by Maryse Conde
However hard Razyé cleared his throat to indicate he was somewhat bored by the speech, Justin took no notice and went on talking.
“Secondly, from the very moment you set foot inside l’Engoulvent, both papa and my sister ignored me. I became a nonentity. I couldn’t dance or sing or beat the drum like you could. Only play the fiddle, and the violin is white folks’ music that doesn’t get your blood tingling. I was convinced that if I fell down and died, nobody would notice. Life would go on as usual. All through my adolescence I had this feeling of being unwanted. I thought the Good Lord had finally taken pity on me when He gave me Marie-France. In fact, He was making fun of me, as He always makes fun of us humans, and He took her away from me before I could realize what was happening. Life with her flew by like a dream. You open your eyes one morning and ask yourself: ‘Did I really live that or was I dreaming?’
“One evening—she had just given birth to our son, Justin-Marie—I was sitting at the head of her bed. I was holding her hand and telling her a silly story she was fond of, the one about a princess who ate a slice of poisoned apple and was laid to sleep in a glass coffin. Suddenly her hand became all soft and limp in mine. I thought she had fallen asleep, but no, she had just passed away like a candle being snuffed out. I wanted to die; I couldn’t. What was I going to do with all the rest of my days, what was I going to do?
“People prattled on about my son and his future. They told me a grammar school had just been opened in La Pointe where I could send him to study and become a doctor. Insufferable chatterboxes. Now that Marie-France was gone I had no attachment to this whimpering child. Fortunately, there is rum, our friend, our confidant for every day of the week, staunch and faithful . . .”
After having rambled on, Justin pulled himself together and resumed the thread of his story.
“When you disappeared and we realized that it was not a question of days before you came back, but that you were never going to come back, Cathy almost went out of her mind. At first, I took no notice, I was so absorbed in my own grief. But I finally realized it was a serious business. She had to be watched every minute of the day so that she didn’t go out and jump over the cliffs or drown herself in the sea, and she had to be tied to her wooden bed that she clawed with her nails. At night she would scream without catching her breath, like a dog that sees death go past. And then she fell into a sort of stupor. She stayed in bed. She refused any food, solids or liquids. In the mornings Nelly brought her a tray of coconut milk, fresh eggs, cassava and coconut cakes and fine wheaten cookies with guava jelly, but she wouldn’t touch a thing. When they took her out onto the veranda to get some air, she would shrink from the daylight and keep her eyes tightly shut as if the sun hurt them. At the same time she kept her head obstinately turned toward the stables, as if she was expecting to see you. Aymeric de Linsseuil did not become disheartened. He came to see her every day the Good Lord made. Doctor Louisor, the family physician, was beyond understanding her sickness and consequently called for a certain Doctor Lacascade, who was well-known in La Pointe. But even he with his leather case, his paunch, his glasses and his self-importance was of no use. As much use as a poultice on a wooden leg. Aymeric was trying to find a way to take her to France to see a specialist when he came up with the answer: Mama Victoire. She was the one who put Cathy on her feet again. Of Nago stock, she was as black as the bottom of a cooking pot and as tall as a bunch of Guinea grass, and lived in Le Moule in the Bois-Sergent district. Apparently her mother was a healer before she was, and her mother’s mother, too, with practices straight out of Africa.
“Yes, it was Mama Victoire who brought Cathy back to life. Cathy had become a zombie and she gave her salt.”
Thereupon Justin took another swig of rum, then continued his story.
“Cathy was married to Aymeric de Linsseuil on 13 April 18—. Obviously the Linsseuils were against it. The white Creoles never want us. They have no intention of mixing their blood with ours. They want to keep their plantations for themselves and all the money they got from sugarcane when they were still whipping their slaves. But Aymeric looked his maman straight in the eye and told her: ‘That’s how it is. You either accept her or else I go back to France and you’ll never see me again.’ His maman cried her heart out, and finally she had to give in.
