Who Slashed Celanire's Throat?

by Maryse Conde

  Celanire and Amarante descended the steps arm in arm. Matthieu leaped to his feet. As he bounded toward them, Celanire pushed Amarante to one side and, shielding her with her body, confronted him with such an insolent expression that he stopped dead in his tracks. What could he possibly do in front of so many people? Hit them? Insult them? He turned and ran outside.

  That particular Sunday evening the Champ d’Arbaud was crowded with people, for the weather was so glorious that the inhabitants of Basse-Terre, who much prefer to sit inside behind closed shutters, had consented to enjoy the fresh air. Children were bowling their hoops. The older ones were playing hop-scotch. Lovers strolled down the paths, gazing into each other’s eyes. Mothers were sitting on the park benches, whispering secrets and exchanging the latest gossip. In the shade of the mango trees, unsavory characters were hatching more mischief. Matthieu climbed into a carriage for rent stationed at a corner of the square and returned home to the Redoute neighborhood. He went to bed but was unable to fall asleep. The hours passed.

  The guilty party arrived home in no hurry at the stroke of midnight. Matthieu, tucked up in bed under his mosquito net, heard the horse pulling a tilbury whinny, piss heavily, then leave in a clatter of hooves. Then he heard Amarante messing around in the washroom, indulging in her ablutions. Finally she came into the bedroom, protecting the flame of her candle with her hand. It had been a long time since Matthieu had really looked at his young wife. He had not noticed how much she had changed. He had married a young beauty, that was for sure, but shy, gauche, and demure so as not to attract the attention of strangers. Now she held her head high and was as succulent as a Kongo cane. She no longer shaved her head as smooth as a coconut in the Wayana tradition. She had let her hair grow, and straightened and curled it with a hot iron like the women of the upper class. For a moment he was jealous of this transformation in which he had no part.

  Amarante slipped into bed, bade him good night as if nothing could be more normal, blew out her candle, and calmly turned on her side. It was then he grabbed her and immediately asked what was going on between her and Celanire. She shook him off and confronted him. Elissa de Kerdoré was absolutely right. Women are meant to live among themselves. Thanks to Celanire, she had discovered infinite bliss. And she didn’t mean simply a sexual or physical attraction, but an incredible communion of minds. Celanire and she had the same tastes, the same desires, the same dreams. They caught themselves sharing the same thoughts and doing the same things at the same time. As a result they had decided their liaison would no longer be kept secret. On the contrary, they would openly flaunt it. At this point, Matthieu couldn’t help snickering. She didn’t really think that Celanire was going to leave the governor, his prestige, and his money to live with Sappho on love alone? Amarante inclined her head and calmly repeated what she had just said. While she shamelessly described her vice, Matthieu gradually filled with anger. He might have forgiven her if it had been a man, a strapping stud, well equipped where it was needed! But horrors! Cheated on by a woman! Cuckolded by a female! His anger bubbled up, suffocated him, boiled over like a pan of milk forgotten on the stove, and he set upon Amarante. He kicked and pummeled her like a common drunkard, he who had never raised a hand to her. She received his blows and his punishment, eyes closed, like a martyr. He ended up throwing her to the floor and then fell upon her. She managed to shake him off and ran for the door. He thought about running after her, but a violent remorse lacerated his heart. He began to sob uncontrollably like a child while a torrent of abuse flowed from his mouth. He heard himself scream at her and throw her out. “Out, shameless hussy! I no longer want to set eyes on you! Never set foot inside my house again!” After this fit of anger, he collapsed onto the bed and burst into tears.

