by Maryse Conde
Without me and without the charm of the children, those two innocent children who have not yet realized in what wretched cradle fate has had them born, how would Irmine have endured her new life? No. 2 on the Place de la Victoire where we settled was a house daubed in pink and white with a yard in the back and a garden in front that had once belonged to the Romilly family. Razyé had bought it for next to nothing two months earlier, when its owners had auctioned it off to pay their debts. Then the family, completely ruined like so many white Creoles in present times, returned to Arles where they had relatives. If, from the outside, the house might just have deceived passers-by, as soon as you stepped inside there was a string of rooms with sagging floors. Almost no furniture. The wallpaper was blistered and the murky mirrors reflected nothing but poverty and filth. In actual fact it didn’t matter, since poor miserable Irmine did not receive a single visit. Our neighbors, all white folks born on the island, needless to say, directors of chambers of commerce and owners of import-export businesses on the wharf, looked at me like a pile of rubbish when in the evening I sat on a bench with the other mabos together with the children, looking so adorable you’d think the Virgin Mary herself had made them. During the day, except for the market women from the outlying districts with their loads of vegetables and tubers on their heads, the only person who crossed the doorstep was a priest, older and more dilapidated than I was. Razyé had hired him to teach Justin-Marie his alphabet, on the condition he never mentioned the name of God in his presence. Razyé remained locked up in the attic all day long. Once I glued my eye to the keyhole and saw him kneeling on both knees in front of a table. On this table, scattered around an enlarged photo of the late Cathy de Linsseuil, was an assortment of jugs, bottles of wine or liqueurs, carafes, stones soaking in oil and playing cards. Two “perpetual lamps” gave a little light to the room. A few chromos were pinned to the wall. A cutlass with a curved blade was stuck upright in the floor. Unfortunately, I was unable to spy for very long, since Razyé turned toward the door and shouted: “Va kilà?”
In the evening Razyé would go out and not come home until two or three in the morning, accompanied by dames gabrielles, black-skinned or mulatto girls smelling of vice under their perfume and makeup whom he probably picked up in the Bas-de-la-Voute or Cayes districts where that sort of person lived. This lot drank, shouted and made merry till the small hours of the morning. Irmine never discusses her relationship with Razyé, and I never ask questions. Some wounds can never be lanced and dressed. The pus and purulence build up inside the flesh and gangrene the whole body. I noticed she was with child again. From the look of her, I guessed she hated herself for having given in to her torturer. But let those who have never wavered cast the first stone. I know I won’t.
One morning I had just scrubbed our pavement when two strapping men placed their muddy boots on it. Two well-to-do men, dressed in the latest fashion, jacket, stiff collar, necktie, patent leather shoes, top hat, but with skin as black as mine.
“I thought they didn’t make them as ugly as this since the abolition of slavery,” one of them sneered at me coarsely.
“Go and fetch your master, and quicker than that,” the other ordered.
I stood up to him.
“And what name shall I give?”
“Monsieur Jean-Hilaire Endomius, assemblyman and mayor of La Pointe!”
Assemblyman and mayor of La Pointe? What could he be wanting with Razyé?
15
The Past Recaptured
Sitting in his office in the town hall, Jean-Hilaire Endomius looked Razyé up and down. The individual corresponded exactly to his description. Tall as a tree from the rainforest, a muscular athletic build, dressed like a dandy with a skin as black as a moonless night. Pleased with his inspection, he put on his winning smile.
“Sit down, sit down. And let’s have a drink. True alliances are sealed in rum.”
The two men clinked glasses and let the rum trickle down their throats. Then Jean-Hilaire asked: “They tell me you bought the house of a white family? And that you got another family’s daughter pregnant before marrying her?”
At a nod from Razyé he said approvingly: “That’s what we all should do. Ruin them and humiliate them.”
After a silence he went on.
“I have created a party. You must have heard of it?” Razyé made a face.
“I’m not interested in politics.” This did not please Jean-Hilaire.
