It occurred to Doctor Hébert that he had not yet kissed his bride. If not for her solid weight balancing his own and the warm touch of her hand in the crook of his elbow, he might have drifted away among the shades surrounding him. But he was happy now, and grateful, glad to be alive. He turned to her, and loosened the veil from the pins in her hair, and began to raise it from her face. As she lifted her face toward him, there was a sigh from their friends who were watching, and the wind caught the veil and tugged it free, light, airy, floating from the crown of the hill above the red roofs of the town.
Fort de Joux, France September 1802
“You are unwell,” Toussaint observed.
Caffarelli, who sat diagonally across the table from him, removed his handkerchief from his nostril to reply. Toussaint had placed himself with his back to the fire. Caffarelli was farther from the meager heat, nearer to that raw stone wall with its constant, dreary seepage.
“It is nothing,” he said, honking slightly. “A cold.”
“Take care lest it become more serious.” Toussaint smiled. “You must take every care.”
An unfolding movement of his hand seemed to indicate for Caffarelli’s benefit all of the frosty, insalubrious conditions beyond the walls, surrounding the mountaintop and the Fort de Joux. To be patronized so, by the prisoner! It was outrageous. Caffarelli blew his nose, delicately, for his nostrils were chafed, and folded the handkerchief into his pocket.
“Oh,” he said casually. “Once I have returned to the lowlands, I shall recover easily enough.”
Toussaint said nothing.
“It is still warm there, below these heights,” Caffarelli said. “You understand, it is only autumn, and a mild one too, once one has left these mountaintops.” As you can never hope to do, he added with a silent smirk.
“Allow me to wish you a safe and pleasant journey,” Toussaint said.
An unpleasant pressure spread beneath Caffarelli’s cheekbones, behind his eyes and the bones of his forehead. He sniffed, swallowed the disagreeable slime.
“I shall not see you again, General,” he said.
“No,” Toussaint agreed. “I regret the loss of your company.” He reached inside his coat and drew out two folded papers sealed with wax. “I ask you to deliver two letters for me,” he said. “One to the First Consul. The other to my wife. If you would render me this small service . . .”
“Of course,” said Caffarelli, in a milder tone than before. He glanced at the letters, then pocketed them. “I shall send you news of your family, as soon as I may. But even now I can assure you that they are treated with all consideration.”
“Thank you,” Toussaint said. “I will be glad of any news of them.” He pressed the madras cloth to the side of his jaw.
“As we shall not meet again,” Caffarelli repeated, “I wonder, General, that you do not take the opportunity to tell me something more substantial.”
“But I have nothing more to tell,” said Toussaint. “You have my memoir.” He dipped his chin. “My letters.”
“Yes, of course,” Caffarelli said, and added in a flash of irritation, “for what little they may be worth.”
But Toussaint only looked at him with his slightly rheumy brown eyes.
“Your secret pact with the English,” Caffarelli said wearily.
“There is no such secret, as I have told you many times,” Toussaint said. “You know all my dealings with the English, and they are clear as glass.”
“Your treasure,” Caffarelli said.
Toussaint blew out a fluttering, contemptuous breath, which made the flame of the candle waver.
“I have no wealth, in money,” he said.
“But in your own memoir you record that at the outbreak of the revolt you possessed six hundred and forty-eight thousand francs.”
“Sir, that was more than ten years ago, and surely you know the costs of war. That sum was all spent on the army, down to the very last sou.”
“But what of the profits of your commerce since? Your exportations, the sugar and the coffee?”
“Commerce?” Toussaint’s eyebrows lifted. “I was a planter, not a commerçant. What property I enjoy is not in money, but in land.” He paused, considering. “In fact, I owe money which for the moment I am not able to pay. For purchase of those lands of which I have told you. For one plantation I still owe four hundred portugaises, and on another, seven hundred and fifty, I believe.”
“And what of Habitation Sancey?” Caffarelli said quickly.
