by Maryse Conde
They ignored Victoire, the only person to be truly unhappy, haggard and red-eyed, who together with the servants handed round plates of thick soup and glasses of star anise, which the guests had no trouble emptying. They had a grudge against her. Why had she come back to the Walbergs? Was she intent on getting her share of the inheritance?
The following morning the rain intensified. The wind got up and carried off the roofs of the cabins in the outlying districts. This time five children drowned in the canal playing with their raft. Despite the terrible weather, in the afternoon the funeral cortege stretched as far as the eye could see. In a church filled to bursting, the priest showered with praise a man who had done nothing but earn money in the least creative way. Then the congregation set off for the cemetery. At the back of the funeral cortege, Auguste could be seen. He had not heeded Jeanne, who had refused to attend the funeral, but did not want to get himself noticed.
The death of Boniface created a gulf between Victoire and Jeanne that was never bridged. Victoire held a grudge against Jeanne for not being present either at the wake or discreetly at the funeral, like Auguste. She especially held a grudge against her for having demanded a certain behavior that was perhaps responsible for his suffering. When she thought of his solitary agony, she could not forgive herself for letting her daughter dictate to her such loathsome behavior. For letting herself be intimidated by reprimands that after all made no sense. What did Jeanne have against Boniface? As Anne-Marie never stopped saying, the Walbergs had brought her up. They had provided her with a comfortable roof over her head, food in abundance, and clothes. And above all an education. Was it their fault if they were white Creoles? Who among us choose our color, our parents, or our birthplace? When the will was read, she would have liked Jeanne to be consistent with herself and refuse the gift that Boniface had made her. Jeanne considered the hundred or so francs pathetic and saw it as proof of the contempt in which he held them. He left nothing, not a cent, not a patch of land, a jewel, or a piece of furniture to Victoire, with whom he had slept to his heart’s content for over twenty years. To her daughter he left a pittance. She accepted it because she told herself cynically that it was better than nothing from the slave drivers.
When after a two-week absence Victoire made up her mind to return to the rue de Condé, Jeanne did not reproach her for the time spent at the Walbergs. Yet she was secretly exasperated by what she called her morganatic widow’s expression. Victoire dressed herself in loose-fitting black, white, and mauve outfits, wore headties around her forehead in the same colors, and spent hours praying in church. In actual fact, Jeanne’s irony hid a violent feeling of remorse. She realized too late the extent of the blow she had dealt both Boniface and her mother by separating them by force. She wondered unfairly why in God’s name Victoire hadn’t rebelled, knowing full well, deep down, that Victoire had never rebelled in her life.
During these tense times, Victoire continued her visits to the Grands Nègres as if nothing had happened. The only change in behavior was that she practically no longer opened her mouth and botched the weekly dinners. The guests politely swallowed the tasteless dishes, wondering what had gotten into the outstanding cook they once knew. One day she served a young rabbit with tamarind and aged rum that was absolutely inedible.
An incident that might seem comical occurred one Friday evening during the course of one of these suppers. While Victoire had disappeared into the kitchen to arrange a dish, Madame Aristophane, who was a bit scatterbrained, asked:
“Jeanne, why is your maman so sad? Who is she in mourning for?”
There followed a deathly silence that Auguste hastened to fill with one of his never-ending anecdotes. Later on, it needed a lot of tact on his part to get Jeanne to forgive the scatterbrain.
“She did it on purpose!” she sobbed. “She asked it on purpose to hurt me!”
The servants took advantage of this newfound freedom to sow their wild oats. A certain Bergette spent her time in a slanging match with her lover in the corridor to the sounds of “slut” and enough kouni à manman aws to make you shudder. To end it all, the lover hit her over the head with a bottle and left her in a pool of blood on the sidewalk in front of the house. Victoire remained passive and indifferent to these dramas.
