Victoire

by Maryse Conde

  “We live in the most beautiful region in the world,” he declared. “And we don’t know it.”

  This nature lover was to make a name for himself as a photographer and later published illustrated albums with the somewhat weak-sounding names of The Garden of Islands and Discovering Eden.

  Just as she was helping herself again to the rindless pork, Anne-Marie suddenly put down her fork and began to cry: noisy, indecent sobs that shook her like a hurricane shaking a tree. Victoire drew her up close and hugged this ill-assorted friend of hers with whom she had shared everything throughout the years. Valérie-Anne also began crying on Maximilien’s chest. Hiding her tears, Jeanne felt a painful feeling of exclusion.

  MY MOTHER NEVER spoke to me about Victoire’s last months, out of fear, I imagine, of reviving feelings that would have been too painful. She preferred to talk about her third pregnancy—she was pregnant again—which she endured in a state of revolt. Physically, she was bursting with health and had the appetite of an ogre, which Victoire was only too pleased to satisfy. But all she wanted were simple, basic dishes. Nothing too elaborate. Spices such as cumin, coriander, basil, and paprika made her nauseous. She didn’t like the mixture of sweet and sour or hot and cold. In order to reestablish communication, Victoire had to abide by her tastes, like an author from the Editions de Minuit who prides herself on writing for Harlequin books. At breakfast, she had to have her cucumber salad and fried fish garnished with capers. For lunch she would eat three good-size red snappers in a court bouillon. One day she devoured a whole roast chicken. She was seized by irrepressible cravings and Auguste had to run from one end of La Pointe to the other looking for crab matété at a time when there were no crabs because of the torrential rains that season; orange shrubb liqueur when it wasn’t Christmas; féros when it wasn’t the season for avocados. Like a vampire, she developed a craving for blood and ate enormous fried slices sprinkled with parsley. Meanwhile, her skin was becoming velvety. Her hair grew strong from invisible juices and tangled over her forehead. She was lovely and vivacious, walking as far as Bas-du-Fort. According to the shape of her belly, not round like a calabash but pointed like a shell from the First World War, Auguste guessed it would be the daughter he so wanted. Moreover, he had dreamed of his late mother, Célanire Pinceau, who had promised him a surprise. Jeanne begrudged him his good mood just as she begrudged her healthy looks. She could not understand why God in His cruelty had made her body a temple bursting with life, whereas her heart was blackened by death.

  At the Dubouchage school, since her mind was constantly elsewhere, preoccupied with Victoire’s temperatures, dizzy spells, and falling blood pressure, her class was no longer the model it once was, chosen by the principal to show the inspectors on their tour of the colony. For the first time in her career, she was poorly rated. Her iron fist loosened while her proverbial strictness mellowed. Paradoxically, never were her pupils more disciplined or affectionate. During recreation she dashed back to the rue de Condé. When she returned red-eyed, fifteen, sometimes twenty minutes late, the girls, sitting quietly behind their desks, would be reciting their verb conjugations out loud. Some of them offered her bunches of flowers. Others wrote her poems. I have found some of them carefully handwritten in purple ink on squared paper. I have chosen at random the one signed “To my beloved mistress. Anastasie Bonhome, fifth-year elementary school class.”

  Mother, do you remember

  Your child who loves you

  And cannot tell you?

  Mother,

  Take my hand, my little hand

  So that

  It will warm your poor heart.

  Even her colleagues who were used to making scathing, disparaging comments began to pity her. Some of them claimed that she could not cherish her mother to such a degree and be without a heart.

  “A sham!” cried the most hard-core of them. “She’s playacting.”

  Once again, passionate discussions broke out in the shade of the mango trees in the recreation yard about Jeanne Boucolon.

