But she smiled kindly at Minette and gently adjusted a lock of hair on her shoulders.
“She’s beautiful, your little find, Mme Acquaire,” she said gaily. “Between Gertrude and Isabelle, they’ll have quite an embarrassment of riches.”
She had made this last comment with an ironic air that made everyone burst out laughing.
As Saint-Martin was just passing by with great strides, seemingly absorbed in thought, the company began cheering him, and someone cried out: “Long live our director!”
Magdeleine threw him a kiss. Without stopping, he made a gesture with his hand and said: “Come on, come on – onstage!”
An actor Minette had only caught a glimpse of immediately stepped onstage. A chorus of applause welcomed him.
“Who’s that?” Minette asked Mme Acquaire.
“The comedian Macarty. The audience loves him.”
Minette barely heard what the actor was saying to the crowd. Her heart was beating wildly and she felt as if she would suffocate.
“You’re pale,” said Magdeleine Brousse, sympathetically. “It’s always like that the first time – you always get stage fright and then you get used to it. Let me put a little blush on your cheeks and don’t get upset if I’m a little familiar with you – that’s how it is among actors. My God, you’re tanned! You must spend a lot of time in the sun!”
She had hardly finished making up Minette before Mme Acquaire took the girl’s hand and pushed her forward, telling her to take deep breaths so as to make her voice clearer.
“I’m afraid,” murmured Minette.
“Don’t say that,” responded the actress. “It’s bad luck.”
The curtains had remained open after Macarty’s exit. The three warning claps resounded like three strikes of a hammer in Minette’s head. Saint-Martin passed through like a tornado shouting: “Isabelle – Isabelle and Gertrude! We’re ready to introduce the opera. Strike up the orchestra.”
Macarty had reappeared onstage to begin the play. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” he announced with his singular accent. “Tonight, as you’ve all seen on our posters, a fifteen-year-old girl will make her debut on this stage, in the role of Isabelle. All preparations were made under the greatest secrecy by this evening’s organizers, Monsieur and Madame Acquaire, who, in presenting their student to you, ask your indulgence, given her youth and inexperience.”
The audience applauded.
“I’m told her voice is a revelation, and we are as impatient as all of you to hear her sing, as her rehearsals took place privately and in absolute secrecy.”
Someone shouted: “How unconventional!”
He waved and then exited to thunderous applause. Minette was instantly unnerved, completely shaken. A voice murmured: “Onstage, onstage – get her onstage!”
Someone took her hand, the curtains parted, she was pushed forward, and then she was onstage. She looked out into the theater and was almost immediately dazzled. It was as if thousands of shooting stars were traversing the room – multicolored stars that twinkled with the clamorous sound of bells. Then they started to take on human form and Minette, half dead from fear, noticed one of the stars smiling at her – another was tilting its head, adorned with jewels, and still another, wearing officer’s stripes, was pointing at her. Her legs were too limp to carry her any further forward, so she closed her eyes and stayed in place, arms rigid, hands clutching her skirt. When she opened her eyes, the stars had disappeared, and hundreds of men and women had taken their place – Whites, nothing but Whites, dressed in their most splendid attire.
The orchestra launched into the first few measures. She heard Mme Acquaire whisper from the wings: “Move around, walk, raise your hands to the sky.”
Obeying mechanically, she heard the first note of the violin to which she was meant to respond. She opened her mouth to sing, but no sound came out. From the rustling of the curtain, the sound of hurried steps, and the whispering voices, Minette was all too aware of the anxiety of all the actors in the wings. As if hypnotized, she kept staring straight ahead, arms still raised above her head and mouth slightly opened. The violin went silent. The orchestra hit that first note with renewed vigor, as if trying to jog her memory. At that very moment, her eyes stopped seeing the extravagant, too-bright theater and focused further into the distance, higher up, toward the twenty-one boxes of the second tier where the people of color were seated. Jammed together and piled on top of one another, they seemed attached to each other in an immense solidarity that suddenly revealed itself to her. They were waiting, too. There was something so distressing in their eyes it made her want to scream. Immediately a series of images unfurled in her memory at a dizzying pace: images of backs riddled with lashes of the whip – one scarred over, the other still bleeding from fresh wounds. A long shudder traversed her body. She heard those lashes of the whip in that very moment, striking thousands of bloody backs with a loud, dull sound. Joseph’s voice whispered in her ear: You’ve got to tell yourself you’re playing for high stakes now. Your voice is your weapon and you’re going to use it.
