Victoire

by Maryse Conde

  At 2 p.m. the din of conch horns could be heard, belonging to the strapping Negroes over six feet tall from the Socialist Federation of the Grands-Fonds, whom everyone feared. They took charge of the coffin, shifting it from one shoulder to the other, then set off for the cemetery, for Dernier had never had time for the church’s holy sacraments. Like all the socialists at that time, he was violently anticlerical and wrote in Le Peuple that religion was man’s stupidity.

  The funeral cortege was unending. The Workers’ Chorale, who opened the procession chanting socialist hymns, was threading its way between the graves, dug at ground level and marked out by the white rocks of the Bergevin graveyard, while the tail end of the cortege was still trailing along the rue des Abymes. Almost right up until evening, in front of the open grave, following the hymns, came a series of speeches that all expressed the same despair. Ah, the mold was broken. There wouldn’t be men of that caliber anymore.

  Victoire listened. She wondered what her life would have been like if Dernier’s passion for the disinherited had materialized into an interest for her own destitution. If this vayan nèg, this valiant Negro, who had advocated free schooling for all, had taken her hand to decipher the letters of the alphabet. Does caring for the forest prevent you from looking after each and every one of its trees? What else does love for humanity signify if not love and respect for every human being? That is why deep down in her heart when she thought of Dernier she felt an immense bitterness. She couldn’t help thinking that it was the hand of justice that had lit the fire.

  Night had fallen when she arrived back at the rue de Nassau.

  It was an evening of entente cordiale. Boniface Jr. had joined in Jeanne and Valérie-Anne’s games. The three children were running after one another in the back garden, uttering Siouxlike shouts. Victoire drew her daughter against her and to Jeanne’s great surprise kissed her. Such a show of affection was rare. She was tempted to tell her:

  “Papa w sòti mò.”

  But had her father in fact just died? For her, hadn’t he died before she was born, nine years earlier, when, without bothering to tell a soul, he had boarded the steamship and put an ocean between himself and two women with whom he had gone through the gestures of lovemaking?

  She kept silent. But from that moment on she took Jeanne to the cemetery at Bergevin every All Saints’ Day. The socialists had clubbed together to give Dernier the tomb he deserved: a ponderous monument of cement and freestone. There was always a crowd around it, praying, lighting candles, changing the water in the vases, and replacing the wilted wreaths and bouquets with fresh flowers; a crowd of inconsolable individuals uttering heartrending cries. Jeanne had no idea why she was there. While her mother knelt down on the cold stone and lost herself in prayer (what was she asking God for?), Jeanne told herself stories to kill time. All she had to do was look around her. Trees everywhere. Flamboyants of an indecent red. Casuarinas. Mango trees loaded with fruit that nobody dared fight over with the dead. The number of funeral processions entering the gates impressed her. It was as if the inhabitants of La Pointe were dying like flies. Here a well-dressed, even opulent-looking, light-skinned family was following a small white coffin. A child. Their child? A daughter? A son? Born into happiness and great expectations. A christening awash with chodo custard and gateau fouetté. Death does not spare the affluent.

  A few alleys over, next to a grove of mango trees, a black family in tears was burying Linda, the apple of their eye: 1880–1899. Committed suicide out of love. The man she worshipped had abandoned her. So she gulped down a massive dose of tincture of laudanum. Commit suicide for a man? What stupidity! As for Death, she didn’t need much persuading; she’ll make do with any prey.

  When the chicken hawks began to spread their wings in the night air, the tombs would be glowing from the candles lit by an infinity of devoted hands. Her mother stood up, dusted off her knees, and led her by the hand back to the rue de Nassau. This protective gesture no longer made much sense. The daughter had recently grown taller and bigger than her mother.

  Jeanne ended up guessing why year after year Victoire took her to this grave, and she understood that Dernier Argilius must be her father. She took no pride in the fact. There is no reason why she should have. She mentioned it to nobody and never sought to make herself known to his family. The fact that he abandoned her mother, that he never for one moment bothered about the fruit of her womb, and let her, Jeanne, grow up in the charitable care of a family of white Creoles seemed to her the perfect illustration of this male tendency to maintain a heroic posture without assuming the real human duties that are often obscure and insignificant.

