by Maryse Conde
de-la-Source. What they called the town, Grande-
Anse itself, was the residential district. It was composed of the cathedral Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul, the balconied, mansarded houses belonging to a handful of dignitaries, the boys’ school for Christian instruction run by the monks, the girls’ day school run by the sisters of Saint-Joseph-de-Cluny, the Saint-Jean-
Bosco orphanage, city hall, the dispensary, and the police offices recently opened in a former rum purging station. All around it were the whorehouses. Whorehouses galore! There must have been at least a dozen. The black and mulatto women whom emancipation had liberated from the cane fields and the great houses, and who had nothing to fill their bellies with, flocked to them. As for the white Creole planters, they did the same and paid a fortune for what they had always taken free of charge. Behind every girl there was a black or mulatto pimp. On the side I was the physician to the most popular whorehouse in Grande-Anse, called the Ginger Moon. There’s a long story to it! My mistress at the time was a certain Carmen, a bòbò from Santo Domingo, matured by experience the way I like them, whom I had cured of a case of furunculosis. One day she came to ask for help. She was fed up selling her body to one and all. She wanted a rest and to get others to work for her. So she had the idea of opening a whorehouse and asked me to lend her some money. I accepted on one condition. I would be in charge of hygiene. The place would be spotless. Disinfectant and bleach. Every three months I would give the girls a checkup so they wouldn’t contaminate the customers with the chancre, clap, syphilis, and what have you. She said, You’ve got a deal, and we were on a roll. And what a roll! Sometimes the white Creoles would be lining up in the corridor. There were mulattoes too, whom I used to see take communion on Sundays beside their wives. As for the blacks, it wasn’t girls they fought over. Believe me, they had other things to think about at the time. One night, I had an urge to see Carmen. I shall never forget that night. It was in September. It was pouring down in bucketfuls, and the claps of thunder would have awakened the dead. Since d’Artagnan, my Arab stallion, was scared of lightning, I walked to the Ginger Moon, wading in water up to my stomach. Soaked to the skin, I was about to go up to see Carmen when a young girl came out of one of the rooms. I had never seen her before. She must have been fourteen or fifteen, in any case no older. No taller than a tuft of guinea grass. Certainly no bigger. Her skin was shiny black. Her hair, a stream of oil flowing down her back. Even so, despite her hair, she didn’t look like a coolie. Rather a hodgepodge of Chinese and black mixed in with Carib blood. The way she swept past me without even a glance, I can’t even begin to tell you the effect it had on me. I arrived quite out of breath and asked Carmen:
“Tiny. Slender. A spark on a bonfire. Who is she?”
“She burst out laughing. ‘The way you speak! It’s Pisket. She hasn’t been here a week. And already the men are mad about her. Do you want to try her?’
“And how! I had no sooner tried the girl, I was mad about her as well. I had to have her morning, noon, and night. She was my morning cassava bread, my noontime red snapper, and my evening bush tea. Soon, I could no longer bear another man touching her. I would have liked to lock her away and keep her all for myself. But I imagined the scandal it would have caused in Grande-Anse and all over Guadeloupe. A man like me whom everyone respected. Me, Dr. Jean Pinceau—”
Hakim gave a start, since the name rang a bell in the thick fog of his stupor.
“What did you say your name was?” he asked.
“Pinceau. Funny name, isn’t it? It’s the name of my mother’s family, a family of talented free blacks since the early eighteenth century. The Pinceau men were locksmiths. The women, seam-stresses and milliners…. So I didn’t dare do anything more about it and merely settled Pisket in a room next to Carmen’s in the attic. She had her own washroom with her pitchers and basins. I paid a servant to cook, wash, and iron her clothes. Believe me, Pisket was a real character. I never knew where she was born, who her parents were…. At first I didn’t even know her real name. Pisket was a nickname she had earned because she was so slender. She was all skin and bones. Carmen knew no more about her than on the day she picked her up while she was making love on a plot of waste ground in Grande-Anse. The fact was, she seldom uttered a word, barely a sound came out of her mouth. You never knew whether she was happy or upset, whether she liked doing it, whether she wanted more. A real autist. It was probably that which got me so excited. I never knew whether she was fond of me or what her feelings were. I had to have Carmen watch her. For as soon as I had my back turned, she took in men. Not for money. Not for pleasure. Just like that. Like a machine. It made me so angry! Can you imagine, me jealous of a bòbò! But she always managed to outsmart Carmen and put a man in her bed. There was this Kung Fui, a Chinese half-caste like herself, a weird guy, who was always in her room and even slept in her bed. When I got angry, she vowed he was her brother! There was also a third rogue, more Chinese than black or Indian, always in their company, but who never stayed at the Ginger Moon. What’s more, Pisket smoked opium. However often I smashed her instruments and broke her pipe, she would always begin again. She was allergic to hygiene too. She was like a cat: hated water. When she got too funky, I would stuff her in a tub of hot water. I would scrub her shoulders and her you-know-what with a bunch of leaves. But there was nothing I could do about it. I wallowed in her filth.
