by Maryse Conde
We stayed two months in Roseau on Dominica. What a lovely little town it is! So different from the dirt and crowds of La Pointe. The houses are built of pink brick with flowers on the balconies. On Sundays the men, all dressed in white, play cricket, a game their masters, the English, taught them. For everyone’s English, though they also speak Creole, like in Guadeloupe. Absolutely nothing happens. Time and life itself with its trail of misfortune seem to have come to a standstill and the inhabitants appear perfectly happy. As for me, however, my life was a living hell. We stayed at a hotel by the sea called the Kiskadee, frequented by dames-gabrielles, those women of easy virtue recognizable by their silks and necklaces made of chrysocolla. I never left my room for fear of meeting them with the men they took in. Razyé was always out and only came home around two or three in the morning, swearing and drunk. At first he was always on top of me. He tore me, showered me with kisses and drenched me with his frothy white seed. Then, for some unknown reason, he stopped altogether. He no longer touched me and turned his back on me in bed. Oh, Lucinda, you will never believe me, but I suffered more from this indifference than his repeated rapes. I had become like a dog who needs her master to give her a kick and then asks for more. One day he suddenly announced we were returning to Guadeloupe the very next morning. I didn’t even have time to protest. In the small hours of the morning we set sail on the Southampton. What a boat! A walnut shell daubed with tar that the waves seemed to swallow up at every instant. You know how bad the channel is between Dominica and Guadeloupe! We had hardly left the coast when people started to vomit left and right. I was as sick as a dog but Razyé didn’t take a scrap of notice.
Now I am burning in a worse hell. Razyé has “given” me to Justin and profits from the indecent passion the latter feels for me to strip him of his property. L’Engoulvent is already heavily mortgaged. Every evening Razyé plays cards with Justin and encourages him to drink rum, or worse still, absinthe. Justin never has a thought for his child, poor Justin-Marie. I am at the mercy of a man I loathe, and despised by a man whom, despite everything, I have never stopped loving.
I dare not write either to my mother or to my brother, for I know they will not read my letter, and rightly so. I cry for my lost youth. Ask Cathy to forgive me.
Irmine
I did not take the trouble to mention this letter to Cathy. Could she still remember who Irmine was?
10
Lucinda Lucius’s Tale (continued)
One afternoon in November I settled Cathy on the veranda. Her pregnancy was now in its seventh month and all that could be seen was the mound of her belly, for all the contours of her body had melted. She was nothing but a bag of bones. Her hair had fallen out in great lumps; her withered skin had yellowed. In short, her beauty was nothing more than a memory. Nevertheless I cherished her like a maman cherishes her sickly child, misshapen by Nature, unlucky in life. As for the master, he had left for the factory and was not about to reappear. He remained absent like that for the entire day. It was as if, in spite of his love, he could not bear being with his wife and seeing the contrast between what she had been and what she had become.
That afternoon the sky was leaden and the winds were laden with salt and water. We had just celebrated All Souls’ Day in memory of the dead. From one end of Grande-Terre to the other the graves were covered with candles and flowers, and every graveyard looked like a huge tray loaded with offerings for the invisible spirits. I helped Cathy stretch out in a comfortable chair and was about to tell her a story, something that would occupy her mind, when she asked me calmly and solemnly, as if all her senses had returned:
“Lucinda, do you believe that after we die we meet up with those we loved on earth and we spend eternity together?”
“Don’t you hear the priest promise us that every Sunday from his pulpit?” I answered in as soothing a voice as I could.
She shook her head.
“He’s talking about Heaven. But I couldn’t care less about Heaven. That’s not where I want to go, to find myself in the company of saints and angels. Heaven is not for me. I dream of an afterlife where we can express all the emotions and desires we have had to stifle during our lifetime. An afterlife where we would be free at last to be ourselves.”
“If people could hear you!” I scolded her. “It’s not Christian to speak like that.”
“I know, I know,” she murmured. “You see, ever since I was little I’ve wondered whether the Christian religion is not a white folks’ religion made for white folks; whether it’s right for us who have African blood in our veins. Shouldn’t there be a religion for every race, every people on this earth?”
It must have been the first time I heard her claim her African heritage. I was stupefied. And then something in the way she spoke frightened me. It was almost as if she was already on the other side of the world.
“The religion we are taught in church forbids us everything that makes life exciting,” she whispered. “Because of that the needs of our body are transformed into a curse.”
In my dismay I ran to the kitchen to fetch the tea tray. In the parlor I bumped into someone hiding behind a dresser, the last person I wanted to see—Razyé! I could only look at him with hatred and terror. Wasn’t his treachery responsible for the state of my mistress? He grasped my arm in a claw-like grip and growled:
“I want to see her!”
“Never, never on my life, do you hear! Do you want to kill her?”
“I want to see her,” he repeated, as if my words had meant nothing.
“She remembers nothing,” I pleaded. “I’m not even sure she would know you.” He laughed bitterly.
“Do you really think she can forget me?”
