by Maryse Conde
Razyé had half emptied his bottle of rum and was beginning to float ever so gently over reality. The memories of his love for Cathy, their jokes and games flashed in front of him, arousing little else but a limp sense of revolt. What! Was that all the happiness he had been allotted? Fate stuffs some and famishes others. How many more years did he have to get through? Despite the constant checks on himself, there were no signs of his body weakening. His eyes could still distinguish a black ant from a red ant in the dark. He could still swallow all his breadfruit and fish. Every morning, in the pre-dawn hours, his member stiffened with the same force. Oh no, his death was nowhere to be seen on the horizon. And after all, would they be reunited? He ended up doubting it. He would have to resign himself to the fact that death perhaps is no remedy.
At that moment a man asked him if he could sit at his table: a man of uncertain age, reddish, lanky, lost in his oversize overalls, but with a knowledgable look. As he sat down, Razyé noticed the dog that slinked against his leg; a bitch, nothing but skin and bones with black and yellow spots, her teats trailing the ground.
“Since when do animals drink in the company of men?” he asked irritatedly.
The stranger stared at him with eyes as old as the earth.
“You say she’s an animal? Yes, that’s what she looks like. But her two ears can hear what you don’t. Her two eyes can see what you wouldn’t even dare dream of.”
Razyé then realized whom he was dealing with and said in an apologetic tone: “I’m sorry. I didn’t recognize you.” Throughout the years, in the hope of seeing Cathy again, he had never given up frequenting the kimbwazé, the gadédzaft, and all sorts of genuine or fake masters of the invisible world. At one point, mistress Pulcherie, a healer from Morne-la-Loge, had made him take potions and decoctions that twisted him inside out with vomiting and diarrhoea then left him emptied and panting like a small child. He realized too late that she was only after his money. Another time, master Mano from Marbial had recited for him all the loas in the voodoo pantheon and had promised to place him under the special protection of Azaka-médé who left Guinea in the colors of the rainbow. Three days later, a stab in the back almost got the better of him. After so many disappointments Razyé was suspicious. Yet something in this man’s expression restored his confidence.
He drew up his chair.
1 Inspired by W. H. Auden
Part Two
Guadeloupe
1
A Meeting Fraught with Consequences
The day he was seventeen, Justin-Marie had another fit. Seated around the birthday table to eat the brown, red and yellow marble cake and drink the thick vanilla-flavored chocolate were his “brothers and sisters,” as he liked to call the Razyé children, and Irmine cradling the newly born Cassandre who, in spite of her name, looked as innocent as the Infant of Prague in her blue blouse. Justin-Marie collapsed on the arm of his chair then slipped to the floor, legs limp, eyelids fluttering, his veins coiling in his forehead like ropes. He only came to after thirty interminable minutes, when Hosannah, the servant who had replaced mabo Julie, called to the Good Lord the previous rainy season, rubbed his temples with tincture of arnica. After that it took him some time to regain his senses and he chose to go and lie down.
The adolescent climbed up to his room in the garret and laid down on his mattress stuffed with corn leaves. Every evening the Indian Curibamgo would stretch himself over his stomach and tell him stories of times long ago. Before Christopher Columbus and his bunch of ruffians had looted the island, then a paradise of parrots, macaws and crested cranes. When gilded fish with streaming strands of hair swam in the rivers and laid their scales to dry on the rocks of the river bank. Above the bamboo groves rainbows lassoed the clouds. Sometimes his favorite “little brother” Zoulou came to play with him, and shouting “the Whites are coming, the Whites are coming,” they re-enacted the battles of old. They were always victorious and rewrote history back to front. Zoulou was twelve. As a baby he had remained forgotten for days on end, wailing at the bottom of his cradle, until Razyé found him this name. He didn’t want Irmine to play the same trick on him as she had done with Aymeric. After Zoulou came Gengis and then finally Cassandre. Only Aymeric was baptized with a Christian name. This was probably why Razyé beat him more than the other children, even though he was his spitting image. Nobody was allowed to call him Aymeric, and everyone, even his schoolmistress, called him Razyé II out of fear of offending the cruel father.
