Victoire

by Maryse Conde

  Suddenly the unexpected occurred and the incredible dream came true. At death’s door following a fall from his horse, Gervais de Puyrode sent for Jeanne Repentir and Vitalis with the intention of putting himself in God’s good graces before the final reckoning by marrying the mother and legitimizing the son. Within a week the deliveries were completed, and the Golden Thimble emptied of all its contents. Even the sewing machine found a buyer. Late one afternoon Anne-Marie and Victoire sadly accompanied Jeanne and Vitalis, who embarked for New York on board the SS Valparaiso. From there they would take the train south to New Orleans. Under the almond trees on the Foulon wharf, Anne-Marie and Jeanne Repentir cried their hearts out while Victoire stood to one side, dry-eyed, yet just as deeply distressed. Was it the end of their friendship? Would they ever see each other again? On this point Jeanne Repentir was categorical. She could not imagine her life without visiting Guadeloupe. Pawol sé van, goes the proverb! Yes, words are a lot of wind and hot air. Weeks, months went by. Mother and son were never heard of again. Not even a hurriedly scribbled letter or cheap card. Jeanne Repentir and Vitalis seemed to have disappeared into a ghostly limbo.

  A few years ago I was invited by Tulane University and made the mandatory rounds of the plantation houses in Louisiana. However hard I pressed my guides with questions, nobody had ever heard of White Mango or of a family from Guadeloupe who was said to have settled there at the beginning of the twentieth century. Wasn’t it rather a family of Haitians? There were plenty of those, especially in the region of Lafayette. I ended my stay no wiser.

  Was the information I got from my mother pure fantasy?

  Nobody knows what Victoire felt when the person who helped color the gray of her days left. She became neither more morose nor more withdrawn. Her daily routine set in once again.

  Fortunately, at the end of December, her daughter gave her the most wonderful of gifts. She announced that she would not be able to travel to France during the long vacation. God had decided otherwise. He had blessed their union.

  She was expecting a baby in July.

  SIXTEEN

  1911 began therefore as a year of grace.

  The neighbors, watching Victoire come and go, noticed that she seemed less stressed, to use a current expression. With less reprimands, the servants played along. Tensions and resentment seemed forgotten.

  In fact, under her impassive air, Victoire was overjoyed.

  “Marvel of marvels! My daughter is pregnant! The woman I carried inside me is now carrying her own child. A little stranger has taken refuge inside her. It’s breathing and feeding thanks to her. In nine months we shall know its face. Marvel of marvels!”

  This belly that was miraculously swelling was a bond of sweetness that tied her to her daughter.

  Only spoiled women experience painful pregnancies. The others don’t have the time. From the very first months, Jeanne was tortured by nausea, vomiting, and dizzy spells. Once she even fainted in a store where she was ordering the lawn and lace of her layette. Victoire did not spare her efforts. Twenty times a day she ran to the Dubouchage school to take her all kinds of herb teas: greasy bush, couch grass, semicontract, worm grass, old maid, and rock balsam that ensure the equilibrium of the body. The most extraordinary thing was that Jeanne got her appetite back, possessed once again of those cravings she hadn’t had since the age of reason. Victoire responded with devotion, feeling at last avenged for so many years of indifference. She would lovingly prepare chicken breasts, veal cutlets, and fish fillets. She cooked up purees and breadfruit stews. She especially strived hard to make desserts, puddings, creams, and flans, since pregnant women need excess sugar to nourish the brain.

  Despite her health, Jeanne refused any kind of sick leave and, pushing her belly in front of her, walked with difficulty to the Dubouchage school. She had too high an opinion of the importance of her job to pamper herself. For her it was more than a mission. It was a calling. She had suffered so much humiliation in the religious establishments where she had been educated that she was convinced of the need for a secular, republican education.

  Seeing her walk past, elderly gossips who claimed to be clairvoyant announced she would have a daughter: her belly had the shape of a full moon. That would have pleased Auguste. But she would angrily hear nothing of the sort. Her child would be a boy. His name would be Auguste, like his father, and would lay the first stone of the “Boucolon dynasty.” One might argue that the Boucolon dynasty was already well established: Auguste’s first two sons already bore the name. But she attached no importance to them whatsoever—they complained bitterly about it later on—and considered them at best as two bastards. Despite the bush teas and baths, Jeanne was no better. Her legs were heavy and stiff with cramps at night. Nightmares would wake her up. One of them in particular: she was making her way through the roots and trees of a mangrove swamp. She did not know who was steering the boat and she was scared. The boatman’s face was hidden under a hood like a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Suddenly the boat overturned and she was floundering in the mud.