Day and night alike, she kept turning the same thoughts over and over again in her head. What a belt of corpses she wore around her waist! What evil eye had she been dealt with to lay to rest all those who came into contact with her? Dernier, Alexandre, and now Boniface. When she was little, people at La Treille accused her of being in league with the devil and a bloodsucking soukouyan. It was probably true. She looked at herself in the mirror and what was hiding behind her pale complexion, her slit eyes, and rounded forehead frightened her.
Little Auguste, Anne-Marie, and music continued to be her only source of comfort. She could no longer part with the little boy. She had composed a lullaby for him without which he could never get to sleep.
Ti kongo a manman
Ola ti kongo an mwen.
I have no idea what she felt listening to the outdoor municipal concerts because, unlike I could with cooking, I could never imagine what music meant for her exactly. The orchestra from a frigate, La Minerve, that had come over from Fort-de-France for an Offenbach festival, performed The Tales of Hoffmann, La Belle Hélène and once again The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein. As for Anne-Marie, she entertained Victoire with her chatter. Anne-Marie had declared war on Boniface Jr. She had got it into her head to have him interned in the Camp Jacob hospital on the pretext of his inordinate fondness for alcohol. A cousin who was on the board of directors was prepared to issue her with a medical certificate. Needless to say, all these endeavors came to nothing. When it came to intrigues, Boniface Jr. won hands down.
When Jeanne told Victoire she was pregnant again, the announcement was greeted with indifference. Victoire’s heart was not in it.
Fortunately, Jeanne felt as fit as a fiddle during this pregnancy and did not need Victoire. This time, nothing brought them together. Neither the bush teas, the perfumed baths, the little treats, nor the massages or the caresses. Jeanne, who had gone back to hard-boiled eggs and tomato salad with one or two sardines in oil as a bonus, now slept beside her husband. She valiantly never missed one day of school.
On July 1, 1912, after a delivery that lasted a mere two hours, Dr. Mélas placed in Victoire’s indifferent arms her second grandson.
“Yet another boy!” Auguste groaned, who had given up hoping for a daughter.
Patience! His wish would be granted a little over two years later, and the father who had been indifferent to all his children showed a passionate and blind devotion to this baby girl.
The second son, christened Jean, was truly as splendid as a star, like his mother said, light-skinned in memory of his grandmother, with almond-shaped, languishing eyes and well-defined, sensual lips that he embellished later on with a Cuban-style mustache. During his teens he was the darling of the girls and nicknamed Bel Ami by his classmates. Beauty, alas, is not necessarily a synonym for happiness. During the Second World War, when he was fresh out of medical school, former intern of the Hôpitaux de Paris, his promise of a brilliant future was cut short. Jean was arrested by the Germans one evening while returning home to his studio apartment on the rue de Lille. He died of cold and hunger in the concentration camp at Birkenau. Was he in the Resistance? Was his only crime the fact of being black? I have no idea. I know nothing about this brother. All I know of him is a photo, a real one this time, of a young black dandy with a long white scarf wound round his neck, a gray fedora shading his feminine eyes, a cigarette between his fingers, smiling at the wonderful life he thought was waiting for him. The date: July 1932. He was twenty years old.
It was unusual for a woman at that time to leave her young children and travel for pleasure. And yet that is precisely what Jeanne did. During the long vacation Auguste and Jeanne went on the honeymoon they had had to postpone twice. They embarked
on the ocean liner for France. They planned to spend two months in the City of Light and leave their four little boys in the care of two maids and three mabo nursemaids under Victoire’s supervision. That was when Jeanne discovered the métropole.
I do believe that France and Paris were truly the loves of her life. Traveling by train to the Mont Saint Michel, she contemplated in raptures the passing landscape as she pressed her face against the window. In Paris she chose the apartments where we used to spend her annual leave on the basis of the districts with which she had mysteriously fallen in love. She had a particular fondness for the seventh arrondissement and Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where we stayed on several occasions.
EIGHTEEN
Victoire had lost all willpower.
