Victoire

by Maryse Conde

Yes, she knew a little Latin.

  So she was counting on becoming an elementary school teacher? What a wonderful profession!

  Good Lord, the Negroes have come a long way since they arrived from Africa, beasts of burden under the whip! We may very well ask ourselves, however, whether they have really evolved. Still as lazy, depraved, and calculating. On this subject, the Rueil-Bonfils kept reeling off a never-ending stock of stories about the behavior of their factory workers.

  One day, Félicité, who liked to think she knew a thing or two about literature, with a spiteful smile offered Jeanne a short novel by Anaïs Ségalas, her idol, called Tales of the Antilles: The Forest of La Soufrière. Since by an amusing coincidence I had been awarded the Anaïs Ségalas Prize by the Académie Française for one of my books, Tree of Life, I made inquiries about this writer and discovered she was a Creole from Saint-Domingue who in her time had enjoyed a certain reputation. I even read her book reedited by L’Harmattan. It’s a worthless pack of racist ideas of that time, curiously combined with an abolitionist rehash. Here is an extract: “Jupiter must have been about thirty; he was a Negro of African race of the finest black or rather the ugliest. He was of average height, strong and energetic. Like all Negroes his feet were deformed and extended behind and in front of his shinbone. His hair was woolly. The bottom of his face stretched out like a muzzle.”

  Did Félicité intend to hurt Jeanne, whose intelligence we would have thought was above such stupidity? In any case, she hit her mark and my mother suffered enormously. In fact, she never stopped suffering. At mealtimes, when Victoire served up culinary delights of her invention, a capon with breadnuts, for example, she received an ovation and a heap of praise that implied she at least knew her place. Not like some people. Jeanne never stopped asking herself whether she ought not to make a scene, stand up, and leave. I do believe that what consequently came to be known as her “impossible nature” was born from having suffered her humiliation in silence out of respect for her mother. The worst of it all, however, was that Aymeric Rueil-Bonfils was competing with Boniface Jr. He insisted on openly courting her, encouraged by the entire family, according to him. She in fact sensed that the family would have applauded if she had been generous with her favors, just as Victoire had been generous with Boniface, thus regaining her true vocation.

  All this suddenly came to an end.

  One day out of the blue, Anne-Marie declared she didn’t like Félicité Rueil-Bonfils, who knew nothing about music. In fact, all she talked about were her books and her simple or double flowering gardenias. Valérie-Anne whimpered because the children of her own age poked fun at her pilosity and called her Red Head. Since Boniface Jr. mistakenly imagined that Jeanne preferred Aymeric, he decided Aymeric was one hell of a joker. Aymeric boasted that his mare Torride always came first at the races and won him sums obviously multiplied by ten. Only Boniface Sr. could possibly like the company of Amédée Sr. Knowing he was in desperate straits, riddled with debts and vainly seeking a buyer for the factory, reassured him in his conviction that trade was a better choice than sugar.

  Finally, the loathsome holidays drew to an end. The Walbergs left for La Pointe. Jeanne for Versailles. This time she did exactly as she pleased and chose the steamer that only took six and a half hours, stopping at Sainte-Rose, Deshaies, and Pointe-Noire.

  For two years Victoire didn’t visit her. Only their letters provided a semblance of communication between them. During those years Jeanne worked herself to death and passed her school certificate with the grade “Very Good” plus “Congratulations from the Jury,” which opened the doors to the teaching profession. But that wasn’t enough for her. In a long, detailed epistle she explained that she would have to continue studying at Versailles for another year. This long separation without the holidays in Vernou, since Jeanne regularly taught remedial classes during the long vacation, was extremely damaging for the relations between mother and daughter. Victoire, feeling abandoned, withdrew further into herself, cooking to excess. At that time when refrigeration did not exist, you couldn’t keep food for more than a day or two. Délia and Maby distributed the leftovers to the families of the needy maléré, carefully selected for their good behavior and their devotion to God. Boniface, so particular about waste, did not protest. Everything his Victoire did was right. She drew even closer to Anne-Marie, who had no need for an explanation, since she could read her like an open book, and thus played certain pieces especially for her. The afternoon sessions therefore changed. Victoire no longer fiddled on her guitar or practiced on her flute. With eyes closed, sitting in her rocking chair, she listened. At times, painful sighs welled up in her breast and tears rolled down her cheeks. Yet Anne-Marie never intervened with questions or words of consolation. She left it up to the music to do its work.