“You should be,” he said severely. “Two things will save us and send us from the bottom rung of the social ladder to the top: education and politics. You can read and write, I assume?”
“Yes,” Razyé growled. “I learned when I was in Cuba.” Jean-Hilaire looked at him with curiosity.
“Tell me about your life in Cuba.” Razyé shrugged his shoulders.
“What do you want me to tell you? I didn’t choose Cuba; Cuba chose me. I was blinded by my grief, weeping endlessly for the girl who had betrayed me when, one morning, the ship docked on that island which like ours hides its wounds under the gold and purple of its Nature. Ruthless judges descended on the hold where I was wallowing under the vermin and offered me a deal: ‘Choose! Either you die in prison or else you save your skin by killing other men.’
“Illogically, I chose the second solution. They gave me a uniform that was too small for me, a gun too heavy, a bag full of ammunition and I climbed up to the forest, the manigua, to hunt down the rebels and their supporters. In other words, all the peasant folk. For the people had had more than enough of the Spanish. I didn’t have a minute’s rest. Every day, even the day of the Lord, I set fire to villages, I tortured women and children, I slaughtered cattle. Sometimes, under the acanas and mahoganys I came face to face with men, hiding naked in the forest, not knowing that slavery was over. They could no longer speak Spanish and had returned to the languages of Africa. I killed them even so, but felt bad about it. I was in the plain of Boca de Dos Rios when they shot Jose Marti, who had just been named Major General of the Liberation Army. I saw him jump from his horse and covered in blood roll toward our lines. After that, the rebellion lost its soul and the rebels dragged their feet. So me and the mercenaries finished them all off. Then, with my hands red with blood, I went down to the city to claim my freedom.
“If you hadn’t seen Havana with your own eyes in 1895 you hadn’t seen anything. They talk of Paris. Bordeaux. Nantes. I haven’t seen any of them, but I know there’s no comparison. Contained within its city walls, Havana lies on a headland that extends to the north as far as the Castillo de la Punta. In the harbor, between the remains of the rusty wrecks lying in the ocean deep and the little isle of Luz, just five or six fathoms of greenish water laps the shore.
“The Atares and San Carlos del Principe castles defend its western flank. Between their massive ramparts lie the districts of Horcon, Jesus Maria and Salud, inappropriately named because in any season you can be carried off by the vomito negro. In the cool of the late afternoon the women are no longer afraid of darkening their skin. They come out to walk along the Alameda, and the men throw them bunches of mariposas and frangipani with impassioned overtures.
“Fairly quickly, I found a shabby room for rent in the calle Soroa, that stunk of salt beef, the tasajo. I led the carefree life of Havana’s free men of color, the blacks, the mulattos and the Chinese, who live in paradise on earth. They sleep all day and wake up only at night for their drunken trips to the gambling dens. I cheated unashamedly and accumulated a small fortune. I was afraid, however, of being picked up by the police again and sent back to where I came from. So I looked for a semblance of work. I found it in the tabaqueria, Señor de Fonseca’s cigar factory. I had got to know Señor de Fonseca, a pure blue-blooded Spaniard of dubious nature, through meeting him in the same gambling houses and the same bordellos. And then one night when some Chinese in a fury were after his gold, I deflected the blade of their knife. After
ward, between two glasses of aguardiente, I told him my story. He wanted to show me his gratitude, and in exchange for a little contraband, he registered me as one of his employees.
“Ah, tobacco! You think sugarcane is worse? Or even cotton? Wherever the nigger toils, he is bound to perish! I spent a few months in that hell and I know what I’m talking about. Despite my connections with Señor de Fonseca I could not be hired as a skilled worker. I was therefore assigned to preparing the tobacco leaves. Each leaf was over a foot long and arrived in rough, reddish bundles of five from the rich black soil of Pinar de Rio. We carefully dampened them one by one and left them hanging to absorb the moisture for two to three hours. Then we placed them to dry on bamboo racks inside wooden hangars with palmfrond roofs. Sometimes we had to wrap them in muslin for protection. Lying side by side in the semi-darkness, looking like gigantic, misshapen infants, they almost scared us. Then we sorted them by size, color and strength before sending them on to the workers who have to grind them with a machine to make pipe tobacco or else hand-roll them to make cigars.
