by Maryse Conde
Poor Thérèse was in agony. Her monogrammed sheet pulled up over her head, she had been weeping and sobbing since the day before. She refused to open her door to Gaëtane, who was primarily concerned with the humiliation.
“Oh my goodness! People will laugh at us.”
“Oh Lord! How will I be able to look at people at high mass?”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, mercy on us!”
Thérèse did let Danila in; she was carrying a woman weed herb tea. Thérèse took the cup with trembling hands.
“I pati?”
Danila nodded that Victoire had left and there followed a long, uncomfortable moment.
Two months later Thérèse booked a category two first-class cabin on board the Louisiane, a steamship belonging to the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique. With no regard for her parents’ grief, whom she was never to see alive again, she journeyed to France, where she lived for the rest of her life. Something was broken inside her. She had lost her savoir-faire and her assurance. She bought a two-bedroom apartment on the rue Monge, opposite the Lutetia amphitheater, and earned a mediocre living by giving music lessons to children of the colored bourgeoisie. Accompanying herself on the piano, she would hum the well-known melody that was still very topical:
J’ai pris mon coeur, j’ai donné à un ingrat,
A un jeune homme sans conscience
Qui ne connait pas l’amour
Ah! N’aimez pas sur cette terre
Quand l’amour s’en va, il ne reste que les pleurs!
She kept quiet about that period of her life. As a rule, seated at the piano, she would sum it up thus with her sweet, broken voice:
“I nursed a viper in my bosom and it bit me. My life is over. That’s all I can say.”
Sometimes between scales she became worked up and asked in a tone of despair:
“Why? Why me? I did nothing to deserve such a blow dealt by fate. I was pure. A virgin. Naive.”
She never married.
ORAISON WAS WALKING in front, his chest puffed out in anger. Wretched females whose bellies bear nothing but shame upon shame! Behind him came Victoire and the sympathizing Lourdes. On leaving the town, where the Maurice Bishop Center now stands, Lourdes linked arms affectionately with her niece, who nestled against her side. Unfortunately, at that very moment, Oraison turned round and caught their gesture of affection. He sent them both flying, one to the right, the other to the left. Victoire lost her balance, fell into the ditch, and twisted her ankle. Thank God, her baby was unharmed.
In the space of a few years, La Treille had undergone major changes. Half of its inhabitants had emigrated to the mainland of Guadeloupe, leaving their cabins to go to ruin. Cut grass and sensitive plants filled the once Creole gardens. The trees were overgrown with creepers. The white blossom of the Santo Domingo briar rivaled the lilac flowers of the gliricidia. No longer were there oxen grazing under the hogplum trees. No longer any oxcarts, arms lowered, waiting to be loaded. There reigned an atmosphere of desolation. When Oraison had been in such a hurry to move in with Isadora, Félix, Chrysostome, and Lourdes had not tolerated the insult to the memory of Caldonia. In unison they moved to a cabin at the other end of the hamlet. Then Félix and Chrysostome each set up house with a woman and went their separate ways. Since Félix was Victoire’s godfather, that was where Oraison brought the criminal, throwing her at his feet with a kick. Félix had given Victoire her baby formula; he had given her piggybacks and carved oxcarts from an avocado pit. Victoire was not the first and would not be the last to push in front of her the belly she got on credit. It was a mode that was here to stay, and stay for a long time, that’s for sure. Deep down in his heart, Félix believed she should be spared. Blame should be placed above all on the wickedness of these Grands Nègres, these sermonizers, who were no better than the small-time blacks, even the maroons. But Destinée, his companion, couldn’t put up with this slut under her roof and he had to give in.
Lourdes asked for nothing better than to inherit Victoire. But money was cruelly lacking. How could she feed yet another mouth? After much reflection, they came up with an idea.
Up till then, Victoire had escaped the bondage of working in the sugarcane fields. Now it was the only way out. Since she had never handled a hoe or a cutlass, she would offer her services as a cane bundler. All they needed to do was make a dress and mittens from pieces of jute and old rags. The two women labored all night and in the gray of the dawn set off for the plantation.
It was harvesttime.
The sun was still hiding coyly in a corner of the sky. Yet already dozens of men and women in rags were busy working. The carts drawn by oxen drained of their force trundled through the cane pieces. Not anyone can be a cane bundler. The job is carried out by federations, genuine convoys of olden times, made up of elderly women, even very old women, who are too worn out for weeding and clearing.
Did José the foreman, a mulatto himself, take pity on Victoire’s belly?
Whatever the case, he accepted her request, and under a sun growing bolder by the minute, she braved exhaustion, the sting of the cane, and dizziness in order to deliver her bundles of sugarcane.
