Victoire

by Maryse Conde

  After Antoine Deligny left for Trouville, life in La Pointe resumed its former color.

  The only difference being that Victoire no longer cooked.

  Not only did she no longer set foot in the little outhouse at the back, but she lost interest in everything, she who used to sniff the meat and fowl for hours, inspect the gills of the fish, and scrape the yams to judge the whiteness of their flesh.

  I don’t think it was a deliberate refusal on her part. It would be difficult to imagine a writer mutilating herself and renouncing her gift on purpose. The gift of writing deserts her, leaves her devastated like the shore after a tsunami. Suddenly, sounds, images, and smells no longer secretly speak to her in a language that only she can decipher. What I mean is that if Victoire no longer cooked, it didn’t mean she was rebelling against Jeanne or against society in general. It was the consequence of the loss of her creativity, the result of an immense weariness and a pernicious feeling of what’s the use.

  JEANNE WAS SO absorbed by correcting her pupils’ homework, preparing her lessons, paying visits to the Grands Nègres, worrying about decorum, and caring for her children that first of all she didn’t notice. It was Auguste who had to tell her. Hadn’t she noticed? Her mother no longer did absolutely anything. The week before, she had been unwell for the weekly reception and they had had to make do with Gastonia’s cooking. Wouldn’t the same thing happen for the next board of directors’ dinner? Shouldn’t they ask her what was worrying her?

  Jeanne began by answering in no uncertain terms that her mother was not a cook at his beck and call and consequently, she was free to do as she pleased. Then she suspected that this change of behavior could have some worrisome significance. She therefore dashed into the room where Victoire, who stayed in bed later and later, was still lounging between the sheets.

  How thin she had gotten these last few months! My God, what had she been thinking? The person she loved most in the world, even though she expressed it so badly, was wasting away and she had not even noticed it! Her skin was diaphanous and her sticky, patchy hair floated like dead seaweed over her shoulders. All the love she felt toward her surged back to her heart, flooding her with its burning wave. She sat down on the bed beside her and took her hand.

  “Ka ki ni?” she asked softly.

  What was wrong? Victoire shrugged her shoulders and played down her condition.

  She was tired, that’s all. A weariness that tied her down from morning till night. She had lost all willpower. If she were to take her own advice, she wouldn’t get out of bed the entire day. Yet she categorically refused to send for the doctor. What she needed was rest. Nothing but rest. And more rest.

  Jeanne was perspicacious enough to clearly see the first signs of depression, even though she refused to acknowledge the cause. Constantly accused, victimized, bullied, and prevented from enjoying what in Victoire’s own eyes could have lit up her life—love, friendship, and remembrance of lost ones—Victoire was losing her footing. With the energy she was known for, Jeanne undertook to care for her mother. In order to do so, she established a drastic set of rules. She gave orders to the servants that the children were not to disturb Victoire. Especially Auguste, to whom Victoire gave everything he wanted. The result was that she made two people unhappy instead of one. Deprived of his grandmother, poor pasty-faced Auguste whimpered from morning to night and began to regress. He antagonized the servants, who called him all sorts of names:

  “Tèbè! Kouyon! Sòti là!”

  They reserved their adoration for Jean, the little rascal, who walked, stumbled, fell, and bruised himself all over, treating his brother with the contempt that God reserves for inferior creatures.

  Before leaving for the Dubouchage school, Jeanne made sure that Victoire’s breakfast tray was well stocked with coffee, coconut cassava cakes bought straight from a shop in the outlying district, soft-boiled eggs, and fresh fruit. Several times during the course of the morning she was tempted to leave the class and run back to the rue de Condé. Her sense of duty forbade it and she dispatched two trusted pupils who came back with a detailed report.

  “Blood pressure 110 over 80, miss.”

  “She hasn’t got a temperature, miss. It’s 98.6 Fahrenheit.”