“That’s where I heard them talk of santeria for the first time. Through Carlo, a comrade from the tabaqueria, a Nago, assigned to making cigar boxes.
“Until then, as far as I was concerned, all this business about God was nothing but a trap fabricated by the whites the better to enslave us with. When we were little, Cathy and I invented a prayer to our liking. At bedtime we would yell it in the ears of poor Nelly Raboteur who was at her wit’s end and ran after us shouting: ‘Hush, you little heathens!’ ‘We hate you, sitting invisible up there in Heaven. There is no justice the way you share out color, plantations and land. We shall never call you our father, cos you’re not.’
“But this was something quite different. The santeria religion came from Africa. Olorun-Olofi had created the earth, the water, the plants and the animals for the good of his black-skinned children. One Saturday, Carlo took me to see Melchior. The white-haired babalawo hung a necklace of six red and six white beads around my neck and began my education. I returned every evening between five and seven. During one of his lessons, he taught me that separation and the final stage we call death are meaningless. Provided my eyes learned to see, I would never be far from this Cathy I was eating my heart out for. I would know what she was doing at every minute. What she was feeling. What she was thinking. Whether she was happy or unhappy. If she was thinking about me. Hearing this I jumped for joy. ‘Is this true what you say, master? Then teach me now, now!’
“But he gruffly ordered me to calm down. The moment had not yet come. When it did, he would take care of matters. Alas! Melchior died before my initiation was complete, and I have remained in the dark, with two eyes and nothing to see.”
Although it was he who had started Razyé off, Jean Hilaire had paid little attention to this rambling speech. He was obsessed by something else. A series of numbers were constantly swirling through his head: the price of a ton of sugarcane, the sugar content of the molasses, the daily wage, the price of a pound of fertilizer, and even when he made love to his mistresses on the Mome-à-Cayes they would not leave him alone. When Razyé fell silent, he got up and began to pace back and forward in his office, assuming the tone of a political speech.
“You are no doubt aware that our island is undergoing a profound change. The factories have gradually replaced the old sugar mills. These factories process the cane from a cooperative of planters who are under contract to them. From the owners’ point of view, this means increased productivity and lower costs. In fact for the workers it simply means widespread impoverishment. You know that the white Creole Aymeric de Linsseuil . . .”
Razyé jumped at the hated name. But Jean-Hilaire did not even notice and went on:
“. . . has established the Compagnie Sucriere de la Pointe as a joint venture with the Savilor company from Paris and has built the Dargent factory in the new district of La Caréne, which he boasts is the biggest sugar factory in the French West Indies. Only last month, as mayor, I had to give an inauguration speech that still leaves a nasty taste in my mouth. It went something like this: ‘Honor to all those of you who worked on this edifice. You are a worthy example to your country. Your memory will be blessed by every generation who comes after you.’ At the same time twenty per cent of Grande-Terre is his land. He is the real master of the island. Razyé, I’m out to get him.”
Razyé’s heart echoed: “That makes two of us. But my reasons are different from yours.”
“What do you expect me to do against an individual like that?” he said out loud. “I’m less than nobody around here.”
Jean-Hilaire sat down again behind his desk. He took a pencil and a sheet of paper.
“I have arranged everything.”
When Razyé stepped outside the town hall, La Pointe was living its last few moments of daylight. Soon lights would go on in all the houses and the cabins would flicker with candle-light. There had just been a heavy shower, making the streets muddy, but at last making the air a little cooler.