It was Lourdes who was so happy! Hoisting up her skirt over her bow legs the color of kako dou, she indulged in so much tomfoolery that she managed to get a smile out of Victoire.
Coming after so many bad days, the evening was blissful. And the following night even more blissful.
Alas! The following morning, no sooner had they set foot in the field than a song rose up amid the laughter and vulgar jibes. It was about a mulatto girl, a slut fallen on hard times, who, after having had her fill of men, stole the bread out of the mouths of her poor black neighbors. Victoire took to her heels and fled.
This was the first and last experience my grandmother had of the cane fields.
Even so, she never gave up. Despite the condition of her rounding belly, she was constantly looking for work. Shortly afterward, her real life began. I next find her as a cook in the service of Rochelle Dulieu-Beaufort, the wife of the owner of the sugar factory at Pirogue. Cook! Let us confess it was a bold claim, since at the Jovials, we may recall, all she ever did was help Danila. Yet from the very first day her destiny took shape. She proved to have an incomparable gift. She won over the Dulieu-Beaufort family with a cream of pumpkin and black crab soup. The Dulieu-Beauforts symbolized the reversal of fortune undergone by certain white Creoles. They had in turn grown tobacco and indigo and set up a coffee plantation, which, according to them, produced the best coffee in Guadeloupe. One of their relatives, a friend of Dominique Guesde who, like him, was a dilettante writer, had invented the slogan:
Sèl kafé di kalité, sé kafé Gwadloup. (The only quality coffee is coffee from Guadeloupe.)
Alas, in the wake of a hurricane, Marie-Galante lost all its coffee and cotton plants. The family had now turned to sugar while in La Pointe Monsieur Souques was preparing to nose out all the factory owners with his Darboussier plant. They were thus living sparingly at Maule. In their elegant house made of solid wood with a roof of wooden tiles, Rochelle rationed the oil and rice for meals and lit only one paraffin lamp to light twelve rooms. Victoire was unable to present any references and what’s more was pregnant. No problem! Two excellent reasons to underpay her!
The Dulieu-Beauforts had managed to engage their eldest daughter, Anne-Marie, a sixteen-year-old beauty, to Boniface Walberg, whose ups and downs in the sugar industry had prompted him to become a trader on the quai Lardenoy in La Pointe. Outraged at being sold to a man she despised for his lack of musical education, Anne-Marie locked herself in her room with her viola and played and played.
Strange, this passion for music in a materialist family! A loving godmother, on noticing her unusual ear for music, had given her a violin on her fourth birthday. She slept with it tight between her legs. It was the first thing she grabbed hold of on wakening. She had forced her parents to send her to the conservatoire in Boulogne, near Paris. Besides the vi
olin, she was learning to play the guitar and the recorder when the family ruin obliged her to return to Marie-Galante. Ever since, she had made a good job of making herself loathsome to everyone.
Anne-Marie didn’t take long noticing the new cook. Not because she could rustle up a sublime gumbo, a creamy concoction obtained by adding additional okra leaves, but because twice she had entered her room unexpectedly and surprised Victoire, holding her viola to her shoulder.
“Do you like my music?” she had asked, surprised.
“Oui, mamzel,” Victoire had whispered.
Do the blacks have an ear for things other than the bamboula? If yes, this would back up Anne-Marie’s theory that there should be no hierarchy between different types of music. Those who called the gwo ka, bèlè, merengue, or mazouk a lot of bamboula, in other words primitive music, exasperated her. Their rhythms were different from a sonata or a symphony, that’s all. However, she hadn’t had time to verify the exactitude of her audacious point of view since Victoire, pushing in front of her a belly that now could not be ignored, had run out.
Thus was born a solid, mysterious relationship that must have exasperated and set quite a number of people talking. It was only to end with the death of Victoire, called to God long before Anne-Marie, who ended her life obese and ninety years old. But we will come back to that.
FIVE
My mother was born on April 28, 1890, at four o’clock in the morning.
Victoire christened her Jeanne Marie Marthe. I have no idea what motivated her choice of this string of first names.
When she went into labor the evening before, Dodose Quidal, the midwife, looked in and then left, predicting the child would not come into this world just then. She proved to be right. The next time Dodose pushed open the door of her cabin, Victoire was expulsing her daughter in a flow of blood and fecal matter. We know that any birth is a butchery. The child weighed six and a half pounds. As soon as she emerged from her mother’s womb, she was beautiful, my mother. A skin as soft as a sapodilla, a mass of hair more curly than frizzy or downright kinky, at least to begin with, for things were to change when she was seven or eight, a perfectly oval face, a high forehead, sparkling almond-shaped eyes, prominent cheekbones, and a well-defined mouth. She was the spitting image of her father. Once Dodose had wiped her with a cloth, she laid her on her mother’s chest, where the baby greedily guzzled on a breast. It was then that Victoire burst into tears. For the very first time.