“Alas, my happiness didn’t last. After a few months I realized she was not menstruating. She was so ignorant, she didn’t know what it meant. I had to explain it to her. Can you believe she jumped for joy, someone who didn’t care a damn about anything. A baby! A baby! For the first time, she was happy. But I was in a predicament, to tell you the truth. A baby with a bòbò! And first of all, was it my child? Despite my words of warning, Pisket had slept with a great many other men. I don’t trust those teas and decoctions women take for an abortion, so I proposed operating on her. Oh, nothing complicated. No need to be frightened. She didn’t say anything, and I took that to mean yes. Three or four days later, she disappeared.
“I can remember it as if it were yesterday.
“It was December 22, to be exact. Lights and Christmas carols in every home. The children from the Saint-Jean-Bosco orphanage had decorated a giant crèche, which they had placed in front of the high altar in the cathedral, and folk from Grande-
Anse came to admire baby Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the ox, and the donkey. I had gone up to her room and found it empty. She had taken all her stuff. Nobody had seen her leave. Nobody knew where she had gone.
“I wanted to die, but had little luck. I began by accusing Carmen of not keeping an eye on her. That was unfair; she had no reason to distrust Pisket, since she never set foot outdoors. One of the girls told us that the day before she had surprised her with Kung Fui near the cathedral deep in conversation with Madeska, a notorious mischief maker who was friends with a certain Madone, Pisket’s only friend. This struck her as being odd. What could she be doing with such an individual? Except for Madone, all the girls used to run and hide when he turned up. They were scared of him. What’s more, he was fat and filthy as a hog in his African boubou. Obviously Carmen didn’t have the courage to kick him out. But that didn’t tell me where Pisket had gone. Where should I look for her? On Grande-Terre in the vicinity of La Pointe? Over by Basse-Terre? Among the cane fields? On the mountain slopes? In the waterfalls or along the rivers?
“In desperation I haunted the places of ill-repute. I mounted d’Artagnan and scoured the countryside. I interrogated the rum guzzlers and players of dice, checkers, and dominoes. I visited one by one the whorehouses on the windward side of the island and dragged the whores from their beds. I lost my appetite for everything. I was a real bag of bones. Don’t laugh, I suffered like I had never suffered before. People were convinced I was working too hard and begged me to take a rest. Don’t ask me how long this hellish state lasted. I was like a drug addict in withdrawal. Then finally I snapped out of it. I conducted mo
re and more daring experiments, endeavoring to transplant rabbit hearts into mongoose and vice versa. In particular I began a crusade against opium. I have to tell you that at the time there were as many opium poppy fields in Guadeloupe as there were cane fields. The plant had been introduced by those Asian workers come to replace the blacks in the plantations. They dried the seeds themselves from the poppy flowers.
“Old Chang, for instance, owned an opium den right in the middle of the Bélisaire district, which, by the way, was thick with Chinese. When the police had had enough, they raided the den, rounded up all the customers, and threw them in jail. After two days they had no choice but to set them free, since there was no law against smoking opium. You could count us on the fingers of one hand, those of us who protested that opium was far more dangerous than rum. I began writing columns in Le Courrier de la Côte au Vent. I worked together with a childhood friend of mine, Dieudonné Pylône, the police commissioner. I opened a small center for treating drug addicts that I called the Refuge of the Good Shepherd. In short, because of all the fuss I made, they awarded me the medal for social merit. More and more, people took me for a role model. They were so adamant I should go into politics, I ended up creating a party that I prosaically called the People’s Party. Unfortunately, I never won an election. The absurdity of my situation, I am convinced, must have stuck out like the Soufrière volcano: me a bourgeois belonging to an old family of freed coloreds, I dared to speak in the name of the slaves.