Razyé was shivering with excitement. Cathy’s death had left him helpless, as if he had been emptied of his vital organs. Life had been dragging him along by the scruff of the neck ever since. Jean-Hilaire had infused him with new energy. He would do everything possible to ruin Aymeric de Linsseuil with the help and on behalf of the Socialists. He had left l’Engoulvent on a sudden impulse, little knowing what he was doing, merely that he had to get out of Grande-Terre if he wanted to write revenge in capital letters in the sky of Guadeloupe. But since he arrived in La Pointe, all he had been doing was weep for his beloved, drink, fill his pockets in the gambling dens or make love without even looking at the face of the woman who was moaning with pleasure beneath him. Now his life had found a new direction.
He headed up the rue de la Voûte toward the new Caréne district that spread along the eastern side of the town, struck by the sickly smell of cane juice that immediately brought back all his memories of childhood with Cathy. Firmly he shut them out. Despite the late hour the wheels of ox carts loaded with cane echoed over the unevenly paved streets, while barges with similar loads loomed up flat and grey in the dusk from the sea. He heard someone cry out.
“But isn’t that Razyé?”
Two young boys in rags were driving a muddy ox team with great lashes of their whips, while a third was perched on top of the load, peeling a kongo-cane with his teeth. They were three workers from the Espérance plantation in Anse Bertrand that belonged to the Linsseuils. The sugar mill had closed its doors and they had been on the road since dawn. Ah, times were not good! And even more poverty was on the way. Before, you started at seven in the morning and finished at five in the afternoon, with a well-deserved rest between eleven and one to stoke up the stomach. Wasn’t that so, José? Now they were talking of replacing day-laboring by job-laboring. And what would happen? Those overseer swines would see to it that no job could be done in one day and you’d have to continue over to the next.
Razyé did not miss the opportunity.
“When can we get together so that I can come and speak to you?” he said in a whisper.
The boys looked at each other. From Anse-Bertrand to Le Moule, the name of Razyé was synonymous with tales of drunkenness and pregnant women. He had never been mixed up with politics; that was the realm of Monsieur Legitimus and his supporters.
Razyé smiled and assured them haughtily: “Things are going to change around here, believe me. From now on, you’re going to see quite a bit of me.”
Then he pushed open the door of a rum shop oddly named Le Tricolore, to celebrate his new vocation. Le Tricolore was crowded with people: the usual collection of brawling rum guzzlers, rolling dice or slamming down dominoes on the wooden tables. He sat down in a fairly quiet corner and ordered a bottle of Belle-Plaine rum. He always sipped the same quantity of alcohol, about three quarters of a liter, no more, for he had no intention of driftin
g into unconsciousness. He wanted merely to numb the old pain that had sunk its teeth into him like a Cuban bloodhound. At times it hurt so badly he was bent in two, shuffling like an old bag of bones, never getting anywhere, never finishing a sentence or a movement. He had got to the stage when he desired a little comforting: a gentle touch or word. He had only Justin-Marie.
He had always hid a tender spot in his heart for the boy because of his resemblance to Cathy. As he grew up, this resemblance had become quite simply amazing. At first he hadn’t really noticed it. Then one Sunday he had entered the little metal-sided cabin where the men of the family took their weekly bath. Justin-Marie was stepping out of the tub of soapy water, clutching the bunch of leaves he used to scrub his skin, when the graceful vision of this hardly virile body had blinded Razyé like the sun. An insane idea gripped him. Wasn’t this the girl he had been seeking in vain, returning to him travestied in some perverted play?
She was quite capable of it! Ever since that day, Razyé, who as a rule took no notice of anyone in the house, never missed an opportunity to study Justin-Marie, to ply him with questions and draw him close under some pretext or other. More than one night he had entered his room and watched him, hidden behind the folds of his mosquito net, without daring to wake him, deeply moved by his resemblance. Tears would stream from his eyes that he thought had dried up forever, while words of tenderness softened his mouth.
You were my north, my south, my season of drought, my season of rain,
My sun, my rain, my hurricane.
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song, Beloved, your cruel games are wrong!1
The man who never wanted to spend a cent on anyone was planning to send Justin-Marie to study law in Bordeaux to become the spearhead of his revenge. The boy was doing well at school, despite hostility from students and teachers alike.
