by Maryse Conde
Farewell! Good riddance!
Then she would have purified the miasmas from his room by burning leaves of sarsaparilla mixed with a pinch of marjoram and cooking salt. But Aymeric just did exactly as he pleased.
In the kitchen a small servant girl was plucking a fowl with a broken neck. The blood was dripping into an enamel basin while the down, like the flock from a silk-cotton tree, was fluttering under the vaulted ceiling and flying everywhere.
Happiness, oh happiness, catch it while you can!
3
Losers Will Be Losers
The writing paper was elegant and cream-colored, the stroke of the pen already assured. The childish signature curled in a pompous flourish.
The Belles-Feuilles Plantation2 April 19-
Dear parents,
My uncle is very good to me. His Great House is magnificent and I like it very much here. The doctor has discovered I am seriously ill. If I’m not careful I might even die. But uncle has promised to cure me. He is taking me to Papaye to care for me. I am sure you will agree it is in my best interest.
Your loving son,
Justin-Marie
Razyé read the short letter over and over again. It inscribed his defeat in writing. Once again he was beaten. Why had he let Justin-Marie leave for Belles-Feuilles? He could blame nobody but himself. Aymeric had only to turn up with his pompous air, his great house, what was left of his land, the portraits of his ancestors on the walls and his Limoges porcelain dinner plates engraved with a cipher, to turn the tables and seduce Justin-Marie. The boy was turning his back on him without a moment’s hesitation, without one look behind, forgetting all about the affection and plans he had for him. Once again he was left with his heart and his hands empty. Looted. Vandalized.
He looked up at Irmine, standing in front of him with her bloated belly, four months pregnant, and asked her calmly and collectedly: “Tell me! What have you got that we haven’t got? You’re no better looking, no stronger, no more intelligent and yet you win every time.”
Irmine, who was used to her husband’s enigmatic words, did not try to understand. She quickly crossed herself and exclaimed rather sadly, for she was struck by Justin-Marie’s ingratitude—not a word for her: “How lucky he is to have found in his misfortune someone like Aymeric!”
That was the last straw! Razyé stood up and silenced her with the back of his hand. Then, so as not hear her whimpering, he walked out. In the yard the children were flying the orangey triangle of their kite over the roof. They quickly stifled their shrieks and ran to a safe distance. He caught sight of Razyé II, the child he hated most even as a baby, and called him over. When the boy was level with him, he interrogated him, at first quite calmly, but then as his anger mounted, his voice grew louder.
“Why are you here on this earth? To put tears in our eyes? To make us crazy? Quite simply crazy! As God is my witness, I’ll send you back where you came from!”
Razyé II looked him straight in the eye, without a blink of defiance or fright. At the back of his black eyes lapped a lake of tranquillity. Razyé was so struck by this that he took stock of his first-born: sculptured out of locust wood like himself, almost as tall, black, perhaps a shade less black, with finely chiselled features. There was a silence, then the young boy quietly asked: “Justin-Marie’s not coming back?”
Without a moment’s hesitation, Razyé slapped him aside. Outside, La Pointe was daubed in red. The façades of the houses, the walls and the balconies were bleeding, and the burst sky dripped scarlet rivulets on the passers-by, who cowered on the pavements. The sun was burning and crackling like a bonfire in the dry season and heat waves shimmered in the air. The sea was restless and swelled up, flaunting its painted canvas. Razyé arrived at the town hall and went up to his office on the first floor, just behind Jean-Hilaire Endomius’s. Idling on a bench, his henchmen were waiting for him, unscrupulous individuals whom he paid to stir up the cane workers and, when need be, to help them set fire to the plantations. The newspapers claimed they had a number of assassinations, political and otherwise, on their conscience. But there had never been any proof. Razyé gave orders to Nelson, a one-eyed braggart, who was looked on as the head of the gang.
“Get the horses ready and take a few men. We’re leaving for Petit-Canal. I want all that’s left of Aymeric de Linsseuil’s land to go up in flames this very evening.”
Nelson looked surprised.
