by Maryse Conde
From the very minute Thérèse’s and Dernier’s eyes met, sparks flew that set their bodies on fire. During lunch he drew up a chair to her left and whispered pell-mell all the clichés of a miserable childhood, a humiliated adolescence, and a passion for the Race from a very early age. During dessert, she sat at the piano and accompanied him as he thundered out with his bass voice the old political favorites; all the guests joined in with a frenzy exacerbated by the alcohol ingurgitated:
Nou voyé on blanc alé
I pa fè annyen ban nou
Voyé on pwèmyé milat
I pa fè annyen ban nou
Voyé on dézyèm milat
An nou voyé Léjé alé pou I défann no z’entéré
An nou voyé Léjé alé pou I monté o Pawlèman!
In the meantime, their blood was boiling with excitement. They were soaked with the burning sweat of desire. If they had been free to do so, they would have rushed into Thérèse’s bedroom and, flouting bourgeois preliminaries, gone into action. Instead, they had to wait one long week, the time it took to elude Danila’s vigilance and especially that of Gaëtane, who would be constantly warning her daughter:
“Pa ti ni konsomasyon san bénédisyon.” (No consummation without a benediction).
Dernier, however, was not entirely blinded by passion, if passion there was. He devised a project that was approved by the party cadres and comrades in La Pointe with whom he corresponded regularly. Together with Thérèse, he would be in charge of an association that aimed at teaching political awareness to the laboring masses on Marie-Galante by way of the arts. He proposed calling it “A Call to the Arts, Citizens.” Thérèse preferred “A Call to the Arts, New Citizens.” But Dernier thought the adjective useless, even redundant, and his decision prevailed. Literary nights, poetry evenings, and music recitals were held one after another in the newly painted town hall, but apart from the usual handful of Fulgence’s and Gaëtane’s friends, it remained hopelessly empty.
For the festival of Sainte-Cécile, Thérèse managed to have the philharmonic orchestra shipped over from La Pointe. The forty-three musicians in their blue and white uniforms and white helmets lined up in front of the town hall and played to perfection excerpts from Meyerbeer’s work. Apart from a few ragged urchins chewing on grabyo koko candies, not a peasant, farm laborer, fisherman, or worker took the trouble to turn up. Thérèse was so mortified she agreed to go along with Dernier, who suggested they concentrate their efforts on the school. At least there the audience is captive. The school principal, M. Isaac, an uptight mulatto, had hardened prejudices, but he feared Légitimus’s people and complied with every request.
Thérèse and Dernier then decided to form a choral society. Unfortunately, they were unable to come to an agreement. As a feminist, lest we forget, Thérèse insisted on including women’s voices and singing the famous “Hallelujah” chorus from Handel’s Messiah. Dernier, who was against mixing the sexes, was all for teaching the same songs that the socialists sang in the Workers Chorale in La Pointe.
Marie-Galante, however, was impatient to hear about their engagement.
Some indiscretions had revealed their affair. It’s true the lovers hid nothing. They galloped on horseback across the island to their trysts, Thérèse’s butt strapped tight into an old pair of her father’s trousers and her hair straightened with a hot iron and held in place by a net. They would meet in a cabin belonging to one of Dernier’s brothers. In order to make up for its modest surroundings, Dernier had brought in a bed made of locust wood and an oval mirror in which it was whispered the couple gazed at their reflection before the act of penetration. Despite all that, people were understanding. Firstly, because the sin of love is not a sin. And then putting Easter before Lent is no crime! Who hasn’t committed it? In fact, what marriage can claim to have escaped concubinage or béni-rété? The young girls who hoped to be bridesmaids had selected their gowns from the Printemps catalog. Others got help from dress patterns. Thérèse, an artist to her fingertips, drew her wedding dress on sheets of ecru paper and showed the sketches to her mother’s dressmaker, who shook her head, helpless.
“An pé’é jen pé!” (I could never manage that.)