“Pardon?” said Toussaint. “What, indeed?”
“It was there that your chests of treasure were buried, is it not so?” Caffarelli lunged. “Fifteen million francs, General—and the Negroes who buried it were afterward shot.”
Toussaint drew himself up. “I am long since exhausted with responding to that atrocious lie.”
“Fifteen million francs, General,” Caffarelli said again. “The sum which was voted by your central Assembly and paid into your treasury and of which no trace has been found since.”
“You are bleeding,” Toussaint informed him.
A tickle on his upper lip. Caffarelli tasted a thread of blood. He touched the area below his nose, and his finger came away stickily red. He smothered a curse as he reached for his handkerchief.
“The altitude,” Toussaint said silkily. “And of course, your cold. But you will do better, as you say, when you have left the mountain.”
Caffarelli, his whole face muffled in his handkerchief, made no reply.
“White people,” Toussaint said, tilting an ear toward the grinding lock. “You blancs always believe that there is a gold mine hidden from you somewhere.”
Outside, the castle bell began to toll. Under cover of the sound, Baille entered the cell, a long cloth bag slung over his shoulder, and relocked the door with his clattering key ring. He turned and faced the table and the fireplace. Caffarelli greeted him with a lift of his chin, swallowing blood as he did so.
“I have brought you fresh clothing,” Baille told Toussaint, laying out garments on the table as he spoke. Civilian clothes, coarse woolens, brown trousers and a long, loose shirt such as a peasant would wear in his field.
“New orders have come, for your maintenance,” Baille said. “If you please, put on this clothes at once, and I will take away the others. Also, I must take your watch.”
Toussaint glanced up at him, then lowered his eyes to the rough clothing. “As you prefer,” he said. He detached his watch chain from a buttonhole and laid the instrument on the table.
Baille cleared his throat. “I must also ask you for your razor,” he said.
Toussaint was on his feet and trembling from head to heel. “Who is it who dares suspect I lack the courage to bear my misfortune? And even if I had no courage, I have a family, and my religion—which forbids me any attempt on my own life.”
Baille’s mouth came open and worked in a moist silence.
“Please leave me,” Toussaint said. Baille obeyed.
Cautiously Caffarelli lowered his blood-stained handkerchief. If he kept his head tilted back, the bleeding did not resume, but he must strain his eyes against the lower rim of their sockets to see Toussaint, who had thrown his coat on the bed and was tearing off his linen. His upper body was taut and wiry, the black skin punctuated with a great many grayish white puckers and slashes.
“How many times have I been wounded in the service of my country?” Toussaint said. He touched his jaw. “A cannonball struck me full in my face, and yet it did not destroy me. The ball knocked out many of my teeth, and those that remain give me great pain to this day—although I have never complained of it before.” He turned out his palm. “This hand was shattered in the siege of Saint Marc, but still it will draw a sword and fire a pistol.”
Cafarelli stuttered without achieving a word. A gout of blood splashed out on his face; again he snatched up the handkerchief. Toussaint unbuttoned his trousers and let them fall. “Enough metal to fill a coffee cup was taken o
ut just here, from my right hip,” he said, “and still, several pieces remain in my flesh. That was when I was struck by mitraille —I did not leave the battle that day till I had won it.” He flicked his finger here and there, from one scar to another on his torso and thighs. “From seventeen wounds in all (if I have not miscounted), my blood has flowed on the battlefield—and all of it spilled for France. You may so inform the First Consul.”
Caffarelli found no answer. With a jerk, Toussaint pulled on the brown trousers Baille had provided. He shrugged into the shirt and sat down with a thump, leaning with his palms braced on the table top.
“Tell my jailer he may come for my possessions,” Toussaint said. “One day there will be an accounting of all that has been taken from me, and of how my service has been repaid.” He sat back, wrapping his arms around his chest. “You may go or remain—you are free to choose. Our conversation is at an end.”