The violin went quiet for the second time. Then it hit the note a third time as the orchestra waited, craning its neck toward the stage like everyone else in the theater.
Minette opened her mouth, and this time her voice rang out, crystal clear, warm, and so full that a long murmur of admiration ran through the audience.
Now that she was singing, she did not see anything else; she did not hear anything else; she was entirely possessed by the incredible sounds pouring out of her. Everything else had disappeared: the theater, the orchestra, and even the twenty-one boxes where her friends were watching her. Something in her that came from far, far away was directing her gestures, her poses. When Goulard joined her onstage to sing with her, she saw the admiration and surprise in his eyes. He was young and handsome, and together they made such a perfect couple that the audience couldn’t help but interrupt with its applause. Saint-Martin, in the wings with the rest of the actors, looked on astounded. Minette’s voice came to him in sparkling bursts, intensified, then faded away with such sensuality and depth that he cried out:
“That child sings like a thirty-year-old woman. Where in France is she from?”
This was the moment the Acquaires chose to reveal their secret. Mme Acquaire, overjoyed, smiled and responded simply:
“She’s a colored girl, François, a colored girl from my neighborhood.”
“A colored girl!”
The declaration created such an uproar that the young director had to order the actors to quiet down.
“She has an extraordinary voice,” said Macarty. “And what grace, what bearing!…”
Still overcome, Saint-Martin suddenly burst into laughter. “Ah! That’s a good one – really, a good one. What a brilliant idea to play such a trick on all this high society with its ridiculous prejudices!…”
The Acquaires had counted on such a reaction and as M Acquaire’s tic twitched with satisfaction, his wife started telling Saint-Martin about Minette. She recounted how she had met her, told him about their first lessons and about her decision to launch her stage career.
Saint-Martin became serious again. “That girl,” he said, “has an exceptional talent that radiates not only in her voice but in every aspect of her bearing: she was born for the theater.”
He parted the curtains again.
Minette was gliding across the stage without the slightest reserve – graceful, lithe, and supple. Goulard, as his role demanded, took her in his arms and together their voices sang words of love throughout the first part of the opera. Magdeleine Brousse entered the scene and then it was Macarty and the other actors’ turn to play the comic roles.
“That’s the very first time I’ve been fooled at first sight by a ‘mixed-race’ person,” confided François Saint-Martin, dismayed, to M Acquaire.
“If it makes you feel any better,” responded the latter, “you only saw her in the shadows, hidden by the curtains.”
“Nothing about her is misleading, my friend, aside from that distinctive and distant air, slightly unusual for a colored girl,” concluded M Acquaire.
“Shhhh!” said someone impatiently.
They were going to part the curtains once more. Impressed by the beauty and talent of the novice, the audience had become somewhat agitated. People were whispering, pointing at Minette. The Governor himself, after speaking in low tones with the King’s Bursar, peeked his head out of his box and distinctly asked an officer seated in one of the first rows: “Just who is that ‘young person’?”
As the question was repeated, without yielding any further information, it only heightened the audience’s curiosity.
When, at the end of the opera, the actors waved before leaving the stage, the enthralled public gave them such an ovation that M Acquaire, beside himself, grabbed the young director by the shoulders and began shaking him, his eye twitching like a madman. So as to make their preference clear, a few spectators cried “Isabelle” as they clapped furiously. A young officer rose from his seat and cried: “Bravo, ‘young person’!”
Minette was obliged to come back onstage. When she appeared, the delirious crowd stood and cheered.