Against all expectations, on December 23, 1889, Dernier Argilius slipped onto the steamer for La Pointe. A little surprised, Thérèse, however, did not worry inordinately about this trip. She knew he loathed celebrating Christmas in the Catholic manner. Like his political mentor, he dreamed of combining December 24 with the anniversary of the death of Victor Schoelcher, combining the savior of the black race with the liberator of the Jews. She only began to suspect the truth when some good souls came to inform her that Dernier had emptied his house in Les Basses of all his papers, clothes, and, above all, the books in his library. Utterly distraught, she ran over to Monsieur Isaac, who confirmed that Dernier Argilius had left Marie-Galante for good, and good riddance! At the request of Jean-Hégésippe Légitimus, he had turned his back on teaching to devote himself entirely to journalism. Later on he was to become director of the newspaper Le Peuple.
Thérèse went down on both knees to beg Fulgence—the outraged father who threatened to write straightway to Légitimus to tell him of his protégé’s unspeakable behavior—to remain silent. She reminded him that there had never been a promise of marriage in the true sense of the term. When she finally managed to get him to promise to stay put, she swallowed a whole bottle of what she thought to be arnica. In actual fact it was a purgative that Gaëtane had concocted with cassia and castor oil. Her entire body became inflamed. She defecated for a whole week and almost died: dehydration, sudden drop in blood pressure, and everything else. She regained consciousness only to be blinded by a photo on the front page of L’Emancipation: Dernier Argilius piously leading a pilgrimage to the Schoelcher museum, inaugurated with great pomp two years earlier, in front of a crowd of ecstatic workers. She fainted once again. After a month, she came through, but was so weak that Léonora Bilé, a Congolese, skillful in the art of herbs, came every day from Trianon to massage her wasted body with coconut oil macerated in balata bark.
It’s a common fact that misfortune never comes singly. Thérèse was gradually recovering from this abominable desertion when they discovered that Victoire, who as usual never said a word, never divulged a thing, was hiding a belly under her shapeless golle dresses. Danila, who had been spying on her for weeks, had noticed that she no longer washed her bloodstained rags once a month. To be honest, she had been nurturing deep down an unspeakable intuition. When she confided her suspicions to Gaëtane, the latter expressed her doubts. Didn’t Victoire take communion every Sunday at eight o’clock mass? Would she dare commit such a mortal sin? In order to back up her accusation, Danila had to force the unfortunate Victoire to bare the still modest yet incomparable calabash of a belly with a darker stripe down the middle and topped by an enormous tumbler of a belly button.
Pregnant!
For whom? By whom?
Like Oraison with Eliette seventeen years earlier, Fulgence was called to the rescue from his office at the town hall and unbuckled his belt. Victoire was less resilient than her mother. After five bloody lashes on her shoulders, she let it out, the name that Danila had not dared pronounce.
Thérèse fell into a swoon.
NOBODY WILL EVER know anything about the relations my grandmother Victoire had with Dernier Argilius.
That story has been erased. Deleted from memory. But I want to know.
I want to know how they communicated their desire, where they met and how many times. How did they manage to hide on an island where nothing is secret? Was Victoire pregnant straightaway? What drove her to him? Did her chaste adolescent heart become inflamed at first sight during that famous New Year’s lunch? Didn’t she have any consideration for her godmother, Thérèse, whose passion for Dernier was common knowledge? Or did she want to take revenge on her arrogance? Years later Thérèse told some close friends:
“Despite everything I did f
or her, she was always jealous of me. I could see that in her eyes, but I never took her seriously.”
She claimed that Victoire never felt anything for Dernier. All she was looking for was a man of standing, “a valid father.” She called her an ungrateful wretch, calculating and manipulating. I don’t believe a word.
As for Dernier, nobody will ever know why the man who possessed the most desirable young girl on Marie-Galante bedded also one of the most destitute. Nor why he turned his back on both of them at the same time.
I can therefore only use my imagination.
It wasn’t rape; that I’m certain of.
