Victoire

by Maryse Conde

  Boniface never came back to the rue de Condé and Jeanne could claim that his relations with her mother were now over and done with. At Christmas and New Year’s he faithfully sent Victoire expensive presents, one of which was one of the first radio sets of the time.

  I find it surprising that Jeanne never intervened likewise in the relations between her mother and Anne-Marie. She probably dreaded Anne-Marie, knowing her to be a loudmouth, capable of making terrible scenes. The fact remains, however, that Victoire and Anne-Marie continued to meet every day on the Place de la Victoire. To my knowledge, Boniface respected Jeanne’s instructions and never came to join them.

  LIFE, THEREFORE, was organized without Boniface.

  On the rue de Condé everything revolved around Jeanne’s teaching. She would get up at four in the morning, leaving Auguste lounging in bed. At that time, I don’t know why, she had given up daily mass, something she was to take up again only after Victoire died. She gave the final touches to her lessons and finished correcting the homework. Then she did an hour’s gymnastics in order to lose weight. Abdominals especially. Or else, dressed in one of her husband’s old pair of shorts, she would run as far as the harbor. Showing off her legs at her age was a bold step and the churchgoers coming home from first mass looked at her reproachfully. Her reputation for being odd started to be without precedent. Everything she did caused a sensation. What was this idea of running to lose weight? A woman should be proud to show off her curves, a sign that she is being spoiled at home.

  Back at the rue de Condé, she would shower—Auguste’s running water was his pride and joy—dress, and rig herself out with jewels. She would down a huge bowl of coffee, without sugar, prepared by Victoire, who had been up since dawn. We should say in passing that this coffee without sugar was another oddity on an island with such a sweet tooth. Then she left for school. It was seven o’clock, the sun had begun to open wide its eyes, and Auguste was scarcely out of bed. She was keen to arrive at school ahead of time so that she could write on the blackboard in her fine, well-rounded writing the math problems or questions of grammar.

  Since there was no lacking in household staff, two servants and a mabo for Auguste’s two boys, Victoire found herself in the same situation as in Le Moule: she had nothing to do all day. This time, she took the bull by the horns and tried hard to invent things to do for herself. She supervised the housework, tracing the dust over the furniture with her finger. When the servants came back from market, she inspected their baskets, weighing again the pork for casserole on an old pair of Roberval scales and checking every cent of the expenses. In the afternoon, she would mend clothes, sew buttons on shirts, and darn socks, things that Jeanne, brought up by the Walbergs as a young lady, was incapable of doing. Then she made sure the washing was well starched and ironed, ruthless about creases in Auguste’s shirt cuffs and collars. Very soon the servants began to loathe Victoire, who was always on their backs. She was the cause of a stream of girls being taken on a trial basis, hired, then dismissed, all uttering the same complaints as they turned in their aprons: the mistress thought she was God’s gift to mankind, but the mother was worse: a real shrew.

  As for meals, Auguste was not much different from Jeanne. He was capable of lunching off a slice of yam soaked in a spoonful of olive oil and rubbed with a piece of cod or smoked herring, a souvenir of his childhood as a maléré. Victoire however gave him the taste for fine cooking. Henceforth, he sat down at the table for lunch with a napkin around his neck like a child and was served grilled lobster tails or smoked chicken in lemongrass under the disdainful eye of Jeanne, who pecked away at her purslane salad.

  “My favorite dishes,” he recalled, on the rare occasions when he talked about his mother-in-law, something he was always reticent to do, I don’t know why, “were not the complicated ones of her invention where she mixed all sorts of spices, sweet and sour, meat and seafood. It was the way she made a simple fish broth with tench and grunt, rice, cow peas, and a sliver of salt pork. For me that was a feast.”