Keeping her calm, she waved modestly and smiled, her eyes fixed on the seats in the back of the theater. There were the seats of those she loved: her mother, Lise, Joseph, Nicolette, and the others.
She was very emotional, however, and once she had made her way back to the wings she threw herself, sobbing, into the arms of Mme Acquaire. Even the young director, who was not easily moved, found himself touched by the sight.
An eight-year-old girl in a dancer’s costume ran to bury herself in Goulard’s open arms. “Why is the new actress crying?” the little girl asked him. “I heard Macarty say she has the most beautiful voice in the world.”
Mme Acquaire, doing her best to calm Minette, introduced her to a few actors she had not yet met. After she had shaken hands with Mme Tesseyre and her young daughter, Rose – both of them dancers – to Favart and Depoix, to the set designer and painter Jean Peyret, and to the stagehand Julian, M Acquaire asked for five minutes of everyone’s time so that the director might say a few words to them.
“My dear friends,” began Saint-Martin, “today nearly all of us are here, aside from Nelanger, who’s ailing, and Durand, who has gone to Saint-Marc for a few days. Tonight, I’m not addressing the men and women who make up this company, but only the artists you all are, with everything that word stands for – the self-sacrifice, free-spiritedness, love, and enthusiasm for true talent in whatever form. Tonight we have among us, for the first time in the history of theater in Saint Domingue, a young colored girl gifted with an extraordinary voice and an extraordinary talent. Although the law forbids her from coming into the theater, Monsieur and Madame Acquaire decided to roll the dice – and you’ve seen the incredible results. Before I meet with the theater’s shareholders on Minette’s behalf, can I count on you to welcome her and to treat her the way a true artist should be treated by other artists?”
Everyone applauded and Magdeleine Brousse came up to Minette and kissed her on behalf of the entire company. Saint-Martin then went up to her and said: “From this day on, you are part of our company, my dear.”
“Thank you, Monsieur,” Minette responded, her voice so overcome with emotion that he couldn’t help but laugh, and added:
“Thank your talent. It alone is responsible for this miracle.”
The Acquaires embraced her, laughing. It was indeed some miracle. That night, Minette had conquered both an audience and a man. That man was Goulard. He was young, unprejudiced, and honest, but poor. A close friend of François Saint-Martin, whom he admired for his passionate, bohemian, and liberal attitude, Goulard had made his stage debut in Saint Domingue as an adolescent. He had taken a small studio, for which he often was unable to pay the rent, near the young director. As faithful in friendship as in love, his head filled with the verses of Racine and Corneille, he yearned for a true passion that would hold him captive for the rest of his life. The passing flings he had enjoyed with various women had been nothing more than a way to prove himself as a man, as Saint-Martin would say. In Minette, he had found his ideal, and this revelation was a wonderful shock for him. He had long dreamt of falling in love with an artist, and she truly was one. She was young, beautiful, modest, and as poor as he. He was overjoyed.
That night, just like after every performance at the theater, there was an “evening ball” organized by the Acquaires. It would take place in an adjacent room, where several buffet tables had been set up. As soon as the votive candles had been lit, the orchestra launched into a country dance that brought merry groups of audience members to their feet. While Saint-Martin discussed the next night’s performance with the actors, Minette, huddled in a corner of the curtains, watched the theater empty out. A few couples had begun to move about, and the dancers’ wide silk skirts reflected flickerings of light here and there. A few people of color lingered in the upper boxes. They were not allowed to attend the after-party, so they contented themselves with admiring the finery and listening to the music from afar. Arms wrapped around one another, they danced in place, moving their upper bodies to the beat. Beautiful coiffed heads in madras scarves peeked out of the boxes, smiling and laughing.
When Minette joined her mother on the street, she was greeted with cheers. Goulard and Mme Acquaire accompanied her. The latter kissed her as she handed her over to her mother, saying: “I would give anything to bring you to the party, you understand that don’t you, Minette?”
“I understand, Madame Acquaire.”