Caffarelli departed, though he had no heart to travel, that afternoon, even so far as Pontarlier. He stopped at the postal relay station at the mountain’s foot. His nosebleed had dried and clotted unpleasantly, his head ached, he had a touch of ague, and he was unable to taste his food. It was a cold, no more than a cold. In a matter of days he would regain full health and vigor, but for the moment he could not shake off the oppressive sense of his own mortality.
Of course he had taken the best private room the post hotel had to offer, which was not, however, so very fine or luxurious. Still there was a good fire in the grate, and the alpine chill of the Fort de Joux was already at a distance. By candle and the light of the fire, he struggled to finish his written report. His accounting to Napoleon would not be an agreeable one as, from almost any angle, it was a report of failure. The First Consul would not fail to recognize it as such. Caffarelli had come away without the information he’d been sent to obtain, and the Consul’s sympathy for any failed effort, however strenuous, was notoriously low.
But after all, one must remember who was victorious and who defeated, who was master now, and who was in chains. Caffarelli dipped his pen for the final paragraph.
His prison is cold, sound, and very secure. He looked at the paper, and added, with next to no enjoyment of the irony: He does not communicate with anyone.
In the evening Toussaint’s fever had returned, although he was not bothered by it. On the contrary, he had come almost to enjoy the sensation, as another man might enjoy the effects of wine or rum—pleasures which Toussaint had almost always denied himself. If this were weakness, it was weakness of the flesh. His body, faithful mount that it had been, had carried him a long way now, and he thought that it would not have to carry him much farther.
The fever repelled the cold of the damp cell. It was always succeeded by bouts of chills during which he must shudder and tremble, clutching the thin blanket to himself, while his loose teeth chattered painfully. The rattling of his teeth became the sound of the drums, and he heard the thin, high keening voice of a woman, calling upon Attibon Legba to open the road, to open the gate.
I am Toussaint of the Opening . . .
His arms spread expansively, in the form of the cross, and then regathered themselves around him. Now he was warm and still all over. The fire was still burning at his back (Baille, who grew more stingy by the hour, had complained again that he used too much wood) but the warmth came from within the molten core of fever. The damp wall opposite caught red glints of firelight, shimmered and ran before his eyes. Sometimes it seemed insubstantial as the laced roots of a mapou tree, or a curtain of vines or a hanging veil of water.
In the coziness of his fever, Toussaint chuckled at the thought of Caffarelli, his dumb persistence toward the buried gold he and his master imagined. He would have done better to look for buried iron. Toussaint had spent every coin he could scrape together packing the hills of Saint Domingue with iron—great caches of guns and the bullets to feed them. But as he had claimed to Caffarelli, there was no secret anymore. The weapons were all uncovered now; they were in active use.
The wall opened and the men began to emerge through the veil as from a cane field at the long day’s end, pouring out in their hundreds, their thousands, through the corridors they had cut in the cane. Their skin was black and their chests and faces were marked with brands of ownership or punishment and also by the random slashes of the cane leaves. Some of them he knew by name and others were unknown to him except in the potency of their spirits, but to each alike he gave a musket, with the same words repeated, every time: Take this, hold it, keep it always—This! This is your liberty.
GLOSSARY
À LA CHINOISE: in the Chinese manner
ABOLITION DU FOUET: abolition of the use of whips on field slaves; a negotiating point before and during the rebellion
ABUELITA: grandmother
ACAJOU: mahogany
AFFRANCHI: a person of color whose freedom was officially recognized. Most affranchis were of mixed blood but some were full-blood Africans.
AGOUTI: groundhog-sized animal, edible
AJOUPA: a temporary hut made of sticks and leaves
ALLÉE: a lane or drive lined with trees
LES AMIS DES NOIRS: an abolitionist society in France, interested in improving the conditions and ultimately in liberating the slaves of the French colonies
ANCIEN RÉGIME: old order of pre-revolutionary France
ANBA DLO: beneath the waters—the Vodou afterworld
ARISTOCRATES DE LA PEAU: aristocrats of the skin. Many of Sonthonax’s policies and proclamations were founded on the argument that white supremacy in Saint Domingue was analogous to the tyranny of the hereditary French nobility and must therefore be overthrown in its turn by revolution.
