Who Slashed Celanire's Throat?

by Maryse Conde

  “Celanire has always testified that ever since she was a baby, it was her foster papa she loved, whereas she couldn’t stand the maman. Ofusan had the most magnificent baby clothes made for her. Nothing was too good for her. But every time Ofusan finished rubbing her with lotion and dressing her up, Celanire would deliberately vomit all over her baby smock. Staring her straight in the eyes, she would fart and defecate such a foul-smelling custard of caca that the whole house stank. Ofusan could not help but notice this aggressive attitude and complained to her husband. But all he had in response was a series of mollifying clichés, such as, ‘Everyone knows little girls always prefer their papa.’ Gradually Ofusan got tired of being neglected. She was still young and lovely; she could make a new life for herself. When Celanire heard her talk of leaving her husband and going back up the mountain, she first of all fell ill to stop her from going. One fever after another. Diarrhea after diarrhea. This only made Ofusan even more determined; she concluded that the air in Grande-Anse did not suit her little girl. Moreover, she worried a lot. Once some crazy woman had tried to steal the child. Ever since, she always kept close behind her whenever they strolled along the seafront, or else stood standing for hours in front of the house. So Celanire took drastic measures. She summoned her protector to rid her of her stepmother. Ogokpi, the superdemon, ran to her rescue, and changed into a dog. He adores this type of masquerade. It was when he turned himself into a dog and sank his teeth into his great rival Beelzebub, drawing blood, that he took over the reins of hell. It was in the very middle of the market he hurled himself onto Ofusan. We know the rest of the story.”

  While Wole had been speaking, the moon had made its appearance and was rubbing its round cheek against the branches of the candlewood trees. Amarante knew full well this was just a tale for young girls so that they didn’t run off with a husband of their own choosing. Yet it moved her to tears. She ran her hand over Wole, who placed it firmly in the right place.

  Wole had attended the local elementary school in Basse-Terre and had been expelled for insubordination. He was now getting his revenge. Every morning he gathered the children around him and incited them to hate white folks who had led the ancestors into captivity and shipped them to Guadeloupe to slave in the cane fields. Although she appreciated the strength and force of this unexpected companion, who was a balm to her humiliated heart and body, Amarante thought these lessons narrowed the mind. Humans need more than just memories of yesterday and yesteryears. They need hope, poetry, and music! Her mother had naturally taught her old Wayana songs, but Amarante didn’t stop there. She remembered how Celanire had initiated her in other music. It wasn’t long before the natural cathedral of the woods echoed with children’s voices exuberantly singing the Regina Coeli and the Exultate, Jubilate. Even though Wole did not really like Mozart, the motets were so beautiful, he did not dare protest.

  Soon, however, Amarante desired something more. She was no longer content with sounds collected by others. She asked those going down to the town to buy her exercise books, pencils, rulers, and erasers, and she began to compose. Up before dawn, lying on her stomach on the carpet of green, it was as if her past suffering and the discontent of her heart and body flowed out of her and changed into this precious, magical stream of sounds. She spent days on end like that forgetting to eat or drink. She no longer needed anything or anyone.

  She was free. She had been healed.

