Windward Heights

by Maryse Conde

  I arrived in La Pointe one New Year’s Day, late in the afternoon, after taking a whole day for the crossing. I wasn’t tired, though. I looked around at all the lights glowing like suns in every house. Except that people had not told me in their descriptions that there were two La Pointes, one for the rich and one for the penniless. Penniless like myself. Although I easily found a job at a bar, Au Soleil Levant, all I could get with my pay for a roof over my head was one room in the Carenage, in a tenants’ yard flanked by a lean-to that housed an earthenware pot, a basin and a pitcher for nature’s needs and washing. Behind a sheet of cretonne sat the imposing, earthenware toma, the thunderbox, in all its majesty. The Dargent factory ruled the neighborhood. Well before the sun half opened an eye, ox carts loaded with cane lined up in front of its gates. Day and night, a thick smoke belched out from its chimneys, and you could hear its machines throbbing and throbbing like a heart that never tires. What revolted me was the sight of the workers. For me they were little better than the slaves of long ago, responding to the strident call of a siren, with no time to catch their breath, their bodies scarcely covered in rags. The oldest had their arms and legs scarred with festering ulcers under their plaster of leaves.

  It wasn’t long before I struck up a love relationship with one of them, a certain Déodat Déodatus, who, every evening, once the factory had closed its gates, came and wet his whistle at the Soleil Levant, but never ever lost his dignity in rum. He wasn’t any old sort of man. I might say he had class. But he weighed no heavier than a cane peel. He wasn’t taller than a tuft of Guinea grass. When he lay on top of me, I didn’t feel his weight and it was like clutching a tiny child, my child. Only his voice sounded raspy and low like a conch shell when he spoke.

  The first time he came over to whisper in my ear, I almost laughed, because I couldn’t understand what was going on. Since when did a brat dare look a grown-up in the eye? But he persevered. He was born on a plantation at Grands-Fonds-du-Moule, but even as a youngster he refused to live like an animal. He would go into the cabins and say to the astonished inhabitants: “Get up, get up! I have a dream,” and people didn’t know whether to laugh or shove him out like a madman. One day when Jean-Hilaire Endomius came to Le Moule campaigning, he started to walk behind him just like that and Jean-Hilaire fell under the spell of his amazing voice. As the years went by, he became one of his most loyal henchmen, like other men, like Razyé for instance. They say that when he spoke, everyone went silent. When he finished, even the most docile of men brandished their cutlasses and were prepared to ransack everything.

  And that’s why they took his life from me.

  One day they found his body lying in a cane path, navigating the red sea of his blood. The gendarmes didn’t even pretend to find the person who had beaten him to death.

  But I don’t want to relive that agony. For weeks, I wanted to die, but I couldn’t. Sad, tender-faced women behind their handkerchiefs leaned over my bed and murmured: “Be brave! You’ve got your child, your son, to keep you anchored to life. What can you expect! There’s no happiness on this earth. Not for us negroes, there isn’t.”

  At Déodat’s wake, Razyé brought me a purse full of money on behalf of the Socialists. That man, whom everyone says is so wicked, wickeder than a rabid dog, had his eyes filled with tears. He clutched my hands.

  “I too have gone through what you’re going through today, and every time I see a corpse or attend a wake, my grief returns and comes galloping back. They say that sorrow heals with time. It’s not true. The more the years go by, the sharper it gets, and it leaves no room for any other feeling. Years ago, you see, it left me free to prepare my revenge. Day after day I sharpened it like a blade, like a double-sided knife. I told myself: ‘Not only will I lay in the dust the man who has wronged me, but I’ll destroy everyone like him, all those of his color, all those of his class.’ Now, I don’t even feel like doing that. I’m tired of dragging myself around. All I want is to lie down and die so that at last I can find her. But I’m not even sure about that. All the kimbwazé and gadédzaft from here and elsewhere have pocketed my money with a bunch of promises that have brought me nothing. I only saw her once, shortly after she died. And perhaps that was just a figment of my imagination. One afternoon, lacking the strength to live, I was lying flat on my back in a field with the sun in my eyes. An arabesque unfurled a little way off and she emerged, as resolute and bossy as she always was, her black braid bouncing behind her back. ‘Come on! Catch me if you can!’ she shouted at me. And I began to run after her as fast as I could, without ever catching her, of course. Ever since that day, however hard I cry or pray even she has never come back. Sometimes I stay all night long in front of my wide open window watching for her. I breathe in the wind and the salt of the harbor. Exhausted, my eyes blur over. I see nothing but the bats that flit from sandbox tree to sandbox tree.”