The house was in a state of plunder. The servants carried off under her nose the barrels of lard, the salted codfish, the smoked herring, the rice and red beans that Auguste had packed in the storeroom in anticipation of his absence. The children went unwashed until noon. Left in soiled baby clothes, Auguste Jr. and Jean had their buttocks covered in rashes. One afternoon when the entire household was on the Place de la Victoire, thieves went into action and boldly carried off furniture and carpets. Something quite unheard of!
This resulted in a raid by the gendarmes in a respectable neighborhood, preoccupied by its image, which did not help Victoire’s reputation. Armed with notebooks, they went into every house, using their poor Creole to address the domestics whom they treated as suspects. Worst of all, it became clear that the robbers had benefited from inside help. They arrested two nursemaids, Gazelle and Priame, who quickly made a confession.
Anne-Marie, who saw the mess in which her friend had got, invited her and the boys to come and stay in Vernou. She would be helped by Délia and Maby, whom she knew from the past. In addition to the change of air, she would be perfectly safe. Victoire preferred to decline the invitation, though she was tempted to accept. She was afraid of Jeanne’s reaction when she learned that her children had found refuge, even temporarily, at the Walbergs. She let Anne-Marie leave with Valérie-Anne and remained stoically behind in La Pointe, where the sky and the sea were swollen equally with bile during this unbearable and suffocating season. The days followed one after another, each one more dismal than the one before. When she walked over to the Place de la Victoire she was deprived of the company not only of her alter ego, but also the music. In July and August the municipal bands took their vacation. She therefore walked around the square all alone, sat down on a bench on the Widows’ Path, and stared glumly at the horizon. She would return to the rue de Condé when the first streetlamps were switched on, for we should point out that at the time La Pointe was no longer a dark and dangerous place. Even the outlying districts were lit up thanks to a dynamic new mayor. Dirty tricks could no longer be hatched in the shadows and there was talk of filling in the stench from the Vatable Canal. The drainage work, in fact, wasn’t to start until years later. But the town was already being modernized.
Soon, however, passersby noticed a man, a white man, who would sit down on the bench next to Victoire. He would hold forth, gesticulating as he discoursed, while she remained silent as usual. Around seven thirty they would stand up, she tiny beside him, who was tall and thin, leave the square, and walk up the rue de la Liberté. Inquisitive bystanders nudged each other in amusement when he kissed her hand in farewell under M. Bartoleo’s balcony.
Who was this man?
We must confess that it was a strange case. The gendarme Antoine Deligny had successfully conducted the investigation on the burglary of the Boucolon house, rue de Condé. Fifteen years of living in Guadeloupe had given him a sixth sense and without encountering any opposition he had laid his hands on the crooks in a few days. They were a gang he had had his eyes on for some time. They holed up in one of the hovels on the edge of the canal. Their leader was called Isidore Gwo Siwo. Antoine Deligny was a singular man, of an unusual appearance. He was almost six feet six inches tall, still young, forty, forty-five, with a mop of icy white hair covering the top of his head. His metallic blue eyes looked right through you. A few years earlier he had had the immense grief to lose both his wife and his two sons, carried off by an epidemic of typhoid fever. The reason he stayed in La Pointe was because he could not resign himself to leave behind their graves, which he decorated daily with white lilies and purple heliotropes. In the case in question, I can but hazard a guess, since I have been unable to untangle the truth. Was grief the common factor for drawing Deligny and Victoire to each other? Deligny was apparently adept at spiritualism. He turned pedestal tables and communicated with his departed. In this way he said he was capable of conversing with his wife, who even went so far as to write him love letters that he carefully kept in a drawer under lock and key. Did he assure Victoire that she too could see again those she had lost? Did he soothe her nagging remorse regarding Boniface’s death? Was that the real reason for her frequent visits to the gendarmerie after daily mass? Antoine Deligny was comfortably housed on the second floor of the police station opposite the church of Saint-Pierre and Saint-Paul: an office, three rooms, a bathroom with a large tub and a shower, a kitchen, and a store room. One of these rooms, filled with tables, chairs, and mirrors, was out of bounds because it was here the séances took place.