  Meanwhile, deprived of a wife who had always been beyond reproach, Matthieu suffered martyrdom. A slow degeneration set in. First of all he was seen downing glass after glass in the rum shops, where men of his standing wouldn’t be seen dead. Then he stumbled along the seafront at ungodly hours. His clothes became filthy. He discarded his frock coat and jacket for a shirt and twill trousers. He began to stink of sweat. His hair remained uncombed. His superiors sharply rebuked him for not taking it like a man. How could he lose face over a woman! They would have turned a blind eye if he hadn’t cornered anyone and everyone to churn out his spiel. He swore he could sense Celanire’s true identity. His mistake during all these years was having believed there were two children, whereas it was one and the same baby. Celanire was Pisket’s child. Don’t ask for any proof! He didn’t have any! And he never would. In this sort of investigation, instinct was convincing enough. He had arrived at his conclusion by supposition, deduction, and sneezing, and nothing would make him think otherwise. His stunned listeners endeavored in vain to get him to see reason. Imagine if such stories reached the ears of the governor, Thomas de Brabant! And if he heard that his beloved wife was the daughter of an unknown father and a bòbò! Nothing good could come out of angering someone with connections high up. But Matthieu continued to do exactly as he pleased. He wrote letter after letter to the Ministry of the Colonies, the Ministry of the Interior, and the Ministry for Public Safety. He swamped the papers in France, Guadeloupe, and Martinique with open letters that never got published. Drastic measures had to be taken. He was retrograded to watchdog, stationed outside the schools. Unfortunately, he insisted on recounting his tribulations to the dumbfounded teachers and pupils. Then he mobilized his socialist colleagues at La Pointe. Always prepared to back the wrong horse, they went to a lot of trouble inquiring why this superior mind was being picked on.

  They then had the idea of transferring him to Grande-Anse. There he could discreetly continue his investigation.

  Matthieu arrived then in Grande-Anse at the height of the dry season. The heat was suffocating. The sea and the sky boiled in sulfur. The flowers of the hart’s tongue clinging to the slopes of the hills were scorched by the sun. He no longer recognized the place he had grown up in. Everything had been freshly daubed and painted. Under the influence of an invasion of rosy-cheeked Mormons from Salt Lake City, the bordellos had been transformed into respectable houses. The turpitudes of the Ginger Moon had slipped its memory, and it now housed a harmless mom-and-pop store on the ground floor. The Saint-Jean-Bosco orphanage had been turned into a college for whites, mulattos, and blacks. The seafront had been planted with royal palms and made into a promenade where families could take the air. Yet despite all these modern touches Matthieu could see that the people remained the same. Acquainted with the purpose of his visit to Grande-Anse, everyone wanted to help him. With the passing of time the memory of Ofusan was revered like that of a saint. Almost twenty years later they still lamented the fate of good Dr. Pinceau. If they could, they would do everything possible to help him reveal the identity of “darling little Celanire,” who without a doubt had caused the couple’s misfortune. But they didn’t have the slightest clue. No sooner had he moved in than Matthieu set to work. There was no doubt in his mind. Since he believed Celanire to be Pisket’s child, the first thing to do was to go back over her tracks. Here was a girl who was probably born in Grande-Anse, had grown up there, died, and was buried there, and yet nobody knew a thing about her. How come there was not a single friend to flower her grave? Not a single enemy to badmouth her? He focused his investigation on the Ginger Moon. Alas, however much he prowled around the upstairs-downstairs house, which could have come straight out of the French Quarter in New Orleans, he came up with nothing. The former owner, Carmen, had turned to religion before being called to God. As for the former residents, who had now settled down and had their own pew at church, it would be unwise to recall the time when they were bòbòs. Matthieu did not give up hope, convinced that finally he would get lucky. He took his meals in a cheap eating house inappropriately named the Delights of Gargantua.

  One evening when he was about to rinse out the bad taste of codfish and rice with some white rum, the owner informed him that her mother would like a word with him. Under her cottony white hair combed into four buns, she must have been in her sixties. Everyone dutifully called her Mama Sidoine after the name of her late husband, a respected fisherman.

  “In actual fact, my real name is Madone,” she said in a mysterious tone of voice.

  As this did not seem to mean
anything to Matthieu, she had to refresh his memory.

  “Pisket’s good friend, the only one she ever had. She came back to die in my arms, that’s proof enough! Two people loved her on this earth. Me and her twin, Kung Fui.”

  Matthieu lowered his voice and went straight to the point.

  “Do you know the name of the child’s father?”

  “Do I know it? Of course I do!”

  She lowered her voice as well.

  “It’s Dr. Jean Pinceau!”