“That’s not what the boss told us. With the capital-labor agreement he ordered us to lie low.”
“Yeah, yeah!” Razyé said angrily. “The capital-labor agreement is a load of rubbish. The Socialists are quarrelling about it amongst themselves . . . Everything must go up in smoke tonight, I’m telling you.”
Nelson said not another word, and together with his associates ran to saddle the horses tied up in the town hall yard.
The men left La Pointe by the Vatable canal district, Razyé leading the pack, wrapped in a red fury, and the passers-by and the children coming home from school wondered where this wild, galloping cavalcade could be headed, led by a man all dressed in black. Frightened, some made the sign of the cross and took the precaution of murmuring a prayer. Others recognized Jean-Hilaire Endomius’s gang and crossed themselves even faster.
Leaving the town of Les Abymes, the traveller immediately enters the sugarcane basin. In some places the cane had just been harvested and in the bare fields the stumps were waiting to bud again. In others, nothing had been cut and the cane stood straight and strong, as tall as a grown man. Balancing their horns, oxen grazed the grass on the sides of the road, while their Indian herdsmen, sprawled under the mango trees, kept an eye on them. Donkeys tied to their stakes brayed the hour of noon. In spite of himself, Razyé felt his heart melt. The dry smell of the earth baked by the sun and the blistering air brought back memories of his younger days. Many years back he had stumbled along this same road, half-crazed with pain, almost falling into every rut. At that time a rum shop stood beside the calabash tree at these crossroads. He had gone in, collapsed on a table and the die-hard drinkers had gathered round to laugh at him. A nigger like him crying? It was the first time they’d seen that. But it was here that a servant girl had taken pity on him and taken him home. A mangy dog guarded her cabin where two or three fatherless children slept. He had eaten his diriémori and laid down beside her on the corn-stuffed mattress. But he hadn’t thanked her or given her what she expected. So in the yellowish light of the pre-dawn hours she had put him out and he had set off again, straight ahead along the unending road. The dogs had yelped as he passed by and doors opened a crack in suspicion.
After two hours at full gallop they reached Mome-à-l’Eau with its splendid houses of the dead guarding the gates. On the black and white marble tombs the archangel St. Michael tirelessly brandished his sword and the crosses made of pearls never came unthreaded. The men stopped their mounts in front of the entrance to let a hearse through, and received smack in the face the stares of a handful of mourners, whose curiosity got the better of their grief. Judging by the expression of the mourners, it must have been a miserable wretch they were burying under the hot two o’clock sun without a flower or a wreath. Barely a squeak of music. Life hadn’t been kind to him, keeping its sweetness for others. No matter! He had been laid to rest. Razyé envied him, as he envied all those who had done their time. He didn’t expect much from death now, even though he stubbornly sought the key. He had been a frequent visitor to Madhi, the kimbwazé encountered by chance in the Carénage district, who had dug up some things from the past but had not yet ventured into the future or the afterlife. He took his money and filled his head with mysterious prophecies that could be interpreted in many ways.
Razyé whipped his horse then set off again at a gallop. Mome-à-l’Eau, with its string of cabins like so many cowpats strung out on a savanna after the rain, was quickly swallowed up by the sugarcane fields. This
was the former land of the Linsseuils, sold to the Crédit Fonder some years before. Their remaining estates covered a loosely drawn square around Port-Louis. They were not more than an hour and a half away. As the sun was still too high in the sky for what they had to do, Razyé led the men in the direction of l’Engoulvent, left in the care of Zébulos, where he hadn’t set foot in months.
