The Stone that the Builder Refused

by Madison Smartt Bell

  Zabeth clicked her tongue and Daspir, startled, met her eyes. Was it up to him to reach for her? She let out a husky laugh, then slipped out under the curtain, leaving him there. He heard the tap of the door closing. More distantly, Isabelle’s voice rose for a moment, the light, bright tone of her parlor chatter.

  Daspir looked about himself. This was no maid’s room, certainly. The furnishings were far too rich. The wall hangings were real silk, his fingertips verified. And then? His heart punched hard into his ribs and he drew a long breath to quiet it.

  With an odd feeling of stealth he undressed, a little hindered by his arousal, and stowed the roll of his clothing in the narrow space between the bed and the wall. The sheet was of an extraordinary cool smoothness when he slipped under it. What means it must have taken to create this luxury here—and how had it been done, so soon after the fire? Even under the sheet, Daspir felt an uneasy sense of exposure. Perhaps it would be better to put out the light.

  In the darkness, the whole extent of his day from dawn to darkness and on to this moment came rushing up at him. Despite his excitement, he was soon asleep.

  Dream covered him with the body of Paltre’s dying horse; the animal galloped over him with all its weight. Hot blood poured burning over his loins. He struggled and bucked upward, unable to free himself. The animal had the torso of an Amazon, with breasts larger and heavier than he had expected. They bore down on him with stone-hard points. Between the breasts was a man’s organ too, with the testicles, but small like a child’s. The discovery puzzled him; he hadn’t known it was like that. He burst awake into the crisis of their jouissance. She’d covered his mouth with her hand to muffle the noise he must have been making, but now she released it, and his panting breaths mingled with the rush of hers. She relaxed and let her weight settle meltingly over him.

  It was still pitch dark in the little room. Tentatively Daspir stroked a hand down the bumps of her spine and over the curved rise of her buttock. This was a woman, not a centaur. Isabelle gave a pleased little moan at his touch. Then she pushed up and rolled free of him. Daspir reached for her, a little too quickly, and gasped at the catch in his torn shoulder.

  “You are hurt,” Isabelle said.

  “It is nothing,” Daspir said, a little shy, though he knew his injury was worth a boast.

  “But you were valiant. I have heard the story. Here, let me.” The balls of her fingers found the sore spot at once: the size of a coin, expanding and dissipating as her touch circled outward. Daspir sighed. He was surprised at the strength of her hands. All the while her voice kept murmuring.

  “You were valiant in his defense, and yet the Captain-General is unkind to you—yes, I saw how he used you today, and I had the story from chère Pauline too. It is only his hurt vanity—it piques him worse than your shoulder pains you.”

  “Was it for that you—” Daspir began, but Isabelle shushed him.

  “Don’t ask for reasons,” she said.

  “From the first time I saw you, I—”

  “Don’t,” she said, and kissed him deeply. But there was something hard between her breasts; he could certainly feel it as she pressed against him. He worked up a hand and felt a flat shape of flesh-warmed metal.

  “What’s that?”

  “The key to this house—in its former state,” she said. Quick as a fish, her hand glimmered between his legs. “And now, I beg you—do stop talking.”

  When they had finished, Daspir fell into a deep, velvety, dreamless sleep, and when he woke, the charcoal sellers had begun to cry their wares in the streets beyond the walls. There was light now in the room, from a small window set high in the wall, filtered through a red cotton cloth. Isabelle was watching him with a neutral, cat-like concentration. As the tinted daylight grew it picked out elements of her aging: marks of childbirth around her belly, the breasts ever so slightly drooping, threadfine lines circling her neck and framing the corners of her mouth and eyes. A pattern printed in the cloth across the window repeated itself in shadows on her skin. All these details inspired in him an awful tenderness. Also, since most of his prior experience had been with busy harlots, he had seldom had such leisure to study a woman completely unclothed.

  “What do you see?” he asked, as she kept looking at him with an equal interest.

  “Your eyes,” Isabelle said reflectively. “Your eyes don’t fit your face.”

  “I don’t understand you,” Daspir said, faintly annoyed.

  “Look here,” she said and touched his cheek, then the groove of his upper lip, as if her fingertip might serve him as a mirror.