ARMOIRE: medicinal herb for fever
ASSON: a rattle made from a gourd, an instrument in Vodou ceremonies, and the hûngan’s badge of authority
ATELIER: idiomatically used to mean work gangs or the whole body of slaves on a given plantation
AU GRAND SEIGNEUR: in a proprietary manner
BAGASSE: remnants of sugarcane whose juice has been extracted in the mill—a dry, fast-burning fuel
BAGUETTE: bread loaf
BAMBOCHE: celebratory dance party
BANZA: African instrument with strings stretched over a skinhead; forerunner of the banjo
BARON SAMEDI: Vodou deity closely associated with Ghede and the dead, sometimes considered an aspect of Ghede
BATON: stick, rod. A martial art called l’art du baton, combining elements of African stick-fighting with elements of European swordsmanship, persists in Haiti to this day.
BATTERIE: drum orchestra
BEAU-PÈRE: father-in-law
BÊTE DE CORNES: domestic animal with horns
BIENFAISANCE: philosophical proposition that all things work together for good
BITASYON: small settlement
BLANC: white man
BLANCHE: white woman
BOIS BANDER: tree whose bark was thought to be an aphrodisiac
BOIS CHANDEL: candle wood—a pitchy wood suitable for torches
BOKOR: Vodou magician of evil intent
BOSSALE: a newly imported slave, fresh off the boat, ignorant of the plantation ways and of the Creole dialect
BOUCANIERS: piratical drifters who settled Tortuga and parts of Haiti as Spanish rule there weakened. They derived their name from the word boucan —their manner of barbecuing hog meat.
BOUNDA: rectum
BOURG: town
BOURIK: donkey
BWA DLO: flowering aquatic plant
BWA FOUYÉ: dugout canoe
CACHOT: dungeon cell
CACIQUES: Amerindian chieftains of precolonial Haiti
CALENDA: a slave celebration distinguished by dancing. Calendas frequently had covert Vodou significance, but white masters who permitted them managed to regard them as secular.
CANAILLE: mob, rabble
CARMAGNOLES: derogatory expression of the English military for the French revolutionaries<
br />
CARRÉ: square, unit of measurement for cane fields and city blocks
CASERNES: barracks
CASQUES: feral dogs
CAY (CASE): rudimentary one-room house
LES CITOYENS DE QUATRE AVRIL: denoting persons of color awarded full political rights by the April Fourth decree, this phrase was either a legal formalism or a sneering euphemism, depending on the speaker
CLAIRIN: cane rum
COCOTTE: girlfriend, but one in a subordinate role
COLON: colonist
COMMANDEUR: overseer or work-gang leader on a plantation, usually himself a slave
COMMERÇANT: businessman
CONCITOYEN: fellow citizen
CONGÉ: time off work
CONGO: African tribal designation. Thought to adapt well to many functions of slavery and more common than others in Saint Domingue.
CORDON DE L’EST: eastern cordon, a fortified line in the mountains organized by whites to prevent the northern insurrection from breaking through to other departments of the colony.
CORDON DE L’OUEST: western cordon, as above
CORPS-CADAVRE: in Vodou, the physical body, the flesh
COUP POUDRÉ: a Vodou attack requiring a material drug, as opposed to the coup á l’air, which needs only spiritual force
COUTELAS: broad-bladed cane knife or machete
CREOLE: any person born in the colony whether white, black or colored, whether slave or free. A dialect combining a primarily French vocabulary with primarily African syntax is also called Creole; this patois was not only the means of communication between whites and blacks but was often the sole common language among Africans of different tribal origins. Creole is still spoken in Haiti today.
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