Windward Heights

by Maryse Conde

  Who can read the heart of a woman? What had she gained by sacrificing him? She had entered the world of whiteness, of course, she bore a noble name, she owned acres of sugarcane land and sat in a centre pew at church! But what did she put in her bed every night? A spineless individual!

  His return would really shake her up. She must have forgotten about him by now. The first few weeks she must have worried about him. Every morning, on waking, she would have examined her dreams for a sign from him, for this was how they used to communicate. As youngsters, when Justin’s spitefulness had separated them, and forced them to sleep far from each other’s arms, he had joined her in his sleep and they had done everything they always did together.

  And then gradually she had forgotten him.

  Suddenly the horse set off at a trot and soon began to gallop as if it were eager to arrive at its destination. The sound of its hoofs striking the limestone road brought back all the echoes of the past, with its inextinguishable suffering.

  When Cathy had returned from her stay with Huberte de Linsseuil, nobody recognized her. The wild girl who laughed at the top of her voice, spoke too loudly, massacred the French language, wiggled her bonda and danced the gwo-ka every evening in the yard, was dead and buried. A respectable young girl had taken her place. She pouted in just the right way. She didn’t walk, she glided, her feet now firmly encased in shoes. She had pinned up and rolled into a chignon her thick black hair that used to tumble down her back. She worried about her complexion, shaded herself under a parasol and hid from the sun. Instead of leaping onto the back of a horse and galloping under the sun, she sat on the veranda leafing through the pages of a book. One lunchtime Nelly Raboteur stood in front of her, watching her savor a fish stew. She skinned the head of the fish with her fork, sucked the bones, the gristle and the eyes one after the other, then placed the remaining bits on the edge of her plate. When she had finished, she sent for some household soap and a bowl of lukewarm water floating with lemon slices and washed her mouth and hands. Justin was certainly proud of her! Every afternoon he would sit his sister in the tilbury next to Marie-France and go visiting all the white Creoles in the vicinity. They would receive him out of pity for his wife, but took offense behind his back at his bad manners. Marie-France was pregnant and thrust her calabash of a belly in front of her. All those who had eyes to see realized that she would not have long to watch her child grow up. But Justin saw nothing of the kind.

  Despite her new appearance, Cathy had not forgotten her Razyé. The day she got back, she rushed out to him in the stables. But once there she looked at him in disgust and addressed him sharply.

  “You could wash yourself a little. Cut your hair. It looks like a cow’s tail.”

  He did not answer, wiped his wild-looking face, and Cathy continued nervously, as if his silence were an accusation.

  “What’s Nelly been telling me? You ran out of the house after I left? I bet you went drinking rum and running after the girls!”

  He found his tongue again.

  “In all my life I’ve never looked at another girl but you.” She spun round the way she liked to do.

  “I’d be surprised a girl would want anything to do with you, the way you look. Listen! Tomorrow I want you to clean yourself up and get dressed so that I can introduce you to Aymeric de Linsseuil.”

  Without waiting for a reply, she dashed out into the yard where Justin was shouting for her. They were invited for coconut sorbet at the d’Hérouville’s, a white Creole family who were living in style at Anse-Bertrand. This afternoon tea extended late into the evening and it was around eleven o’clock and pitch dark when they returned to l’Engoulvent, cackling, laughing and singing the latest mazurka. That night Razyé waited for Cathy in vain. Around three in the morning, tired of tossing and turning on his straw mattress, he left the stables. It was the month of September, midwife to hurricanes and ill winds. Yet the sky was crystal clear and the air was dry. Outside was as bright as day. An obese moon sprawled high in the sky and lit up every corner of the landscape. The wild and desolate savanna. The waves surging in from the sea. The jagged edges of the rocks. The cross high on the cliffs erected for the three fishing boats lost in the deep with their cargo of men without a grave or a Dies irae. On the horizon, the island of La Désirade, isle of lepers and outcasts like Razyé himself. Who was this Aymeric de Linsseuil Cathy wanted to introduce him to? Huberte’s older brother? Why did she seem so infatuated with him?

  The next day he tried to make himself look presentable. All his clothes were too short, too tight, stained with mildew and years old, but he did his best and went so far as to look for Nelly Raboteur to cut his hair.

  Unfortunately, just as he was about to enter the kitchen, Justin bore down on him and erupted in a fit of anger.

  “What are you doing around here? I thought I told you never to set foot inside the house. Get back where you came from and double quick!”

  He was forced to beat a retreat and he had to watch from the stables as the Linsseuils’ elegant tilbury trundled up to the house. Aymeric was accompanied by his sister Huberte whom he curiously resembled, but in a more effeminate way. It was because he was so blond, his complexion so pink and his eyes so blue that his family had nicknamed him “heavenly Cherub.” As for the malicious gossips they called him quite simply “Dolly.” He had studied tropical agronomy at university and spent several years in Bordeaux with his father’s older brother, which meant that he spoke elaborate French but not a word of Creole. Because of that, and the color of his hair and eyes, all the eligible white Creole girls dreamed of walking out of the cathedral on his arm to the tune of Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March.” But his mother was keeping watch, for Aymeric was her only son and the apple of her eye. As far as she was concerned, he had only one flaw, the result of his natural goodness. During his stay in France, he had read too much Montesquieu and other philosophers and believed in the equality of the human races. He believed in eradicating the very memory of slavery and transforming the Belles-Feuilles estate into a model plantation where there would be no white Creoles, no mulattos, no blacks, but free men, equal in the eyes of the law. In his student days he had perpetrated a short essay on “The White Creole Class in Guadeloupe,” which he was rather proud of.