  “Your mouth, and all your features really, are merely sensual. Goodhumored enough, ready for pleasure, a little greedy, I should think.” She smiled. Masked in the projected shadows of the cloth, her face was for a moment a little frightening. “Except the eyes. The eyes are deeper, stronger. Maybe harsher too. It may be that I see some resolution there.”

  “Well, I don’t know—”

  “You mustn’t mind my fancy,” Isabelle said. “In the end, your face will grow into those eyes. Only give it time.”

  It seemed she saw some future in him. Pleased with that thought, Daspir let the topic drop. When she leaned in to kiss him lightly on the forehead, something swung out from between her breasts: the key he’d grasped earlier, yes, but something else too, dangling above the key. He caught it as she withdrew from him.

  “Careful,” Isabelle said sharply. “You’ll break the chain.”

  Daspir squinted, ignoring what she’d said. He liked the sensation of holding her near him by the force of her own reluctance to break away. His thumb and forefinger enclosed a small, hard gray stone penis, carved in such convincing detail that he let it go as if it had burned him.

  “Where the devil did you come by that?”

  “A souvenir,” Isabelle said distantly. Mercifully, she’d covered the pendant with her palm. “It does not concern you.”

  She dragged a chemise from the tangle of bedclothes and pulled it over her head and shoulders. Daspir admired the lift of her arms and the sharpness of her nipples against the fine silk. The pendants also made a bulge against the fabric, which reminded him of his first hallucinated awakening. He reached for her hip, but she pushed his hand away.

  “It’s too late,” she said. “You had better go.”

  “Of course,” Daspir said. “Your husband.” Though as he spoke it occurred to him that the man had not appeared in the salon the night before.

  Isabelle lifted a glass of water from beside the candle stub and looked at the disturbance of its surface. “That isn’t the question,” she told him. “My husband is dead.”

  35

  Astride his horse, the doctor could look over the wall that enclosed the courtyard of his sister’s house. From the carpet of ash that had been the garden, some greenery had begun to push itself up: broad leaves of bananes loup-garou, and a feather frond of the yellow cocotier, around which a couple of pale butterflies were floating in the humid air. A scorched limb of a tree that overhung the rear corner of the wall was also budding a few fragilely folded leaves. The house itself did not quite look habitable, though the roof had been retimbered, and stacks of pale rose clay tiles stood ready to be tiled over the new wood. Inside the shell of the building, a saw groaned slowly, then stopped with the sound of a falling plank. Michau stepped out into the courtyard, bare-chested and gleaming with sweat, and smiled up at the doctor, squinting in the afternoon sun.

  “Where are the ladies?” the doctor asked him.

  “They have been staying with Madame Cigny.” Michau knocked sawdust from his hands. “Here it is not yet ready—but soon.”

  “I’ll look for them there, then,” the doctor told him. He touched the brim of his hat and clucked to his horse.

  “But now they have gone to La Tortue,” Michau added.

  “Oh?” said the doctor. “And for how long?”

  Michau shrugged and looked away. “I don’t know.” He wiped at his
temples with a scrap of blue cloth. “They have been already gone some days. It was Madame Captain-General who invited them.”

  The doctor touched his hat again and turned his horse back into the street. Guizot fell in behind him. Maillart had ridden ahead; already he had turned the corner, doubtless bound for the Cigny house and the same disappointment.

  The doctor’s head swirled with fatigue, now that the expectancy that had carried him this far was deflated. He’d felt a little unhinged all day from his queer fainting spell the night before, though the swim at the Baie d’Acul had refreshed him for an hour. All through the day’s ride he’d felt that Moustique was studying him for some reason, but Moustique had detached himself from their group as soon as they entered the gate of Le Cap, and hurried toward Morne Calvaire to look for the women of his family.

  He met Maillart coming back along the street, on foot and leading his horse. Behind him the shadow of Zabeth withdrew into a doorway of the Cigny house.

  “They’re away,” the major said glumly. “Gone to La Tortue.”

  “So I’ve been told,” said the doctor. “Do you know their mission?”