  The sequence of events that follows is not entirely reliable. It is a collection of eyewitness accounts gathered here and there that we have pieced together. The next-door neighbors, surprised by the noise, since the Dorlisses were not in the habit of making a commotion, didn’t budge during the quarrel. Only the neighbor opposite picked up courage and peeped through the louvers and outer doors, despite the late hour. She saw Amarante leave the house with a look of defiance, holding a suitcase, and set off in the direction of the seafront. Two homeless people at a street corner comparing their lot saw her pass by and wondered where she could be going at this late hour with such a heavy load. Apparently she sat down on a rock at some distance from the road. After the splendor of the sunset, the night was a magnificent deluge of India ink. A sliver of a moon tucked into a corner of the sky had a hard time illuminating even its own nook. Reassured by the darkness, the cohort of invisible spirits was creating a terrible din. They capered along the shore and swung in the branches of the almond trees. Sometimes they even dived into the ocean from the clifftops, and you could hear a great splash, but not a ripple could be seen on the surface. Other times the spirits mischievously crept up close to Amarante, hissed into her ears, or clasped her neck with their icy cold hands. Just before dawn Amarante walked back to the road. A vegetable grower, lugging his dasheen and gherkins to the Carmel market, hoisted her up exhausted into his cart. He stacked her case among the crates of vegetables and pityingly noticed her swollen face. Another one who had been manhandled by the heavy hand of her husband! Nevertheless he respected her silence and did not pry. He set her down in the Colchide neighborhood where, like every battered wife, she would probably take refuge with her maman. But at seven in the morning, Dorisca, the fishwife, had bumped into Amarante at the coach station, where she took the first carriage to set off for the center of Basse-Terre. There witnesses saw her walk in the direction of the Gai Rossignol conservatory, whose doors were still closed. She remained for a long time, leaning motionless against the iron gate. At 8:30 A.M., Celanire arrived to give the first flute lessons. Nothing had transpired from the conversation the two women had. A student who had been there since nine claims that Amarante emerged from the office around 9:30 A.M., in tears and shaking. One hour later Celanire went to practice her singing exercises with Elissa de Kerdoré, who had just arrived and was smoking cigarette after cigarette under the mango trees in the yard. Several children can confirm that at ten Amarante lay prostrate in the garden, her heavy suitcase standing beside her. Others say she wandered like a lost soul through the neighboring streets. At the stroke of eleven they lost sight of her as she was swallowed up by the flow of women returning from market, the crowds of children running to school, the stream of workers and civil servants and politicians dashing for the Conseil Général.

  What is absolutely sure and certain is that around six in the evening two boys who were flinging pebbles at the mouth of the river des Pères saw a woman walk into the water fully clothed. She strode out toward the open sea, purposefully threw herself into the water, and disappeared among the waves. The boys looked at each other and hesitated. They were afraid of Mami Wata, the water spirit, who had the power to lock up the fish in order to starve humans, drive foolhardy swimmers to their death by unleashing a raging storm, or attack them by changing herself into a shark. But their finer feelings got the better of them. Bravely they tore off their clothes and rescued the drowning woman.

  5

  When, after several long months in the hospital, Amarante had fully recovered, she did not go back to live with Matthieu. Celanire had given her the taste of another life. She felt a kind of shame when she thought of all those years depending on a man and all that care and attention lavished on him that she seldom received in return. She remembered how she would hurriedly get up at midnight to reheat his dinner and, on Sundays, warm his bathwater and cut his fingernails and toenails as if he were some Oriental potentate. In short, she had been his servant. She didn’t go home to her mother either. All those precepts they had rammed down her throat when she was young—Love thy neighbor, Return good for evil—bored her. What was the point of them? Did she deserve to be hurt and neglected like this? As a result of all those scandals, there was no qu
estion of her going back into the teaching profession. So she bravely rented an upstairs-downstairs house on the rue du Soldeur and hung a sign over the door that read, “Singing and Music Lessons.” But owing to the proximity of the Gai Rossignol and Celanire’s reputation, she was unable to attract sufficient numbers of pupils and soon lacked the basic necessities of life. She experienced hunger. Consequently, bitterness and resentment mixed with her love for Celanire. While Celanire wallowed in opulence, she had become the victim. Memories of their moments of passion together woke her up during her nights of solitude. If she lived to be a hundred, she would never get over the shock of hearing Celanire laugh that morning she had come seeking refuge, naively reminding her of her promise to live openly as a couple.