The vegetable garden, which the Indians had taken so much trouble over in the past, was now abandoned. Nothing grew there any more—just a few cabbages gone to seed and some pepper plants. The old house, however, was still standing, staring through the louvred shutters of its attic windows at the yellowish savanna bristling with columnar cacti and the scrub of razyés. In the distance the waves still took out their rage on the rocks strewn haphazardly in the ocean and on the geometrically walled silhouettte of La Désirade. A fishing boat pitched its sails. Letting the men continue on up to the house, Razyé galloped over to the little graveyard on the edge of the cliff, a few yards from the void. He dismounted in front of Cathy’s tomb. Unlike the other graves of the Gagneur family, whose bare, grey stones were flaking, Cathy’s tomb stood white and adorned with bunches of fresh, sweet-smelling flowers. Taken with a fit of rage, he knocked over the vases of lilies and arums, and stamped on them. He knew that Cathy was not under this slab, otherwise he would have gone to join her. But these painstaking efforts to rob him of her over and over again exasperated him. Once his fit of anger had passed, he stood standing helpless, at a loss what to do, feeling the sun drilling nails into his head. It was as if he were losing Cathy a second time in this new version she had devised for herself.
At midnight, a wall of orange hue loomed up in the sky.
Clusters of sparks exploded in the darkness and drew cabalistic signs in gold. The heat was so great that it reached outlying villages and drew people from their beds. Wrapped in the rags of sleep they ran to their doorsteps and saw the glow of the fires. A single cry went up.
“Kann-la ka brilé!”
The sight was a common one. Yet it roused the same terror. Sugarcane is the mother of every Guadeloupean. A fatal blow, and what would be left?
The fires had been lit in numerous places at the same time and flames leapt up everywhere. Powerless in their efforts to put them out, the men, women and children of the plantation, armed with buckets, cans and even pitchers, formed a human chain from the ponds scattered around the savanna, while waiting for the municipal water pumps. As they passed along the water, they lost themselves in conjectures. Some claimed to have seen a pack of black horsemen, the spitting image of Jean-Hilaire Endomius’s henchmen. Others swore that they had seen with their own two eyes a ball of fire fall from the sky around ten in the evening that set the cane fields alight in a single blaze. There was something unnatural about this fire. While the crowd argued, their efforts proved useless. The fire played havoc with them and leapt under their noses, devouring one patch of cane after the other. Aymeric galloped around on horseback like a madman. Whereas these Bengal lights, as they were nicknamed throughout the island, had ruined all the planters, one after the other, his estates had always been spared. At the Chamber of Agriculture meetings he was even a little proud of it and put it down to the respect his workers had for him, even when they were goaded to strike. Now he galloped in circles, humiliated and exasperated. Where were the municipal firepumps? Except for Anse-Bertrand and Saint-François, all the municipalities were in the hands of the Socialists, and they must have been only too pleased at what was happening to him. The harder he yelled, shouting words of encouragement at the rescuers, the more his voice got lost amidst the crackling and the hot hissing of the flames.
At four thirty in the morning, when the first water pumps finally arrived from Anse-Bertrand, there was practically nothing left to save. Almost ten thousand acres had gone up in smoke, and Aymeric de Linsseuil was penniless.
4
Sanjita the Housekeeper’s Tale
On 21 December 1867, the Allahabad set sail from the port of Calcutta for the island of Guadeloupe with Shashi, my father, aboard. My father was the son of a fishwife seduced by a Brahmin, who hid his noble birth under his traveller’s rags. Such stories are common in India, the land we come from. You might even say they can be heard in every lane, in every street. The poorest Indian can see through the disguise of the destitute traveller standing on his doorstep and recognize the wise man underneath. He opens wide the door to his house and offers him drink and his finest food. When night falls, he lays his most beautiful daughter in the bed prepared by his wife. However, things did not quite happen like that for my father. His mother was scaling fish on the banks of the Ganges, our holy river, when she saw the Brahmin’s boat drifting downstream. Before she had time to realize what was happening, he had sprung into the river with a great splash and rapidly swum in her direction. Then he had dragged her behind a curtain of trees and gallantly mounted her. My father’s mother was sixteen and a virgin. Rape? No, when the ardor of God manifests itself, this word is unbecoming.
“I am Parashar and a saint,” the wise man had said suavely as he withdrew. “A son will be born from our union.”
As he had predicted, the belly of my father’s mother soon began to swell. Her father, who was also a fisherman eking out a living, noticed it and was about to disown her when she told him the story of her visitation. So he accepted the fact and nine months later Shashi, my father, was born.