This new fit by Justin-Marie, which had lasted so much longer than usual, together with the memory of his burning fever all through the rainy season, so terrified Irmine that she made up her mind to take him to the hospital where, Hosannah had told her, the consultation would be free.
Irmine never went out, not even to go to mass or confession, so it had been a very long time since she had been to church, which was only just around the corner. The reason was that she had nothing decent to wear. She had only one dress, quilted from constant mending, like the ones worn by the women bundling sugarcane, cut from a piece of taffeta a Lebanese peddlar had sold her on credit. At times she trembled at the idea of hell, then told herself that the Good Lord in his understanding would surely forgive her. Outside, the melted gold of the sun shimmering over the harbor dazzled her. Large butterflies danced in front of her eyes, then tiny insects. Finally she could clearly make out the sandbox and almond trees on the Place de la Victoire as well as the colored façades of the houses. Red and white steamers crowded the wharf and the sea was laughing in a never-ending ripple of laughter.
In the morning, once the sanitary tubs had been picked up and their foul smells hastily washed away by the refuse collectors, La Pointe resembled a dancer about to prepare for her entrechats. Spinning, whirling and pirouetting, she sang with the trills of her Indians, sellers of water who for a few cents filled buckets, barrels and basins, yelped with the cries of her market women selling whelks and black pudding, and whistled through the throats of a thousand ragamuffins offering their services from house to house and ready to pilfer anything that fell into their hands. In the meantime, the boxes of bougainvillaea flashed red on the balconies. Irmine crossed herself ostentatiously as she passed in front of the cathedral of Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul, as if she hoped this would appease the tall stone saints sheltering in their niches.
The general hospital, which La Pointe had just been endowed with, was the pride of the colony and had been inaugurated in great pomp by the governor, as if it were a palace of fun. Standing at the top of a hill, in the midst of a verdant park planted with all types of trees, it was a wooden building several storeys high, girded with verandas that fluttered with the white cornets of the nuns. A crowd thronged the ground floor reserved for out patients, and Irmine had a lot of trouble finding her way through all these people, along these unending corridors that wound round and round and then suddenly backtracked. Doctor Bellisle was a dark-skinned mulatto with languishing eyes and delicate slender hands. He found Justin-Marie to be too thin, too puny, short of breath and the inside of his eyelids anaemic.
“He doesn’t eat,” Irmine made an attempt at explaining. But the doctor wasn’t listening. He examined Justin-Marie’s narrow torso again and again and appeared worried. He put his stethoscope back on, listened, tapped here, tapped there, had the boy cough and repeat “ah” dozens of times.
“Now get dressed,” he finally ordered him. “And go and wait for your maman on the veranda.”
Alone with Irmine, he looked her straight in the eye, but couldn’t hide his aggressiveness. He knew these white Creoles like the back of his hand, not a cent to their name, despising anyone with a darker skin, but forced into making pretenses given their new state of affairs. This one hadn’t even been able to pay for her consultation and had registered with the destitute.
“Is there a history of lung disease in your family or your husband’s?” he asked her abruptly.
She told him the story. When she had finished he said in an even more serious tone of voice: “We shall continue with the examinations, but I’m afraid it could be tuberculosis.”
Tuberculosis? It was Irmine’s turn to faint. Doctor Bellisle was used to this sort of incident. After having dampened her forehead and temples with assafoetida, he gave her a thimbleful of Port mixed with an egg yolk that he had beaten himself. When he thought she had sufficiently recovered, he accompanied her to an adjoining room where his next patient, Aymeric de Linsseuil, was waiting for him.