  Dernier Argilius was nothing but a whited sepulcher.

  Without seeking to excuse him, one question remains, however: Did he know about his daughter? Did Victoire have the courage to confess to him her condition? This presupposes an intimacy that perhaps never existed between them. He took her, withdrew, and went his way. He never asked questions, and not being very talkative, she never confided in him. However, even if he had been aware of her pregnancy, it is unlikely that Jeanne’s destiny would have changed. Up till very recently our men were like sowers, carelessly sowing the first field they came across. Sociology and literature are full of stories illustrating this machismo. “The condition of the Antillean woman” has become an indispensable topic of interviews, dissertations, and theses.

  All that is in the process of changing, like Antillean society itself. What will our American students have to write about in the coming years?

  NINE

  I have described in Tales from the Heart: True Stories from my Childhood how nobody in my family told me anything about slavery or the slave trade, those initiatory voyages that founded our Caribbean destiny. I had to negotiate on my own the weight of this terrible past. On the other hand, since individual stories have replaced our collective history, my mother on several occasions alluded to a journey my grandmother (whom she seldom mentioned except for a few clichés) made to Martinique in the year 1901. I keep asking myself why she insisted. What did she want to tell me? Her watered-down version of this modest odyssey took up the home-sweet-home theme, so beloved of the English, illustrating the risks an honest woman ran by leaving the security of her own home; by having adventures with men who respect nothing and nobody; by undergoing physical ordeals and leaving herself vulnerable to suffering, degeneration, and death. When I think about it, I believe it was her way of exorcising a memory whose pain never subsided. In actual fact, as a result of this journey, her mother met a stranger and abandoned Guadeloupe and her daughter for him. It didn’t matter that she recovered her wits and returned home, the intention was there. It was proof that her daughter did not mean everything to her.

  The facts I managed to gather corroborate my mother’s fears. This journey and the distress it caused can be considered incendiary and excusable, when all is said and done, in a life that was routine to say the least. Victoire, who at the time was only twenty-eight, that age when body and heart are raging with desire, was tempted to rearrange her lifeline. I can equate her flight with one of those types of marooning of which Victor Schoelcher speaks when the African, tired of the rigors of slavery, dreams of freedom but lacks the determination needed to realize his plans.

  Here are the facts.

  Those who are called local whites in Guadeloupe and Békés in Martinique amount to one and the same creature. Since the sixteenth century identical names can be found on either side of the Caribbean Sea. In 1684, Donatien Walberg, having sliced up a rival with a machete—they were both sharing the same bed of a free colored woman without knowing it—fled Guadeloupe in a fishing boat. Quite by chance, he sailed up a river and settled in Le Francois in the south of Martinique. There he founded a family. One of his descendants, Philimond, a merchant at Saint-Pierre, married Amélie Desgranges in February 1901. Philimond had spent many of his childhood vacations with the branch of his family in Marie-Galante and was especially fond of his cousin
Boniface, who, like him, had succeeded in business. He therefore invited Boniface together with his wife to his wedding, specifying that they should bring with them their cook, whose reputation had reached far beyond the shores of the island.

  Leaving the household in charge of the servants, Boniface and Anne-Marie, flanked by Victoire, succumbing under the weight of the wicker baskets that supplemented three large trunks, settled into the first-class section of the Lusitania for an eight-hour crossing. The steamer had barely left the quai Foulon when Anne-Marie began to feel sick. A little later she began to vomit noisily into brown paper bags. The sight of this woman bent in two, a greenish bile around her lips, was not very inviting, so Boniface went and stretched his legs on the promenade deck.