  TWELVE

  The newspaper Le Nouvelliste celebrated Jeanne’s success at passing her final, superior school diploma with a vibrant article headline “Onward, Negress! Forge ahead!”

  Beneath the headline was a photo, alas not a very attractive one. My mother, as lovely as she was, never was photogenic. In front of the lens, she would tense up, become stressed, and in the end look like a hunted animal. In addition, the newspaper listed with satisfaction the names of the four young black girls, including her, who had received their final diploma. They were the first of their race. The pictures of these pioneers appeared in Femmes en devenir, a journal we might label as feminist, as well as in the monthly magazine La Guadeloupe de demain. Ever since Marie de la Redemption, the Mother Superior of the convent school at Versailles, had declared in Diocèses de France that in all her career she had never come across such a brilliant mind, from one day to the next Jeanne became a kind of star, public opinion crediting her with a superior intelligence. In reality, the Mother Superior and her pupil had never got on together, the former constantly reproaching the latter for her arrogance, susceptibility, and impertinence. The latter reproaching the former for her racism. Jeanne did not keep happy memories of Versailles. I admire her courage and determination to spend three years there. Three years of her youth when she could have been laughing, dancing, and flirting. In light of the Walbergs’ recommendation, the convent, which admitted only legitimate children, made an exception for Jeanne, whereas the other pupils had never tolerated her and at the slightest opportunity reminded her who she was.

  Perhaps out of respect for Victoire, Anne-Marie wanted Jeanne to celebrate her success at rue de Nassau. They would invite Monsieur Roumegoux and Father Moulinet, who taught the children catechism and gave Jeanne her first communion. Jeanne refused, with the excuse that she was obliged to attend a teaching course in Basse-Terre. I don’t know whether it is possible to imagine exactly how Victoire felt as she contemplated the picture of her daughter in the newspapers. Even if she could not read the accompanying articles brimming with praise, her heart was no doubt bursting with pride. What a revenge she had taken on Dernier! Without his help, she had prized open heavily padlocked doors for her daughter. Without his help, she was offering her a radiant future. I believe, however, that these feelings were mixed with a great deal of sadness. She was fully aware that this success had been paid for dearly, too dearly, acquired at the price of too much humiliation. She was making her child inaccessible, locked in a prison where the air was rarefied. My mother was of the same opinion. I constantly heard her exclaim in a tone of voice that was unmistakably ambiguous: “My mother could neither read nor write, but without her I wouldn’t be where I am today.”

  Where was she? Those who had eyes understood full well that she did not see herself in paradise.

  In October, she was assigned her first teaching position. Then as now, it was the custom to assign beginners to the most thankless schools. But her results were so exceptional that instead of sending her off to La Désirade, Terre-de-Haut in Les Saintes, or some other godforsaken hole, the Ministry of Education appointed her to Le Moule, the second largest town on the island, with more inhabitants than Bas
se-Terre.

  I don’t know what the monthly salary of a young female elementary school teacher was in 1909, but I do know it was one-fifth below that of a man’s. Such as it was, it allowed her no doubt to support her mother. Jeanne hastened to ask Victoire to come and live with her. Ill-informed and bad-mouthing are those who claim that once she had assured her daughter’s education, Victoire rushed to drop the Walbergs like a crab drops its claw, as the saying goes. For two months she turned a deaf ear to her daughter’s pleas. To the point that in November, Jeanne, stung to the quick, had to come and fetch her herself in La Pointe.

  What was Victoire afraid of? Did she think this invitation was dictated by propriety? Couldn’t she resign herself to leave Boniface and especially Anne-Marie?