  “To gather mushrooms and turtle eggs . . .” Maillart fanned himself with his hat. “I don’t know, really—it is some fancy of la belle Pauline, apparently. But even Xavier is gone—I find that strange.”

  “We’ll find ourselves beds here, at least,” said the doctor, clambering stiffly down from the saddle. “If all the rest of them have vacated.”

  “I don’t know,” said Maillart, centering his hat back on his head. “I may just go along and look in at the barracks. And you—” he glanced up at Guizot. “You’d better come along with me, to report.”

  Alone, the doctor watched them down the street. It was the first time Guizot had been separated from him since he’d begun treating the arrow wound, and even now the captain allowed himself a backward glance over his shoulder. The doctor knew he ought to get out of the sun. His horse had shoved itself up against the house wall, into the edge of shade the overhanging balcony provided. Certainly he ought to water and stable his horse, but something, perhaps only his lassitude, seemed to hold him where he was.

  A strange shimmer rose from the corner where the yellow sunlight spangled the white dust lying in the street. The doctor took off his glasses and began to clean them on his sweaty shirttail. Into the shimmer glided the figure of a tall woman with a water jar balanced on her head. Quickly he stuck his glasses back onto his nose. It was Nanon, much as she’d seemed when he’d first truly looked at her—her graceful gliding progress, the cage of a pet monkey steady on her head, when they’d chanced on each other in the Marché Clugny almost all of ten years ago. What had happened to that monkey? Destroyed in the first burning of Le Cap, most likely, or maybe it had managed to escape. It had always been a troublesome creature. But now, Nanon’s movement toward him was so abrupt that the water jar went flying from her, releasing a wave of bright water and painting a dark round stain on the dust.

  There was the sweet shock of their contact, flesh on flesh, wrapped silkily on bone. Again the doctor’s mind went reeling through his visions. “You were with me,” he mumbled into the cloth of her bodice. “All through the worst of it you were with me still.”

  Inside the house, the doctor and Nanon looked in for a moment on Gabriel and François where they slept. It was the hour of the afternoon siesta. Nanon invited him to rest, to bathe—Zabeth had retrieved the jar unbroken and gone to fetch more water. But the doctor wanted to see Paul, who had gone to Morne Calvaire. Together they walked in that direction, lightly swinging their linked hands.

  The church on the hilltop where the doctor and Nanon had been married had lost its roof to Christophe’s conflagration. A stick-and-thatch shelter had since been built against one of the smoke-stained walls, and in its shade sat Claudine Arnaud, still as a snake in her rusty black dress. Moustique’s little boy Dieufait pressed into her hip and lightly stroked her hands.

  “She did not go with the others to La Tortue?” said the doctor.

  Nanon shook her head, smiling as she looked away. “Such parties of pleasure are not to her taste.”

  It was always windy on the hilltop; the doctor reached to brush Nanon’s hair out of her face. He stumbled a little on the path, because he could not stop looking at her. Then he was almost knocked off his feet by Paul, who came charging out of the palm palisade of the Morne Calvaire lakou.

  “Moustique has come, and told me you were here,” Paul blurted. “He says you were at all the battle at La Crête à Pierrot.”

  The doctor held him at arm’s length by his shoulders. “So,” he said, teasing a little. “You didn’t want to visit La Tortue with Sophie and Robert?”

  “Oh yes, but we waited for you, Maman and I. Maman said she knew you were going to come.”

  The doctor tried to catch Nanon’s eye, but Paul was pulling him by the wrist into the enclosure of the lakou. Fontelle and Paulette and Marie-Noelle abandoned the laundry they had been peeling from the rocks to fold and came clustering around him. Even Maman Maig’ rolled her great bulk upright and smiled at him broadly, before she settled herself back down on her low stool.

  Moustique was unpacking a number of squat, cloth-covered clay jars and arranging them around the rainbow-striped central post. The doctor slipped out of the cluster of women and walked in that direction. Among the jars lay a shard of mirror which for a long time he had carried in his own pocket—he was interested to see that it was still there. Moustique was watching him again, with the same half-smile, his face half averted. There was still that faint electrical charge between them from the night before. As the doctor leaned in to look at the mirror, a shadow darkened it, and he felt an odd touch of foreboding.