  That man’s grief only plunged me even further into despair.

  Once my Déodat was gone, I could no longer bear La Pointe or the Carénage district that I had loved so much, or the Dargent factory. Besides, the Dargent factory was no longer the Dargent factory. Before he died, Aymeric de Linsseuil had sold it to the Crédit Foncier to pay his debts, and you could sense the end was near, even though there were still lines of ox carts clanging their wheels in front of the gates and yells from cane-cutters sitting on piles of sugarcane. So with my child, my little Déodat clutching my headtie, I sailed back on the Notre-Dame-des-Victoires to Marie-Galante.

  We were in the month of November. What a rainy season it was! The sky was drilled with holes that water poured through like a sieve. There was no telling the sky from the sea. When we got close to land it loomed up like a darker line against the surrounding grey. My family wanted nothing to do with me, because of the shame I had brought on them. So I looked for a room in the town of Saint-Louis and I tried to hire my services for housework. But jobs were hard to come by and, more often than not, me and my child we stopped up our bellies with cassava flour and sugared milk. Men would come up to me, sniff me over, drag their boots over my floor, but had nothing good to offer me and I sent them packing. In a word, my life was nothing but solitude and boredom. Until the day Cathy de Linsseuil comes knocking on my door.

  I didn’t know her, but I knew what family she came from.

  For the people of Grande-Terre and Basse-Terre, except for the Socialists, Aymeric de Linsseuil was the model of the good white man and good plantation owner. When he passed on, the whole island went into mourning. As I stood in front of the cathedral of St-Pierre-et-St-Paul among the crowd of other people who had never seen him with their own two eyes, who didn’t know him from Adam, but had heard of him as the Good Lord Himself, I watched the funeral as it filed past. The procession stretched out like ants dressed in deep mourning from the far end of the rue du Pere Labat, almost as far as the Hill of Massabielle. The music marched up front: Monsieur Demonin with his entire band was playing dirges that made you want to lie down and die, if you hadn’t done so already. Behind him came dozens of little boys and girls carrying wreaths of white flowers, little white Creoles, children of his friends and relatives. But there were also little black children, children of his workers or from the plantation school as well as little mulattos. So there was no distinction of color. The bier was pulled along by four horses dressed in black hoods embroidered in silver. You couldn’t even see the coffin under the roses, the lilies and arums that gave off such a scent. In the same way you couldn’t see his wife, wrapped under the miles and miles of black veil, or his daughters and sisters bundled up the same way, and all that grief gripped you and made your heart grieve. Standing on the pavement people started to cry hot tears as if it was their father, a brother or a cousin that was being carried along to his last resting place.

  When I found myself face to face with her I was all sur­prised, quite astonished, at the color of Cathy, and the more I looked at her the more something in her
bright, staring eyes, the curve of her eyebrows and the bulge of her mouth made me think of someone I’d already met. But who? I couldn’t quite place it.

  She hired me straightaway and we became friends.

  How happy women would be if, at some time in their life, they didn’t have to give in to the whims of their heart!

  From one day to the next, I saw Cathy change. When I started working for her, she had few things on her mind. Always the same. The memory of her beloved papa; Razyé whom she claimed was the cause of her papa’s death and whom she hated like poison; her forty pupils, their education and amusement. When she talked about her papa, she never stopped. A real carnival rattle. How her papa loved Guadeloupe, how he loved the negroes, though he was white, how he loved the poor, though he was rich, and so on and so forth. Sometimes I was tired of hearing her ramble on, but I had to put up with it for a long, long time. Talking about her papa would get her on the subject of Razyé.