  We do not know the details of the separation and if it really was surrounded in drama. We do know, however, that at six thirty one morning, when it was raining cats and dogs, Jeanne and Victoire climbed aboard a carriage that in four hours drove them to Le Moule. Throughout the journey they did not say a word to each other, each locked in her gloomy thoughts. On arrival, Jeanne hired the services of a street porter who wheeled her mother’s trunk through the streets on a barrow.

  “Le Moule has a melancholy air about it,” someone wrote at the time, “and its wide streets are empty. A devastating fire has swept through the town! The town is dead, the port abandoned, the only edifice standing, the church, the only walk, the graveyard.” The town was not only melancholy. It was overpopulated and wretched. Although in this sugar-producing region the factories at Zevallos, Gardel, and Blanchet procured a seasonal employment for the workers from the former plantations, they did not provide any kaz-nèg, in other words any lodging. The workers were forced to crowd into an ever-growing number of shacks surrounding the center of town. Jeanne had rented a two-room cabin, tiny but prettily painted in light gray with green persienne shutters, just two steps from the rue Saint-Jean, a flourishing neighborhood lined with the shops and warehouses of the white Creole merchants. The interior was sparingly furnished, for she had refused the slightest gift from Anne-Marie, whose house on the rue de Nassau was crammed with furniture: low tables, high tables, square or oval, chairs, sleigh beds, canopy beds, four-poster beds, all locked away in the attic. She would have liked Victoire to share her bed—a so-called bed à boules, padded with two mattresses, a bolster, and two pillows—in which she saw a symbol of her new station. But Victoire remained intransigent. A straw mattress thrown on the floor would be quite sufficient for her. Up at four in the morning, they would walk to mass, Victoire trotting behind as she always did. Back home, they would drink their coffee in silence. Scalding hot, black, and heaped with sugar. Then Jeanne would leave for the elementary school for girls, which used to be where the present technical lycée stands. Left on her own, Victoire had plenty to do. She would dust the furniture, air the straw mattress, beat the others, sweep the floor, scrub it three times a week, wash her daughter’s clothes, whiten and starch them, then iron them. Since she was a real workaholic, the housework was finished around eleven. Her day was then over. Since Jeanne ate nothing or very little, there was no cooking to be done. I wonder what it meant for Victoire never to set foot in the kitchen. Never to match savors and colors. Never to breathe in the smell of spices. No longer to be God.

  Such a situation is comparable to that of a writer who, due to circumstances beyond her control, is kept from her computer. What torture! How does she fight that terrible feeling of uselessness that assails her?

  At eleven thirty Jeanne would return home from school, perspiring despite the parasol she held over her head, for Le Moule is a stifling town. Hot waves of feverish gusts would blow in from the ocean. Mother and daughter, without a word, would lunch off a salad. Jeanne would leave for school again. At first, during her absence, Victoire did not get out of the house and stayed cooped up in the cramped interior. Then around four in the afternoon she got into the habit of walking as far as the ocean, the Atlantic on this side of Guadeloupe, raging, boiling, and roaring. It was bordered by a promenade, a sort of malecòn, planted with thatch palms. Little towns, like little countries, don’t like strangers, those who come from God knows where. They sniff them with distrust, for danger lurks in the folds of their clothes. The inhabitants of Le Moule would watch Victoire. “The new schoolmistress’s mother” boded no good. She would walk, machinelike, absorbed in her thoughts. Sometimes she would sit on a bench, savoring the sea breeze. Jeanne finished school at five in the afternoon. She would return home, her parasol under her arm, preceded by a pupil proud to be carrying the exercise books. In the light of an oil lamp she sat engrossed in her corrections, while Victoire remained outside on a bench. Women selling grilled peanuts and topinambos set up shop not far from her on the sidewalk, but did not engage in conversation with the stranger. The night gradually closed in around her motionless figure, the racket of the insects grew louder, and the great voice of the ocean intensified into a howling roar.

  I interviewed Léonie X, who has lived all her life in the anchorage district and as a child used to see Victoire. “She scared me,” she confided in me. “All alone in the dark. Maman convinced me she was gagé, had made a pact with the devil to leave her skin on the side of the road and turn herself into a dog. Sometimes she lit a pipe and it glowed like a big eye.”

