by Tanith Lee
“You feel nothing for me,” said Jean. It was a boastful demand. Despite her look, he was certain by now that she loved him.
“Oh Jean,” she said.
“Then I’ll ask him tonight.”
“He will refuse you.”
Jean hesitated. He had not made his intentions obvious, but neither had they been opaque. Would Gentilissa’s father not have sounded some warning previously, if he were vehemently opposed?
“Allow me the attempt,” said Jean.
“I can’t. How can I? Papa has no objection to my holding court … that I should have admirers. But he expects me to marry a man of substance. Already there is someone in view.”
“That’s barbarous.”
“It’s how it is done here.”
“Nonsense. I –”
“Jean, you will grieve me.”
It was so shocking, this development, he could not credit it. He sought to take her hand. Gentilissa would not permit this.
“I love you,” he said. “I think you care for me.”
“I may not answer.”
“Your eyes answer.” This was a lie. Her eyes were blank. She said nothing, either. But he had all the evidence of several weeks, when every sigh and tremor and sideways look had concocted meaning. “Gentilissa, in a year or so I might be a rich man. It’s been said to me, promised.”
“Dearest Jean,” said Gentilissa. Her breast rose with delirious softness as she drew in her breath. “I can’t go against Papa. He means me to marry a man from another island. There’s nothing I can do. I never guessed the strength of your feeling. I thought you amused yourself with me.”
Jean swore by God. Gentilissa averted her head. She said, very low, “You must leave me now. We must never see each other again, until after I am married.”
Jean sprang to his feet, but already Gentilissa was moving lightly away, like a piece of white cotton down. And summoned uncannily without a cry, the servant woman, Tibelle, was slinking toward them.
In a rage of powerlessness and disbelief, Jean stood in the Ferrier garden until the black woman and the white had disappeared together beyond the mango trees.
There is another name for the Religion of the Night among the islands. They term it Nightmare Magic. Once you have ever been touched by it, there is no getting free. To the devotee that is no problem. To the outsider, whom the gods, however obliquely and remotely, have ridden, the Religion is fever. It may lie dormant ten years. But it is not to be escaped from, in the end. They tell you, have nothing to do with it. But sometimes wanting is enough to bring it down, like a cloud from the mountain. No sooner did Jean run into the apartment of his aunt with the branch of their hate in blossom, no sooner did he set sail, than he called the Devil, and the Devil started forth. Before he left the ship, the first night, the entity had shown itself. It was too late. Death brought Jean de St. Jean to the Island, and cheated him and bargained with him and claimed him. There is not a boulder or a leaf there without some life in it, or something of death in it. It was not only the forests or the human skin of Haïssa that earned it the adjective Black.
For a month, Jean dwelled in a condition of misery and fury that was almost lunatic. Initially, he did his best to go about his affairs of business and existence otherwise as before. But that was impossible. His heart had been cut out. He was in constant agony and barely alive. Sometimes he would lose himself in awful daydreams, riding to the house and confronting Monsieur Ferrier, bursting in upon her wedding and shooting down the groom. At other, worse times, he visualized his own life stretching to infinity bereft of Gentilissa. It seemed to him his pain would never cease. If he got drunk it might abate for half an hour, only to return with redoubled ferocity. Sober, he was like a man beneath a ton weight, he could hardly raise his head.
He was thought to be ill. He was treated with sympathy, next with concern, ultimately with impatience. This was not the obliging, efficient Jean they knew.
At night he would sit in his rooms and look at his money saved for the homeward voyage. It was like the coinage of oblivion. To go away was out of the question. To remain was not to be endured.
That he also thought of killing himself is conceivable, but it was a symptom rather than an intent.
Then one afternoon there came to his office, where he was sitting in rapt dejection, a letter. He knew at once that it was from her. Tearing it open he read: I can bear our separation no longer. If you still love me and will dare the consequences, be this evening just after sunset by the statue of the slave. Tibelle will bring you to me.