  When she came home for lunch she expected to find Victoire in her rocking chair, her back resting on a pile of cushions. Forbidding her to confront the perils of the stairs, she had Victoire’s meals sent up to her. Then she enclosed her under her mosquito net for a long siesta. So as to occupy her, she brought her piles of illustrated albums, which Victoire looked at with Auguste, who managed to slip in and join her. Pictures illustrating the tales of Grimm, Andersen, and Perrault. She took pity on the little match girl and admired Karen’s red shoes, which reminded her of Thérèse Jovial’s present. But the picture she preferred above all was the wolf disguised as the grandmother in “Little Red Riding Hood.” Auguste and she reveled in its big gleaming eyes behind spectacles, its large pointy ears under its nightcap, and its sharp teeth sticking out of its mouth. There was only one point on which Jeanne never managed to impose her will. Around four in the afternoon, Victoire flouted all restraints, got dressed, and, as best she could, dragged herself to Anne-Marie on the Place de la Victoire as if it were a salutary recreation.

  Times had changed. As a result of deep budgetary cuts, there were no more municipal concerts. Only the bands from the ocean liners moored at quay performed from time to time. The one from an Italian ship, the SS Stromboli, gave a performance of The Barber of Seville in magnificent costumes.

  Yet in the eyes of Victoire, Anne-Marie, who could no longer fit into her dresses, was still just as entertaining as ever. She never stopped talking about her children. A certain Maximilien du Veuzit, a lad of seventeen, the only son of a white Creole from the region of Saint-Claude, who had had the rich idea of exchanging his coffee plantations for banana groves, had noticed Valérie-Anne at an afternoon birthday party and ever since had been languishing for her. In order to leave her mother and the rue de Nassau, Valérie-Anne would have given herself to the devil in person if he had wanted her. Consequently, she too claimed to be lovesick.

  Should she let them get married?

  Without stopping, Anne-Marie became venomous.

  “Give me some news about Jeanne.”

  She had added some new grievances. Apparently she too had frequented Antoine Deligny’s spiritualism séances. Not to get in touch with Boniface, whom she had seen enough of while he was alive, but to communicate with her mother and above all her beloved Etienne, who had passed away accidentally the year before. She had been outraged by Jeanne’s accusations. Especially the way she had treated the gendarme. According to her, Jeanne had sent a series of letters denouncing him to the assistant governor general, which accounted for his expulsion from the colony. This seems to me most unlikely. At the time, Jeanne had no access to colonial administration circles. I would even say that as an educated black woman she was automatically suspect. The French authorities had not yet cataloged her among the totally inoffensive, right-thinking personalities whom they showered with republican decorations such as the Palmes Académiques, the Ordre du Mérite Social, and, what was the crowning achievement for my father, the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. Yet as I have said, I have not managed to shed any light on this mysterious affair. Anything, therefore, is possible.

  Given her state of health, Anne-Marie would accompany Victoire back to the corner of the rue de Condé and the rue de la Liberté, but not a step farther. She would only set foot in Jeanne’s house once Victoire was really sick and bedridden.

  Because of this drastic agenda, life on the rue de Condé became even less enjoyable. In the evening, the children, educated as Europeans, were sent to bed very early. The mabos left as early as six in the evening and the servants a little later, after they had served supper. Auguste would then read his newspapers, with a preference for Le Nouvelliste and its editorials. Sitting opposite him, Jeanne would prepare her l
essons and begin carefully correcting the pile of homework. Around nine o’clock she would go up to tuck in her mother, who was listening to records on her gramophone, a present from Boniface. It took all her self-control not to burst into tears and shower her with kisses on seeing how frail her mother had become. Instead, she turned down the lamp on the bedside table, for economy’s sake. Shadows stretched over the walls and the tropical night, the color of Indian ink, took possession of the room. Victoire often listened to her records far into the night. She was oblivious to the fact that the sounds carried on the night air and seeped through the persiennes shutters amidst the silence of the street.

  “Ka sa yé sa?” the neighbors asked, perplexed.

  Music is meant to stir the blood and deliver electric shocks to the heart, the belly, and the sex. It’s meant to stiffen your calves with pleasure and set you dancing.