  One Sunday in December, an event somewhat out of the ordinary came to trouble the morning routine. The sound of a Cleveland automobile roaring past the church, in front of which the faithful out of high mass were still chattering, drew a crowd of neighbors. Boniface, with aviator goggles and muffler, stepped out of the car while the neighbors in their curiosity rushed out onto their doorsteps. He shyly planted his lips on Victoire’s forehead and asked how she was.

  “Sa ou fè?”

  “An bien mèsi.”

  He had brought a gift: a gramophone, a highly sophisticated English make that had cost him a fortune, together with a box of records. Since he had been guided by whatever took his fancy, his choice was somewhat disparate. It included beguines, Christmas carols, and patriotic hymns such as “The Song of Departure.” Nevertheless, he had not forgotten Anne-Marie’s favorite work, Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins, or an assortment of opera excerpts. Thus, failing her cooking, Victoire rediscovered the joy of music and the melodies from Carmen:

  L’amour est enfant de Bohême

  Il n’a jamais jamais connu de loi

  Boniface’s visit lasted exactly thirty minutes. As soon as he had downed a glass of shrubb prepared by Victoire since it was Christmas, he asked to be excused because of the long drive back to La Pointe. In actual fact it was too painful for him to be near his beloved Victoire and not take her in his arms. Above all, it was especially difficult to put up with Jeanne’s gaze as she sat in a corner stiff as a poker: a mixture of disapproval, contempt, and anger. Confronted with such a look, everything that had bound him to Victoire for so many years became dirty, sordid, and guilt-ridden. As I have already said, relations between Jeanne and Boniface had considerably deteriorated well before her departure for Versailles. Once the best of friends, on the rue de Nassau they no longer spoke to each other; Jeanne would merely offer her forehead for a kiss each morning before stiffly taking her place at the breakfast table. There had never been a declaration of war between them, but a chill that prevented any communication.

  Boniface’s visit was the cause of the first quarrel between Jeanne and Victoire. Quarrel, moreover, is not the right word. It implies a sharp exchange of words, even insults. In the case in point, it was rather a monologue on the part of Jeanne, who, without ever raising her voice, expressed her irritation with Victoire sitting mute and withdrawn. The reasons for her anger could be summed up by her concern about what the neighbors would say. What will the neighbors think, seeing this white Creole sweep into their house as if he owned it? How could they think of them as respectable women?

  In fact this first “quarrel,” which was to be followed by a few other
s for the same reason, set a pattern. Victoire never opened her mouth or defended herself. Each time, she remained mute, as if petrified by her daughter’s words. Like many children, Jeanne was possessive and therefore unfair. She could not allow Victoire to have feelings of affection for anyone but herself. Certainly not for Anne-Marie, and even less for Boniface. Although Jeanne was never attached to the socialist ideas of the time and seemed to me totally apolitical, in her eyes these white Creoles had merely exploited Victoire. Mainly she tensed up thinking of Boniface, who had shamefully abused her body. She sincerely hoped that no pleasure or emotion had come out of their embraces. She could not understand how Victoire could like living on the rue de Nassau and consider it home, where absolutely nothing belonged to her, not even the Regency room that housed her miserable personal effects in a wooden trunk, not even the bed she slept on. She could not understand either why she had never tried out anything else besides being a servant at the Jovials or the Walbergs, or imagined another setting for her life.

  Boniface never came back to Le Moule, although he constantly sent Victoire presents by the driver of the charabanc that soon replaced the diligence. Presents as ill-assorted as his choice of music: an alarm clock concealed in a Swiss chalet, a coffee grinder, some lavender water, and, most surprising of all, a dozen Cholet cloth tea towels.

  THIRTEEN

  Le Moule had no cultural life to speak of. The only events that brought a little distraction were the religious festivals of Easter, the Feast of the Assumption, and Christmas. In such a monotonous existence, the round of visits to the club of Grands Nègres constituted an essential element.

  Lest we forget, her job as an elementary school teacher, one of the first black elementary school teachers, invested Jeanne with a heavy responsibility. Despite her young age, she was now enrolled in the embryo of the bourgeoisie. She therefore had to form alliances with the members of this prestigious club.