  Auguste was the only one in the household to be spared criticism by the servants and the neighbors’ gossip. They pitied him, rather, having to live with such a mother-in-law and married to a shrew he was incapable of taming. In actual fact, contrary to what people thought, he was somewhat hard-hearted and indifferent to anything that didn’t concern Jeanne or himself. He never shared his wife’s idealism on the values of secular education nor the generous aspirations of the Grands Nègres who claimed to lead the entire Race onward. His only concern was to make money. He spent his time satisfying the obscure dreams of a child born in a hovel on the Morne à Cayes and finished up brandishing his cutlass, dressed in khakis, and playing the gentleman farmer and banana planter on his property in Sarcelles.

  The round of visits to the Grands Nègres in La Pointe, however, was just as imperative as in Le Moule and also took place on Sunday afternoons, since high mass at the cathedral of Saint-Pierre and Saint-Paul took up the mornings, dress preparations and gossiping in front of the church included. Edgar Littée, a bourgeois mulatto, had the idea of capturing on film daily scenes in the life of this society of mimicry in La Pointe: a riot of drapes and wide-brimmed hats, little boys dressed in sailor suits and the girls in frilly dresses. Here and there a black face, if we don’t include the mabos, the nursemaids. In La Pointe the club of Grands Nègres was more closely organized. Its members all lived in close proximity to one another, in a neighborhood situated symbolically far from the white Creoles, but also far from the stench of the outlying district where the maléré lodged.

  When I returned to Pointe-à-Pitre after an absence of twenty years, I realized I had practically never crossed the Vatable Canal. All I knew of the town was the narrow quadrilateral where I had been brought up. I had to go back and discover its shacks, its yards, and its storm channels swarming with guppies.

  In actual fact, the members of the club of Grands Nègres were never very many in number. As the years went by, it became increasingly difficult to join. It was no longer just a question of education or being one of the first physicians or first teachers. Apart from the basic rules of occupying a certain position in society, living in an upstairs-downstairs house, speaking only French, and having been at least once to France and stayed in Paris, more subtler edicts were proclaimed. Monsieur Cabriou, for instance, magistrate, who roared with laughter in the most vulgar way, displaying the pink velvet of his uvula, and whose wife sat on enormous buttocks, was excluded forever. More than in Le Moule, Victoire loathed these visits. Alas, she was forced to accompany Auguste and Jeanne on every one of them, walking three steps behind them. She sat without a smile or a word, never answering questions, turning her glass of grenadine round and round in her hands. Soon an even more terrible ordeal loomed.

  Together with a group of Grands Nègres, Auguste planned to establish a bank, the Caisse Coopérative des Prêts, which was the exact name for this institution that in fact was quite modest. The members of the future board of directors decided on a weekly dinner with their wives. Wasn’t sitting round a table for a meal the most convivial way of getting to know one another? Auguste and Jeanne, who had an outstanding cook at home, offered to be the hosts for such gatherings. I believe the idea was Auguste’s; he was afraid that his mother-in-law was finding life on the rue de Condé somewhat empty. Like at Anne-Marie’s, Victoire found herself in the position of a writer forced to honor a commission from her publisher. Very quickly, her work weighs heavy on her, becomes unbearable and a chore. For cooking, like writing, can only blossom in an atmosphere of total freedom and cannot stand constraints. The devil with rules, treatises, manifestos, and poetic arts. Paradoxically, Jeanne was constantly on her back, overwhelming her with suggestions.

  “How about cooking your splendid stew of crayfish in lemon and green mangoes? Or your guinea fowl with currants and honey?”

  “No! Whatever they pretend, those people have no palate. Just do a chicken fricassee served with a gratin of gr
een golden apples.”

  “No! Rather pork with saffron and coconut milk served with Creole rice.”

  Victoire complied, without sulking and without betraying any grudge. It would have been all right if she could have stayed in the kitchen with the servants facing the dishes she had contrived to cook. But once again Jeanne forced her to get dressed, sit in the drawing room with the guests, sit down at the table with them, and listen to an incomprehensible conversation in which she was incapable of taking part. However much the guests heaped compliments on her, she got the feeling she was not in her place. The devotion that Jeanne showed her at those meals appeared to her ostentatious and theatrical. She was convinced it was nothing but a smokescreen designed to conceal to what degree she was ashamed of her. So she hunkered down at the end of the table, silent and sickened, offering the sight of her profound distress to one and all.