I have roamed around the police station quite a bit, hoping in vain to obtain some explanation. Unfortunately, too many years have passed. The gendarmes themselves have changed and darkened in skin. Many young Guadeloupeans now choose to become gendarmes the way they join the state security police force—in order to escape unemployment.
These rendezvous on the Place de la Victoire and visits to the gendarmerie had been going on for some weeks when the SS Isaura moored alongside the quay. Jeanne was back, exalted by the marvels of Paris, whose memory still haunted her. Never had La Pointe seemed to her so small and mean. She and Auguste had attempted to decipher the Mona Lisa’s smile in the Louvre. They had even traveled to Chartres by train to admire the cathedral’s famous angel. After having heard the habanera from Carmen so many times, Jeanne had dragged Auguste to the opera. But they had both been bored to death. The love of José for his cigar worker had left them cold. Jeanne had brought back four trunks full of clothes, toys for the children, and records for Victoire: The Barber of Seville, The Sicilian Vespers, and Rigoletto as well as rugs, paintings, and ornaments for her house, which had acquired the reputation of being one of the best decorated in La Pointe, years before the one on the rue Alexandre-Isaac. Her mother seemed to be in better shape than when she left. Relaxed. Less pale. Almost smiling. The perfect grandmother. She tenderly helped Auguste take his first steps along the balcony and lulled Jean to sleep.
Alas, some good souls, who did not dare approach Jeanne, took it upon themselves to inform Auguste of the reasons for this metamorphosis and made no secret of their comments.
“It hasn’t been six months since she buried Boniface Walberg! And already she’s seeing someone else! If she hasn’t a heart, at least she should behave herself!”
Deeply upset, Auguste waited three days before he picked up courage to tell Jeanne, who couldn’t believe her ears. A gendarme! In order to understand their reaction, we must bear in mind what the gendarmes represented in the social hierarchy of the time. The gendarme was the very opposite of the white Creole and the most vile and despised category, the last rung on the ladder: a martinet who does the colonizers’ dirty job. The fact that Victoire, after Boniface, had teamed up with a gendarme betrayed an uncommon wish to hurt both her daughter and son-in-law. It was also a sign of perversion. The enormity of the accusation stunned Auguste. He had started to assume his role of extinguishing the home fires and refused to fully believe in such an accusation.
“Ask her,” he advised. “Let her speak. See what she has to say.”
Jeanne went straight for it, head down.
Personally, I remain convinced that there was nothing between Victoire and Deligny but the séances, th
e invocations to the deceased, and words of comfort on his part. In my opinion, they shared solitude and grief, not sensuality. Victoire, then, was almost forty years old. An ancestor, an old woman for her time. The time had not yet come when people got married with one foot in the grave. Jeanne was so easily duped and so quick to swallow the slander because, deep down, she had always considered her mother a sort of Jezebel. I think that, beside herself with anger, she lost all sense of proportion and Victoire, as usual, did not defend herself. It was the final split between the two women. And it was never to mend either.
Antoine Deligny exited the picture in January 1913, after a last mass for his dearly departed at the church of Saint-Pierre and Saint-Paul, when he sailed back to France on the SS Canada. He retired to Trouville-sur-Mer, where he was born. I know that he wrote the text for a collection of watercolors entitled Gendarmes in Guadeloupe: The Colony at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century. I have been unable to find a copy of the book, but during one of my visits to my friend Letizia Galli, who lives in the apartments of Les Roches Noires, I discovered while nosing around the museum with her that a certain Antoine Deligny had worked as a guide during an exhibition of the painter Eugène Boudin, one of whose works was On the Beach at Trouville. The museum employees were both intrigued and helpful and gave me the address of the house where he had lived around 1920. I rushed over to find that it was now a pharmacy and nobody could recall anything about him.