Claude Goulard looked at her so lovingly that Joseph took note. Lise was holding Jasmine’s hand. Wearing a flowered skirt and a calico bodice adorned with a little scarf, delicately held together with a pin, she was playing with her fan and acting the part of an elegant young lady. The little crowd of laughing, shouting colored folks went along arm in arm, singing rhyming couplets in Creole and sharing the latest gossip.
A few white women walked along amorously entwined in the arms of the officers, the bodices of their transparent gaules as plunging as those of the colored women. “Kiss-Me-Lips,” devastatingly beautiful in a wide, bright-colored skirt, her breasts exposed underneath a transparent batiste bodice and her hair pinned up under her jewel-studded madras scarf, was accompanied by the King’s Bursar. She wore a triumphant smile on her lips. Minette, watching amusedly as the crowd dissipated, noticed Nicolette get into a carriage driven by a black coachman in white livery with gold buttons. A heady, intoxicating scent permeated the air, tickling the nostrils and clouding the brain. The men shamelessly caressed the women’s arms and kissed their seductively painted lips. Heavy six-horse carriages, decorated with velvet, tassels, and braiding, ran alongside more modest two-seater cabriolets and covered carriages, equipped with peek-through blinds and little taffeta cushions. Bejeweled masculine hands emerged through the curtains to help that night’s conquest step up into the carriage. Gorgeous Negresses, mulatto girls, and white women fought over the most beautiful coaches and several altercations broke out among them. The horses’ hooves raised the dust along the road in front of the inns, cabarets, clubs, and boutiques.
Minette raised her eyes to the sky. It was so beautiful, with its many stars and the immense suspended lantern of the moon. Gentle warmth suffused her heart. “Ah! To live happily under this very sky, to live like the others, to climb into a carriage and take the arm of a handsome white man, why not?”
Joseph, Jasmine, and Lise embraced Minette and then proceeded to let her know what the audience had been saying.
“A white man said you had the most beautiful voice he’d ever heard,” said Lise.
“I’d say your risk paid off,” said Joseph. “But they don’t know your social class yet. Let’s wait and see what tomorrow’s paper says and then w
e’ll know for certain.”
Jasmine knew at last what happiness felt like. One of her daughters had just taken such an enormous step forward in life that she was overwhelmed just thinking about it. She had seen Minette onstage, singing alongside white folks. She had seen a crowd of white hands clapping for her. She had heard people call out her name, praise her beauty, talent, and grace. Her dream had become a reality. The Good Lord had performed this miracle. Did she dare rejoice already, or should she wait for tomorrow’s paper, as Joseph had cautioned? Something told her that her little girl was not going to be stopped any time soon – that she would continue to rise very high. The emotions generated among the spectators from Minette’s first notes could not possibly be diminished over a simple question of caste – it simply was not imaginable and she did not even want to consider it. For once in her life she would allow herself to be happy. She, who for so long had dragged behind her the weighty and tiresome burden of the past and who at the age of thirty-five already felt like an old woman, found herself suddenly rejuvenated – as if the justice that her child had just been granted washed away all of her old wounds and restored her entirely.
It was with these thoughts in her head that Jasmine arrived that Christmas night at Vallières Square, cluttered with dozens of tents in front of which gesticulating street entertainers shouted out the price of admission and invited passersby to come see the acrobats and trained animals. A few young women ran over, followed by men offering to pay for their tickets. Two young Negresses stopped, out of breath, and lifted their skirts to wipe the sweat from their faces.
A delirious crowd hurried into the street. The coachmen snapped their whips to get their horses moving. Everything was lit up: the Governor and the Bursar’s palaces, the barracks, the dance hall next to the Comédie, the Vaux-Halls, the cabarets, and the inns. Further ahead, the opulent residences of Bel-Air sparkled with an excess of light that made them look as if they were aflame. That evening, eighty torch lights illuminated the long path leading to the Marquis de Caradeux’s mansion.
Dance on the Volcano Page 6
