I excused myself early from the company, leaving Albane and Esteban singing a duet at the piano, and retired to my room. There I studied the vague letter written on Esteban’s behalf by my husband.
“This is to introduce Don Esteban Ramón de Vasconcellos,” he wrote, “the son of a friend of my youth from St.-Domingue. Señor de Vasconcellos has great education and is related to one of the oldest families in Spain, but alas, his is only a modest fortune. I commend him to you as a suitable match for your ward, Albane, and ask you to see that they are often together.—Don André de la Roca.”
Without my knowing why, the idea of marriage between the pair revolted me. This beautiful and courtly young man wasted on Albane, who was such a wan and nauseating creature! I threw myself down upon my bed and wept bitterly. Then, in the morning, I awoke to the sound of laughter from the gallery, and when I looked at my face in the mirror, I knew that I was in love with Esteban. It was like falling prey to a terrible disease. At first I could hardly breathe. Then I unloosed my corset and was sick in my water basin. My heart—untouched since the death of my mother, a woman whom I did not even remember—now filled itself with fury and fire.
Still, my sense of honor and family pride made me determined to resist these new, painful emotions. Over the following days I complied with my husband’s wishes and saw that Esteban and Albane were constantly together. I suffered. My suffering was sublime, the only thing that made my empty life bearable. Then, by the end of the third week of his stay with us, Albane sought me out to acquaint me of the obvious. She was deeply in love with Esteban, and she put it rather blasphemously.
“I love the man more than I love God or my own salvation,” she said. “He has returned my affection eagerly, if not yet with the matching enthusiasm that will come as we are more and more together. And lacking only your permission, dear cousin, we hope to marry in the spring.”
I paused at this revelation as if considering it carefully. The girl positively quivered in terror at the thought of a rejection. When I gave my consent, she threw her arms around my neck and embraced me with great feeling.
“You have been so kind to me,” she said. “You have at last become the sister I never had,” and she covered my cheeks and my hands with kisses and both laughed and wept from joy. But each kiss, each tear hardened my heart against her. Why should this miserable orphaned girl, who had already stolen my father from me, now steal the only man I would ever love!
The prospect of her happiness, unearned as it was, seemed more terrible than death itself. I confess to this cruelty and this selfishness and can only excuse myself by saying that love had been too long denied my heart, which now fell prey to a passionate and sinful jealousy.
Later that same night I donned my most revealing dress, touched a little scent of verbena behind my ears and between my breasts, and went to Esteban.
I did not know what I would do until I saw him there smoking a last cigar on the gallery before the door to his new room on the second floor. Most of the other guests had departed just after Christmas. Only Esteban and a few others had consented to stay on for the New Year. He was a little shocked to see me there at such an hour and, as he was attired in his dressing gown and ready for bed, sought to excuse himself. But I put my hand on his arm and would not let him go. I asked him if he loved my ward, Albane. He smiled and shrugged, as if to say—She will do.
“An offer of marriage has been related to me through my ward,” I continued. “It is considered good form in these matters that such an offer be addressed to the guardian first. I am Albane’s guardian, and I have heard nothing from you concerning your intentions.”
Esteban apologized; the whole thing was somewhat hastily done, he said. And he expressed his intentions to approach me with a proper proposal in the morning.
“Nevertheless, I am prepared to accept the offer now,” I said. “And if it is made, I will increase my ward’s dowry with an additional contribution of ten thousand Yankee gold dollars.” Then I stepped back to see the expression on his handsome face in the dim moonlight.
If he was surprised, he did not show it. He nodded his thanks complacently, as though prepared for such an act of generosity. I waited a full minute without saying anything else. I heard the mournful splash of a side-wheeler down on the river, and the cry of loons from the bayou, and the quick sound of my own breath. Then I took him by the arm again, and this time my hand was a claw.
“I had thought you a gentleman,” I hissed, “and supposed your affections too precious to be sold for so mean a sum as ten thousand dollars. In this matter you have shown yourself the lowest sort of opportunist, trading for gold on a poor girl’s affections. But if you dare go through with the cheap transaction, monsieur, I shall with my own hands slit your throat on your wedding night.”
I did not give him time to react to my violent statement. I leaned up and pressed into him with my body and kissed him on the mouth with such longing and such passion that we went immediately into the bedroom and lay together on the bed. After we had committed ourselves once to each other, we closed the shutters against the night and stayed in the bed together as man and wife. During those dark hours Esteban repeated many times that act which until then beneath my husband’s bulk had been without meaning or pleasure. Let it suffice to say that I loved Esteban with my heart and my body, and my love was returned.
At dawn, after again experiencing his love, I put Esteban’s dressing gown over my nakedness and went down to Albane’s room. She lay asleep, dreaming perhaps of the bliss of married life, a look of peace and contentment on her face such as I had not seen there before. I waited quietly by the side of her bed until she awoke with a start to my presence. When she was lucid, I told her that I had reconsidered my consent of the night before.
“As your guardian,” I said, “I must forbid a marriage with a man as penniless as Esteban de Vasconcellos. You had better accept one of the other willing, richer bachelors in this one’s place.”
