by Maryse Conde
Quite frankly, she was ugly, but nevertheless she possessed a piquant sort of charm. Her teeth, perhaps a little too large, were of an impeccable ivory; her cheeks were dotted with warts, much like birthmarks, and her bulging eyes emitted a powerful magnetism. While she hugged Celanire passionately up against her, whispering words of Spanish in her ear, Thomas stood staring at them, hopping from one foot to another in astonishment. Where had the two women first met? By way of explanation Madame Eusebio peremptorily indicated he should leave. Dumbfounded, he closed the door behind him and went to join Ludivine, slumped in a chaise longue on the deck. To while away the time Ludivine was making an effort to read, but Madame Bovary, Eugénie Grandet, and Le Père Goriot, all those books her father had recommended as masterpieces, made her yawn, and she sat there blinking and staring at the dazzling lid of the Pacific clapped over the ocean depths.
Today ocean travel is coming back into fashion. People pay a fortune to cruise slowly from one point of the globe to another. But at that time travel by ship was boring, and everyone dreamed of a faster mode of transportation. On board there were very few distractions. During the day the men played endless games of billiards. In the evening they sat down to poker before crowding into the bar to wet their mustaches in the crushed ice of their cocktail glasses. The women badmouthed each other behind their backs and rivaled in elegance at dinnertime, which was occasionally followed by a cotillion that alone broke the monotony of the journey. Every Saturday they danced the waltz or the foxtrot. At night they huddled under their blankets on chaise longues and peered into the dark for the sign of a light on the coast. The farther north they sailed, the greater the number of birds that flocked slowly across the sky. But nobody looked up in that direction. These landlubbers felt they had been tossed by the waves from time immemorial and had lost touch forever with their familiar surroundings. They imagined they would never get rid of the peppery, bitter smell of the sea, which irritated their nostrils.
From that moment on Madame Eusebio never left Celanire’s cabin. From morning to night it was filled with the smoke from the mysterious plants she burned. She barred Thomas from entering, and he was reduced to wandering the deck at all hours of the day, lighting up Havana after Havana in the smoking room and downing glasses of port in the bar. Sometimes the captain took pity on him and invited him to his table for meals. But Thomas never failed to launch into endless tirades against the conquistadors who had devastated the Amerindian cultures. He also extolled the merits of Simón Bolívar and regretted that his dream of building the Gran Colombia had never been realized. Moreover, he meddled in politics, daring to criticize President Eloy Alfaro and saying it served him right if the crowd had recently torched him like a carnival puppet. Blathering away in this fashion, he appeared to forget that his traveling companions possessed the courtesy of the Spanish and that his Gallic outspokenness risked offending them. In short, the captain ended up leaving him to lap up his soup all alone in his corner. At night he went and slept on a mattress in his daughter’s cabin that the stewards had laid out on the floor. He quickly realized that here again his conversation bored Ludivine to tears, and he took comfort in his beloved poems translated from Quechua. Since he had lost his sleep worrying over Celanire’s condition and read until dawn, he wrapped the only lamp in the cabin with a green shawl so as not to disturb the young girl. In the early hours of the morning, while she was still asleep, he slipped on his clothes without washing.
We don’t know whether Madame Eusebio treated Celanire with the medication recommended by Dr. Iago Lamella. Cod-liver oil? Shots of camphorated oil? It’s highly unlikely! She did exactly whatever came into her head. We do know with certainty, almost down to the last detail, the diet she had her follow. Twice a day she went down into the heat of the kitchens, tied an apron around her waist, and began preparing her patient’s food tray. The most incredible stories began to circulate about her behavior, spread by the chefs and kitchen boys. For them there was no doubt Madame Eusebio was a bruja, worthy of those witches from the southern coast of Peru. More than milk, she needed blood and more blood, a never-ending request for blood. Sometimes she curdled it with rock salt, sliced it, then steamed it in a pan sprinkled with chopped parsley. Other times she filled vials of it, which she wrapped in her mantilla as a precaution against prying eyes. She searched for offal, liver, hearts, and brains and above all, filet steaks, which she cut into fine strips like carpaccio. Despite his aversion for Madame Eusebio, Thomas very quickly ascertained the results of such a treatment. In a few days’ time, Celanire emerged from her drowsiness. In the morning she would leaf through some illustrated magazines and in the afternoon appear on deck, leaning on the arm of her nurse. She would shuffle over to the railings, close her eyes, letting the ocean breeze caress her face, then totter back and lie down on a chaise longue. While Madame Eusebio wrapped her legs in a plaid rug, she would exchange a few words, which got less laborious by the day, with her husband and stepdaughter. Her interest in her traveling companions and for life on board returned. What music did they dance to at last night’s cotillion? What was Ludivine reading? Had she managed to play her Beethoven on the piano in the smoking room? Then she went back inside her cabin as soon as the wind freshened. The entire first class waited for these moments, however short they were. Although the women turned their noses up at her color, the men lathered themselves up into a frenzy over the contours of her breasts, the curve of her hips, and a glimpse of her ankle, seized once more by their age-old fascination for the morena. Of course there was always that wretched kerchief tied around her neck. What did it hide? Thereupon the most outlandish stories began to circulate. At the age of sixteen Celanire had been doused with acid by a lover she had scorned. Aiming for her eyes, his hand had trembled with rage, and he had drenched her throat. This had occurred somewhere in Africa, a few years before she married Thomas. The latter had used his influence as governor and had the guy shipped to a penal colony. He was probably still there. Or else they claimed that as a child she had almost ripped her head off with a skipping rope and had been patched up by the best surgeon in Guadeloupe, who had then raped her. And so on and so on…But the one thing that emerged from all this gossip, where bits of truth had been crudely stitched on to bits of legend, was that Celanire was a woman best not to meddle with. In her time, as the Peruvians say, she had waltzed with Lucifer and danced the polka with Marshal Castilla. They pitied Thomas, regarding him simply as the incarnation of the perfect cuckold.