  Matthieu leaped to his feet, drew himself up to his full height, and shouted furiously, “À pa vwé! Manti aw! Manti aw! It’s not true! You’re lying!”

  She eyed him scornfully.

  “What’s got into you to shout like that! You really think some men are different from the rest? The best of them are not worth the rope to hang them with. All of them are scumbags. In fact few people know that Dr. Jean Pinceau was stinking rotten to the core. Everyone in Grande-Anse respected and worshipped him like the Holy Sacrament, whereas he liked the ladies of the night and was a regular visitor to the bordellos! At the Ginger Moon his favorite was Pisket, the dirtiest slut of them all.”

  Matthieu was no longer listening to her, and was pacing up and down like a madman. The idol of his youth had bit the dust. So the paragon of virtue wallowed in vice. The slayer of opium eaters worshipped a drug addict. He recalled the fervor in his handsome face. He could still hear the brazen speeches of his electoral campaign: “Guadeloupe is not France, and France is not Guadeloupe. It is an entirely different country whose interests are in contradiction with those of colonialism.” Such bold words at the time! He tried to tell himself that this old woman was lying. But no, his nose sensed the truth. Ignoring him, she prattled on, coming out with everything she had kept bottled up inside her for too long, her hands deformed by arthritis resting on her knees.

  “The poor girl was naive enough to believe that with all his money the doctor would at least promise to help take care of her baby. Despite their wicked ways, that’s what the white Creoles did when they had children with black girls. But all he could say was, ‘An pa sètin sé ti moun an mwen! Fo ou fin èvèye. I’m not sure it’s my child. Get rid of it.’ This upset Pisket, despite her shameless ways. She cried a lot, I know. But she didn’t let on to the doctor. When he offered to give her an injection for an abortion, she pretended to accept. And then she let Kung Fui make a deal with Madeska. When they left the Ginger Moon, they didn’t tell anyone where they were going, except me. You should have seen Dr. Pinceau that day. He was like a lost soul, a zombie. You’d have thought he’d go mad or die. He didn’t want any of the other girls as a consolation. You couldn’t help pitying him.

  “I seldom visited Pisket at Bélisaire. People in our line of business don’t like going out in broad daylight. When the children meet us, they shout ‘Shoo!’ as if we were dogs or else ‘Zouelle, an bòbò!’ and respectable persons make the sign of the cross. And then visiting them wasn’t very pleasant. The Blanc Galop was a real hornet’s nest. Kung Fui had brought his inseparable Yang Ting with him, who was living with their sister, Tonine. But Pisket and Kung Fui couldn’t stand Tonine. They hurled insults and abuse at her. Sometimes even Pisket tried to hit her. Yang Ting would intervene, and there’d be a hell of a commotion. And then Madeska and Pisket didn’t get along. She complained that the mischief maker’s food was tasteless, since salt was taboo. Once a month he wanted to cut her, take her blood and bits of flesh. But what I really want to tell you is that you’re barking up the wrong tree in your investigation. Celanire, the governor’s wife, is not Pisket’s child. She couldn’t be! Seven months pregnant, and the child slipped out.”

  “I don’t believe it!”

  “But it’s true! The child slipped out! Pisket had a miscarriage. But Kung Fui was an artful one! I don’t know how he did it. All I know is that he and Pisket came to an arrangement.”

  “An arrangement?” Matthieu yelled. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, they found a belly for sale. Don’t ask me where or how, I haven’t got the slightest idea. I had my own troubles at the time: I ate some conger eel, which gave me blood poisoning. I spent three and a half months in the Saint-Félix hospital at death’s door. When I came out, Grande-Anse was in a hullabaloo. Madeska had vanished; the only talk was of ‘darling little Celanire,’ ‘darling little Celanire,’ the baby Dr. Pinceau had miraculously saved. They said she was so lovely, so beautiful, a woman had tried to steal her. One Sunday during mass I dashed to look at her in the arms of her foster mother. She gave me the shivers. A pink silk ribbon was tied around her neck. Her head reared up like a cobra’s, and she stared at people with her black eyes, gleaming like hot coals. As for Pisket, after her miscarriage, she disappeared for a while. I only saw her again the year after, when she came back to die in my arms. You won’t like what I’m telling you, I know. But it’s the truth. And the truth is hard to swallow.”