When we came out onto the veranda, with him walking behind me, Cathy looked up and stared at him, intrigued, as if she were trying to picture him back in her mind. Then all at once the color returned to her cheeks. She became flustered and chattered disjointedly. He fell at her feet, pressed his face against the woollen blanket over her knees while she caressed his curly hair, reproaching him in her little girl’s voice: “Heartless! You see what you did to me when you left! Are you happy now?”
By the shudder of his shoulders, I realized he was crying, but I didn’t pity him any the more. Cathy went on, in the same childlike voice:
“I’m going to die, and you’re the one who’s killed me!”
He quickly got up and with eyes full of tears protested wildly:
“It’s not me. It’s you. It’s your fault. You were ashamed of all the happiness we had together when as little heathens we roamed wild and free. You began to despise me. To prefer those with white skin, who read books and speak fancy French. You didn’t realize it was yourself that you were despising, that you were repudiating. And in the end it was your ruin, because you can’t lie to your own blood. You can’t.”
Cathy began to cry. Unmoved by her distress he went on, even more savagely:
“Have you thought of the life I’m going to lead once you’re gone? Have you seen people live without their soul?”
She cried even louder and he took her in his arms and showered her with kisses which she returned with great passion, frail as she was. I was horrified at their shamelessness. They seemed to have forgotten they were on a veranda in full sight, that I was there and that the servants could come in at any minute. What they must do when they were all alone!
And then I heard a horse galloping over the stones in the drive. The great mastiffs we kept around the house to protect us started to shake their stubby tails and bark like crazy. It was the master, back earlier than usual, as if he had sensed there was danger. I thought I would lose my mind and rushed to separate them.
“It’s Monsieur de Linsseuil! He mustn’t find you here.”
But he pushed me away.
“So let him try and make me go!”
It was that night that
Cathy, Cathy Gagneur, Cathy de Linsseuil, whom everyone called Mam Razyé behind her back, passed away. It was that night her daughter was born, a motherless child her papa christened Cathy, like the woman who had just left us.
11
The Wake and Cathy’s Story
Dressed in her wedding gown, with her diadem of orange blossom clasping the dark velvet of her hair, Cathy lay on a bed placed in the middle of the hydrangea drawing room that opened out onto the veranda. A pearl crucifix hung around her neck and a silver rosary was rolled around her fingers, while Barbados lilies and crumpled corollated tuberoses were strewn over the bed. By the magic of death, in a single stroke she had regained her lost beauty and youth and looked like the girl she used to be before wanting to be admitted at any price to polite society.
But despite the religious objects and her hands crossed in prayer, nobody could have mistaken her for a real lady. First of all the color of her skin was not white. It was as if her black blood could no longer be contained and was taking its revenge. Victorious, it was flooding through her. It thickened her facial features, distended her mouth, giving a mauve touch to her lips, and with the stroke of a pencil redefined the arch of her eyebrows. It did wonders for her figure. What was this girl of African descent doing here, you might well have asked, and how did she get laid out on a sheet surrounded by all these white Creoles trying to put on an appropriate face for the occasion?
In the glow of the many candles a nun was leading the prayers, Sister Léa, a Linsseuil who had been relegated to the convent of Saint-Joseph de Cluny at the age of twenty-two because there were too many girls in the family and not enough husbands to go round. Ever since she had taken her vows, her cheeks and upper lip were covered in bristly hairs, her voice had become as deep as a man’s and you could hear her thundering out the Our Father and Hail Mary as far as the kitchen, where the servants were busying themselves around the pots of thick soup, the baskets of bread rolls, the bottles of rum and corked wine, and coffee pots filled with coffee black enough to keep everyone awake until morning. None of them really felt any grief at seeing Cathy leave for her final resting place, but they were all struck by the circumstances surrounding her death. All were filled with pity for the newborn baby.
“Po pitit’à manman,” repeated the women, sobbing into their aprons.
And the men shook their heads.
Sister Lea had brought with her the school choir of teenage girls who whispered and occasionally giggled amongst themselves when they were not singing the Libera in their high-pitched voices. However many angry glances she threw them they took no notice, and the hubbub continued. At the head of the bed Madame de Linsseuil, huge and decrepit, sat beside her son. While her head gently nodded she softly caressed his limp, lifeless hand. Despite her gown of deep mourning her face betrayed the almost jubilant way she was scheming: Aymeric was barely twenty-seven. His youth would inevitably prevail over his grief. In one or two years he would at least be resigned, if not consoled, once again good for marriage, and this time there would be no mistakes! They’d choose a wife for him, a good Christian, who’d raise the children from his first marriage. She was not the only one to think this way. In fact, among the crowd surrounding the funeral bed, apart from Aymeric nobody was really grieving, except for Justin and Huberte de Linsseuil, who had been sincerely fond of her sister-in-law.
