by Maryse Conde
Lucinda started crying even louder.
“She mentioned nobody’s name. Nobody, you hear? . . . All this is your fault, and you haven’t even come and prayed for her soul to rest in peace.”
“As long as I live,” Razyé sneered, “she will never rest in peace. She will always be beside me. She’ll cling to me like the murdered haunt their murderers. Because you and all the rest of you think I’m the one who killed her, isn’t that right?”
Lucinda did not answer, and after a while, Razyé went on, imploring her.
“Can’t you get me a picture, a lock of her hair, a dress she wore, anything!”
This seemed a legitimate request, yet Lucinda was suspicious. You can do so many things with a dress, a lock of hair or a portrait! She looked up.
“What for? I don’t trust you.”
“What a stupid question!” he answered impatiently. “You’re truly a heartless creature. I have nothing left of hers. Don’t I deserve something to remember her by?”
She hesitated, then nodded, murmuring: “It’s agreed. I’ll give you a locket and a lock of hair of hers I’ve kept. Now come and pray for her soul!”
But Razyé shook his head violently.
“That’s not her in there!”
Shrugging her shoulders she turned her back on him and returned to the house. In the funeral chamber the scent of tuberoses, lilies and candles, whose tallow dripped down the silver candelabra, mingled with a bitter, captivating and intimate smell, as if the secret humors of the dead girl’s body were starting to warm up under her skin. This was the first sign of the decomposition her figure, at one time so coveted and admired, could expect once it was in the shadow of the earth. Lucinda made the sign of the cross, slipped into the place Madame de Linsseuil had just vacated and tried to repeat the prayers Sister Léa was singing at the top of her voice. Propped up against her pillows, Cathy gently moved her lips and spoke to those who had ears to hear her.
I am gone.
At last I have finished with life and all those who loathed me are here, hypocrites, pretending to mourn me. Even Madame de Linsseuil, taking out her handkerchief and looking for water in the desert of her eyes. What does it matter! Loved by some. Hated by others. All that is no longer my concern.
I’m frightened. I don’t know what is waiting for me on the other side of this door that I must push open to slip into the other world and begin my eternity. But I already know that what awaits me will be no more painful than what I experienced in my lifetime, through my own fault, through my very own fault.
Where are you?
I don’t see you in the crowd. Don’t you love me enough to forgive me the evil I have done to you? You must realize we shall never see each other again, for death is nothing but the night. It is a migration of no return. You see, I was right.
When we were little and we played our games in the graveyard beside Maman’s tomb, you promised never to leave me. You told me that if you were the first to go, you would not leave for the other world, but stay on earth and circle me forever. You would be in the tree that trembles, in the wood that creaks, in the rushing streams, in the stagnant pools, in the vault, in the crowd. You would never leave.
I claimed it was impossible. But you said that all you had to do was learn the secrets of the kimbwazé, those sorcerers in perpetual contact with the invisible world, and you prowled around the places where they lived. Once, when he had gone out, you dragged me inside old Carnot’s cabin. We stared, fascinated at the jumble of nails, the crucifixes, the pictures of saints hanging on the wooden walls, the pieces of bone, the skulls and the jars full of roots soaking in murky water. Unfortunately old Carnot returned earlier than usual and he gave us more blows than we could take. Impenitent, you tried to approach other sorcerers. In vain! They always rejected you. You frightened them. They sensed that with you, their secrets would be in the wrong hands.
While I was on earth, I had the feeling you were inside me, always there, in my head, in my heart and in my body. I even got the impression I was you. It was often painful, because you were not a very agreeable companion. No more was I; richer in failings than in virtues. But now I am gone and I have lost you. Forever. And this emptiness is suffocating me.