For her future son-in-law, whose heart she wanted to win through his stomach, Gaëtane used to send over a series of small dishes. At noon Danila would pile the plates on a tray that she covered with an embroidered napkin. With the tray on her head Victoire would trot off to Les Basses, which was then a densely populated suburb on the outskirts of Grand Bourg. She never found Dernier at home. He could be found either at the schoolhouse helping out the dunces, or downing neat rums at the Rayon d’Argent rum store with the party’s farm laborers. She would push open the door, which was never locked (in those days a burglary was unheard of), and arrange the plates on the table. That too was a moment of liberty that she made the most of. In order to comply with his political opinions, Dernier lived in a modest two-room cabin. The place, however, was unique. Books! Piles of books! Everywhere you looked. Piled up on the floor. Stacked haphazardly on shelves along the walls. Some were dog-eared. Others were annotated. Yet others were in shreds. You sensed that their owner loved them and read them. Not like Fulgence, who kept his leather-bound volumes in a mahogany glass cabinet and never touched them.
What a magical object a book is! Even more so for someone who can’t read, who doesn’t know there are bad books that are not worth sacrificing whole forests for.
Victoire would turn them over and over again in the palms of her hands. Sometimes she opened them and studied the signs that were indecipherable to her. She regretted her ignorance. Yet her heart did not hold Caldonia to blame. All she wanted to remember was Caldonia’s tenderness. Living a life of solitude, she could constantly hear Caldonia’s grumpy, affectionate voice repeating the riddles whose answers she knew by heart but pretended to search for:
“On ti bòlòm ka plin on kaz?” (A little man who fills the whole room.) A candle.
One day. The heat was suffocating. Dry lightning streaked the sky. The sea was glowing like a gold bar being smelted. With tongues hanging out, the dogs did little else but sniff one another’s backside and seek the shade. Livid, the anole lizards puffed up their dewlaps on the stems of the hibiscus. Victoire arrived at Les Basses soaked in sweat. For once, Dernier was at home. He had taken off his frock coat and, shirt wide-open on his hairy chest, he was fanning himself with a newspaper. She greeted him shyly in a muffled, slightly hoarse voice.
“Ben l’bonjou, misié!”
He inspected the tray, tasted the food, made a face, shrugged his shoulders, and exclaimed in Creole:
“What bunch of heartless individuals sent you out in this heat?”
Victoire remained expressionless. Did she share his opinion? He disappeared into the bedroom and came back with a towel that he threw at her.
“Go and wash your face in the washroom,” he ordered.
“Washroom” was a fancy word for it. A trellis fence marked out a space behind the cabin where a half-empty water jar and toiletry utensils could be found. Victoire obeyed and went outside. He came out onto the doorstep to stare at her with his arrogant eyes. Out of modesty she hesitated to undo her headtie in front of him. When she finally made up her mind, her black hair immediately tumbled down to her shoulders.
“What’s your name?” he shouted.
“Victwa, misié!”
“Where’re you from?”
“La Treille, yes!”
She filled a basin, washed her face and neck, dried herself, then went back inside. He had settled back in the rocking chair and looked up to stare at her with sustained attention, caressing her breasts with his eyes. Under this fiery gaze, she picked up the dishes from the day before and got ready to take her leave.
It was then that he stood up and walked over to her.
“You’re in too much of a hurry!”
He took her by the arm.
Did they make love that day? It’s unlikely.
I believe on the contrary that she was frightened; frightened by his touch, by this male smell that was filling her nostrils for the first time. She wriggled free, secured the tray on her head, and made a bee line for the town. People who saw her shoot past strained their necks. What was this crazy girl running after? Sunstroke, that’s all she could hope to get.
Danila’s suspicions were aroused from the very first day. Monstrous suspicions. Amid the ensuing misfortune, she grouched that her heart had warned her before everyone else.
She was putting the final touches to a sea urchin stew when Victoire came charging in, red and sweating. She was coming back from Les Basses, Danila remembered. What was she running away from? No use asking her, she wouldn’t answer. Danila noticed her hands trembling as she clumsily put away the plates she had brought back, even more awkwardly than usual. She almost fell flat on her face while crossing the yard. In charge of seasoning the salad, she mixed up the salt and pepper servers. While clearing the table, she crossed the knives and forks under Gaëtane’s very eyes and earned a sharp reprimand to which visibly she paid no attention.