“One morning I was in my surgery, about to operate on a small boy for tonsillitis, when Carmen sent urgent word that Pisket had reappeared. I left the child laid out on the operating table and ran outside like a madman. Yes, Pisket had come back. But not the Pisket I knew! A zombie. She now smoked as many as fifty opium pipes a day and had reached the stage of bondage. She could no longer stand on her own two feet, walk, or eat, and it was Kung Fui who did everything for her. He of course had reappeared, together with his Chinese friend. Eyes wide open, at night she had hallucinations and sometimes screamed like a hog having its throat slit. At that stage, all my learning was to no effect. She gradually drifted into a state of terminal cachexia, and one morning, while I was leaning over her, the life went out of her.
“You can’t imagine what happened next. No doubt because of the opium she had consumed, her body turned rotten in next to no time. She passed away at five in the morning when dawn mass was being said. At eight, she reeked to high heaven. At noon, the stench made it impossible to remain in the house. A thick juice, as black as tar, oozed from her private parts, which liquefied, and stained the bedsheets. I had to run to the undertakers. The undertaker quickly cast a lead coffin, which he placed inside a second ironwood casket. But the smell! You can’t imagine! During the wake we had to beat off the swarms of blowflies, bigger than beetles, that settled on everything and everyone. The removal of the body was a great relief. The priest, of course, refused to give her the extreme unction. But I had a tomb built in which we buried her on Sunday, August 30, the day of Saint Fiacre. The bad talkers of Grande-Anse were not surprised to see me in deep mourning because of my work with the drug addicts. They thought I was trying to show the young people an example of what not to do. Little did they guess that the sun had set forever on my life and that I was laying my only love to rest. I envied Kung Fui, who had nothing to hide and was crying his heart out as he followed the hearse, propped up by Yang Ting—that was his name, I remember now. A nasty piece of work he was, you only had to look at him, but you couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. I didn’t give him long to live either. He was already an old bag of bones, as yellow as saffron. Emaciated. Eyes dilated—red and swollen. A certain Tonine was also walking behind the coffin. They said she was Pisket’s sister. I had never seen her before. I remember she looked a lot like Pisket except for that shy, gentle expression, which Pisket never had. A few weeks later, grave robbers came and opened Pisket’s coffin and scattered her remains. All her fleshy parts had been eaten by worms. Only the skeleton was left, but broken into a thousand pieces. It was all the more surprising, since grave robbers as a rule go straight for the tombs of the white Creoles and make a beeline for the jewelry, gold necklaces, cameos, gold chokers and beads of the women, and the pocket watches, the rings, and the bracelets of the men. What did they hope to find on a wretched prostitute? And yet the biggest surprise was yet to come. One morning I got a letter from a notary in Grande-Anse informing me that Kim Lee Fui—that was Pisket’s real name—had left me and Kung Fui an inheritance. She had left a considerable sum of money in the Crédit Colonial and a laundry in her name, Le Blanc Galop. We then discovered she hadn’t gone very far. To Bélisaire. She hadn’t gone into hiding. She had opened this laundry on the ground floor of her house, where she employed not only her so-called brother and the inseparable Yang Ting, but also two Chinese and the girl called Tonine, who was the close friend of this Yang Ting. Instead of looking under my very nose, I had gone looking for her as far away as Basse-Terre. Pisket had made pots of money! I didn’t understand how she had amassed such a fortune, nor why she left me half. Obviously, I refused every penny of it and gave my share to Kung Fui, who pocketed it and vanished from Guadeloupe with Yang Ting. And no one was any the wiser.