“During the two weeks prior to the wedding it poured with rain, something you never see in our region, especially during the month of July when everything is so dry it goes up in flames like a piece of candlewood. The sky pissed down like a drunk who never quite finishes pissing. For the first time in years the desolate savanna was coated in a fine cover of green and bloomed with the mauve corollas of the creeper used for rabbit food. The water butts and barrels beside the cabins overflowed. This strange phenomenon started off malicious gossip. People said that rain like this meant tears would mar the wedding to be celebrated in silk and gold. The rain would drown it in grief from the very start. It’s a fact, love is blind. It’s a fact, it gouges out its eyes rather than look truth in the face. But even so, who was Aymeric de Linsseuil going to fool that he did not know what everyone knew—that he was eating Razyé’s leftovers?
“And that’s why he dismissed Nelly Raboteur. Nelly Raboteur had been in Cathy’s service for years. She had kept her clean and tidy and done her hair. She had taken care of her like a maman when she was sick. Nobody knew her whims and fancies better than she did. Nobody but Nelly could get Cathy to laugh at her own bouts of anger and sulking fits. But she also knew too much. So Aymeric got rid of her, on the pretext that there were already enough servants twiddling their thumbs at Belles-Feuilles and that he had hired a certain Lucinda Lucius to take care of his new wife. Without saying a word, Nelly packed her bags and went back to her family. I heard she found work with some mulattos in Le Moule.
“But, miracle of miracles, on 13 April the sun rose in all its splendor, so bright over the sea that as early as eight in the morning it was impossible to support its glare. It blinded two fishermen who had the nerve to look up at it and burnt the eyelids of some kids who had done the same.
“Hate the white Creoles as much as you like, you have to admit that they stick together. Not like the mulattos and specially the blacks, always ready to tear each other apart, run each other down and do the dirt on each other. The Linsseuils had ended up accepting Cathy, even though she was a penniless mulatto girl, and consequently, the white Creoles rallied when they were called. Even those from Matouba and Saint-Claude, who hang their great houses on the steep slopes of the volcano, and every morning screw up their eyes to inspect the color of its smoke. Even those lost in the depths of the forest seldom pierced by the sun’s rays. All those who have grown rich from the prosperous sugarcane regions. The people round about, who were not used to seeing such a multitude of white folk, thronged the side of the roads and their doorsteps, grumbling: ‘It’s been almost fifty years since slavery’s supposed to be over and yet the blacks only find misery at the bottom of life’s bowl. Meantime the white Creoles are still parading around with the same wealth and haven’t suffered one bit.’
“Seeing this silent crowd massed around them, the white Creoles took fright, but hid their feelings under their smiles and embraces, under the kisses and hand-kisses they gave each other. They hadn’t yet got over the freedom the slaves had won by torching the plantations, poisoning the masters and the cattle. They hadn’t got over the speeches by the first mulatto politicians, who were popping up everywhere and claiming to deny what whiteness had always meant. Was this a sign of the end of the world? Were families, one after the other, going to marry into mulatto families like the Linsseuils were doing today? Or worse still into black families? And who knows, one day into Indian families? Was Guadeloupe going to become one vast pig-swill where you couldn’t tell one color or origin from the next? Rather be dead, the patriarch de Saint-Riveaux said to himself, as he descended on arthritic legs from his tilbury. Rather be dead, the dowager
Dormay swore to herself, as her jowls touched the velvet of her dress.
“How beautiful Cathy looked in her yards and yards of crêpe de Chine and Alençon lace, with a diadem in her hair and a diamond necklace around her neck, a present from Aymeric, for the Gagneurs owned nothing, not even a vulgar grenn-do neckband. How pale she was too, as if she knew on that day she was turning her back on everything that had made her life enjoyable. Under the crystal chandeliers she waltzed with Aymeric over a floor that generations of slaves, her ancestors, had polished, and the music sounded in her ears like the tears of a requiem. For the house of Belles-Feuilles was filled with the sighs and sorrows of black, mulatto and white women united in the same subjection. Slaves raped by sadistic planters. Mistresses poisoned by a rival and dying in unspeakable suffering at the banquet table. Virgins sold to old men for money and parcels of land. Sisters lusted after by their brothers. Mothers by their sons. A week after her marriage, one bride had thrown herself headfirst from the second-floor circular gallery, and the flagstones in the hallway were still stained with her blood. The servants covered it up with pots of flamingo flowers and red ginger. After slavery was restored by the infamous Richepance, some Mandingo women strangled themselves rather than go back into irons. And discerning these wails and sighs amidst the echoes of the wedding feast, Cathy realized she was taking her place of her own accord in a long procession of victims.”