Poor Albane went very white at my words. She did not weep or make a sound. Then her eyes took in the disheveled state of my appearance, the man’s dressing gown I wore. And she said in a small voice, “I know what you have done. You do this to me because I came to your house once as an orphan, alone in the world, and asked for love and your father gave it to me. You have never forgiven me for my need. Your soul is black. You will pay for your sins in the darkness of eternal night.” Then she turned away from me and pressed her face into the pillow.
I felt a momentary chill and thought of the gris-gris, but I left the room and made immediate arrangements to get away from Belle Azure with Esteban. I dismissed the remaining guests, with the excuse that I was going on a journey to look over some family property at St. Francisville. Esteban bade me good-bye in front of the house slaves, boarded the packet to New Orleans, but had himself put ashore just a few miles upriver. And that evening, at dusk, we met at Papa’s old hunting lodge in the bayou, a crude rambling structure of cypress logs that overlooks the Prasères lagoon.
Secreted away from the outside world in the heart of the jungle with only the wild birds for company, we lived as man and wife for two months, engaging in conjugal union as many as six or seven times a day. He hunted and fished. I traded small bits of my jewelry with the Acadians at Coeur de France for cornmeal and molasses and eggs. We were like Adam and Eve before the fall, surrounded by the bounties of the garden and wed in the eyes of God—an idyll that would last until M. Levallier could dispose of a significant portion of my property, enough to allow us to take ship for Brazil and live comfortably there. But our arrangement was blind, clumsy. We should have fled immediately to some other country, money be damned. We knew in our hearts that disaster could strike at any time and were too enraptured with each other to care. Pride, conscience, caution—all of these were thrown aside for the sake of our primeval love.
The sky burned a clear blue the afternoon they came for us. I stood waist-deep in the lagoon, washing our clothes with a bri
ck of lye soap like a good Acadian housewife. Esteban lay asleep in the hammock strung between two of the beams of the porch, one of Papa’s books open over his stomach—Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois. I had kept my sweet lover awake half the night with my desires, as indeed I did every night, and he was indulging in a well-earned siesta.
Then I heard a crashing through the bayou and the barking of dogs and the shouts of men. I left the clothes floating in the water and ran up the slope through the underbrush to the lodge, a thick humming that was the sound of my own blood in my ears.
There were seven men in the hunting party—my husband, four huge Negroes from the fields, and two white men I did not know. A dozen bloodhounds growled and frisked nervously about the yard, tails down, as dogs will do when they know something is up. Esteban knelt trembling before Don André. I was too far away to hear their words. My husband made an impatient sign, and I watched in horror as one of the bucks took Esteban around the neck with his huge hands and snapped his spine in a second as a child would snap a twig. I heard the awful cracking sound and saw my love’s eyes bulge out and go dark. I started to scream and screamed until I went faint and fell to the ground.
A few minutes later, revived by a mouthful of brandy, I found myself on the porch of the lodge, arms held fast behind my back by one of the big buck Negroes. Don André looked me up and down, expressionless. When he saw that I was fully awake, he nodded gently at the buck who had killed Esteban. This one took out a heavy curved knife, cut Esteban’s body down the middle as you cut open a calf for the roasting, and reached inside and fumbled about as if it were an old sack. In another moment he pulled out a dripping red organ that I saw was my lover’s heart.
It was then I begged them to kill me, so I could fly to my beloved Esteban in death. But my husband turned to me with a weary and understanding smile that was all the more horrible considering the circumstances.
“You are my wife,” he said, “and you will remain my wife. That is the more sublime torture.” Then he told the buck to throw Esteban’s heart to the dogs so that they might devour it before me. At this I begged and pleaded most piteously to be allowed to eat the heart myself. If I could eat his heart, I thought, I could keep Esteban’s love inside me forever. Even Don André was surprised at this request and hesitated for a moment. “If you love the traitorous bastard that much,” he said at last, “then fight the dogs for him.”
The buck threw Esteban’s heart to the dogs, and the other let me go, and I scrambled into the mud of the yard and fought the dogs for the heart. But these beasts have hard claws and sharp teeth, while I am made of softer flesh. I received many bites and scratches and only managed to get a single mouthful of my lover’s heart, still warm from his body. It tasted of his love, of salt and life like the fluid of his seed. But one of the dogs tore the precious organ from my grasp and trotted off into the woods to devour it in private, and I fell into a swoon from the pain and horror of my ordeal.
I lay sick for many days, caught in a fever between sensuous dreams of my dead lover and monstrous visions of gore and riven organs. When I awoke from this madness, I found Don André at my bedside, his hands clasped, calm as death itself. My cousin Albane stood by his side, dressed in the mourning that always seemed to suit her so well. She looked skinny and paler than usual. Her eyes, ringed with dark circles, were fixed on the floor.
Helpless and weak as I was, I cursed my husband and informed him that I would have M. Levallier contact the government prosecutor in New Orleans with the particulars of this odious crime. “Unless you kill me now while you are able,” I said, “you will be arrested and dragged in irons before the court, where they will convict you for the murder of my beloved Esteban.”