If I think back, my happiest years stopped at the age of fifteen, when I was invited to the Belles-Feuilles plantation. Justin took this invitation to be a great honor. In great excitement he drove me to La Pointe to buy me clothes, at least enough to fill a small wicker basket, for I couldn’t visit a respectable house with the rags I had on my back. Up till then I had only left l’Engoulvent to go to mass at Petit-Canal with Nelly Raboteur, unbeknown to papa, because he thought all this business with the Good Lord a waste of time. If the Good Lord existed He would never have tolerated slavery, wars and all the vile deeds in the world. I had therefore never set foot in a town before and I remember my amazement at discovering the straight streets hemmed in between the tall façades of the houses squeezed one against the other. In some neighborhoods, everything was peaceful. Sandbox trees lined a square that on one side opened out onto the sea, the ships and the bluish zigzag of a chain of mountains. On the other side, however, it was chaos. Crowds thronged the pavements and blackened the streets, and at every instant horses almost trampled on unwary pedestrians. Rowdy individuals auctioned off pieces of richly colored cotton and silk in front of shops, mysterious as caves, overflowing with all sorts of cheap goods, while big-bottomed women, with their faces covered in sweat under wide straw hats, sat on small benches, steps away from piles of dung, reaching out for the legs of passers-by and trying to get them to buy blood pudding, coconut milk, cakes and candy such as nég an sak and kilibibi, with a litany of sugary words: Coco, chéri-doudou, bel pitite an mwen, choubouloute à manman!
Justin bought me a glass of cane juice at the corner of the rue Frébault then entered the store, Au Bon Marche. He purchased some panties, a petticoat and a dress in blue silk with grey flowers. Then he bargained for the price of a corset. A corset! I had never seen anything of the sort! I pulled him by the sleeve and whispered: “What’s that for?”
“All the girls in high society wear them,” he replied, importantly. “It gives you what they call a wasp waist.”
A wasp waist! I remembered the mason-wasp nests I used to wreck with Razyé and gave up trying to understand. To get a better look at this strange object, I took hold of it and fingered its whalebones and iron rods. I had no idea that for me, this was the beginning of the end. That everything I had been was about to die in me.
After that, I didn’t have one minute of happiness. I lived in opulence. I possessed what I had never possessed before. Yet when I looked at my painted face in the mirror, with rings on my ears and heavy necklaces around my neck, the night of a ball, I knew that behind this mask lay solitude and regret.
I made every man who loved me suffer. Razyé. Aymeric. Razyé could face the suffering. But not poor Aymeric. He tried to change me with the power of love. An impossible task! Love has to be drunk in sips with the milk from your mother’s breast, otherwise it’s useless. When I was little, nobody really loved me. Nobody took the trouble to teach me anything at all. Good. Evil. Beauty. Ugliness. Justice. Injustice. I grew up like a wild coolie plum in the savanna. My papa was no good and an ignoramus. He turned Razyé into his plaything before Justin turned him into an animal. As for Justin, when he finally knew how to read and write, he kept it all to himself. Like the miser he is. Aymeric, however, guided the pen in my hand. He bought me books. He corrected my mistakes and explained the difficulties of language. He read me poems that I could understand.
Reed that ripens in the plain,
Making a hedge along the dusty road,
I shall pick your proud stems,
And bend them blade by blade.
I shall weave them with my hands.
• • •
He taught me the pr
oper name of flowers, plants and animals. He would laugh.
“Don’t say kongolio. Say myriapod. Don’t say manzé Marie. Say sensitive plant or mimosa pudica.”
He spun a globe and showed me the green of the forests in Africa and the Americas, the white of the polar ice fields and the deep blue of the oceans just about everywhere on the surface of the earth. He talked to me of God in whose image all men are created, even the blacks, he said. Their sins had burnt and cracked their skin, but they could, if they walked straight, be redeemed, so great was the torrent of God’s love for his Creation. During those moments tears filled my eyes because I couldn’t help thinking of Razyé. Nobody had loved him either. Except for me, who in the end betrayed him.
What’s the use of lying! I desperately regret leaving this life, however bitter it has been for me. Will I miss my children? They’ll have enough loving care without me. They say that daughters only ever belong to their maman. So perhaps Cathy will rummage for my image in the dresser drawers where the sepia-colored portraits slumber, with the faded velvet ribbons and the empty perfume sprays.