  “Poor Madame Quidal! You do feel sorry for her!” commented the diners back home with a full stomach, having eaten their fill.

  “What can you expect with a daughter like that. She’s a real pain!”

  We would be wrong in thinking that Jeanne, like Anne-Marie at the time, got any pleasure out of these weekly gatherings. For her too, but for different reasons, they were torture. It was not just the smell from the mounds of food that turned her stomach together with the sight of the so-called distinguished guests stuffing themselves greedily, Auguste worst of all. What an appetite he had! It was because she was the youngest of the group. They treated her like a child who meddles with grown-up affairs instead of minding her own business. She suggested for instance that the future employees of the Caisse Coopérative des Prêts wear badges with their names on them. A ridiculous idea! Some of them had known the first Madame Boucolon, Antoinette Sambalas, and hinted that she was far better than the second. Less beautiful. Less elegant. Less educated, that’s for sure—she was merely a salesgirl in the haberdashery department of the store Au Dernier Chic—but that didn’t mean she wasn’t less adorable, less agreeable, and she knew where a woman’s place was.

  As you can see, life on the rue de Condé was not exactly pleasant. Auguste, who in his time had been quite a lad, had turned over a new leaf. After school was over, he was always home reading his newspaper or watching the crowd in the street from the balcony. In private he did not bother Jeanne with his stories, since she took no interest in them. The one exception to his staid ways was his Montecristo cigars he ordered from Cuba, on which he had his initials, AB, printed on the ring. As for Jeanne, she never stopped working. She would buy the teacher’s answer books and immerse herself into the key to exercises. As for Victoire, she dreamed. About what?

  As you can see, there was no music or reading. My father ordered books, a little like he ordered champagne, from the House of Nelson, who shipped the entire works of an author. All of La Fontaine. All of Molière. All of Lamartine. These were hardbacks with a white cover. Once he had arranged them on the library shelves he never touched them again. I can recall having read at the age of ten all the plays of Victor Hugo. Le roi s’amuse made a deep impression on me.

  AT THIS TIME, apart from Anne-Marie, Victoire began to keep company with a person who could have been of great comfort to her. Alas, the relationship was short-lived.

  Her name was Jeanne Repentir, and she was somewhat of an eccentric. She had arrived from New Orleans five years earlier and had opened a dressmaker’s shop under the name of the Golden Thimble, a modest sign hung on the door of a modest lodging. Jeanne Repentir quickly became the darling of the black and mulatto coquettes of La Pointe, since with the help of a little dark girl from the outlying districts, two mannequins, and a few patterns from the Modes et Travaux collection, she managed to give an inimitable touch to her creations.

  Victoire had accompanied her daughter one day for a fitting and the two women had got along well with each other.

  They had a good many things in common.

  Both from Marie-Galante, they had left their native island very young and had never returned. They had no idea what white man had fathered them, though Jeanne Repentir liked to claim, with no grounds whatsoever, that he was a Basque country gentleman with a double-barreled name as long as your arm. But what would a Basque country gentleman with a double-barreled name as long as your arm be doing in Marie-Galante at the end of the nineteenth century? In any case, I could find no trace of him in the archives. They were so light-skinned that even the eye of a Guadeloupean, expert in detecting the slightest degree of color, could be mistaken. Jeanne Repentir had bluish purple eyes; Victoire’s, as we know, were pale gray.