  Her grief knew no bounds when some good souls informed her that Celanire had quickly got over her loss and was carrying on openly with Elissa de Kerdoré. It didn’t surprise her: she had always thought those two were made for each other—equally attractive, provocative, and diabolical, with that touch of nonchalance of the leisured class. At their initiative, the innocent little island of Fajoux, which is anchored in the crystal-clear waters off the Grand Cul-de-Sac, was transformed into Lesbos. A cohort of Zanmis set up tents and wattle huts, each with her one and only. They swam in their altogether, shamelessly baring the cups of their breasts, the curves of their buttocks, and their fountains of life. They barbecued red snapper and crayfish that they caught themselves. They brazenly caressed each other as they rolled in the burning blanket of sand. Owing to her official duties, such as inaugurating maternity homes, nurseries, and orphanages, Celanire had to stay in Basse-Terre and only joined Elissa on the island at weekends, when she would stimulate intellectual activities, such as never-ending verbal jousting and theatrical entertainments. She inaugurated a poetry competition in Kréyol, a language she had always encouraged. When Elissa, who hated Kréyol and considered it vulgar, criticized her for not speaking it herself, she retorted that the mouth does not always need to express what the heart cherishes. Sometimes Thomas de Brabant came with her, spending the night in the open so as not to get in the way of her lovemaking with Elissa. The fishermen, shocked by the copulation going on almost under their noses, quickly hauled in their nets, and it wasn’t long before there was a shortage of fish in Grande-Terre.

  The priests frowned upon all this. But they didn’t dare protest. The governor’s wife had connections in high places. Bishop Chabot’s purple robe covered up for her. They had recently made a deal. The overpopulated orphanages that the church had trouble running had just been handed over to the colonial authorities. Celanire scrubbed and modernized them and hired a dozen girls, whom she sent to be trained in Lyons, where she had kept in touch with the missionaries. As for the orphans, some of them already sang in a choir and had performed at Saint-Pierre in Martinique.

  Gripped by jealousy, Amarante began to harbor ideas for revenge. Old rumors came streaming back to her. It had been gossiped around that the young Celanire had been the cause of Ofusan’s death as well as the ruin of Dr. Pinceau. And goodness knows what else. Amarante, who had always been a sensible, down-to-earth person, grew frightened of all these shadowy figments she felt accumulating inside her.

  One morning, to escape her inner self, she turned her back on Basse-Terre and set off for La Soufrière.

  Three thousand feet up, the forest of Guadeloupe becomes stunted. Gone are the châtaigniers, the mastwoods, the mountain immortelles, and the red cedars. The earth is covered with a mass of purple-flowered, scentless bromeliads and white orchids streaked with cardinal-colored venules. Amarante, born and raised on the coast, just steps from the remorseless splendor of the ocean, discovered a landscape whose beauty is on a human scale. Here the sun can veil its face so as not to dazzle the newcomer, the sky clothe itself in gray, and the air grow soft with streaks of blue as cool as a mountain stream. Despite the advent of a new society following the abolition of slavery, a group of Wayanas clung stubbornly to the slopes of the volcano. Others had returned when they realized that nothing had changed down below. Down on the plain or high in the mountains, life always had the same bitter taste. The same bowl of misery was served wherever you were. To avoid being harassed by the gendarmes, the recalcitrant Wayanas had simply climbed higher and hid their wattle huts behind the camasey trees, whose leaves are embossed in greenish black. They slashed and burned plots of land. Then they cultivated whatever they needed to subsist—soukous yams that grow well high up, sweet potatoes, a little tobacco, and hemp, which the women wove like flax. If the leaf-cutter ants became too bothersome, they would abandon the plot and begin again farther up.

  When Amarante loomed into sight at the end of the day, the yellow-and-white Creole dogs did not bark. On the contrary, they came and rubbed themselves up against her. After all she was still a Wayana for these years. Under the soap and rouge of the town, her skin had kept the smell of her people. According to Wayana hospitality, the guest is a gift from heaven. So no questions were asked. They gave her food and drink. When the night turned black, they hung a hammock for her on the veranda of the communal house. Amarante was delighted with this newly discovered monastic life, which her mother and father had experienced during their childhood and yearned for all their lives. She understood that happiness does not reside in a restless mind, as Celanire had taught her to believe. It resides in dispossession: wrapping oneself in a cloth dyed and woven by hand, washing oneself with the others in the icy waters of the gully, lighting a fire between four stones, cooking with the women, listening to stories under the lenient gaze of the moon. Only the insipid taste of the food bothered her, since for the Wayanas salt belonged to the gods and was not to be eaten by humans.

