by Maryse Conde
Yang Ting couldn’t help thinking of Soumathi—Tonine, if you prefer—as someone he had hurt. What had become of her? Gone crazy, probably. She had always been a bit cracked. She had accompanied him to the foot of the gangplank of the steamship Tourville, crying her heart out, pretending to take his promises at face value. Of course he’d soon send her the money for the fare, and then she would come and join them.
Soumathi—Tonine!
She had completely escaped his memory when at the age of twenty he bumped into her at a place called La Rose de Sable, a den for society’s outcasts situated on the Morne Miquel, where they smoked opium, drank rum, and the desperate gambled in the hopes of winning their way out of a life of hell. Tonine was no longer the little sister victimized by her siblings, sniveling and skinny as a stray cat. She was hardworking and well behaved, an apprentice to a seamstress. Her virtue did him the world of good. Furthermore, she worshipped him like the Holy Sacrament and confessed that she had always kept a place for him in her heart ever since their time at the Drop of Milk. Flattered by her confession, he soon moved in with her in a tenement yard on the Morne La Loge. But he was not made to live on love alone in a shack! As soon as Kung Fui called him back to Grande-Anse, he realized this juicy contract was their chance of a lifetime. Agénor de Fouques-Timbert was loaded. They weren’t going to relieve him of just a few crumbs of his fortune. They would get out of him enough to last for the rest of their lives. Tonine pleaded with him. The farther away they kept from sorcerers, diviners, and mischief makers, the better off they would be! Those people had formidable powers! And then she was a sentimental type. Selling, sacrificing your own baby, an innocent newborn! Yet another great idea of those two villains for whom jail was not good enough. Finally, when he threatened to leave without her, she had been so much in love with him that she followed him. As soon as they arrived at Bélisaire, he realized his mistake. Pisket and Kung Fui did absolutely nothing but spend their time lying in bed, drifting amid the smoke of their opium pipes. As for the money paid by Agénor de Fouques-Timbert, nobody ever saw the color of it. Pisket had locked it in a safe at the bank. All the work at the Blanc Galop fell on them. They had to soak, soap, and scrub the laundry, starch it, hang it out to whiten, and iron it. What’s more, it was poor Tonine who had to run around with a heavy tray on her head, making the deliveries. Not a minute’s rest! What kept Tonine going were the prospects for her child. If they ever got their share of the cake, they wouldn’t have to worry about his future. For she too had become pregnant. Yang Ting, however, was far from being delighted and looked moodily at the calabash of her belly under her shapeless dresses. Why did they have to saddle themselves with another stone around their necks when they already lived so miserably? For the first time during their life together she stood up to him. Even if Kung Fui did break his word and didn’t give them what he had promised, tété pa jin two lou pou lestonmak. The breasts are never too heavy for the stomach. She wouldn’t ask anything from anybody and would expect nothing from anyone. She would work hard for her boy—for it would be a boy; she could feel it—and give him the instruction and education she never had.
But he had betrayed her.
One evening at La Wiracocha he had just sat down with his drinking companions when a waitress brought him his glass. He was about to down it without another thought when he changed his mind and looked up. He got the impression he had been kicked full in the chest. Reeling from the shock, his teeth chattering, he stood up, gasping for breath, and stammered in his poor Spanish, “For Christ’s sake, where did you come from?”
The girl quietly explained she was a china-chola from Urubamba, come to seek her fortune in the capital. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen. Petite, slender, yet well built, with pretty curves exactly where they should be. A shiny black skin. Slit eyes. Her hair, a stream of silk. Since he had left Guadeloupe, Yang Ting had given up womanizing. Artemisa, the mulatto woman, had done more than half the work in seducing him. Suddenly his member vigorously reminded him of its presence. Burning with the desire of a sixteen-year-old, he dashed over to the owner, who was casually keeping an eye on the rum guzzlers from the bar.
“Jesus, is she yours?”
Jesus shrugged his shoulders.