The effect upon Jean, after his unhappiness, was galvanic, almost injurious. He shook, went white, laughed aloud once or twice, and generally furthered the prevailing opinion among his colleagues that he was not long to be among them.
The letter he did not let go of, and leaving his post early, he rushed to his rooms to prepare himself for this clandestine and romantic assignation. He had not a single qualm, although he did think her a trifle foolish, and very endearing, to trust him so much. Surely she loved him, and through the blessing of that, everything else could be made to come right.
The statue of the slave, a rough and ready work attempted in the classical mode, stood near a crossroad and a market. They were unfamiliar to Jean, although he found the statue easily enough. He had arrived before time, and watched the sun go down behind the towers of a pair of churches, and then the darkness came, and he beheld the fires burning in the market, and the ragged awnings, and the chicken corpses along the carts, and smelled the overripeness of the gourds, and heard the chattering of the black men and women who idled there. An unpleasant memory wakened in Jean. Before he had satisfactorily thrust it off, he saw the woman Tibelle coming across the street. Her hair was tied up in a cream kerchief as always, and on her ebony stick of wrist the bracelet dripped like water. She walked right up to him, and scrutinized his face. To be sure of me, for her mistress’ sake, Jean thought to himself, but he was not easy with her look for all that.
“Now you come with Tibelle.”
“Where?”
“Tibelle take you.”
“Where are we going?”
“You come, you see.”
Jean shrugged. He no longer felt as he had done, elated, slightly drunk, a little afraid. Now there was something heavy again, something pressing down on him. As he went after the servant woman, his entrails were cold and his heart beat in hard leaden strokes. His father might have told him, these are the sensations of a man en route to the gallows.
Up behind the market the streets rose and then there began to be the wide avenues where the fine old houses had been built, the houses of broken sugar under the poured molasses of the vines.
And then they were on a stretch that could have been Oleander Road, or Mango Tree Ride, or one of those other flowery, fruiting tracks that led into the forest and the hills. And then they came over a stony slope showing the sea in a net of trees, and there was a cemetery before them, a graveyard.
Jean stopped, and in front of him his guide halted and turned to look at him again.
“Where you think she can meet with you,” said Tibelle contemptuously, “in the hotel?”
“But here –”
“Here is safe,” said Tibelle. “What you got to worry?”
And she went on again, in at the gate with a sort of stumble that might have been an obeisance, and between the graves.
Jean followed her. There was perhaps no going back. The night was all around, and the hills of Haïssa. It was too late to fly.
He noticed as he got down the ridged path behind her that things were hanging out on many of the headstones, like curious washing. There were bunches of feathers, and beads, and garlands of paper flowers, with here and there a rosary, a mask on a string with staring eyeless eyes, bones and bells that clinked and rang sometimes as the night breeze twisted at them. There was a feeling of immensity and congestion, everything too close and the night outside vast as all space where hung the bell
s and bones and stars inaudibly clinking and fluttering in the breath of the gods.
Jean began to cough a little, something that had not happened since he was a child, it was a sign of nerves.
Tibelle said, “Hush, hush, here you are.”
And there was a shack or hut before them under a stunted palm, in the middle of the death-place.
Tibelle went aside, as she had been used to before, as if to smoke her pipe, and Jean was left by the hut in the darkness. He knew quite well that all there was to do was to push the door. He knew, and it no longer mattered. The interval of a year had evaporated, and its pleasures and agonies with it. Therefore, without hesitation finally, he opened the door and walked into the hut.
He was half surprised. For Gentilissa was sitting there before him, on a small chair, with her hands folded in her lap.
“Jean,” she said.
Her eyes were large and luminous. He had always been struck by some quality in them, an effect he had taken for purity or innocence. But it was a sort of vacuity really, he could see as much now, a sort of vacancy, and when she had been with him and seemed to shine, it was because her eyes reflected him, he filled up the emptiness. It had made her attractive, like a flattering mirror.