  “A ship! A ship!” Little Dieufait came galloping down from the church, beckoned at large, and ran back up the hill. A gaggle of the smaller children of the lakou went after him full tilt. Paul followed at a somewhat more dignified trot. Nanon and the doctor walked after them.

  Claudine now stood at the brow of the hill, gauntly erect beside the three crude wooden crosses that had been restored to that spot after the fire. Her hair blew out behind her in the stiffening evening breeze. The cloud that had covered the sun blew clear of it, and light fell harshly on the whitecaps of the harbor. Among them L’Océan had dropped its anchor and the men were lowering the sails. Two longboats were rowing from ship to shore. The doctor reached for his spyglass and took a closer look: the dark woman’s head was Isabelle Cigny, and the fair one was his sister.

  “They’re back.” Absently he handed the glass to Paul. “Let us go down to greet them,” he said, half-reluctantly, for a touch of that queer premonition clung to him still.

  Daspir sat in the bow of the first longboat, facing the other passengers, enjoying the light salt spray on the back of his sunburned neck and covering Isabelle with a dazed smile of sexual satiety. This excursion had certainly been his happiest interlude since he first disembarked in Saint Domingue. Pauline, in collaboration with Isabelle no doubt, had been shielding him from Leclerc’s ill-treatment. The Captain-General, for whatever reason, had redirected his most unwelcome attentions to Paltre. It was Paltre, and sometimes Cyprien, who’d accompanied Leclerc and Xavier Tocquet in the search for sites for the hospital Leclerc meant to install there. Meanwhile, Daspir had been free to accompany the ladies, mushrooming, flower-gathering, and the like . . . and Isabelle had introduced him to more than one mossy and secluded bower.

  The boat knocked against a piling of the dock, and Daspir, startled from his revery, climbed out and secured the bowline. The second boat was still no more than halfway from ship to shore, since it had taken a long time for all of Pauline’s paraphernalia, with the lady herself, to be stowed in it. Daspir stooped and stretched down to help Elise up the ladder from the boat, then gave his arm to Isabelle. She swayed against him for a moment as she came up onto the dock, depending on his elbow, then let go and assumed her independent
balance. Her release was just sudden enough to perplex Daspir a little.

  Their arrival had attracted the usual assembly of small black children and waterfront idlers. Daspir picked out Doctor Hébert on the far side of the street, standing with the gorgeous mulattress Nanon. There too was Guizot, who raised his hand with a watery smile, and beside him Major Maillart, fingering the end of his mustache as he studied Isabelle with an interest that made Daspir slightly uneasy. The wind was twisting, raising dust and small specks of debris in spirals from the ground. As the red sun lowered toward the ridge of Morne du Cap, the wind hurried darkening clouds across it. Daspir had learned to feel the tension of this moment, when it would either rain or not. He felt his spirits lift and twist, without knowing which way they would blow.

  Paltre might have had something of the same perturbed sensation. “Ah, the good doctor,” he said, raising his hat with a queerly fixed grin. “I see you’re reunited with your whore.”

  The doctor seemed to wobble slightly as he rolled across the street toward them, like an egg wobbling when it rolls. He was a small and oddly shaped and unimposing figure, and yet he moved with a startling efficiency. A length of stove wood was in his rising hand, and Daspir had just time enough to register its splintered edge before it smashed full into Paltre’s face. Paltre reeled backward, arms whirling, and might have pitched into the harbor if Cyprien, just climbing up from the boat, had not broken his fall. Unstrung, Paltre collapsed against Cyprien’s legs. A woman had screamed—Elise—though more from irritation than fear, Daspir thought.

  “You are speaking of my wife,” the doctor said. The length of stove wood quivered in his hand. Xavier Tocquet pulled himself from the boat onto the dock and surveyed the scene, running his thumb along the edge of his lower lip. Daspir made a protective gesture toward Isabelle, but she had moved a step farther away from him and would not let him catch her eye. He looked at Nanon, standing alone on the opposite side of the street, head lowered as in meditation or prayer. Beside her was a stack of split wood and Daspir thought distractedly that it must be destined for shipboard stoves, since all cooking in the colony seemed to be done with charcoal.