“Who? Amparo? She’s not my type!”
All these years of solitude had changed Yang Ting’s character. He was no longer what he used to be. His own desire scared him. He dared not approach Amparo, struck by her staggering resemblance to Tonine—minus her gentleness and vulnerability, of course. This girl looked as though she had guts, knew what she wanted and what she was doing. He watched her pirouette across the noisy, smoke-filled room, carrying her tray on her shoulder, wipe the tables with one sweep of her cloth, laugh, joke, and firmly extricate herself from the groping hands of the rum guzzlers. Occasionally he got the impression she turned toward him with a little half smile and encouraged him. Then he got hold of himself. What could an old bag of bones like himself be possibly imagining?
Around two in the morning, he got up and left. He had never seen such a night. Black as the ass of a Kongo slave. Up above, a wretched little crescent of a moon illuminated next to nothing. He slogged through the dark to his neighborhood callejón. When he reached home, a scream that made his blood run cold sobered him up on the spot and made him dash inside with all the energy he could muster. Kung Fui, usually nailed to his bed in a perpetual stupor, lost in his dreams, was lying on the floor, as dead as he possibly could be. There was no sign of a wound. His features had been contorted in terror that only some terrible aggressor could have caused. Yang Ting grabbed a machete. But however hard he searched the four corners of the house, tore outside, and paced up and down the neighboring streets, nothing moved in the funereal darkness.
Yang Ting wept bitterly.
Kung Fui may have become a mindless, apathetic, and blind deadweight, but he represented Yang Ting’s last link with the land of his past, his deepest, inner self. It was his entire childhood, his youth, his dreams, and his hopes that were about to be buried. He had admired him, worshipped him, served him like a slave, and never been able to refuse him anything. Not a thing.
One night, a few months after arriving in Bélisaire, Kung Fui had hammered on the door of the room he shared with Tonine and dragged him to his quarters. What a sight! The musty room stank of urine and excrement. Pisket, lying half unconscious on the filthy bed, was losing her blood in great gobs. A miscarriage! Fearful of indiscreet gossip, Kung Fui had called neither doctor nor midwife and was stifling his sister’s moans with a pillow. In the dawn’s early hours she finally ejected her fetus. Then for some unknown reason she stopped bleeding. Kung Fui looked as though he would go crazy. He wept, stammered, and fumed. All his grand plans had been shattered. An individual like Madeska would not let them off lightly. Kung Fui would have to reimburse him his money, which meant slipping back on the dog collar of misery. Unless…unless…Suddenly an idea germinated in his highly imaginative mind, and he looked up. Unless they chanced upon a surrogate belly! Since Yang Ting looked puzzled, hoping he hadn’t heard right, Kung Fui went on to explain: a belly for sale, for God’s sake! So many girls forced into an unwanted pregnancy would be only too willing to get rid of their bun in the oven on the cheap. So the two accomplices began scouring the bordellos of Grande-Anse but came up empty-handed, plagued by bad luck. And Madeska was beginning to suspect something! It was then that Kung Fui pleaded with him. Tonine was going to give birth in a month or two, wasn’t that so? They would tell Madeska some story or other. Who can predict exactly when a woman gives birth? Yang Ting, knowing that Tonine would never accept such a scheme, laid down his terms. They wouldn’t tell her anything. They would make her believe the baby had died soon after it was born. And the deal was made!
Madeska, the diviner, divined nothing. Likewise, the hell-hound of a midwife he dispatched for the occasion. When she arrived, Yang Ting claimed the premature birth had taken them by surprise and that the baby, a gi
rl, had popped out on her own to see the world for herself. They handed the infant over to her, wrapped in a rag, and the dirty trick was done. Tonine took it quite differently, however. She did not believe a single deceitful word of the tale they were spouting and realized straightaway they had handed her baby over to Madeska as a substitute for Pisket’s. Beside herself with anger, she threatened to go to the police. After so many years her screams still echoed in his head—“Assassins! Scoundrels! Thugs!” He had called her a nutcase, punched her, then abruptly showered her with kisses.