  The visit by Huberte and Aymeric lasted for hours.

  After having eaten the guava tart, Nelly Raboteur’s speciality, and drunk the vanilla-flavored chocolate, Aymeric took Cathy’s arm and they walked to the very edge of the savanna, where the void takes over from the land and the mind is seized by vertigo. They seemed to be deep in conversation. Looking at their silhouettes in the twilight, Razyé dreamed of stealing upon them and with one slit of the throat, getting rid of Aymeric. Oh, to see his blood run thick and red. To send him to his grave and make sure he never returned among the living!

  Once again that night he waited for Cathy in vain. Around midnight he walked down to the beach in despair and stretched out on the seaweed. The seagulls contemplated him in astonishment and perched on his body for a better look. Why didn’t he have a maman like all the other human beings? Even the slaves in the depths of their hell knew the womb that had carried them. He wondered what face he should give to his dreams and who was this mother he was never to know. Sometimes he told himself she was an Indian who had arrived in this land of exile and misfortune on board the Aurélie. Other times she was an African, treading the island paths in search of lost gods. Or else a mulatto girl, torn like Cathy between her two races. Had she been raped and then set about despising the child of the man who had assaulted her? What father’s crime was he paying for? How could he explain his abandonment? Razyé was suffering agony. There was a time when Cathy had been a papa, a maman and a sister to him. Her body had protected him. When he curled up against her he found the softness of the breast and the womb he had never known. Now she had deserted him.

  He cried for hours and took refuge in a
cave.

  When he emerged the sun was at its station, as implacable and tyrannical as usual. Half-naked in their rags, the Indians were cracking open the dry belly of the earth and planting their seeds.

  From that day on Aymeric was a regular visitor. He no longer took the trouble to have himself chaperoned by his sister. As the Belles-Feuilles estate was not too far from l’Engoulvent, you could hear the bell on his tilbury tinkling from a distance and he would turn up all alone at any time of day, as if he owned the place. He would sit on the veranda with Cathy and show her picture books or else read her the magazines from Paris. He taught her to play croquet and other society games. He gave her a little poodle with curls as tight as his that he called Pompom. Once he brought his fiddle and played some Italian capriccios for her. Razyé wondered how Cathy could put up with all these antics. If only they could split their sides laughing once Aymeric had left. But, alas, he could not even get near her. During the day she deliberately made sure that she was always with company. In the evening he would wait for her in vain. Hidden in the shadows, however loud he croaked like an ungainly toad under her window, she would not open her shutters.

  One day he took advantage of a moment when Justin had gone to Petit-Canal and a doleful Marie-France, a few weeks away from giving birth, was asleep once again, to slip into the house. He went through the kitchen, where some quails with an occasional flap of the wings were being drained of their blood in the sink, and tiptoed to the threshold of the dining room. Nelly Raboteur was teasing Cathy while she served her cassava cakes and her morning hot chocolate.

  “You’re very quiet this morning! You haven’t yet flown into a fit of anger, insulted anyone or come to blows! I’d almost say it wasn’t you sitting in front of me. What’s the matter?”

  Sullen and pale, as if she had spent a sleepless night, Cathy seemed to hestitate then made up her mind.

  “Yesterday Aymeric de Linsseuil asked me if I would like to marry him.”

  Nelly had trouble hiding her disbelief.

  “Did he say marry?” she exclaimed.

  Cathy nodded. Nelly had been watching Aymeric prowl around Cathy like so many other sons of good families before him. But she expected nothing good to come out of those affected manners and never once dreamed it was for the right reason. A belly, that’s all Cathy would get out of it! For there is a golden rule that knows no exception and it is this: the white male will never marry a mulatto girl, though she may be his mistress. Guadeloupe was full of mulatto women who had been given a house, a carriage and a few acres of land in exchange for their reputation.

  “Monsieur Justin will be pleased, that he will!”

  Cathy put her cup down on her saucer with a clatter.

  “Not so fast! I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

  “What are you waiting for?” Nelly jibed. “It’s not as if you had a stream of suitors to choose from.”

  Cathy burst into tears, and it was so unusual for her that Nelly put her arm around her and quietly asked: “Do you love Monsieur de Linsseuil or don’t you?”

  Cathy looked up. She seemed to be in agony.

  “I do love him . . . How could I not love him? . . . But can someone like me marry a heavenly Cherub? You know me and you know I’m no angel. Anything but. It’s as if there were two Cathys inside me and there always have been, ever since I was little. One Cathy who’s come straight from Africa, vices and all. The other Cathy who is the very image of her white ancestor, pure, dutiful, fond of order and moderation. But this second Cathy is seldom heard, and the first always gets the upper hand.”