Razyé measured the amount of rum remaining in his glass and asked in a tone that cut short any further rambling:
“Where can I sleep tonight?”
Lost in his thoughts, Justin remained silent for a while and then answered: “In your old room, the one where you used to sleep with Cathy when you were children. That way you’ll be bound to have sweet dreams.”
7
The Belles-Feuilles Plantation
A drive over a mile long bordered with royal palms led to the steps of the great house at Belles-Feuilles. This, together with its park of trees mostly unknown on Grande-Terre, such as mapous, candlewood and mahogany, was its only claim to beauty, for the house was fairly commonplace. Each generation of Linsseuils had added to the original building dating from the seventeenth century—a music room, a child’s bedroom, a greenhouse, an ornamental pond, sometimes an entire wing, depending on its fancy. On several occasions the house had been put to the torch by rebellious slaves. Each time it had been rebuilt, massive and identical. A wrought-iron balcony ran along the first floor, but only reached half-way round, stopping up against a strange statue of a young woman with both arms raised, apparently in anger. They nicknamed her Josephine in memory of a temperamental ancestor who had whipped her slaves herself whenever she felt like it. A Linsseuil infatuated with stars had pierced the ceiling with the dome of an observatory and night after night looked for his heavenly bodies through a telescope. Another had perched an astrolabe on the roof.
The abolition of slavery had not diminished the wealth of the Linsseuils, who still employed a hundred or so free negroes in their sugar mill at Sainte-Marthe and as many farm workers in their latifundias that covered almost the entire area of the sugarcane basin on Grande-Terre. They took pride in saying that a man on horseback could travel three days and three nights among the sooty waves of sugarcane without coming to the end of it. Since the premature death of his papa Alix, victim of an attack of apoplexy, Aymeric, despite his youth, had been in charge of everything. He was a good master, even a very good master, one of the best on the island. He had been one of the first to install steam-driven mills. His black shack alleys painted in bottle-green under galvanized roofs were a model of their kind. They were aligned in parallel rows under the shade of mango trees and were all fitted with zinc gutters channelling the rainwater into earthenware jars. Behind them stood the latrines, one for every six cabins, regularly disinfected with quicklime. Not far from the great chapel that had witnessed the services and prayers during slavery, Aymeric had recently erected a school that could match Petit-Canal’s. A monk paid monthly with money from the estate conscientiously taught the little negroes to recite:
“Our ancestors the Gauls . . .” Beside the dilapidated and run-down infirmary, he was planning to build a dispensary, where the workers would be inspected for parasites such as ascarides, pinworms, amoeba and hookworm, and treated for the dysentery that was causing too many to be laid in coffins. Despite all this, nobody liked him on the plantation. Faces scowled when he appeared on horseback. They said he was always on their backs and never let them alone. Secretly, they uttered the insult makoumé. Those who had known him much preferred his papa, who gave up counting his illegitimate children and as drunk as a lord would roll in the sawdust of the rum shops with his slaves. In short, he had been a man who had what it takes between his legs.