“Jean?” she said again, now in a questioning tone.
She was wearing black. That was arresting, for Tibelle the black woman had worn white. Gentilissa in black was changed. her face was like a moon, a mask.
“Oh, Jean,” she said.
And outside, the drums started, as he had heard them countless times from the hills, throbbing and rattling, for some festivity or dance. the little drum and the drum of the second and the mother Drum who roared in the earth.
Gentilissa came to her feet. She stamped lightly and tossed her head and her hair flew out, the heavy ringlets. Her eyes were flat as windowpanes. Then he began to see that something moved behind them.
Gentilissa laughed and gave herself. Her face slackened and became an idiot’s. Her eyes rolled. She seemed about to fall. But something caught her and held her. Her head turned on her neck and moved around again to confront him. Behind the mask of her face, another was there, that Jean recalled. It was at the same time black and white. Whether the black lay under the white or the black was fleshed out upon the white he could not be sure. But in the eyes there was no mistaking it, the night being, the lord who had come to ride his mare, and to claim the bargain price.
Gentilissa’s mouth gaped open. Out of it boomed the note of a deep bass bell. “I here. You know me,” she said, in the voice of a giant man taller than the treetops, older than the Island, with the sea for blood and the bones of all the Island’s dead in a necklace at his throat. “Know me,” said Death. And Jean knew him, knew him. Knew him.
They said he died of a fever in Haïssa Town, having been sick for some while. The Island is noted for its seasonal fevers. They said it was a shame he died so young, the same age as his father, indeed, and far from home. You may come across the grave in a shady corner of the Christian Cemetery near Oleander Road. There is no inscription beyond his name, Jean de St. Jean. Though sometimes flowers may be left there, by girls in colored scarves who walk like cats and smile, blackened by the sun to the darkness of night, Negré girls, who cannot, probably, have known him.
* * *
This grave is modest, here in the cemetery of Paradys. Easy to overlook it, but we shall not.
Weeds grow, unpruned, there are no floral tributes.
The name: Julie d’Is.
Beautiful Lady
Sugar and spice
And all things nice.
– Traditional
Chorgeh said, leaning a little over the balustrade, “How does she merit the name? I wouldn’t think her even somewhat stylish. Her hair scraped back under that worm of a hat, her gloves darned. Her figure is all right; her face is nothing, only sallow. Her eyes – Well, they seem a little unusual, tilted, like an Oriental’s. Is that the clue?”
“Not at all,” said Chorgeh’s informant. The two men (Chorgeh young and dangerous-looking in his fashionable coat, the elder conservative and restrained, yet tapping a new-fangled cigarette on a silver box) stared a moment over the gallery at the woman passing underneath along the arcade. “No, it’s nothing about her appearance. Put it in the Roman tongue. Have you never heard of deadly nightshade?”
“Poison,” said Chorgeh, abruptly smiling, pleased and satisfied. “I see.”
Below, the woman had paused to glance into one of the tiny, dainty shops. It was true, she looked poor, shabby, and neglected, by others and herself. Close to, her face would be unpowdered, her nails too short, her hair carelessly combed and stuffed into a small bun, unbecoming and resentful.
“Other than Bella Donna, her name is Julie d’Is.”
“You know this for a fact.”
“Oh, I know all about her. I make it my business to know such things.”
“You romancer,” said Chorgeh. The man was his uncle, inasmuch as he had once been Chorgeh’s mother’s lover, and remained her friend. The man was also a writer of some eminence. His stories were always interesting, and sometimes real, but Chorgeh felt free to insult him, since he was one of the few persons Chorgeh genuinely respected. The “uncle” smoked his cigarette, and Julie d’Is, the Beautiful Lady, gazed in at delicate eggs of enamel and wonderful chocolates in the shape of flowers. Her face was like a snake’s now, without expression. Clearly, she regarded such items as having nothing to do with her, she only watched their strangeness, perhaps to see if they would provide prey.