Aymeric had not crossed his sister’s path for almost ten years and seeing her so changed made his heart bleed. What! This is what that smart, sassy girl in the flower of her youth had turned into? She had a tragic expression on her face that was scored with wrinkles: crow’s-feet at the corner of her eyes, furrows around her mouth. Wisps of hair straggled from her grey and white-streaked chignon. Her awkward body was crammed into a dress not even the poorest would want. And her eyes were red and swollen from the tears she had just cried. He felt guilty and almost asked her forgiveness for what the family had done to her. As for Irmine, she looked in dismay at what was left of the handsome heavenly Cherub: he had started to go bald, his cheeks were flabby, he was as thin as a rake and yet he was growing a pot belly. After a moment’s hesitation, brother and sister embraced. Then Irmine began to cry again into her handkerchief.
“I heard that Maman passed away last Christmas.”
“Like a true Christian,” Aymeric murmured, with an even sharper feeling of remorse. “The name of our Lord Jesus Christ on her lips.”
He thought of adding that she had asked for her daughter before dying, but could not bring himself to lie. At that moment Justin-Marie, who had been bored on the veranda, entered the waiting room and made Aymeric gasp. Was this his Cathy he was getting back, younger than ever, as radiant as the first days of their marriage? She had cut her shoulder length black hair into a fringe, and although her cheeks were more hollow than he remembered, her greenish blue eyes were brimming with a life-like sparkle. He was about to run toward her, take her in his arms and embrace her when, pricking the illusion, Irmine affectionately ordered:
“Justin-Marie, come and embrace your uncle.”
The adolescent frowned, and in his breaking voice asked: “Monsieur de Linsseuil?”
The tone was clearly hostile. Although Justin-Marie knew nothing of the old rivalry between Razyé and Aymeric, he nevertheless considered the latter to be a symbol of a hated class that had to be eradicated. Moreover, hadn’t he forced Irmine to live in solitude and destitution, the woman whom Justin-Marie loved like his very own maman, and the woman he could not help pitying like all the rest?
Aymeric far from suspected what was going through Justin-Marie’s mind.
“You’re her very image!” he murmured in an uncontrollable outburst of emotion.
Irmine blushed. She had never spoken of Cathy to Justin-Marie, for she did not know what attitude to take. She had never forgiven her for coming between Razyé and herself. Even dead, her memory haunted her all day and turned up in her bed at night.
So without understanding why, Justin-Marie found himself embraced and caressed by a complete stranger.
On leaving the hospital, Justin-Marie ran to school, the lycée Carnot. He had already missed two hours of French and one hour of natural science. He had no intention of missing the geography class, his favorite, and dreamed of seeing one day with his own eyes those far-off lands of Africa, India and China whose maps were drawn in the pages of his atlas. Monsieur Oriol, the teacher from France, described them so well. He was sorry he had not shown more dislike for Aymeric and that he had let himself be treated like a little boy. It was because Aymeric was not at all like he had pictured him and what he expected of someone of his sort. He looked shy, preoccupied and unsure of himself.
As he reached the corner of the rue Schoelcher and the rue Sadi-Camot, the school bell rang for classes to resume. He ran as fast as he could, but arrived at the bottom of the monumental flight of steps that led to the classrooms just in time to faint again. His head banged on the flagstones, and he only regained consciousness in the infirmary amidst the smell of bay rum. The janitor’s wife, who also served as a nurse, advised him to go home.
Justin-Marie felt worn out.
Retracing his steps along the rue Sadi-Camot, for the first time he felt worried. What was happening to his body? For months he had a burning fever at night. Every morning he woke up wet through, wrapped in the smell of his sweat- soaked sheets. The slightest effort, such as climbing the stairs, playing ball with the little ones or carrying Cassandre in his arms, made his legs give out. Sometimes he coughed so much he lost his breath. He was not scared of death, provided she didn’t come for him too early, before he could prove to all those neglecting him who he was. It must be his mother who had left him her tainted blood together with her color. He knew he was the child of an adolescent, hardly older than himself, who had not stayed long on this earth. One morning, which must have been All Saints’ Day, Irmine had given him her portrait in a locket, begging him in a melodramatic tone never to part with it. He had looked at her pale cheeks, her colorless eyes and her strands of lifeless hair, then he had thrown it in the bottom of a drawer. When he thought about it, he had no feelings for this dead girl. Nothing but bitterness, for she had cared little about him, turning her back on him when he was just seven months old.