Aymeric had always despised the company of women and feared that of men. The adulation of his maman, his seven sisters and the gaggle of white Creole girls who had only one idea in mind—to catch him and keep him tied to their apron-strings—had cured him of their artificial poses, their dreamy looks and their false modesty. Moreover, when he was twelve his cousin Déodat, almost forty and already bald, had savagely sodomized him in the attic, while on the lawn below they were drinking the traditional chodo after the confirmation of his eldest daughter. During his years as a student in Bordeaux he couldn’t walk the streets without being bothered by indecent proposals from strangers. During classes on tropical agronomy, male students with a crush on him would slip him passionate love letters. Despite the grief it would cause his mother, he was vaguely thinking of taking refuge in a presbytery when, entering his sister’s boudoir, he had caught sight of Cathy. Sitting next to Huberte, she was awkwardly jabbing her needle into a tapestry. This young girl, who was visibly bored in such insipid company and casting looks around her like a trapped mongoose, had sown in his heart for the first time the desire to conquer. The ardor of his gaze had troubled her and in her clumsiness she had pricked herself. In the blood he had caused to flow, he had seen the prelude and the symbol of the blood that would redden the fine linen of their wedding sheets. When he discovered she was not the girl he thought she was, he had not been disheartened. On the contrary! The more he learned about her, the more he desired her. No, she was incomparable, and this passion for Razyé, which cast a shadow over her reputation, likened her to the scandalous Erzulie-Fréda and not to that gaggle of geese dreaming of children, silks and wicker baskets filled with 18-carat gold jewels.
After three years of marriage, his feelings for her had not lessened. She had remained frail after her illness and had to be treated with great care, but she gave him no serious cause for reproach. She did everything possible to satisfy him, even if she didn’t always succeed. She had given him two boys, Déodat and Isidore, as blond as the Linsseuils could be. She sewed and embroidered diligently. She sang in tune (a little too loudly, and Madame de Linsseuil, the mother, rightly reminded her that shouting was not singing). After high mass at the church in Petit-Canal she accompanied him to the chapel on the plantation and nodded her head in agreement when, after the sermon by the priest for the negroes, he reproached his workers for their fornication and adultery, in a word, the enduring wickedness of their lives. But he had understood it was useless keeping a woman imprisoned by his side, morning, noon and night, and then in his bed after dark, if her spirit roams wherever it pleases. He realized that Cathy did not belong to him and all he would ever have was a hollow mannequin painted in her image.
That afternoon, when he entered the pineapple-living room, so called because the walls were covered in a white brocade with startling bright blue pineapples, he was covered in sweat and beside himself with anger. A terrible accident had just occurred at the sugar mill. A worker had had half his arm crushed by a machine and had almost died of pain and bleeding. It reminded him of the darkest days of slavery when the lives of the slaves were sacrificed for profit. Aymeric had already spent a fortune modernizing the machines. Appa
rently it was not enough. However, after a short while, Cathy’s smiles, the gracious face of Irmine, his young sister, the sparkle of the silverware and the delicious prospect of the coconut tart on the tea-table soothed his nerves. He regained his usual verve, for he read a lot of French journals and was thought to be extremely witty and knowledgable. He was being offered a cup of vanilla chocolate by a young maid when Lucinda Lucius, the beanpole of a girl he had chosen to replace Nelly Raboteur, rushed into the living room. She dashed up to Cathy and panted: “There’s someone asking to see you.”
“Who is it?” Cathy asked, slightly irritated.
Lucinda bent down and whispered in her ear. Cathy turned deathly pale, got up so quickly she knocked the table, making the silverware clatter, and ran out of the room. While the young maid busied herself trying to mop up the chocolate that was dripping everywhere, Aymeric turned to Lucinda and asked: “Who is it?”
She seemed to hesitate then murmured: “Razyé.”
At the same moment, Cathy entered, beside herself with laughter, arm in arm with an athletic, well-formed man of towering height and upright carriage. His tight curly hair fell over his forehead; his eyes were full of black fire, his cheeks shaven and his skin so black that the cloth of his coat seemed light by comparison. Aymeric had never seen Razyé with his own eyes and from what he had heard, he’d taken him for a common scoundrel. He was stunned by his dignified manner and at a loss for words when Cathy crushed his hand into his. Then his upbringing prevailed and he managed to stammer: “I am delighted to make your acquaintance at last.”
Razyé openly mocked him.
“Now there’s a lie you’ll have to admit to in the confessional.”