  Ever since Victoire had left Marie-Galante some ten years earlier with her infant in her arms, she had never crossed the high seas. The immensity of the voyage they were about to undertake frightened her. At the slightest noise or rolling movement she imagined the Lusitania swallowed up by the waves. More harrowing than this physical fear, though, were the thoughts that the wind on the open sea fanned like glowing embers. Jeanne had just been admitted to the Sisters of Saint-Joseph-de-Cluny day school, which had opened its doors right behind the church. This solid edifice built of gray stone still exists. It was not one of those schools founded strictly for the education of white girls. They accepted colored girls as well, most of them mulattoes from well-to-do families. According to some indiscreet revelations, Jeanne apparently was the class punching bag. Using little imagination, the pupils nicknamed her Little Whitey. One of their favorite ways of greeting her every morning was to dance round her, singing a nursery rhyme:

  A little Negress who was drinking some milk

  Said to herself, oh if only I could dip my head in a bowl of milk

  I’d become whiter

  Than all the French, my, my, my.

  She herself never complained. She merely became increasingly remote, increasingly silent, a foreigner to all those around her. As if she came from elsewhere, as if she possessed her own untranslatable idiom and her own incommunicable ways. Anne-Marie shrugged her shoulders:

  “Pooh! It will forge her character. Whoever we are, we all have to get over our childhood.”

  Victoire did not contradict her. Yet a pa vré sa (that’s not true), she thought, head lowered over her tomato coulis. Her childhood had been her only moment of happiness. She felt terrible for Jeanne and tortured herself, realizing that perhaps she had made a huge mistake believing she had acted for her daughter’s good. Daughter of a servant to a white Creole family, wasn’t that a scar that would remain with her all life long? She wondered how else she could ensure her education and contribute to the blossoming of her intellectual gifts.

  Around eleven, since Anne-Marie’s vomiting had subsided, she went and joined Boniface, who was calmly leaning against the ship’s rail, scanning the immense horizon. His serenity had a calming effect on her. Her fears appeared laughable to him. She convinced herself he was right. As long as he was alive, she possessed the security that Jeanne needed. Security, that’s the main thing.

  At times, schools of flying fish sheathed in silver like shining commas leapt out of the water. At a respectful distance a procession of porpoises accompanied them. Apart from that, blue waves rippled as far as the eye could see. Apart from that, there was nothing else. Nothing.

  Although they had left at dawn, when they arrived at Fort-de-France, night had fallen. They could not make out much of the bay, one of the most beautiful in the world, whatever Césaire might think. The town, which like La Pointe was a constant victim of conflagrations, hurricanes, and earthquakes, appeared sad and haggard. The unfortunate coaling girls, described with a dubious lyricism by Lafcadio Hearn, were bent double under their loads as they filed up the gangways of a steamer belonging to the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique bound for Bordeaux. Women carrying water jars waddled along one behind another. Boniface, Anne-Marie, and Victoire ignored the line of carriages for hire and walked. Unlike La Pointe, where walking was a perilous exercise because of the pickpockets, beggars, piles of garbage, and all sorts of clutter, the streets of Fort-de-France were practically deserted. The municipality had just renamed them and they bore the names of contemporary writers: Victor Hugo, Schoelcher, Isambert, and Perrinon. To save money, Boniface took a room for three in the Hotel du Prince Alfred. The window opened onto the oasis of tamarind and mango trees on the Savane. According to a tradition recently revived, the oompah-oompah of a band could be heard. They were playing La Belle Hélène by Offenbach. For one moment Anne-Marie was tempted to look for a bench, sit down, and listen. But she was utterly worn-out, like Boniface and Victoire. The trio did not even have the strength to go and admire the statue of the Empress Joséphine de Beauharnais, which had just been erected and nobody had yet thought of slashing her neck. Cutthroat statue. They retired for the night.

  In what manner of fashion?

  The moon in her curiosity peeked through the persiennes, but there was nothing ambiguous to see, if only to reveal the social hierarchy of the time.