Suddenly a procession of men in rags, armed with cutlasses, with a determined look under their bakoua hats, cut across the rue Frébault and headed for the seat of government yelling slogans. The sight had become so commonplace that passers-by did not even slow down to watch. Only Justin-Marie stood on the edge of the pavement to admire them. Everyone had had enough. For over a year it had been one strike after another, accounted for in every detail in Le Peuple, La Cravache, Le Libéral and Le Nouvelliste, but always with differing viewpoints, as if their reporters had not witnessed the same events. The previous week in Morne-à-l’Eau, the workers from the Dubost factory had held their boss hostage for two days and two nights. In Belle-Plaine, the gendarmes had had to use their clubs and left three men as good as dead on the distillery flagstones. Justin-Marie carefully cut out all the articles that dragged Razyé in the mud, calling him the henchman of Jean-Hilaire Endomius and Monsieur Légitimus’s Socialists, and likening him quite simply to the Devil himself. This hatred the rich of the island bore Razyé warmed him like a bonfire. He too, when he grew up to be bigger than Razyé, he would unleash this same hatred, and everyone would know what sort of a person the little boy nobody had taken any notice of had grown into. Standing in the sun, Justin-Marie in his elation did not tire of looking at this cortège of shadowy faces, chiselled and remodelled by the hand of poverty. Yes, perhaps he would become a lawyer in order to avenge them and punish the well-to-do.
Irmine was waiting for him in the room that had the best of their unpresentable furniture, the one they used as a drawing room. He suddenly noticed in slight disgust that she was pregnant again. In spite of this, she appeared to be in an unusually joyful mood. She took his hands, kneaded them in hers and announced in that excited little girl’s voice she sometimes assumed: “Just imagine! Your uncle . . . your uncle has invited you to stay at Belles-Feuilles.”
Justin-Marie looked down to hide his thoughts and said sullenly:
“And what about school?”
Irmine burst out laughing.
“In a week’s time it’ll be carnival. You’ll be able to rest in the fresh air and the doctor says that’s just what you need.”
Thereupon she threw herself on him and showered him with kisses. He wriggled free in irritation. Couldn’t she understand he was a man? That a weapon whose power he hadn’t yet tested, but whose lethal nature he knew, was lodged against his thigh? He was wondering how to teach her a lesson when Razyé, whom they never saw home before nightfall, appeared. Although Razyé had put on weight, although fat had softened the fibres of his muscles, his appearance, despite the passage of time, remained striking. Always erect in carriage and immaculately dressed in black, his mop of grey and white hair now formed a wild crown over his head. The journalists called his expression diabolical because they were unable to read what lay at the back of his eyes that so attracted women, every woman, from the dame-gabrielle to the ladies of society. Irmine literally threw herself around his neck, and he pushed her away, exclaiming: “What’s got into the woman? Are you crazy or what?”
Without losing countenance, Irmine told him what had happened at the hospital.
“And so the great reconciliation has been made!” he said ironically. “For years he’s not interested in knowing whether you’re dead or alive or whether I’ve bullied you to death. You meet him by chance and suddenly all is forgotten.”
At the same time his restless mind was making a rapid calculation. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a spy on the inside? Justin-Marie never hid a thing from him. If he stayed at Belles-Feuilles he would know how to get him to tell everything that went on there. He walked toward the stairs and said hypocritically: “Do what you like! Do you think I’m interested in your doings?”
Astonished by this unhoped-for victory, Irmine turned once again to hug the disconcerted Justin-Marie.