Celanire improved every day during the two-week voyage. Once they reached the coast of Ecuador, she was fully cured.
Perhaps it was the effect of the illness, but from that date on Celanire’s character radically changed. Up till then she had been the life and soul of the party, full of energy, always on the move, a little person whose company, after all, was somewhat tiresome. She slowed down, wrapped herself in thought, and became languorous. Her eyes lost their sparkle and deepened. She let others express their opinions and listened to them. She seemed to be constantly hiding inside her things, which were giving her food for thought. Her language too became more moderate, reflecting her new mood. She began to repeat that she needed a new aim in life to continue, a new reason for living.
At Esmeraldas Celanire and Madame Eusebio wept greatly at the moment of separation when Madame Eusebio set off in the direction of Borbón. Yet once again Ludivine couldn’t help noticing what she called her stepmother’s indifference, even her hypocrisy. The carriage that bore Madame Eusebio away had no sooner turned the corner of the Avenida La Floresta than Celanire stretched like a cat, grinning in seventh heaven at regaining her health.
Guadeloupe
The Same Year
When they landed at the Lardenoy wharf in La Pointe, all the lychee trees on the island, from Matouba to Montebello, from Cocoyer to Trois-Rivières, were loaded with fruit, a good three months ahead of time, and it was as though clusters of tiny Chinese lanterns had been lit among the thick foliage. The lyc
hee is a miserly and secretive tree. It only bears a few bunches at a time, and even then only every seven years. What then did such an abundance herald? A series of catastrophes, no doubt. Since March was not the hurricane season, some people peered at La Soufrière. It was true that for some weeks now it had been emitting gas and smoke again, as nauseous as somebody breaking wind. Others remembered it was the tenth anniversary of an earthquake that had devastated La Pointe from top to bottom. Afterward they had lost count of the number of dead and homeless. Other conflicting voices claimed that on the contrary, the lychees were a sign of good fortune. Good fortune, however, was something the folks in Guadeloupe were not used to seeing, and nobody paid them any attention.
Elissa de Kerdoré was waiting for Celanire at the foot of the gangway with members of the Lucioles association, clutching bouquets of arum lilies. Celanire accepted the flowers. Oddly enough, she refused to return Elissa’s outpouring of emotion and gave her a reluctant peck, as if suddenly she was embarrassed by their relationship. As for the Lucioles members, she scarcely greeted them. She eluded Elissa’s questions about the journey, explaining merely that in Lima she had fallen seriously ill. She had almost lost her life, in fact. As a result she had seen nothing of what travelers enthuse over—the selva, the páramo, the pyramids of the Incas and their temples of worship. She hadn’t visited Machu Picchu. No, she hadn’t made a pilgrimage to Arequipa in the footsteps of Flora Tristan. No, she hadn’t been interested in the condition of the Amerindian women. Thereupon she turned her back on the crowd of inquisitive women and headed for the carriage, whose horses were stamping impatiently over a mountain of manure.
The journey from La Pointe to Basse-Terre lasted the entire day.
Comfortably propped against the cushions, Thomas and Celanire constantly dozed off. As for Ludivine, she never tired of gazing at her surroundings. She had forgotten the splendor of her adopted island. They drove through a series of landscapes, each one more impressive than the next—from the formidable mangrove swamps around La Pointe and the cane fields of Petit-Bourg, bristling with their shaftlike flowers, to the banana groves at Capesterre, each tree bent double from the weight of its cluster of fruit, and the foothills of the volcano flecked with fleecy clouds. After Gourbeyre, they made a sharp turn, and the horses seemed to gallop straight for the blue gulf of the ocean. Then they swerved suddenly to the right and entered Basse-Terre.
It was barely dark. But with shutters lowered, the houses were already asleep. At the governor’s residence the servants, making believe they were glad to see their masters back, served a light supper. Ludivine’s nurse went into raptures: how she had grown in such a short time! How could she possibly talk to her like a little girl now and tell her bedtime stories! Then everyone retired to their quarters. Thomas and Celanire had been sleeping in separate bedrooms for some time now, and night visits to each other were rare. Once he had drunk his laudanum, Thomas was about to drop off when he heard the door creak open. He opened his eyes and to his surprise saw his wife appear, her hair falling loose, wearing a white silk negligee over a nightdress of the same color, a lace ribbon around her neck.
She came and lay down next to him in bed, and he caressed her tenderly, surprised by her mysterious, preoccupied expression.
“What’s the matter, my little pet?”
She curled up against him. He loved her fresh smell of the rain forest.
“Do you remember what Montaigne said: ‘The soul which has no set aim is lost’?”
He burst out laughing.
“I thought you hated Montaigne. Since when have you been reading the Essais?”
She turned to face him.
“I want a child!”
“A child?” he repeated, flabbergasted, almost frightened.
He doubted he was capable, but miraculously, he felt his member stiffen. Meanwhile, she was clasping him in her arms as she used to do and whispering in his ear:
“Please, Thomas! All I can do now is be a good mother.”