But he listened calmly to my threats, and I could see in his face that his revenge was not yet complete. At last he informed me with a cold smile that the quadroon slave called Esteban de Vasconcellos had been disposed of legally and in the presence of the sheriff of Plaquemines Parish and his appointed deputy for the crime of violating a white woman. The punishment for this crime, as everyone knows, is death,
I looked from Albane’s white face to my husband’s black eyes, the eyes of an unfeeling animal mistakenly endowed with intellect, and I saw that this statement was true. He then went on to tell me that the quadroon slave called Esteban de Vasconcellos was in fact his own son, born on St.-Domingue out of a youthful union with a mulatto slave woman of his former estate.
“Yes, the boy looked like a white man and showed a quick wit,” he said. “But he was still a Negro and a slave under the laws of the United States and under the regulations of the Code Noir. Long ago, out of a mistaken affection for his mother, who died during the uprising, I promised to send the boy to Europe, where he might be educated properly. This was a terrible mistake, which I realize only now. It is always a mistake to educate a Negro above his station. For that alone I am responsible. But your whorish and base passions are to blame in every other respect. If you had encouraged this marriage between your ward and my son, no one would have been the wiser. Instead you took the slave for yourself and lay with him in fornication, and in so doing sullied the precious honor of the de la Rocas. The slave is dead. You will live on to ponder your misdeeds.”
Don André then paused for a while for this terrible information to sink into my brain. But if he waited for me to express regret or horror concerning my love for the person whom he identified as a Negro and a slave, he waited in vain. For in that instant I abandoned all conceptions I had of the differences between Negroes and whites, between slave and free. Esteban was a slave and I had loved him, and I still loved him. Don André was white and a monster and a murderer, and I hated him with the full force of my passion.
When Don André saw that I was not moved by his revelation, he let loose one final arrow.
“You should know that it was your own dear cousin who informed me of your perfidious adultery,” he said. “As soon as she discovered your whereabouts, she sent for me. But now the poor girl appears distressed at the outcome of her efforts. Pity. Allow me to leave you two alone to commiserate over the death of a Negro slave.”
And he bowed with ultimate contempt and left the room.
After he was gone, Albane tried to speak to me. She pleaded for forgiveness and expressed herself with much emotion, but I cannot tell you now what she said. I turned my face to the wall and did not hear a single word of it. And at last she, too, fell silent and left me alone with my grief.
In the months of my recuperation I lay propped in a chair on the top-floor gallery at Belle Azure, watching the light change over the river and plotting my revenge. The thought of my revenge was the only thing that kept me from taking my own life.
Since the law would not touch my husband, I must be the one to drive the dagger into his heart. I imagined this scene many times—armed with a knife or a pistol, walking up to him in his coffeehouse on Bourbon Street and ending his life in a second with a single bloody eruption. But I came to consider that this assassination would be too quick an act. He would suffer little, and at his age he was no longer much afraid of death.
By and by I discovered through correspondence with a few friends in town that Don André had fabricated a near-fatal bout of cholera to explain my prolonged absence from society. News of my affair with Esteban, and of his death, were not known in New Orleans, having been hushed up by my husband and his agents. This detail revealed my husband’s weakness, put the true weapon in my hand. The place to wound him was in his pride. I must bring dishonor to his precious family name, drag it in the mud once and for all. And after it had been dragged in the mud for a good long time, all Louisiana would come to know the dishonorable circumstances of my life. A woman may perhaps be excused one affair, or even two, but thousands! Only from such a mortification would Don André truly suffer.
So this is the reason I have become a whore, the common prostitute you will share the bed with tonight. Understand that I am a whore now only because I alone ha
ve willed it. I was not driven to this vile trade through need, like all the other poor sluts. I am a whore out of spite, to work my revenge on the only person in all Louisiana whose pride is greater than my own, that monster of arrogance, my husband, Don André Villejo de la Roca. It is his portrait you see there, staring down at us now from the wall over my whore’s bed. He has watched like a guardian demon over the sweating backs of countless men. Watched as I opened my legs for them and took their pleasure into my body. My body, which is the weapon I shall use to strike him in the heart of his pride, for there alone is he capable of sustaining a mortal wound.
When I was well again, I left Belle Azure in the middle of the night and fled north, to reach a place beyond my husband’s reach. As you know, he is too powerful in Louisiana to allow me a free career of harlotry in that province. I stopped for a while in Savannah, in Charleston, in Baltimore and Philadelphia, but in each place received intelligence that my husband’s agents were on my trail and under orders to end my life.
At last, four years ago, I arrived in New York City and from there crossed the river to Brooklyn and this dingy neighborhood near the docks. Here I believe I have escaped him utterly. I put my card on the door, as is the fashion with whores, and installed myself in these squalid rooms. I am famous among the sailors for my looks, which are better than those of the common prostitute, and for my willingness to sleep with anyone. Negro or white, man or boy, I treat them all alike. I take them inside my body, into the wound that is my love.
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