“What was she like?” she will ask those who knew me. “Do I look like her? Tell me I’m the living image of her.”
Yet what could I have given her, a no-good person like myself?
Above all I shall miss the intangible things. The taste of blood, as it flowed warm and salty from my wounds when I fell on the rocks, the sear of the sun, the burn of the sea when it opened its belly for me, the spray of the waves and the bitterness of the coco plum snatched from over the hedge. I shall regret the heat from Toussine, my mare, and the ridge of her back as we galloped together over the savanna. Above all I shall miss my body and Razyé’s, a marvel of flesh and blood created for my satisfaction. The first time we made love it was by accident. We didn’t know what we were doing. Our hands and mouths simply followed an untrodden path, and at the end the red flash of pleasure blinded us. We started over and over again, each time more skilful and more passionate. Call it vice if you want to. I know it was innocence.
I heard that Aymeric wants to bury my body in the little graveyard at l’Engoulvent beside Maman. Only a living person could think that such a belated reunion would be of some use. We never knew each other, our hearts didn’t have time to love one another. Now is not the time. Our bones will crumble into dust beside each other. That’s all there is to it.
Life is past. Eternity ahead. Eternity. Infinite time on my hands. Infinite.
12
Life Repeats Itself
Cloaked in the blackness of the night, Razyé left the park and strode off along a sunken lane that cut across the cane fields. The pain and the revolt had in a way diluted into his blood and now irrigated every particle of his being. The rain beat down on his back, but he couldn’t feel it. He knew he would carry this fever with him as long as he lived, mixed with the vital fluids of his body. It would only abate with death.
The man he was searching for lived on the Linsseuil estate, for when he was not conversing with the invisible spirits, Ciléas, a Nago negro, son of Ciléas Ciléas, the Ancestor, known from the Pointe-des-Châteaux to Matouba, put on a pair of drill konoko and crushed cane juice at the factory. He had even lost two or three fingers doing it. But since everyone on the plantation feared him, Aymeric had allotted him a secluded place, remote from the other black shacks, near an abandoned mill overgrown with thistles. Yet the women complained that, as soon as darkness fell, they bumped up against all sorts of terrifying shapes in the sunken lanes, probably spirits in disguise, on the prowl for wicked deeds; shapes like Ti-Sapoti, jan gajé in league with the devil, running to find their skin, and soukougnans, drinkers of fresh blood. Because of this they lived in fear and kept their little ones under their skirts, frightened that they would catch a fatal sickness. A hurricane lamp lit up the outside of Ciléas’s cabin, which resembled any other until you looked up at the ridge of the roof. A row of birds of prey, with wings drooping, mounted guard night and day, and you realized that the man who lived under this roof was no ordinary mortal. A yellow-eyed creole dog started barking furiously as Razyé approached, then suddenly crawled in front of him as servile as a slave. At the commotion the door was opened by a very young woman, an infant clinging to her breast. Razyé brusquely pushed her aside.
“Listen, I’ve got no time for you. It’s your man I’ve come to see.”
Ciléas was a short, slender little black man of about thirty, whom you wouldn’t notice if it hadn’t been for the void in his eyes that stopped you dead in your tracks. The depths of time swirled beneath his swollen eyelids. Since his return from Cuba, Razyé had had frequent dealings with him. They had met one evening over a glass of rum in the shadows of Childeric’s bar, when Ciléas had slipped beside Razyé to ask him about Melchior. When Razyé jumped:
“How come you know Melchior?” Ciléas had smiled mysteriously. “Why does that surprise you? Don’t we all come from the same place? Don’t we all share the same thankless earth under our feet?”
Ever since that day the two men had become inseparable, one showing the other the color of his gold, the other in exchange revealing his secret knowledge.
“I’ve got what you asked me to get,” Razyé murmured in an urgent tone of voice. “Can you snatch her spirit, the way you told me you could, and seal it at the bottom of a jar before it embarks on its journey?”
For a moment, Ciléas said nothing, then tipped his head backward.