  After a few weeks she became involved in communal activities. Although she hated scratching her hands planting, hoeing, and digging up sweet potatoes or yams, she took a liking to hunting. The Wayanas did not use firearms, coward’s weapons that kill from a distance. They hampered and fettered the animal with a lasso and fought with it close up, using a knife. When they finally got the better of their prey, they thanked the gods with a prayer and quartered the animal alive, then lay the chunks on a crisscross of young branches to cure them. Amarante also learned how to recognize each plant by its shape and its smell and began to read nature like an open book. All these activities purged her of her ill humor. She noticed that gradually she forgot the way she had been abandoned and betrayed, the love between Celanire and Elissa de Kerdoré, and all that nonsense that had caused her so much pain. She craved for a different way of thinking; she hungered for a new life.

  One evening, in accordance with the Wayana tradition, a young man named Wole came and hung his hammock next to hers.

  “No, I didn’t come here for that,” she sharply rebuked him. “I don’t want anybody. Men have shown me their limits and women their cruelty.”

  Wole shrugged his shoulders.

  “Don’t generalize! You speak of a man who made you suffer, for he was set in his heart on satisfying his ambition. As for the woman you were infatuated with, everyone knows she was a demon. Didn’t she kill our noble sister Ofusan?”

  Amarante, who had often heard such nonsense, burst out laughing.

  “I’d like you to explain how a baby can kill a grown-up.”

  Wole’s expression turned serious.

  “You Wayanas from the town, your minds have been completely distorted. You always need to have an explanation. You need logic and reason! Do you want me to tell you what happened?”

  In spite of her expression of disbelief Amarante was dying to hear the story of Ofusan. Wole collected his thoughts.

  “Noble sister Ofusan came into this world in the black of midnight. She was such a lovely little girl that all those who were present at her birth were overjoyed. Yet Gongolosoma, our protector and god who followed us from Africa, looked worried and predicted she would cause serious trouble for those she loved. This turned out to be true soon enough. All through her childh
ood and adolescence she was rebellious, pestering, and disrespectful of the elders. So nobody was surprised when at the age of sixteen she left the mountain to go down and marry a mulatto in the plain, a ladies’ man and womanizer with the airs of a patriot. When she left she broke two hearts—her mother’s and that of Agboyefo, to whom she had been predestined by the elders ever since she was a baby. Mothers’ hearts are always prepared to forgive. But not the betrothed’s. Outraged, Agboyefo went and asked Chéri Monplaisir, the dibia, who resided down at Saint-Sauveur, to help him take his revenge. ‘What do you want me to do?’ asked Chéri Monplaisir. ‘I want her to suffer like I’m suffering today. Invent for her the most terrible of punishments. Make an example out of her. It’s not just me and her mother she has insulted. She has offended the sacred traditions of the Wayanas. She has preferred the white man’s gods to ours.’ Chéri Monplaisir began by requesting a white heifer without a single blemish on its body and three hens of identical color as a sacrifice. When Agboyefo returned three days later, the dibia was overjoyed. ‘Things are looking good. I’ve made a deal with the superdemon Ogokpi. He’ll take care of Ofusan.’ Ogokpi is the master of the seven circles of hell. One day, he swallowed his daughters by mistake and gorged himself on their blood. Ever since, he has been asking for sacrifices of children and babies. The younger they are, the happier he is. He adores newborn babies. As promised, he took care of Ofusan. During the seven years of their marriage her mulatto husband cheated on her with all the bòbòs in Grande-Anse and thereabouts. As a rule women console themselves for their husbands’ philandering with a litter of kids. But her home was filled with nothing but hot air. In her solitude, then, she almost went mad. So she fell headfirst for the bait Ogokpi sent her: a little girl as radiant as the new moon. Anybody in her right senses would have been suspicious: a newborn discovered with her throat slashed at a crossroads! But no, not her! She blindly adopted the child and made her the queen of her house.