  Out of respect for the two women, Boniface removed only his patent leather shoes and jacket. He lay down practically fully dressed on the bench, set beside the bow-fronted armoire, and immediately filled the room with his snores. Anne-Marie slipped on her batiste nightdress. Propped up against her pillows, she began to read L’Imitation de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ. She had put on quite a bit of weight, a genuine Rubens, blonde and pink. She blamed her portliness on Victoire’s sumptuous cooking and her irrepressible sweet tooth, especially for the rahat-loukoum they sold at the patisserie Trébert. Victoire, sitting at the very edge of the bed, undid her headtie and removed one by one the pins that held her buns, releasing her long black hair. Then, in her burlap nightdress as rough as a flour sack from France, she flopped down onto the patch of carat palm mat between the bed and the bench. Around midnight Anne-Marie woke her for a body friction with camphorated alcohol. She wasn’t feeling too well.

  The wedding took place at Le François on the family estate. They traveled in a hired “family-size” carriage. Today the Walberg sugar plantation is a famous landmark. It has been transformed by an enterprising heir into a five-star hotel. Tourists book certain rooms months in advance, insisting they sleep in the former slave shacks. Although these have been updated, they are a reminder of a past age.

  At that time the plantation produced its bushels of sugar year in, year out. The wedding of Philimond and Amélie, which it was hosting, was what is commonly called a beautiful wedding. For the marriage ceremony, three hundred and fifty guests, most of them from Saint-Pierre, crowded into the church, destroyed in 1891 by a hurricane that had killed sixty people, and rebuilt on the spot miraculously designated in a vision by one of the nuns of a neighboring convent. The wedding banquet was served on tables laid out in the plantation yard illuminated a giorno by torchères. Two orchestras that were a hit in the cabarets of Saint-Pierre, commonly cited as the uncontested capital of good taste, continued playing fashionable melodies one after another while waiting for the ball to open in the former boiling house. They would dance the cotillion and the cake walk imported from America until dawn. They would also sashay to the sounds of the beguine that was all the rage from one end of the island to the other:

  Manman, mwen desann Sèn Pyè

  In order to satisfy the desires of all these guests who were living their final days without knowing it, about twenty domestics had been laboring since dawn in the disused mill, transformed into a kitchen. Victoire was not afraid of the competition by the caterers, who’d also come from Saint-Pierre, with their guinea fowl stew. She was preparing one of her culinary triumphs, duck cooked in cassava and lemongrass—which I came across quite by chance years later in Belem—when a handsome Negro, somewhat of a dandy in his tight-fitting dark jacket, approached Victoire. She had met his insistent eyes with a beating heart several times. Once, he had even purposely br
ushed up against her. His name was Alexandre Arconte and he was the wine waiter, or in other words the employee in charge of drinks lent by O’Lanyer and Sons from Saint-Pierre and supervising a host of waiters skilled at pouring aperitifs, white wine, red wine, champagne, and liqueurs stored in the vinegar cellar. Victoire was red and sweating from the heat of the bagasse and kindling, which for economy’s sake had replaced the charcoal. Consequently, he placed a glass of orange wine between her hands, which she gratefully accepted.

  “Just look at them!” he murmured, not budging. “Has anything changed since the days of slavery? They’re having the time of their lives, whereas we are working ourselves to death.”

  She vaguely sensed the truth in his words. For Victoire, who had always worked without ever possessing anything, without ever receiving anything in return, who could neither read nor write, who lived off the goodwill of a white family, the abolition of slavery had changed absolutely nothing.

  What would happen if she quit her collar, she asked herself once again? She could become a street seller and sell popular dishes such as rice and beans, fried fish and court bouillon. Or else become a hawker, toting merchandise from village to village, far from the main marketplaces. Difficult and exhausting work that frightened her. Was she lacking in courage?

  She did not know what to say. Apparently Alexandre was not offended by her silence, since he invited her to sip a glass of Dutch anisette with him. A few hours later, when couples slipped their arms around each other’s waist and with wings on their heels flew to the ballroom, inquisitive eyes followed them as they delved into the park’s thick vegetation. I imagine it was something like the beginning of the world: acres of woodland lush with casuarinas, trumpet bushes, cigar-box cedars, palms and silk cotton trees, crisscrossed by forest paths and tracks running in every direction. If you followed those to the south, you came to the sea and a gentle beach strewn with shells and seaweed.