  So as not to disturb Auguste, she transferred her night things to a little room in the attic that Victoire came to share with her.

  These were moments of intimacy that perhaps mother and daughter had previously never known and were never to know again. Jeanne had seldom seen her mother undressed, without her ungainly headtie, with her long, straight schoolgirl’s hair reaching down to her shoulders. Like a little kid, she got great fun passing a comb back and forth through Victoire’s hair. She became permeated with her subtle sensuality, vaguely envying her, for she had always been convinced she herself had no sex appeal. She all too often had been a wallflower at the afternoon dances in Basse-Terre, where they sometimes went, unbeknown to the nuns. No bashful lover, frantic with desire, had waited for her behind the boarding school wall. I am convinced that the only man she had made love to was my father. If she felt any passion, she controlled it very closely and let nothing show.

  Victoire for her part only knew her daughter in her Sunday best, decked out, made up, and caparisoned. She now saw her without makeup, her hair disheveled, in a crumpled nightdress, and it was as if she had become a little girl again. She would bathe her, tenderly passing the sponge over the heavy fruit of her belly and massaging her with a glove soaked in a mixture of camphorated alcohol and turpentine. At the same time she would speak to her silently:

  “I know you’re not happy, in spite of your upstairs-downstairs house, your diamond engagement ring, your torsade wedding band, and your jewel box, which keeps getting heavier thanks to Auguste. It’s my fault, my very own fault. As soon as you drank my milk, everything changed for the worse. Instead of breathing strength into you, it contaminated you with my malaise and my fears. And now I’m poisoning your life. Besides, haven’t I always poisoned it, thinking I was doing the right thing? You deserve another mother.”

  To be sure, Dernier would win hands down in the game of who’s to blame. His absence had made Jeanne vulnerable, creating in her the urge for security and respectability, which was increasingly to govern her decisions and take away any spontaneity. Yet Victoire could never free herself from a violent feeling of guilt. Jeanne was what she was because Victoire was what she was.

  Bringing a child into this world at the time was exclusively the business of women. A handful of midwives, whose services were much sought after, delivered women from the bourgeoisie at home. But as we have seen, Jeanne was not afraid to be daring. She therefore called on a man, Dr. Mélas. This Grand Nègre, first of all a general practitioner, had studied obstetrics at the University of Port-au-Prince in Haiti. Given the ostracism that reigned in France at the time, Haiti fully enjoyed its role as cultural capital. The Guadeloupeans and Martinicans flocked there to obtain the diplomas they were barred from elsewhere. At the hospital in Jérémie his patients called him tenderly Papa Doc. His very simple techniques were nevertheless revolutionary. As soon as he took charge of Jeanne, she was transformed. He taught her t
o breathe. He initiated her into gymnastics and prescribed brisk walks; before its time, he was a firm believer in jogging.

  With Victoire by her side she jogged as far as the Jardin d’Essai that had just been created in Les Abymes, a conglomeration that today is virtually an extension of Point-à-Pitre, but at that time was rustic and wooded. They would bend down together to smell the perfume from the beds of strange flowers: the milkweed asclepiad from Curacao, the aloe, and the Erythrina, commonly known as cockspur, because of its brilliant cherry-red flowers. However, it was a little too long and tiring for Jeanne, who preferred to walk up the rue Victor Hughes and slowly climb the hillock where the general hospital and the Massabielle church stand today. The top of the hill was overrun by a stunted wood and a savanna of thornbushes. The place was fairly disreputable, where homeless lovers met. You could see them wildly embracing each other in the bushes. From up there you had a wonderful view over to the coast of Basse-Terre and the phosphorescent plateau of the sea, the infinite ambiguous ocean encircling two islands that had marked Victoire’s life: Marie-Galante, land of her birth, and Martinique, land of her lost love. Life is nothing but a series of decisions that always prove to be unsatisfactory. Although she never called into question her decision to leave Martinique, ashamed of having nurtured the idea of abandoning her daughter, she sometimes regretted Marie-Galante and the life she thought fit to turn her back on. She began idealizing it like in a Creole novel. When all is said and done, what had she gained by following Anne-Marie’s suggestions and settling down with a family of white Creoles in La Pointe? Neither she nor Jeanne had gone hungry. And that’s about it. But the poor child bore scars that no surgery could repair.