“She does look,” said Chorgeh, “a remarkably horrible woman.”
“Be well advised. Keep far away from her. No, I’m not joking. A distance of ten feet was reckoned barely sufficient.”
“Then she is a poisoner.”
“Aside from Bella Donna, she was called the Angel of Pestilence.”
“But not any longer?”
“Now she’s avoided. She lives in a tiny apartment near the Temple-Church. No one visits. She calls upon no one.”
“Look, she’s moving on. Shall we follow her?”
“If you like,” said Chorgeh’s “uncle.” “But I warn you, if she turns, we retreat.”
They descended from the gallery, and moved after their quarry through a light, pushing, frivolous crowd. It was a bright winter day. There was hard sparkle on everything, and now and then the wind attacked from corners, the columns below libraries, and wolflike down long steps, mutter-howling under its breath. The sunshine insisted that they be pleased by it, but it blinded them at every white wall and pane of glass. The people on the street, not knowing about the story, brushed by Julie d’Is, almost collided with her.
“There she goes,” said Chorgeh, “into a pastry shop after all. Does she eat pastry?”
“I expect so,” said the “uncle.” He lit another cigarette, the case a plaque of cold fire. “There were times when she was invited to dinners. She ate and drank like everyone else. Rather greedily in fact.”
“Were you ever present?”
“Thankfully, no. There was only one occasion … I had been warned, and so declined. That was when I heard the story first, four years ago. When you, dear boy, were only thirteen.”
“The worst years of my life. Tell me about Julie d’Is.”
The “uncle” began his tale in a manner quite unlike his means employed when writing. Chorgeh knew that the story, if it had been or were to be translated into printable prose, would gain ornament, elongation, and proper suspense. But as a raconteur, the writer was quite brisk, almost abbreviated. Mentally Chorgeh was not above adding a brushstroke here and there.
The parents of Julie d’Is had come from the colonies of the East, some place of fans and ivories, rice, camels, bazaars, and flying carpets. They had been disgraced, the family, or simply the father, in some gambling or speculating of a nature that was kept obscure in the City – the odd codes and loyalties of the returned colonists, who would cut Monsie
ur d’Is, yet not betray him to outsiders. The d’Is child was female, and two years old, a weak infant mewling and puking in the tradition of weakly infants. The climate had seen to her as foolish villainy had her father; both were undone. Yet she continued, weakly, to persist, like a wan plant that straggles on, refusing to die and give up its pot to a nicer specimen. And certainly there were no other children. Shortly there began to be an exotic rumor, which was that the family had fallen afoul of a sorcerer in the Eastern lands. That just so the father lost his work and his name, and so the mother produced, from the huge burden of her womb, only the one ailing weed. Since no one spoke to the family d’Is, however, no one could verify the rumor.
Monsieur d’Is toiled as a clerk in a seedy business near the docks. Madame did her best. And the miserable daughter went on with a grisly graceless tenaciousness redolent not of courage or hope but of a dripping tap.
It was when the child, Julie, was six years old, that the tide turned for them all. They were, if not forgiven, at least forgotten. That is to say, suddenly people came upon them, exclaiming that they were the persons d’Is, and what were they doing now and how did they go on? Such reversals of attitude were not uncommon in the bored City. It was less an act of charity than a desire to see, squirming and doing tricks under the microscope, suitable microbes.
Madame d’Is began to appear in sewing circles, at afternoon teas, her husband and she played cards and dined at this house and that once or twice in a pair of months. They were hardly overwhelmed, but no longer were they excluded. Presently the child, too, perhaps perforce and in a moment of aberration, was absorbed into a children’s party.
She was not, after all, such a horrid creature. She did not cringe or seek to intimidate, often the failings of the weak. No, she went along with the little-girl games, was a modest pleased recipient of favor or victory, good at losing, quiet, but with a spark. “That child,” they said, “might look almost pretty, if her mother would wash her hair in softer soap, and dress her more like a child than a parcel.”
