The Great Escape

Like memory itself, the more we learn of the phenomenon from Martinique, Patrick Chamoiseau, the deeper are we drawn to dig in the treasure pit of time. In the last two years, four of Chamoiseau’s books of memoirs and stories have been reconstructed into English from their original melange of French and Creole, beginning with his 1992 novel “Texaco.”

Now, with the appearance of his first novel, the 1986 “Chronicle of Seven Sorrows,” Chamoiseau presents us with a gift--the key to the treasure of his secret. At the end of his tale of the lost Central Market of Fort-de-France and its lost porters (known as djobbers in a language that borrows from English when the music suits the meaning), there is an article from the newspaper France-Antilles. “City Hall has decided,” the opening sentence proclaims, “although the historical value of the central market on Rue Saint-Louis might have argued the case for renovation, the building will be completely reconstructed instead.” The argument is reasonable to an engineer: The original metal has decayed to such an extent that only magic can save it.

Which is precisely what “Chronicle of Seven Sorrows” does. Renovation, not reconstruction, is Chamoiseau’s project. Using only the tools of language, memory and invention, Chamoiseau creates a past as magical and political as anything in the library of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or William Faulkner. His goal is neither remembrance nor recherche of time past, but a la renovation du temps perdu.

Chamoiseau threads a marketful of tales through the pipes of the djobbers, the lowest rung-sitters on the market ladder, the men who, “just when a vendor’s baskets became too heavy for her . . . appeared, at first to lend a friendly hand, later to help out every day in exchange for a little something at the end of the afternoon.”

The king of their clan is the master djobber known universally as Pipi, the son of the virgin Heloise and the gravedigger, Anatole-Anatole, a man who was able to take on the form of a dorlis: “People get lost in conjecture trying to figure out if he used the technique of the toad hidden beneath the bed, the one of the ant that slips through keyholes, or the one of three-steps-forward-three-steps-back that lets you walk through walls. The fact remains that on the evening in question, he found himself in Heloise’s bedroom despite all locks and barricades.”

From his miraculous birth, Pipi navigates his djobber wheelbarrow through an unrequited love for the beautiful echappee-coulie, Anastase, to a welcoming bed in the shack of the fertile Marguerite Jupiter. At first, Pipi shows the mark of the champion, beating all his fellow djobbers in a race to retrieve and deliver a 200-pound yam. But as he gets older, as Martinique weathers World War II and supermarkets start to prey on the Central Market of Fort-de-France, Pipi falls under the spell of the modern world-greed.

Led by the old tales of a buried treasure guarded by the ghost of a murdered slave named Afoukal, Pipi begins to dream. In those dreams, Afoukal vouchsafes to him secrets to the mysteries of the treasure, secrets that waking unravels until he can dream again. It is only the hunger of Marguerite Jupiter’s 16 boys that shakes him out of his reverie. Running off to the woods, Pipi communes with the Rastas who speak to plants and know the secrets of agriculture. On his return, Pipi grows a miraculous crop that not only feeds the 16 boys but sells at such a low price that it saves the vendors and djobbers and drives the French supermarkets to distraction. “He had proved, people trumpeted, that independence was a viable option. France-Antilles published his photo in that choice slot usually reserved for rapists and murderers.” And then the economists and agronomists invade Pipi’s Eden, and Pipi is undone by a dark Eve, a woman who may be no more real than his dreams.

The irresistible rise and fall of Pipi echoes the fortunes of the Central Market and its chorus djobbers. But with a final coup of the renovator’s pen, Chamoiseau memorializes his chorus in a poem:

Djobbing was

Desperately perfecting

The indispensable creation

Of the wheelbarrow

Every vendor had her regular djobber

The djob was a mark above all

Of preference

And the delicate pepper sauces of feeling

Djobbing was then

The last rampart of the down and out.