  When the first gas lamps began to dot La Pointe with light, mother and daughter would retrace their steps back to the rue de Condé arm in arm. Thanks to the treatment prescribed by Dr. Mélas, Jeanne had no trouble giving birth. In a few hours, the child came into this world on July 7, 1911. A boy. Fairly ugly. One wondered where he got his drooping lower lip and flat nose from. Joking as usual, his father maintained that a man has no need for beauty. Given the size of his appendage, he could swear that he would know how to please the ladies. Jeanne was not amused. She did not like dirty stories and was visibly vexed at having given birth to this ungainly infant.

  As for Victoire, she was in seventh heaven. She saw none of the imperfections that were so obvious to the outsider. That boy was her daughter’s, therefore the most perfect and adorable son in the world. At night she would slip into his room to spy on his breathing. During the day, she would take him in her arms as soon as Jeanne had her back turned, for Jeanne, full of modern ideas, ardent reader of the Catholic journal J’élève mon enfant, was of the opinion that babies should be given a strict routine, a bottle of milk every three hours, alternating with a bottle of apple juice or filtered water, and never be taken out of their cradle for the slightest reason. In short, Victoire was so happy that one day she persuaded the mabo nursemaid on the quiet to take the baby to Anne-Marie on the Place de la Victoire. Unfortunately, Anne-Marie did not like babies. Her nostrils were tickled by their disagreeable smell.

  “They smell of shit and Jean-Marie Farina cologne,” she claimed. “A horrible mixture.”

  Deep down, she found the baby a little too black and puny in his sumptuous smocked blouse, but out of fear of hurting her, she said nothing to Victoire.

  Ever since the departure of Jeanne Repentir, Victoire and Anne-Marie had been left to themselves. They listened to the municipal concerts together. Since Anne-Marie, who never stopped eating grilled peanuts, was suffering from the first signs of obesity, she believed that walking round the square several times would be a way of fighting it. Soon out of breath, she would sit down on a bench facing the harbor, admiring the serenity of the pink and gray sky. They would listen to the cathedral bells and part around seven thirty.

  THE BIRTH OF their first son and the christening as sumptuous as a wedding that followed—there were as many as three hundred guests—consolidated the entrance of Jeanne and Auguste into the club of Grands Nègres. I don’t know why, they became one of the most highly regarded couples in La Pointe. I say I don’t know why because I must confess I have difficulty understanding the reasons for this preeminence. They did not excel in any particular field or show any specific talent. The Grands Nègres established a cultural association, Alizés, which published a somewhat pretentious rag called Trait d’Union. I cannot see my father’s signature anywhere. My mother has signed two rather uninteresting articles written with very little imagination. One defends the need for a democratic and secular education—her pet subject. The other is an obituary of one of her colleagues who died giving birth at the age of twenty-five. Apart from that, they never expressed a political opinion and never took part in any major cause. Perhaps it was simply because of appearances. They formed a handsome couple. Both tall, slender, and satisfied with themselves.

  For the christening lunch Jeanne called on a Lebanese caterer, a certain Maalouf, who initiated the bourgeoisie, tired of Creole cooking, into the delights of the Middle East: tabbouleh, hummus, and boned duck stuffed with olives. Just as for her wedding, she refused to treat her mother like a servant and burden her with a responsibility that probably would have been too heavy for her. Once again, however, her intentions were misunderstood. Victoire felt excluded, although she carried her grandson to the baptismal font. The newborn was wrapped in a blouse of batiste and Valenciennes lace, several meters long. A fluted frill bonnet hugged his little lackluster face. The godparents were of course two carefully selected Grands Nègres. What mattered were appearances. On every birthday they ritually gave their godchild a small wad of crackling brand-new banknotes. Nothing more. No sign of affection. No special consideration.