At three in the morning the remains of Kung Fui began to give off a foul stench. From a waxy yellow his pockmarked, swollen face changed to gray while thick sooty streaks streamed over the sheets. At noon, unable to bear it any longer, Yang Ting went to look for some wood to make a coffin. The few zambos he managed to muster recoiled from the stench. Soon he was all alone assembling and nailing the planks. But the afternoon heat made the stench unbearable. It was as if the coffin were porous and the smell of decay seeped out through a thousand invisible cracks. Yang Ting gave up the idea of a wake. At four in the afternoon he decided to get it over with and asked his arrieros to carry his companion to the graveyard. No flowers or wreaths, please. The funeral cortege was composed of half a dozen veiled women clothed in black, mouthing prayers, who never miss an opportunity to woo death.
Shortly after having buried Kung Fui, Yang Ting, who had never had trouble sleeping, found it impossible to get his sleep back. He began to have the same grisly dream. Kung Fui wrenched him awake with a hand as cold as death’s. Gripped by an eerie anguish, Yang Ting followed him across a barren landscape dotted with meteorites, lit meagerly by a sliver of a moon. At the end of their journey a wide-open coffin was waiting for them. He went up behind Kung Fui and looked inside. On a bed of unspeakable filth strewn with rotting livers, gizzards, and intestines lay a baby, a little girl, with her throat slashed.
Until then Yang Ting hadn’t given a thought to the infant he had surrendered to the mischief maker’s knife. His very own child? Unlike Tonine, he had never wanted her and consequently felt no responsibility whatsoever toward her. Suddenly he sensed he had committed two crimes—one against Tonine, whose motherhood had been stolen, the other against the innocent victim, who had not asked to come into this world and who had been martyrized as soon as she opened her eyes. Incapable of falling asleep in the blackness of the night, he argued with himself, spent hours endeavoring to justify his behavior, as if he were facing a tribunal. Okay, he had acted wrongly. Yet his act, however dark it had been, had ended happily. The police had picked up his little girl, and then Dr. Pinceau had rescued and adopted her. At the present time she couldn’t be lacking for anything. She was surely enjoying a better life than she would have with impoverished parents like Tonine and himself. But however hard he repeated this argument to himself over and over again, he finally realized he was atoning for his dual crime with a life of failure and solitude. The money it had procured him was cursed, and he would never stand to gain from it.
As a result, he was now a regular visitor to La Wiracocha, downing more and more glasses of chicha to chase away the bitter taste of his life. As a rule, when he arrived, the tavern was still deserted except for a few blacks gambling illegally. He would sit down in a corner and systematically get drunk. One afternoon when Amparo set down the chicha in front of him, her expression was unmistakable. Despite his decrepitude, the young girl had taken a liking to him.
People in Lima still talk about it to this day. If you go in for a drink at Juanito’s in Barranca or at the Brisas del Titicaca near the Plaza Bolognesi, they’ll tell you about it, adding numerous unverifiable details. They will tell you a storm was raging the evening Amparo left with Yang Ting. Frightened by the wind, which had already uprooted the centuries-old mahogany trees in the plazas, the inhabitants of Lima’s poor neighborhoods never gave up nailing down their doors and windows. They will tell you that the waves of the ocean swept away the homeless sleeping on the sidewalks and flooded the second floors of the houses along the malecón. They will tell you the heavens opened and poured gallons of water over the streets and pavements.
The regulars had always been suspicious of Amparo, who had suddenly turned up out of the blue at La Wiracocha. In answer to their questions, she said she came from far away, from Urubamba, which explained why nobody had heard of her family. But her sly looks and cheeky smile did not go down well, and nobody appreciated her sharp tongue, especially from a waitress. Soon all the men boasted they had slept with her, whereas in fact nobody had.