  “Oh, if I were a man, I’d take my revenge on him!” she moaned.

  “But how would you do that?” I said, poking fun at her, all casual like.

  That shut her up because she’d never thought how to go about it. Then she said: “I’d go and see his wife and children and set them against him. I’d get them to hate him as much as I do.”

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “His own family? That would be the first time! Even the devil in hell has people who love him. The bonds of blood and heart know no reason.”

  She began to cry and I tried to comfort her.

  “A Christian like yourself must learn to forgive. Didn’t they teach you that in catechism?”

  On hearing me she flew into one of her tempers.

  “Forgive? Never! Never!”

  When she wasn’t talking of her papa or Razyé, she kept herself busy with the school. For hours on end, with tongue between her teeth, she would bury her head, correcting the pupils’ homework and preparing for classes, and sometimes it was past midnight and I could still hear her Sergeant-Major pen scratching away in red ink. On Saturday afternoons she put on a battered wide-brimmed hat that she tied around her neck with two velvet ribbons, and took the pupils under the blazing sun for their walk outdoors. Sometimes she took them on visits to the distilleries, the factories and the windmills, her favorite she told them, and showed them the cartouches, the rubble of limestone masonry, and the remains of the old grinding stones. Other times, marching her litter of children like rows of soldiers, singing at the top of their voices “J’aime la France, c’est mon pays,” she went down to the mudflats and mangrove swamps. There she explained to them the different types of mangrove—red, black, white and grey, and what’s more, their names in Latin: Avicennia germinans, Conocarpus erectus. When the pupils in their amazement plucked up courage to ask her how she knew all these things, she sighed: “My papa taught me.” She began to cry in front of the children, who took no notice since they had seen her cry a hundred times before for the same reason.

  From the moment she met First-Born, as he wants to be called, things were very different. At the beginning, it was all moans and groans.

  “He smokes like a sugarcane train. His breath smells.”

  “He’ll never pass his exams. Every time I give him an exercise in French he has to look up every word in the dictionary.”

  “Romaine, I don’t think he’s very intelligent. He never says anything of interest.”

  “I wonder if he dreams at night, if he travels in his imagination.”

  And then suddenly she sang another song.

  “He’s a good fellow, you know.”

  “People say—and you do too—that he’s the one who gave Asturias a belly. He would never do a thing like that, never, do you hear?”

  Good fellow or not, First-Born arrived every afternoon, once classes were over, on the stroke of four thirty, his face hidden in a cloud of smoke. It’s true he did smoke a lot. He helped Cathy in her garden, watering, weeding and pretending to like flowers, sometimes bringing her cuttings of red ginger, torch ginger or blue allamanda wrapped in newspaper he’d found somewhere or other. They worked in silence as dusk fell. Then they entered the house for his lesson, still without saying a word.

  I was waiting for fate to make her move.

  4

  Political Meeting at Grand-Anse

  Seated on the upper deck, Razyé was watching the line of waves and thinking what a wonderful shroud these flecks of mourning would make as they rolled as far as the eye could see. The rain was soaking his black wide­ brimmed, felt hat, his black cloth riding habit and black hand-made cowhide boots. He himself did not feel a thing.

  The Josephine, which had replaced the Notre-Dame-des­ Victoires after it almost sank with all on board in the very middle of the channel, was bravely ploughing through the bad weather that had blown over from Dominica these last two days and would soon change into a hurricane, according to the doomsayers. The boat groaned, wheezed and seemed about to break in two at every new wave. Passengers were vomiting left and right. Those who had the presence of mind to bring lemons pressed the pulp to their colorless lips, but this did not prevent them from joining the numbers of the sick. Even the infants and babies, usually unaffected by seasickness, were not spared.

  This political meeting had been decided at the last minute, since a violent quarrel had broken out between the partisans of Jean-Hilaire Endomius, defenders of the capital-labor agreement, and those of Boisneuf, who rejected it. At that time tempers flared easily on Marie-Galante (they still do). There had been bloodshed and one of Boisneuf’s followers had been laid in a coffin, his body shredded by a cutlass.