  Auguste Jr. had the bad idea to be born nine months, almost to the day, before Jean, Jeanne’s second son, who was as splendid as a star, his mother would proudly repeat. Auguste Jr. was first of all his father’s favorite, but dropped out of favor when he showed no inclination for physical activities and too much liking for unreadable books: Auguste, who had done brilliantly in sports at school, dreamed of a volleyball or football champion for a son. The family legend goes that at age twelve Auguste Jr. would sit on the balcony reading Tacitus and Pliny the Elder in the original. His bedside book was Descartes’ Discours de la Méthode, from which he could recite entire pages. He had an exceptionally successful university career. The first Guadeloupean to pass the high-level agrégation exam. The first black teacher in a prestigious Parisian lycée. Unfortunately, he was never a rebel like his contemporary Aimé Césaire, who, moreover, knew him. Although he courted the muse, his literary talents were lacking and he spent his days, childless and anonymous, among his pink and blonde wife’s Pomeranian dogs in the suburb of Asnières.

  Thank goodness for Auguste! He was the only one of us who remembered or thought he remembered Victoire. For all of us, this strange-colored grandmother was half imaginary. A spirit. A ghost. Floating in the mist of time long, long ago. At most an enigmatic photo placed on top of a piano. He remembered the contours of a face as white and gentle as the moon that leaned over his cradle. He claimed that in accordance with the horrible custom of the time, they made him kiss her on her deathbed. He was barely four, but he still shivered as he recalled his terror when he saw the person he adored transformed into a cadaverous object. She never left his side. When he reached the age of piano lessons with M. Démon, the mulatto, who taught all of us our scales, her hand guided his tortured fingers over the ivory and ebony keys. Later on, like Victoire, he adored opera.

  Especially the Carmen he saw staged all over the world: in Paris, London, Madrid, Tokyo, and Sydney. Victim of the family virus, he traveled a lot. Every time the opera singer started singing the melody he was particularly fond of, a mysterious voice would accompany the words in his ear:

  L’amour est enfant de Bohême

  Il n’a jamais, jamais connu de loi
/>   SEVENTEEN

  The rainy season following Auguste’s birth was so wet that people remembered it for years to come. The tropical waves, not yet known by this poetical name but simply as “stormy weather” or “blows,” came one after another. The children of the needy maléré drowned while floating their roughly made rafts in the canal that had overflowed. One evening Anne-Marie urgently sent for Victoire.

  Boniface was very sick.

  For months he had suffered from agues, anginas, and hemorrhagic dengue fevers. At present a banal urinary infection was causing blood poisoning and the doctor believed he would not survive the night.

  Braving the rain, Victoire ran frantically to the rue de Nassau, where she hadn’t set foot for over a year. On arrival she scrambled up the stairs.

  Boniface was lying in the Regency room where they had spent so many nights together. When she came in, he regained consciousness and burst into tears. He was unrecognizable, all skin and bone. Perhaps she had never realized until then the place she occupied in his life nor the one he occupied in her heart. Boniface was a man of few manners, had difficulty expressing himself, was incapable of formulating the emotions she inspired in him, and was somewhat shy. All of a sudden she realized that her absence was killing him and that perhaps she too would die from it. However hard she deployed her panoply of bush teas, herb teas, decoctions, poultices, emetics, and purgatives, nothing helped and his condition worsened. After two heart attacks, he passed away.

  If Boniface had been a beggar, nobody would have given him a thought. He had not accomplished anything memorable, nothing that would go down in history. By making money out of selling codfish, he had built up a considerable fortune: one of the biggest on the island.

  As a consequence, a flotilla of white Creoles with the appropriate expression invaded his house for the wake. I say white Creoles because the island society was reluctant to integrate. Only two or three mulattos were to be seen amid the gathering. As for the blacks, the only ones present were the store employees from the Lardenoy wharf. Overdressed and ill at ease, they hastily recited a dozen rosaries in front of the corpse and hurriedly exited to soak their soles in the puddles. Everyone presented their condolences to Anne-Marie, half hidden under her mourning veils, surrounded by her two children, who, like their mother, had no idea what attitude to adopt. Boniface Jr. had theoretically loved his father but had never paid him much attention. Valérie-Anne was mainly frightened. Didn’t the dead come and tickle your feet? Anne-Marie, who had made no mystery of her lack of sentiment for her husband, felt merely that strange fear we all feel in the vicinity of death.