Aymeric had lost his strength and color. With vacant eyes and stuffed with calmatives prescribed by Doctor Louisor, he could not get out of his head the events of the previous day. He had spent the whole morning at court in Petit-Canal as a witness in the trial of one of his workers unjustly accused of rape. Neither the judge nor the jury—all white Creoles—could accept the idea of a black man’s being innocent, and the lawyer, whom he had to pay out of his own pocket, had his work cut out for him. On the way home, his ears still buzzing with the racist words he had heard, he let his horse roam where it liked on the stones of the road bordered with sugarcane fields, as he turned one thought over and over in his mind. When would the world be like a garden where every race on earth could walk together in harmony? When would this island cast off its demons? Tortured and disheartened, he had arrived home to find his wife in the arms of another man. He knew he would never forget this picture of Cathy confronting him, rejecting him, utterly transformed by a burning passion she had never shown toward him.
She had never been very active in her love-making, letting herself be taken with passiveness, even indifference. Recently she had tried to conceal a genuine repulsion. Because of this, he was ashamed of his never-ending desire. Night after night, ashamed of himself, he suppressed the eternal question and the name of Razyé.
“Why do you prefer him to me? Is a man’s qualities measured by the lustiness of his member? Isn’t my heart bigger and warmer than his? My mind more cultivated?”
Recalling the sweetness of those moments when he had made her burst into tears on reading to her passages from Uncle Tom’s Cabin or playing for her little capriccios on his violin, Aymeric’s eyes suddenly filled with tears, like his brother-in-law sitting erect on his left. What was Justin weeping for? For the small affection he had shown his sister and his share in the blame for her death, since he had only been interested in selling her to the highest bidder? For bringing ruin on himself? Razyé had just won l’Engoulvent from him at cards. His child no longer had a roof over his head. Not an inch of land to his name. Nothing. Those who watched him out of the corner of their eye noted how his complexion had turned brick red, how his hair had turned prematurely white, in short, how vice and rum were finishing him off. He had brought with him his son, the little Justin-Marie, and the child, impressed by all the paraphernalia of death, stared without blinking at this aunt he had virtually never known. The other mourners yawned furtively, rushed through the prayers to the dead, yearning deep down for the daylight to filter through the louvred shutters so that they could go home after the chore of the funeral, which would probably last two full hours under the blazing sun. Once home, they would wash down the bitter taste this marriage and its premature end had left them with a carafe of Bordeaux chilled with ice. To their great surprise, they learned that Aymeric would not open the family vault at Petit-Canal. He preferred to lay his beloved Cathy to rest in the little graveyard at l’Engoulvent, as if he were giving her back to the world he had never managed to wipe from her memory.
On the first floor, Lucinda laid in her cradle the little girl gurgling with milk, who would never see with her own two eyes her namesake in the flesh. As tiny as she was, it was plain to see that the new Cathy had nothing in common with the rest of the family. Unlike her brothers, her skin had already darkened, as if she had gone back in time in search of a lost family tree. This forbode a fine future for her! They would make faces and comparisons and declare: “How dark she is!”
How pitiful a society where qualities are defined according to skin color!
Lucinda went over to the window to close it. What had become of Razyé? Where was he holing up? Shouldn’t he be downstairs, sitting with those watching over the body?
The messenger they had dispatched to l’Engoulvent after Cathy had died could only find Irmine, Justin and the little Justin-Marie. Lucinda wouldn’t have been surprised if he had committed some act beyond repair. Thrown himself over the cliff. Drunk himself to death. Or else set sail on the first boat for an unknown destination. Lucinda pressed her forehead against the shutters. How could you tell who had hurt the other the most? Who had been destroyed by whom? When the body and the heart are grappling with egoism and ostentation, the self-inflicted wounds are more than either can take.
There was then a knock at the door and a little maid servant entered, holding a letter in her hand. It was unsigned and merely ordered: Meet me under the great manjack tree.
Lucinda did not need a signature. She went down the stairs buzzing with the hum of voices. A procession of servants was crossing th
e hall, carrying at arm’s length huge trays clattering with Limoges porcelain plates. The glasses of Baccarat crystal were also tinkling cheerfully. Outside, farewells were being exchanged. You could hear the wheels of the tilburies grating on the flagstones in the drive as they carried off those in a hurry to get away, those who could no longer bear to stay and keep up pretences. No, this wasn’t the wake Cathy deserved. Hypocritical expressions, mouths pinched halfheartedly in prayer and self-righteous litanies. Where was Maroude, the storyteller? Where were the drummers? Where was the rum? The dances, the laughter and the hearty jokes that were not afraid of drawing lessons from life?
“Ladies and Gentlemen, come and hear what happened to the toad who wanted to be king, to the heifer who thought she was a young girl, to the hot-blooded mulatto girl who married a white Creole with nothing between his legs . . . Come and see how you die when you turn your back on your culture . . .”
Lucinda wiped the tears that were streaming down her cheeks and went out. In the night daubed with Indian ink the din of the frogs calling for rain was deafening. By the dampness in the air you could sense their prayers would be answered and the sky would soon burst open. A wind filled with as many tears as a mourning handkerchief was already flattening the tops of the bushes and shaking the branches of the trees. Shivering, she made for the great manjack tree. A shape emerged from its shadow and walked briskly toward her.
“Don’t give me any nonsense. That she died like a saint, that she looks like an angel and so on and so on. I want to know one thing. Did she ask for me before she died? Did she mention my name?”