  Ah! The Boucolons were a funny lot!

  NINETEEN

  Valérie-Anne was married one Sunday in August 1914, at La Regrettée on her father-in-law’s estate in Matouba.

  War had just been declared in Europe. The majority of Guadeloupeans, however, did not know or did not care. They did not know it would be so deadly and that so many of them would leave to lose their lives there.

  Despite her failing health, Victoire did not hesitate for one moment. Showing initiative for the first time in her life, she did not ask Jeanne for permission to leave La Pointe. Jeanne had to accept the fait accompli when two days before the wedding, very early in the morning, the Cleveland came to pick Victoire up on the rue de Condé.

  They stopped to buy gas at the Shell gas station, the only one on the island. Located in the harbor so as to refuel the first motorized boats and automobiles, it caused a sensation. Bystanders spent hours admiring the mechanized pumps and the attendants in their red and white uniforms with a shell spread across the middle of their backs. Victoire sat next to Jérémie, the chauffeur, so as to let Anne-Marie spread out her weight in the back. He spoke to her with familiarity, like someone of the same social status. Had she been following the massive strikes that had shaken the sugar industry to its core? Ah, those needy maléré who up till now had been reduced to silence with a plateful of calalu were realizing their strength. They were becoming a proletariat with a formidable force. Victoire did not know what to say. She realized to what extent she was nothing but a leftover from the old days. The modern words were “labor unions,” “strikes,” and “demands.” Jérémie told her there had been a union for domestics for some years. She should have joined. You have to defend yourself since black or white, the boss is the same. A rich mulatto is a white man. A rich black man, a mulatto. The only concern of either is to exploit the weakest.

  Bewildered, Victoire was hearing this type of discourse for the first time. I wonder what she thought about it. Did she fully understand it?

  Neither she nor Anne-Marie had ever gone farther than Petit Bourg when they stayed at Vernou. Very soon, they found themselves indisposed by the bumps and jolts of the automobile to pay attention to the picturesque landscape. Yet the sight was not to be missed. To the right, villages perched in the opaque green of the foothills. To the left, the blue of the ocean dotted with little white specks of foam. Soon Anne-Marie was snoring. She only woke up when they reached Dolé-les-Bains, where, because of its reputation, she insisted on having lunch.

  The spa at Dolé-les-Bains was the first to attract tourists to Guadeloupe. Cubans—recognizable more than anything else by their enormous Havana cigars and bicolor leather shoes—and all sorts of Europeans, French, English, Dutch, and Swedish fought over the rooms in its five-star hotel. From the restaurant guests enjoyed an unobstructed view of the islands of Les Saintes. A sophisticated personnel, trained in Haiti, officiated. While Victoire, as usual, merely nibbled at her food, Anne-Marie ate too much. She helped herself twice to the excellent thrush pâté, the crab matété, and above all the chocolate-flavored coconut flan. Around two o’clock they resumed their journey to Basse-Terre. It was the first time either of them had set foot in the capital, since they had never paid Jeanne a visit while she was a student at Versailles. The town was cool, bourgeois, and peaceful. The authorities constantly compared it to La Pointe: “Here, there is a sense of calm,” the governors wrote. “It is crime free and trials take place without incident.”

  Both women were impressed by the battalion of ships waiting offshore to be loaded, by the tamarind trees on the Cours Nolivos, and, above all, the imposing silhouette of the volcano La Soufrière in the distance. The threatening smoke from the fumaroles twirling up into the sky reminded Victoire of the Montagne Pelée and recalled in her heart the happy stay in Saint-Pierre, Martinique, which she had erased from her memory as if it were taboo. Soon, Anne-Marie complained that the air was becoming increasingly cooler as they approached Matouba and they had to stop the car and look for a shawl in the trunk. Uttering cries of fright, she was terrified when the car set off along a winding, mountainous road that threatened to be swallowed up by a dense vegetation of giant red and white dasheen leaves, breadnut trees, all sorts of palms, and the foliage of the ubiquitous lofty tree fern. Jérémie was chuckling to himself.