  Soon, Victoire was too weak to walk to the Place de la Victoire and Anne-Marie, breaking with habit, had to come to the rue de Condé. Every day she would turn up with her viola, flute, bass guitar, records, and mint candies, fanning herself energetically since, owing to her weight, she was always too hot. Jeanne had trouble putting up with these visits. She was probably jealous. We know that deep down she had always been jealous of all those who were close to her mother: Boniface, Jeanne Repentir, Valérie-Anne, Jérémie Cabriou, and Anne-Marie—especially Anne-Marie, who had stolen Victoire from her since childhood. Now that Jeanne would have liked to be alone with her mother, to finally strike up that difficult dialogue which had all too often been interrupted, Anne-Marie increasingly managed to capture Victoire’s attention and force out of her one of those rare, secretive smiles. What could she be telling her? Jeanne wondered, mortified. Nothing very interesting, that’s for sure: the latest escapades of Boniface Jr.; of Valérie-Anne’s difficult pregnancy. Since Jeanne had no friends, she did not know that friendship is largely based on just that: shared trivialities.

  Jeanne, however, thought that Anne-Marie was judging her, blaming her, and bad-mouthing her. This was true in the past. Now Anne-Marie was too affected by the condition of her alter ego and preoccupied by other concerns. Seeing Victoire leave meant losing whole chapters of her own life. It was as if she too were leaving. She had never experienced anything like it since the death of Etienne.

  One afternoon, Anne-Marie appeared at the rue de Condé followed by a servant carrying a heavy box of gospel and blues records, a music that was little known in Guadeloupe at the time and had its origins among the blacks from the Deep South. Jeanne, who was as a rule so impervious to any sort of music and anything that was not French from France, became fascinated by these harmonies from elsewhere. For her they seemed to well up from her own suffering, from deep inside her. I often heard my mother hum: Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.

  Victoire died at the end of June 1915.

  According to legend maintained by Jeanne, before passing away Victoire took the hands of Jeanne and Auguste, who were standing next to each other at her bedside, and murmured:

  “Sé douvan zot kale a pwezan. Mwen pé pati.” (You go on. I can leave now.)

  These prophetic words that seem to come straight out of the manual The Last Words of Honest Souls are quite improbable. Crammed with morphine, for the cancer had spread to her bones and she suffered agonies, Victoire probably slipped into the other world without saying a word, without revealing anything about herself, the same way she had lived her life.

  Jeanne’s grief was without bounds. Even her children’s kisses could not console her. Not even God Himself, at whose feet she lost herself in prayer day after day. As the modern saying goes, she never got over it. Her grief went even deeper, owing to the conviction that she hadn’t been loved because she had been a bad daughter, who had brutalized Victoire and had not been able to tell her everything she meant to her.

  But isn’t this the risk we all run when we think of our deceased mothers?

  She held it against Auguste for accepting Victoire’s death with relative indifference and above all for not helping her build a mausoleum in memory of the deceased. I have already said that it was always most reluctantly that he spoke of her. Apart from the times when he gave himself an imaginary set of parents, he never mentioned anyone. It was quite by chance I learned that his mother, Célanire Pinceau, died accidentally, burned alive when her shack made of old soap boxes went up in flames while he was out playing football near the hospital. As a result, the colonial authorities put him into care and enrolled him in the Lycée Carnot’s boarding school. His guardian was a mulatto notary, a fervent churchgoer, to whom his mother had hired her services. I think I am unfair to my father. Too much suffering during his teenage years had stunted his feelings.

  In her grief and her remorse, Jeanne constructed a myth that barely corresponded to rea
lity and left in the dark uncertain aspects of Victoire’s personality. In short, she endeavored at all costs to have her conform to the clichéd norm of the Guadeloupean matador, the fighting woman who courageously resists life’s trials. As for me, I prefer my grandmother to remain secretive, enigmatic, the improper architect of a liberation that we, her descendants, have known how to enjoy to the full.

  TWO WEEKS AFTER the death of Victoire, amid the popular rejoicing of a July 14 Bastille Day, Jeanne gave birth to a baby girl, who from the very cradle was lovely and melancholic, as if the sorrows of the mother had been passed on to her: my sister, Ena.

  * From Eloges and Other Poems, translated by Louise Varèse. New York: Pantheon Books, 1956.