  Matthieu got the impression his brain was about to explode. Large drops of sweat rolled down his back. Years of research and speculation to arrive at this. All for nothing. At the end of the day Celanire was not Pisket’s daughter. In despair he left.

  To the east, along the rim of hills, Grande-Anse glowed red. At first he thought it was a figment of the fever that had set his mind ablaze. Then he realized the Fouques-Timbert plantation house was burning like tinder. At the very moment when Matthieu was watching in disbelief, the glow of flames had already reached as far as Antigua, dazzling the fishermen at Half Moon Bay, who hauled their boats up on the sand and, sensing some strange foreboding fell on their knees to recite the prayer for the dead. The flames could also be seen as far away as Nevis and Montserrat, whose inhabitants wondered where exactly could the fire be burning. Ever since a delegation led by Celanire had come to their rescue, they looked on the Guadeloupeans as their brothers and took an interest in their fate.

  Agénor de Fouques-Timbert perished in the fire of his Great House like a common mortal. Not only did he lose his life, but Ji, his concubine, his two illegitimate daughters, and six of his seven legitimate sons were also lost. Only the wildest and handsomest was spared, since as usual he had spent the night out, and was nicknamed Sanfoulanmò ever since, because he had defied death.

  The incident deserves a closer look.

  On April 26, the feast of Saint Alida, Agénor was waiting in his office at the Conseil Général for the director of a highway construction company to pay him his commission. He received 10 percent on all the contracts in the colony and demanded it in cash. He loved the smell of money. The filthier the bills, the more dog-eared they were, the greater his delight, since they reminded him of his own rotten life. The director had arrived at six on the dot, carrying the money in a wicker basket. The two men barely greeted each other. They had nothing to say. The money did the talking.

  Agénor had then mounted Colibri and set off for Grande-Anse. On leaving Basse-Terre, shortly before passing through the Colchide neighborhood, he met a funeral procession. Some wretch was being hauled feetfirst in a miserable cart rigged out in black rags. A few musicians shuffled along in front, blowing their brass instruments, and a ragged group of mourners brought up the rear. And yet Agénor, who had everything—women, children, land, property, and political power—envied the deceased. Lanmò. Death. Eternal rest. He couldn’t wait for Celanire to make up her mind. In his longing to see her in the flesh, he had gone to the carnival opening-night ball disguised as Nero, the emperor on whom he would have willingly modeled himself. Moreover, the crown of laurels and the Roman toga suited him. In his hands was a gilded wood lute, which he would have liked to fiddle as well.

  Flanked by Ludivine, as sulky as ever, Celanire and Thomas were greeting their guests. Thomas was disguised as an Egyptian pasha, a costume that suited his paunch perfectly. Celanire was dressed as queen of the fairies, something out of The Magic Flute. It needed just a little imagination to guess the connection with her diaphanous, multicolored moiré dress, h
er golden crown, and the magic wand she brandished arrogantly like a whip. Agénor bent forward to kiss her hand, and when he looked up, he found himself level with her pair of eyes. There then followed a silent dialogue.

  “What are you waiting for?” Agénor inquired. “If you want to take your revenge, take it.”

  “Revenge,” retorted Celanire, “is a dish best eaten cold. Don’t you know that?”

  “But why are you so angry with me? It was nothing personal. For me, I couldn’t put a face, a name, or even a sex to you. I simply needed a child. You’d do better to concentrate on your parents. Those two deliberately did you harm by handing you over to Madeska. You killed him, but he was only doing his job.”