  Razyé had been sent to restore unity in the Socialist camp, a job he had accomplished very well at the trouble spots of Marquisat, Sainte-Amélie and Pointe d’Or, but this time he was none too pleased. Moreover, nothing pleased him very much nowadays. Walking. Dressing. Drinking rum. Making love. He had lost his taste for everything. He had trouble remembering he had to drink a cup of coffee when he woke up, that he had to sit down for lunch or quite simply drink goblets of water when he was hot. Never very talkative, he could spend a whole week without voicing a word or even communicating in gestures, like he used to do. Since Aymeric had passed on, the revenge he had hankered after was meaningless and he no longer saw a reason for living.

  In fact Razyé had agreed to travel to Marie-Galante for quite another reason, a very personal reason. He had learned through his spies that Razyé II was hiding in the vicinity of Saint-Louis, under some ridiculous name. What would he do to him once he laid hands on him? He did not know and in actual fact had not given it a thought. It was as if a part of him was so used to savagery it continued to act behind his back.

  The curtain of rain frayed at the edges and the corrugated iron fronts of the hovels in Grand-Anse and the egg-yellow dome of its church appeared. Standing in the puddles, five or six men were waiting for Razyé on the wharf. People made way for them, for they were notorious, ferocious­ looking, club-wielding thugs. The group set off for the Inn of the Forbidden Fruit, a grand-sounding name for a building that wasn’t much to look at and could only accommodate a few travellers at a time. Before showing Razyé to his room, a dank, stifling rat-hole, Padéole, the innkeeper, thought it best to offer a round of drinks. Razyé was about to refuse, now that alcohol merely burned his throat and provided no pleasure whatsoever, when he thought of the effect this might have. Who would ever be mad enough to refuse a neat rum? So he let his glass be filled with Paul Rameau 90% proof rum. Then he coughed, which surprised nobody given the weather, and declared:

  “Politics will have to wait until tomorrow. This afternoon I have a personal matter to settle. I’m after my son. Has anyone seen him?”

  The thugs looked at each other cautiously. Finally, one of them made up his mind to speak.

  “He works for Tonin. But if you want to find him, you’ll
have to look elsewhere, if you want my opinion.”

  “At the schoolteacher’s, I bet,” added another.

  Laughter broke out.

  “What schoolteacher?” Razyé asked drily. “What are you talking about?”

  There was a silence. Then speaking all at once, the men told the story, one of them summing it up with the words:

  “It seems he wants to put a bun in her oven as well. He’s some fellow, your son!”

  Amid the chuckling, Razyé remained speechless. He had a poor opinion of his son and wondered what any woman could see in him. Had he been mistaken? So he had taken up with Aymeric de Linsseuil’s daughter? Well! Well! Here was the revenge he had virtually given up on. What the sick or weak-natured Justin-Marie had been incapable of doing was now within arm’s reach. He was now in a position to graft his own rotten, wretched offspring onto this respected family tree.

  He stood up and yelled.

  “Padéole, a horse!”

  A voice tried to stop him.

  “Where are you thinking of going in this weather? Outside the lightning’s as bright as daylight!”

  Razyé didn’t hear. He was already leaping onto a stallion in the yard.

  Those who saw Razyé that day as he galloped through the rain, the lightning and the thunder were of the firm opinion that the occupant of the Devil’s Hole had emerged from his lair, a few yards from the mome de la Treille. In order to ride faster than the wind, Razyé lay flat along his mount. He clung to the long hair of its mane, digging his heels into its sides. The road from Grand-Anse to Saint-Louis at that time was pitted with potholes and water spurted up in a muddy spray under the horse’s hoofs. Those made homeless by the previous hurricane, who had taken refuge in the old Roussel-Trianon plantation house, came out in the pouring rain to try and understand what manner of creature was this. Too late! They were unable to identify the meteor that shot past toward the mangrove. All they could do was cross themselves and haphazardly recite two or three Hail Marys.