  The estate of La Regrettée was spread over 187 acres and numbered over six hundred coffee trees, which the farm workers were beginning to cut down since coffee was no longer profitable. Bananas were said to have a promising future. If the weather had been more pleasant, the place would have been splendid. But the sky weighed low and gray. The Du Veuzits welcomed Anne-Marie effusively and accommodated her in one of the best rooms in the Great House, whereas Victoire, like Jérémie, had to be content with a bed in the former drying house, converted into a dormitory for the servants. She did not think of it as a humiliation. If she felt morose, it was not because of the ambiguous mistress-servant position, which had long ceased to bother her. It was because suddenly the landscape was so like Saint-Pierre in Martinique that she couldn’t get the memory of Alexandre out of her head. As if the past were shaking up his ashes and coming back to haunt and burn her.

  The next day was bustling with activity. Victoire would have preferred to stay in the gardens at La Regrettée, where some magnificent Malabar glory lilies were growing. Instead, she had to follow the intrepid Anne-Marie, who had herself driven to the Bains Jaunes, thus named because their waters were strongly mixed with sulfur. A paved road, called the Pas-du-Roy, leading to the baths was unfit for cars but fairly easy for walkers. They had barely returned to La Regrettée when the rain that had been threatening since morning came down in fury. The wind then joined in and it was as if hordes of neighing horses were being whipped as they galloped around the Great House. This lasted the whole night long.

  On the day of the wedding, the sun rose radiant.

  Three hundred guests—some had come from Martinique and even Puerto Rico, where the du Veuzits had family—squeezed into the former coffee plantation house. Everyone agreed that Victoire was not looking well and seemed sad. Living with her daughter did not suit her! Not surprising! Jeanne was an ungrateful person who was now bad-mouthing religion. (Jeanne had just written that article on teaching in Trait d’Union that I have mentioned.) The nuns at Versailles had taken offense and interpreted it as an attack against their teaching methods. The guests also regretted the absence of Boniface Jr. Anticipating a fad that was later to thrive among the middle classes of Guadeloupe and Martinique, he had given as an excuse a hunting trip to the game-rich forests of Haiti that had not yet been felled by the Haitian peasants. On the other hand, everyone was touched by the young bride. Under her bonnet and veil, she looked rather like a first communicant.

  “Qué linda!” the matrons of Puerto Rico exclaimed in tears.

  As is always the case with weddings, it reminded them of their youth, the time of illusions when the assiduous suitor had not yet metamorphosed into a fickle husband. They got worked up, emotionally imagining an innocent and virginal Valérie-Anne, whereas the cunning little minx, takin
g advantage of her chaperone’s inattention, had arranged on several occasions to taste the forbidden fruit.

  When Valerie-Anne had tenderly placed her head on Victoire’s shoulder and begged her to take charge of the wedding banquet, Victoire hadn’t dared tell her the truth. How could she confess she was henceforth incapable of cooking? Now that she had her back to the wall, in order to create an illusion, she had surrounded herself with a regiment of dark-skinned coolies with oily hair and red dots in the middle of their foreheads who could barely understand Creole since they came from Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras. We should mention in passing that because of this Indian domesticity, the du Veuzits proclaimed they had never enslaved any blacks and had nothing to do with slavery. This did not prevent Jean-René, one of Valérie-Anne’s sons and president of the banana planters’ union, from being assassinated in 1995 by his plantation workers, who had had enough of him. Victoire was back again amid the smell of browned pork crackling, stuffed fowl, braised lamb, chives, garlic, and spices. But she neither created nor invented anything new. All she did was reel off old recipes to these docile flunkies, more used to throwing together curried colombos than perfecting culinary feats—like a novelist who shamelessly uses over again the tricks of the trade in her best-sellers. She looked at her hands and the chagrin at having lost her gift weighed her down. Moreover, this wedding constantly reminded her of another: Philimond’s. That time too they had carelessly amused themselves in the shadow of a volcano that had taken offense. In its cruelty it had destroyed their society from top to bottom.