  In an almost identical manner, they had both got pregnant by a black male. As for Gratien Philogène, Jeanne Repentir’s short-lived partner, he had recognized his daughter. However, he had taken so little care of her that he had let her die of tuberculosis at the age of thirteen, whereas he could have had her treated in a sanatorium in France. After that Jeanne Repentir had fallen madly in love with Gervais de Puyrode, a white Creole from Martinique, owner at the time of the Courcelles sugar factory in Sainte-Anne. Barely escaping the fire that burned down his property, Gervais, together with Jeanne and Vitalis, his newborn son, took refuge on the White Mango estate not far from New Orleans. Passion doesn’t last, it’s a well-known fact. Cradling Vitalis in her arms, Jeanne Repentir was soon back in Guadeloupe, where, taking advantage of her travel experiences, she set up her own business. As for Vitalis, he was so handsome, blond and curly-haired, that the priests would choose him every year to crown the Virgin Mary during the August 15 celebrations at the cathedral of Saint-Pierre and Saint-Paul. Apart from that, he was a little brat who broke his mother’s heart by playing hooky and spending his time fighting the little ragamuffins in the Vatable Canal district. Jeanne Repentir lived in expectation of a letter from Gervais, who would bring her back to White Mango, where she and her son would take up their rightful place. She had seen this moment in her dreams and her dreams never lied.

  Other things separated them. One of them was fundamental.

  Since her mother’s family had not lacked presence of mind, Jeanne Repentir had been educated and knew how to read and write. Her invoices, written in blue ink on squared mauve stationery (my mother kept several of them), were proof of it. She spoke the most refined French, at times a little affected. The two women so alike yet so different would often meet in the afternoons in Jeanne Repentir’s home, composed of four rooms, since the living room was divided in two by a cretonne drape behind which the fittings took place. Victoire sat head lowered over the hems that Jeanne Repentir gave her to overcast, listening intently to her friend’s phantasmagorical tales.

  “New Orleans,” she recounted, turning nonchalantly the handle of her Singer sewing machine, “believe me, I never liked that city. It’s built on the stench of the swamps. As soon as dusk falls, there’s a terrible smell and humidity oozes out of everywhere. You can’t even bury the dead for fear the bodies will emerge from the mud and come back to haunt the living.

  “I left because of the yellow fever epidemic that broke out that year. I had never seen anything like it. They would cover the heaps of corpses with quicklime and burn them on the sidewalks, in the storm channels and in the yards. What with the stench of the swamps, you can imagine what it was like. Of course there are some things I miss. In the French market, they used to sell bananas as red as pomegranates, grapes as sticky as dates, china, porcelain, and picanninies tattooed like monkeys.”

  Having nothing as juicy to recount, Victoire brought desserts that she knew Jeanne Repentir was particularly fond of.

  “I’ve got a sweet tooth!” she laughed, showing off her English.

  A mamee apple pound cake. A soufflé of ripe papaya. A custard flan with cashew fruit from La Désirade.

  “You’re a poet, a poet,” Jeanne Repentir would say, biting greedily into these small wonders. “You don’t know it, but you’re so much better than your daughter.”

  She too didn’t like Jeanne ve
ry much, although she was one of her best customers. Not that she took offense because Jeanne was jealous of her friendship with Victoire. That’s how children are. But she knew that despite her white skin and her sojourn in the United States, Jeanne looked down upon her. A dressmaker! A subaltern!

  When she didn’t have any urgent orders, she would accompany Victoire to the Place de la Victoire, where they met up with Anne-Marie. In the shade of the music kiosk, there was a court-bouillon of gossip, as the saying goes, that Victoire had no other choice but to swallow.

  “If she keeps puffing herself up like a peacock, Jeanne will burst!” Jeanne Repentir guffawed.

  “She’s like the frog who aspires to become bigger than the ox!” chimed in Anne-Marie, remembering her La Fontaine fables.

  Anne-Marie never suggested Victoire return to live on the rue de Nassau, for she knew Victoire would never accept it, but she made no mystery of what she thought of the life Victoire was leading at her daughter’s.

  “They’ll kill you. All that counts for them,” she declared in contempt, “is appearances. They’ve got no real feelings.”