At least that’s the story my parents used to tell us, and I am sure they ended up believing it. They never answered our questions. So they could never explain how this fairytale beginning ended with my father’s exile, his humiliation in the plantations of Guadeloupe and the poverty we, my seven brothers and sisters, now endured. I think their heads must have been full of dreams, and that every man has the right to dream, especially if his life is wretched. In actual fact, my mother and father were probably peasants from Bengal who grew jute and roamed around looking for work. A sirdar had no difficulty propositioning them on the edge of a marketplace.
My parents had always been in the service of the Linsseuil family, the branch from Basse-Terre, the one that owns land in the region of Gourbeyre and beyond. On his death Amédée de Linsseuil left my father almost fifteen acres at the bottom of his estate, La Solitude, in Plaisir. It was in fact a poisoned gift. The land was covered in scrub and tall trees. Despite his unremitting work, my father could never get anything to grow there. I saw his hair turn white, completely white, for a few cabbages, carrots, turnips and lettuce, not even enough to sell on Sundays outside the cathedral. Up to the day he died, the only pleasure I saw him take was an afternoon here and there at the pit. He was too poor to bet. He was merely content to watch the cocks fight each other.
Neither my mother nor my father had ever set foot inside a school. They could neither read nor write, and on paydays my father would trace a large cross on the overseer’s register. When they opened up school for everyone in Guadeloupe, he enrolled us. But the other children made fun of us; they would hold their noses saying we smelled; when they hit us for no reason at all, the mistress sided with them. So after a few years I dropped out and began hiring my services to the white Creoles in the area. That’s how I met Apu, who was breaking his back as a gardener on a neighboring plantation. Oh, our marriage wasn’t easy. My parents were from Calcutta, almost as white as the white folks we served. Apu’s family came from the South of India. They all had skins as black as black folks and the same coarse features. So my father began by saying no. He brought out all his Parashar stories and went to great lengths explaining his mysterious birth. How his mother stunk of fish, but this did not stop the saint who hid a real shaft under his dhoti. How he had conjured up a kind of cloud that hid them from the eyes of all those who crowd the banks of the Ganges every morning. (There was never any mention of my mother’s origin; I suppose she didn’t count.) But we held firm and finally we were married in church because our parents had
become good Catholics who prayed to the Good Lord.
Now coffee growing is dead in Guadeloupe, or almost. The coffee plantations have fallen into ruin, one after the other. So you can’t imagine how wonderful they were. When Madame Marguerite offered us the job of guarding the estate for her, I knew I was going to be in paradise. A paved road, two or three miles long, lined with palm trees and giant ferns, led up to the house, itself somewhat rustic. To the left was a vast, tiled terrace which was once used for drying coffee. A hedge of white roses separated the garden from the roasting pans, once piled high with sacks of coffee, and from the plantations terraced in four tiers up the sides of the mountain. When we arrived in Papaye the tightly knit rows of coffee trees were covered in a veil of star-like flowers, and their perfume mingled with the hedge of roses.
In the surrounding park grew the most beautiful trees I had ever seen, not the common trees around here such as candlewood, mapoo or guinep, but trees from French France such as pines, thujas, oaks and especially a peach tree that Alphonse de Linsseuil, Madame Marguerite’s late husband, had taken pleasure in planting. He was fond of saying: “This is my orchard, my little corner of France,” and when he died, that’s where they buried him.
We settled into the quarters built to accommodate the twenty or so servants in the old days; used to our cabin, we would get lost. Everywhere you looked you could see the volcano that never slept, day in day out, and quietly rumbled. Occasionally, it would puff out rings of smoke like an old person puffing on his pipe. In Papaye the soil is blessed. It gives everything man’s heart desires to feed his stomach. With Madame Marguerite’s permission we staked out a part of the coffee plantations that were no longer any use to anyone and dug four trenches thirty feet by three where we planted vegetables: cabbages, carrots, turnips and runner beans.