  Nelly Raboteur shrugged her shoulders.

  “Don’t start talking nonsense. Just think, if you marry Monsieur de Linsseuil you’ll have everything you never had and more! You’ll be the envy of Guadeloupe!”

  Cathy sighed.

  “I know, I know! And that’s why I’m going to marry him. I’ll get out of l’Engoulvent that’s nothing but a hole full of rats and bats. I’ll have silk dresses, wide-brimmed Italian straw hats and servants at my beck and call. My children will be white and rich.”

  Yet the longer she listed her future happiness, the darker her face became and she seemed about to burst into tears.

  “If Justin hadn’t done what he did to Razyé, I wouldn’t even be thinking of this marriage. But the way Razyé is now, I could never marry him. It would be too degrading! It would be as if only Cathy the reprobate existed, stepping straight off the slave ship. Living with him would be like starting over as savages from Africa. Just the same!”

  The memory of these words opened up the same old wound inside Razyé. It was on hearing these words that the calabash of his heart had been smashed, and he’d never managed to piece it back together.

  With its lights glowing behind its louvred shutters, l’Engoulvent loomed up from the savanna like a ship in peril on the sea. The hurricane lamp that used to light up the outside was long gone, and for an instant Razyé was swallowed up by a mouth full of shadows. The air was filled with the squeaking of bats, whirling around their nests, and the endless din of the night insects. Razyé dismounted, and the famished horse searched in vain for some grass between the cracks in the paved yard. Then he walked up to the entrance, whose door was wide open despite the late hour, as if the inhabitants possessed nothing of value that needed protecting or guarding, and crossed the kitchen where the smell of saltfish lingered sullenly. The dining­ room was even dirtier and shabbier than he remembered. An odd assortment of furniture fidgeted on the dusty floorboards in all four corners. A piano sat bored under its dust-cover. A man sitting in front of a glass and a half­ empty bottle of rum looked up, and Razyé almost didn’t recognize him, he was so altered. Justin was haggard and aged. From light brown his hair had turned to a yellowish white. A beard the same color was eating up his face, in which his eyes flared red like distress signals.

  “Well! The devil has crawled out of hell!” he sneered.

  Razyé put down his heavy sack, sat down opposite him and drank from the bottle.

  “Well that makes two devils meeting again in hell.”

  Justin looked him over with eyes that no longer conveyed hostility, merely weariness and a bottomless despair.

  “Where have you been all this time?” he asked. “You look like you’ve been a soldier. You’re as stiff as a broom.”

  Razyé drank from the bottle again.

  “I’ve made my fortune. I can pay you what you like for board and lodging if you let me stay here.”

  Justin expressed surprise.

  “You want to stay here? You’ve got no scruples, like a dog with fleas. You want to stay here after the hellish treatment you got from us? Me, and specially Cathy.”

  He began to laugh wickedly.

  “You sat on the egg for years but another has come to eat the chicken fricassée.”

  Razyé leapt on him and threw him to the ground, his neck in a strangle-hold, shouting: “Don’t talk like that, do you hear, or I’ll shove you back in your mother’s c—” Holding him brutally like a hog about to be slit open, he asked: “Where is she?”

  “First, let me go,” Justin said calmly.

  Razyé reluctantly obeyed and Justin got up.

  “Where do you think she is? At the Belles-Feuilles estate. With her husband. Didn’t you know she got married?”

  He helped himself to another glass of rum and started to speak in a cracked voice without nuance or inflection.

  6

  Justin Gagneur’s Tale

  For once I’ve got you in front of me, and I’m going to tell you what I think. And even if you don’t listen to me, I’m going to tell you and you’ll have to hear it.

  “You see, I got off to a bad start in life. All those I loved abandoned me, one after the other. First Maman. Maman was beautiful, like a rainbow over the sea after the rain. I remember her wake and her funer
al as if it were yesterday. On the news of her death nobody took the trouble to come over from Petit-Canal or Anse-Bertrand, because people don’t like mulattos like papa, who have nothing to their name but lord it over all those who are blacker than they are. So there were not many people around her bed. Maman was dressed in her wedding gown, a little tight around the breasts and belly. Her face had been made up. There were white lilies in her hair and arums strewn all around. Old Juminie who never misses a wake and its thick soup led the prayers and mumbled on, caring little about the words: For everything its season, and for every activity under heaven its time: a time to be born and a time to die.

  “The few mourners were half asleep and the few friends of papa were gossiping on the veranda where Théobalde was telling a story, though nobody was listening.

  “In the morning the corpse started to smell as though all sorts of poisons had come up through the skin. Papa jumped on his horse and went to fetch the priest and the undertaker. But all to no avail. He couldn’t find them since they had gone to bury someone else in Grands-Fonds-les­ Mangles. So we had to stay here and wait for them right up to the afternoon. By that time the corpse stank so much we couldn’t go near it. When they arrived, the undertaker’s men hurriedly laid it in the coffin and everybody had their handkerchief pressed to their noses. That’s what I’ve never been able to forget: the smell of Maman’s decaying corpse.”