“What do you want me to do with it? Hide it in the body of a newborn infant? A household animal? Or release it among the living to haunt their sleep and peace of mind?”
Razyé shook his head.
“Deliver her to me as a prisoner. So that she never leaves me. So that she’s with me for the rest of my days. So that she haunts me like the murdered haunt their murderers . . .” He completed his sentence with a bitter, triumphant laugh, “ . . . since I’m the one who killed her!”
Used to Razyé’s manner, Ciléas was not taken aback by such an outburst and merely said: “Good, now let me get to work! The night is going to be long.”
The next morning they found Ciléas lying in the tall clumps of eddoe. No sign of a wound could be found on his body. No blood either. He was simply as cold as marble. As stiff and heavy as a log of lignum vitae.
The police made no investigation, merely asked his tearful wife with a child in her arms a few hasty questions. It was clear from the start that this was no ordinary case. What mortal in his right senses would dare attack a kimbwazé, especially if he had Ciléas’s reputation? It was without a doubt a combat of the giants, between spirits squabbling at a higher level than the world we mortals tramp daily.
So, without taking the trouble to organize a wake, they hurriedly buried Ciléas, and that is how his funeral cortège passed Cathy’s as she came out of the church at Petit-Canal. Well, “cortège” is an exaggeration! A few motley men and women, shivering under a steady rain, doffed their bakoua hats at the procession of Linsseuils and their friends who in their pomp and silks didn’t even give them a glance. In the meantime Papa Legba, sitting at the crossroads with his pipe between his teeth, was nodding his head: Weren’t Cathy and Ciléas both going to the same place, a place where there were no whites, no blacks, no mulattos, no rich, no poor, no misbegotten, no wellbegotten?
Half hidden behind an almond tree on the church square, Razyé watched those following Ciléas drift into the fading light and recalled another, more imposing, procession—Melchior’s. So life was repeating itself. For the second time, the invisible spirits were scorning him. Twice they had let him rub his face against the murky window of death, only to snatch away its secret at the last minute. The great dream he had cherished would never come true. The girl he loved was now out of his reach. How could he live without Cathy? Can a human being live without his soul?
13
Irmine de Linsseuil’s Tale
He’s coming.
He has just spent another day sitting motionless for hours on the barren tombstone of Cathy’s grave, looking out to sea, at the island of La Désirade outlined against the horizon. All that remains of her is there. What goes on in his heart? Not a word is spoken. Not a prayer murmured. Not a tear fills his eyes.
As stiff as a poker, he’s crossing the savanna, a black shadow in the approaching darkness. The last rays of the setting sun burn his neck. But he cannot feel them. All he can feel is the thistle of pain scratching his heart. I have no pity for him. Now it’s his turn to suffer, after having made my life so unbearable. How could Catherine’s heart stoop so low as to love such a monster? But perhaps his mouth, that only has insults and curses for me, was less hard on her? Perhaps his embrace, that has been nothing but defilement and humiliation for me, was laden with tenderness for her?
Five days ago, at the same moment as poor Cathy, my womb opened and I was taken with the pains of labor. There was nobody to go and fetch the midwife. God knows where Razyé was. Justin was snoring in the kitchen. Zébulos, the handyman, had disappeared. So I pushed out the foetus in a torrent of blood; I cut the umbilical cord with a knife and washed the new-born baby in a bucket of lukewarm water. Any doubts about who its papa was were dispelled immediately. The baby was the very image of Razyé, but a lighter skinned version. The same fiery eyes, the same forehead. It was as if all my white blood had been to no avail. Logically I should have hated him, this son sown in my flesh by a man I had ended up loathing. Yet from the moment I clasped him to my breast I experienced feelings I had never felt before. Nothing is so cunning as motherly love. It slips in through the fissures of the heart like bats squeezing in through the narrowest cracks in the roof. I kissed his eyelids and his rosebud mouth, promising myself to teach him a whole different language from his father’s. When he stuffed my breast into his toothless mouth, my heart finally melted.