“Dieudonné Pylône was right to be intrigued. He put Mangouste, one of his assistants, on the case; like his nickname, Mangouste was as cunning as a mongoose. He went and prowled around Bélisaire, but turned up nothing. The neighbors had never seen Pisket’s face, since she never went out, never even attended mass. One morning they had seen Le Blanc Galop all shut up. They couldn’t care less what happened to Pisket, Kung Fui, Yang Ting, Tonine, and the two employees. Dieudonné was about to close the case when the manager of the Crédit Colonial sent him a confidential memo stating that Pisket’s money had been deposited by a rich white Creole, a certain Agénor de Fouques-Timbert. What was the relationship between the bòbò and the planter? Dieudonné and Mangouste thought Agénor should be interrogated. But they were apprehensive. At that time the eyes of the whites drilled into ours. They finally picked up enough courage and set off for the plantation. The story of the Agénor de Fouques-Timbert family is part of the history of Guadeloupe. It was an open secret that the Fouques-Timberts had black blood in their veins. For that reason, some of the white Creoles refused to have anything to do with them. Nevertheless, they were perhaps the richest planters on the island. Not only did they escape bankruptcy following the abolition of slavery, but Agénor was clever enough to modernize and expand his sugar factory. He was the first to have replaced the so-called Père Labat system with modern sugar-making technology. Megalomaniac, he planned to invest in a large factory on the windward side of the island, which would rival that of Darboussier. To increase his fortune and his whiteness, he had no scruple marrying Elodie, the only daughter of Emmanuel des Près d’Orville, who was hunchbacked and so ugly that nobody wanted her despite all her papa’s money and estates on northern Grande-Terre. Even so, she gave him seven fine children, all boys. Nothing was lacking, except a position in politics. It nagged him like the urge to piss. One morning he began stomping for votes. With no trouble at all he was elected to the Conseil Général. At the time, you see, it was a lucrative affair. The Conseil Général was in complete control of taxation. It was there to protect the rich. Agénor’s secretary received Dieudonné and Mangouste on the doorstep and told them anything that came into his head. That Agénor was in the habit of making gifts to institutions and the underprivileged at Christmas. That he had Pisket on his list of charities. They didn’t believe a word of it, but they didn’t dare pursue the matter. And yet they sensed they were on to something.”
Hakim cleared his throat.
“And Pisket’s baby, your child, what became of it?”
“There’s nothing to prove it was my child! But I’m not a complete scoundrel. When they reappeared, I asked Kung Fui what had happened to Pisket’s pregnancy, since she was no longer in a position to answer for herself. He
replied that she had had a miscarriage, which didn’t surprise me. Opium had become her only food, and her body was unable to nourish a fetus.”
“And what about Ofusan?” Hakim insisted.
“You oblige me to return to the scene of my crime. For pity’s sake, you’re making me live it all over again. Where we come from, our wives are used to being neglected and spending their nights all alone in bed while their husbands are out having a good time with their mistresses. If they have the nerve to complain, they are beaten. Ofusan was not used to that. She did not come from a society like ours, where the male is God incarnated. What’s more, she didn’t have a friend in the world. Nobody could say anything bad about her, that’s a fact. She was beyond reproach. At confession every Friday. On her knees at the altar every Sunday. Plus vespers, rosaries, and the month of the Virgin Mary. Despite all that, she was only barely tolerated at Grande-Anse. They never forgot her family were Wayanas, maroons, black as sin, who on weekdays sat in the market.
“One morning in early September, the seventh, the feast day of Sainte Reine—I can remember it as if it were yesterday—shortly after Pisket’s death my friend Dieudonné Pylône rushed into my surgery in a frenzy. He was carrying a kind of package in his arms. He unwrapped the bloodstained cloth and revealed a baby. A baby girl, a few hours old or a day at the most. A plump little body, her tiny almond slit between her thighs, her umbilical cord neatly cut under a scab of blood. But horrors, I’m not kidding, her head was hanging on by a thread. A blunt instrument—a machete, a cutlass, a butcher’s knife, or garden secateurs—had virtually sectioned it from her body. The baby had completely drained itself of blood through this hideous wound. Clinically she was dead. Her heart had stopped beating. Her encephalon showed no signs of life. Anyone else would have called a priest. But I saw the opportunity I had been waiting for. Defy nature and coax back life like a docile bitch into the body she had deserted. While I was frantically preparing my instruments, Dieudonné told me the story. He had been chasing a common thief in the infamous neighborhood of Bas-de-la-Source when he stumbled upon this mutilated baby at the Calvaire crossroads, lying amid rusty nails, pieces of iron, shards of mirror, and red rags. Visibly there had been a sacrifice. He had gathered up the little victim and dashed to find me.