Thus far
in my writings I’ve been conspicuously silent on the subject of my beloved
town, Arivonimamo. In the beginning I
listed a few of the essential statistics and peppered my writing with anecdotes
from around town, but I’ve tended to focus on topics other than the daily deeds
in the town of a thousand drunks (literal translation of Arivonimamo). Yet, in
the past few weeks there has been an intruder amongst us in Arivonimamo causing
quite the kerfuffle. Arivonimamo is now besieged by a menace so insidious,
ghoulish, so outlandish, that the
story must be told.
I first
caught wind of our new interloper when the group of children who normally bumble
around outside my house came knocking franticly at my door, ostensibly with some
very urgent news. I ushered them inside, they hustled up my stairs and, once
the door was securely locked behind them, launched exasperatedly into the tale
of Arivonimamo’s Antandroy ghost serpent.
To
paraphrase: A few days before someone had discovered a giant snake here in
Arivonimamo. Now, this was no ordinary snake according to the girls, oh no. This
snake, they told me, was six meters long (roughly 18 feet) and had a head the
size of an ox cart. What’s more, this
snake was currently living down on the soccer field, located a couple hundred
yards from my house, and the word on the street was that the night before he
had eaten a drunkard and left only his head down on the field.
Now I
was incredulous at first, of course. I’m very much a ‘see it to believe it’
type of guy and mythic serpentine monsters have yet to cross my field of
vision. I played along with the children
though and decided to ply what information I could from them.
Allegedly
the local police force (Gendarme) had bravely ventured down to the soccer pitch
the day before only to come face-to-face with the slithery terror. The intrepid
foot soldiers engaged the creature, guns a-blazin’ yet tragically, and
bafflingly, came up empty handed.
I then
pushed the children on where on earth this serpent may have come from, and what
in the name of all that is holy, Arivonimamo could have done to bring this
fresh hell down upon ourselves. To that they gave me two seemingly incongruent stories,
which only thickened the plot.
The
first explanation was that an old vazah (white person), who lived up on a hill
outside of town, was raising this snake as a pet. The vazah supposedly skipped town a few years
back but must have forgotten to fortify his serpent pens because one of the
little buggers escaped and ate what I can only assume was a dozen cows to grow
himself into the monstrosity terrorizing my soccer field.
Here’s
where it gets weirder. The other story begins with an Atandroy man (one of the
18 ethnic groups of Madagascar), who had been living and working for a number
of years in Arivonimamo. When this man suddenly died, he was laid to rest in
one of the tombs on the high ridge to the Southeast of town. Sometime during
the night, this Atandroy fellow broke free of his Merina burial shrouds (ethnic
group in my area) and turned into a giant snake. The snake busted out of the
tomb, but not before devouring a few of the other bodies around him. Sometime
that night he must have slithered his way down to the soccer field where he was
residing at the time the children told me the story.
My
favorite part is that when the kids told me about the man turning into a snake
they must have noticed a hint of doubt in my expression, because they gave me
the, ‘Eric you’re so dumb,’ look that I’ve come to know so well. Apparently
it’s common knowledge here that whenever an Atandroy person dies, they turn into
an animal. I’m always the last to know I guess.
So it
could be either story. We’ll never know.
Anyway,
I assumed that an active imagination had gotten the best of the children and I
decided to investigate. Astonishingly, as I roamed the streets of town that
morning, asking people to tell me what they’d heard about the newest resident
of Arivonimamo, every single person I talked to knew about it. Every. Single. Person.
The
Gendarme shoot-out: most people had heard about that. The vazah with the pet
snake: very plausible most people thought. The Atandroy thing: Oh duh Eric, of
course, it’s definitely an Atandroy guy turned serpent, that makes sense.
I did
get a lot of variation on the story from different sources. Some people
disputed the size, saying it was only a meter or so long. I later checked with
the Gendarme who told me that they didn’t know anything about the shoot-out but
that they had heard of the snake and heard it had moved down the hill where
someone saw it drinking water. I even met a few people, notably younger
individuals from the capital, who told me they had a hard time believing the
story.
Nonetheless,
I was advised not, nay forbidden, to head down to the soccer field by my neighbors
and all the little kids that I basically run a day-care for here in
Arivonimamo.
I did
anyway though and low and behold, no 20 foot snake. After coming back from a
run down at the field I stopped over at my neighbors to tell them I’d been down
looking for the serpent but couldn’t find him.
‘That’s
because he’s part ghost. When he sees you he can choose to hide and then strike
when you’re not expecting it.’ They explained to me.
I was
then informed that there is a very good possibility that this ghoulish creature
can also take human form and may now be walking amongst us in the streets. At
this point one of the ladies who was sitting and having coffee with us rolled
her eyes and exclaimed how the whole thing had been blown out of proportion and
how this kind of gossip is so typical of Arivonimamo:
‘If we
had grasshoppers come into town by the time they got here, they’d be dogs, and
by the time they made it to the bottom of the hill, they’d be people.’
My
friend James stopped into Arivonimamo around the time this was all going on and
over lunch, while we were contemplating taking my Tsimahety sword (another
ethnic group) down the field to hunt snake, we came across an article in one of
the national newspapers that we had bought to read:
‘Arivonimamo:
Bibilava hafahafa hoe? Toy ny olona ny lohany,’ meaning, ‘Arivonimamo: A
strange snake? His head is like a human.’
So thanks to the hard hitting journalism of
‘Gazetiko’ I found another piece of the puzzle. Supposedly the snake has a
human head. The article did mention that
there were a number of rumors flying around town and nobody seemed to know the
true story.
Unfortunately,
there isn’t some dramatic climax to this story. Somehow the snake never re-surfaced,
Arivonimamo wasn’t stormed by hordes of zoologists looking to document a new
species of man-snake, and the buzz around town seemed to fizzle out. A week or
so ago a little shop owner across the street told me that a Gendarme officer
had stopped by his store and mentioned that the Gendarme had seen a few-foot
long, harmless snake somewhere in the rice fields outside of town and decided
not to bother with it. So at this point it’s beginning to feel as if
Arivonimamo is finally safe from the Atandroy ghost serpent.
But then
again, who knows, maybe he’s still walking among us.
Until
next time,
Veloma.