Then she left untouched her more modest meal (no hors d’oeuvres or dessert), which she took with Danila in the kitchen. She sat daydreaming, her chin resting on the palm of her hand, before tackling the washing-up and breaking two ramekins in one go.
ONE MORNING, SHE who was generally mute as a blowfish, started humming a song while putting the wash to bleach. An old wake ceremony song that Oraison used to sing at La Treille, each time accompanied by bursts of laughter that flew from all sides. An old melody that Caldonia liked:
Zanfan si ou vouè
Papa mò
Téré li an ba tono la
Sé pou tout gout
Ki dégouté
Y tombé an goj a papa
In her amazement, Danila, who was busy kneading the batter for vegetable marinades, grated her left middle finger, mistaking it for a chunk of pumpkin.
IF PEOPLE HAD eyes to see—but people are blind, that’s a fact, and can’t see farther than the end of their noses—they would have noticed one thing: that Victoire’s beauty, up till then questionable, argued over, even contested, burst into the open.
Here she was suddenly less sickly, less adolescent. Not in the least bit little Miss Sapoti. A head of hair as thick as the Black Forest. Surreptitiously, her portliness made her breasts heavier and rounded her shoulders. Her overly pale complexion took on a velvety texture and darkened.
Danila, made perspicacious by her hatred, was the only one to notice this metamorphosis, which was even more suspect since Victoire no longer touched her food. What nurtured her were the kisses, the caresses, and the sweet words breathed into her. From where?
From a man, no doubt.
There is nothing like love to make a woman as beautiful as that. It’s not only the feeling. But the act. Making love.
What man are we talking about?
Danila refused to imagine the unimaginable or a fortiori speak the unspeakable. As her nurse, mabo Danila had held Thérèse over the baptismal font. She had wiped her behind, washed her menstrual-stained undergarments. She had no proof whatsoever, but wanted to shout at her:
“Watch out! Open both eyes! You think she’s a child, but she’s not the child you think she is. She’s a perverted little thing. A female of the first degree!”
Fifty years later, on her deathbed, Danila was still racked by remorse. She beat her breast: “Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.” For hadn’t she heard whisper that Dernier was an incurable womanizer? Under the guise o
f literacy lessons, Dernier received a constant stream of peasant girls. Some rumors had it that he was the father of Marinette’s son, who worked at the Folle-Anse plantation, and also Toinette’s, who toiled at Buckingham. Yet she hadn’t told anyone of these rumors. Not even her confessor. What was holding her back? The fear of hurting her beloved Thérèse. And now look what happened!
Her heart had jumped, that’s for sure. But in the end, what purpose had it served? Nobody had come out of it unscathed and she had not protected the girl she worshipped.
WHAT DISGUSTS ME in all this is that Victoire was never considered a victim. I can excuse Thérèse, who was blinded by her own grief. But as for the others, there was not a moment of compassion. Victoire was just sixteen. Statutory rape. Dernier was twice her age. He was educated, and a respected, even well-known notable. Everyone treated her like a criminal. I like to think that she hid her tears in her attic, revolted by her pregnancy, but not complaining, crushed by her solitude and convinced of her insignificance. Perhaps too she was expecting Thérèse to say something, but she never did.
“Here we are the two of us, both taken for a ride. At least you carry the future in your womb. Me . . .”
Fulgence demanded Oraison come and take back his daughter. She had disrespected the sanctity of his home. Oraison turned up at eight in the morning—he hadn’t gone to sea that day—flanked by Lourdes. Informed of her crime, he flung himself on Victoire and gave her such a slap that she fell to the ground, her mouth covered in blood. He then vented his anger by kicking and punching her. Under the terrified gaze of Gaëtane, Fulgence had to hold him back.
If he wanted to kill his child, let him do it elsewhere. There would be no bloodshed on his floor.
Without a farewell, without a thank-you, and, most significantly, without a penny, Victoire left the home where she had toiled for over six years, hugging the wicker basket containing the loose golle dresses and matador robe that Thérèse had forgotten to take back.
