like
the endless thin chorus of nocturnal insects,
which was so
persistent that the ear learned to filter it out and for long stretches would
be quite deaf to it, and
then, in a lull in the conversation, with an
infinitesimal
returning of attention, it would come back in a startling
crescendo.
 

Theron Netlord caught the Saint listening at
one of
those moments, and said: “They’re having a
br
û
ler zin
tonight.”

“What’s that?”

“The big voodoo festive ceremony which
climaxes
most of the special rites. Dancing, litanies,
invocation, possession by
loas,
more dances, sacrifice, more invocations
and possessions, more dancing. It won’t begin until much later. Right now
they’re just telling each other
about it, warming up and getting in the
mood.”

Simon had been there for more than an hour,
and this
was the first time there had been any mention of
voodoo.

Netlord had made himself a good if somewhat
overpowering host. He mixed excellent rum cocktails,
but without offering his guest the choice
of anything
else. He made stimulating
conversation, salted with re
current
gibes at bureaucratic government and the
Welfare State, but he held the floor so energetically that
it was almost impossible to take advantage of the
provocative openings he offered.

Simon had not seen Sibao again. Netlord had
opened the door himself, and the cocktail makings were already
on a side
table in the living room. There had been sub
dued rustlings and
clinkings behind a screen that almost
closed a dark alcove at the far end
of the room, but no
servant announced dinner: presently Netlord had announced
it himself, and led the way around the screen
and switched on a
light, revealing a damask-covered
table set for two and burdened
additionally with chafing
dishes, from which he himself served rice,
asparagus,
and a savory chicken stew rather like
coq au vin.
It
was during one of the dialogue breaks induced by eating that
Netlord had caught Simon
listening to the drums.

“Br
û
ler
—that means
‘burn,’ ” said the Saint. “But
what is
zin?”

“The zin
is a special
earthenware pot. It stands on a
tripod, and a fire is lighted under it. The
mambo
kills a sacrificial chicken by sticking her finger down into its
mouth and
tearing its throat open.” Netlord took a
hearty mouthful of
stew. “She sprinkles blood and
feathers in various places, and the
plucked hens go into
the pot with some corn. There’s a chant:

“Hounsis l
à
yo, levez, nous domi trope;

Hounsis l
à
yo, levez, pour nous laver yeux nous:

Gad
é
qui l’heu li y
é
.

Later on she serves the boiling food right
into the bare
hands of the
hounsis.
Sometimes they put their
bare feet
in the flames too. It doesn’t hurt them. The pots are
left
on the fire till they get red hot and crack, and everyone
shouts
‘Zin
yo craqu
é
s!’ “

“It sounds like a big moment,” said
the Saint gravely.
“If I could understand half of it.”

“You mean you didn’t get very far with your re
searches today?”

Simon felt the involuntary contraction of his
stomach
muscles, but he was able to control his hands so that
there was
no check in the smooth flow of what he was
doing.

“How did you know about my
researches?” he asked,
as if he were only amused to have them
mentioned.

“I dropped in to see Atherton Lee this
morning, and asked after you. He told me where you’d gone. He said he’d told
you about my interest in voodoo, and he sup
posed you were
getting primed for an argument. I must
admit, that
encouraged me to hope you’d accept my in
vitation
tonight.”

The Saint thought that that might well
qualify among
the great understatements of the decade, but he did not
let
himself show it. After their first reflex leap his pulses
ran like
cool clockwork.

“I didn’t find out too much,” he
said, “except that
voodoo is a lot more complicated than I
imagined. I
thought it was just a few primitive superstitions that
the
slaves brought
with them from Africa.”

“Of course, some of it came from Dahomey.
But how
did it get there? The voodoo story of the Creation ties up
with the
myths of ancient Egypt. The Basin of Damballah
—that’s a sort of
font at the foot of a voodoo alter
—is obviously related to the blood
trough at the foot of
a Mayan altar. Their magic uses the
Pentacle—the same
mystic figure that medieval European magicians be
lieved in.
If you know anything about it, you can find
links with
eighteenth-century Masonry in some of their
rituals, and even
the design of the
v
ê
vers——
”

“Those are the sacred drawings that are
supposed to summon the gods to take possession of their devotees,
aren’t
they? I read about them.”

“Yes, when the
houngan
draws them
by dripping
ashes and corn meal from his fingers, with the proper
invocation.
And doesn’t that remind you of the sacred
sand paintings of
the Navajos? Do you see how all those
roots must go back to a common source
that’s older
than
any written history?”

Netlord stared at the Saint challengingly,
in one of those rare pauses where he waited for an answer.

Simon’s fingertips touched the hard shape of
the little
tin plaque that was still in his shirt pocket, but he decided
against showing it, and again he checked the bet.

“I saw a drawing of the
v
ê
ver
of Erzulie in a book,” he
said.
“Somehow, it made me think of Catholic symbols
connected with the
Virgin Mary—with the heart, the
stars, and the ‘M’ over it.”

“Why not? Voodoo is pantheistic. The Church is
against voodoo, not voodoo against the Church.
Part of
the purification prescribed
for anyone who’s being in
itiated as
a
hounsis-canzo
is to go to church and make
confession. Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary are
re
garded as powerful intermediaries
to the highest gods.
Part of the
litany they’ll chant tonight at the
br
û
ler
zin
goes:
Gr
â
ce, Marie, gr
â
ce,
Marie gr
â
ce, gr
â
ce, Marie gr
â
ce, J
é
sus, pardonnez-nous!”

“Seriously?”

“The invocation of Legbas Atibon calls
on St. An
thony of Padua:
Par pouvoir St.-Antoine de Padoue.
And
take the invocation of my own patron, Ogoun Feraille. It begins:
Par
pouvoir St.-Jacques Majeur…”

“Isn’t that blasphemy?” said the
Saint. “I mean, a
kind of deliberate sacrilege, like they’re
supposed to use
in a Black Mass, to win the favor of devils by defiling
something
holy?”

Netlord’s fist crashed on the table like a
thunderclap.

“No, it isn’t! The truth can’t be
blasphemous. Sacri
lege is a sin invented by bigots to try to keep God under
contract to their own exclusive club. As if supernatural
facts
could be altered by human name-calling! There are
a hundred sects all
claiming to be the only true Christianity, and Christianity is only one of
thousands of re
ligions, all claiming to have the only genuine divine
rev
elation. But the real truth is bigger than any one of them
and includes them all!”

“I’m sorry,” said the Saint.
“I forgot that you were a
convert.”

“Lee told you that, of course. I don’t
deny it.” The
metallic gray eyes probed the Saint like knives. “I
sup
pose you think I’m crazy.”

“I’d rather say I was puzzled.”

“Because you wouldn’t expect a man like
me to have
any time for mysticism.”

“Maybe.”

Netlord poured some more wine.

“That’s where you show your own
limitations. The
whole trouble with Western civilization is that it’s
blind
in one eye. It doesn’t believe in anything that can’t be
weighed
and measured or reduced to a mathematical or chemical formula. It thinks it
knows all the answers because it invented airplanes and television and
hydrogen bombs. It thinks other cultures were backward because
they
fooled around with levitation and telepathy and
raising the dead
instead of killing the living. Well, some
mighty clever people
were living in Asia and Africa and
Central America, thousands of years
before Europeans
crawled out of their caves. What makes you so sure that
they
didn’t discover things that you don’t understand?”