She hadn’t cried when Caldonia died.
She hadn’t cried when Dernier ran away. I use this verb, “ran,” although we will never know for certain whether Dernier ever knew about her pregnancy.
She hadn’t cried when the Jovials threw her out like a slut.
She hadn’t cried when Thérèse left for France barricaded in bitterness and hatred.
Was it then, through her tears, that she swore to her daughter she would watch over her and give her every possible chance in life so that nobody would ever trample on her daughter like they had trampled on her? Education, education, swear to God, would be her emancipation. Her daughter would be educated. She would sacrifice herself for that.
Dodose expressed amazement when she received the placenta in her hands. Piecemeal. Stained in red. Greenish in places. Foul-smelling. It boded no good. In fact, three hours later Victoire came down with a high fever. Dr. Nesty, a mulatto who had studied in Paris, called to the rescue, confirmed it was caused by an infection of the placenta. For days on end, despite leeches to draw out the bad blood and lemon hip baths, Victoire struggled between life and death. She was covered in sweat. She pushed aside Lourdes, who never stopped sobbing. She was delirious, calling for Caldonia and Eliette, her mother whom she had never known. Day in and day out the Dulieu-Beauforts’ carriage trundled along the clayey, never stony, tracks of Marie-Galante. A tearful Anne-Marie begged her mother not to abandon her poor cook. Mme. Dulieu-Beaufort, always at the disposition of charity, obeyed the word of God, who was speaking through her daughter. At her request, the priest at Saint-Louis came to confess Victoire and give her communion. Was it the effect of these last sacraments?
To everyone’s surprise, Victoire recovered.
On the eighteenth day of her illness, sitting next to her on the mattress of her kabann, Dr. Nesty took her hand, reassuring her she would live, but whispering that now that she was sixteen she would never see her blood again or have any more children. I think I can guess what Victoire felt. In our societies, even today, to be a mother is the only true vocation of a woman. Sterility means nothing less than dragging around a useless body, deprived of its essential virtue. Papaya tree that bears no papayas. Mango tree that gives no mangoes. Cucumber without seeds. A hollow husk.
Victoire’s pain and disappointment no doubt surged back toward her heart, which became a burning niche for Jeanne, the daughter whom the Good Lord in His mysterious ways decided would be the one and only. She never managed, however, to translate into acts the devouring passion she felt for her beautiful baby. None of those cannibal caresses like those of certain mothers who eat up their children with kisses. None of those absurd pet names. None of those intimate little games. Constantly busying herself around her baby, she remained silent as if shackled from inside. Her hands darted around with sharp, precise gestures, as cutting as machetes.
There were moments of gentleness even so.
She would make Jeanne delicious little dishes and was overjoyed at her appetite. When Jeanne wriggled and whimpered like any child trying to get to sleep, she would take the music box, turn the handle, and softly sing along while the little girl was lulled to sleep with the song from Carmen:
L’amour est un oiseau rebelle
THERE REMAINED, HOWEVER, one final station of her calvary.
These were incredible times. So that there should be no mistake, the priests baptized on Sundays those infants born into the holy sacrament of marriage who slept blissfully in fine lace blouses. On Saturdays, it was the turn of the infants born in sin. These represented 95 percent of all the births. On Saturdays, lines of newborns, some of them choking from the heat, wailing in the arms of their godmothers, stretched as far as the street. But Saturday could not be the day for Victoire. Her sin was neither venal nor mortal. It was extraordinary. Her daughter was Satan in person. Father Amallyas, the priest at Grand Bourg, was a friend of Gaëtane’s and her confessor: purely for form’s sake, since the good soul had nothing on her conscience, except perhaps her liking for curaçao from Holland. He was also a friend of the mayor’s. He would stuff himself at Sunday lunch at the Jovials and turn a deaf ear to Fulgence’s speeches inspired by Voltaire. He thus refused to baptize Jeanne and in a confidential note dated May 10, 1890, he urged the priests at Saint-Louis and Capesterre to do the same.
Such unchristian behavior offended Rochelle Dulieu-Beaufort. How could a priest condemn an innocent child to eternal damnation? She turned once again to her friend the priest at Saint-Louis and begged him to ignore this shameful directive. Jeanne, dressed in a gauze robe and wearing a bonnet worn by the last of the Dulieu-Beauforts’ ten children, was baptized in the chapel at Maule. Anne-Marie and her younger brother Etienne acted as godmother and godfather.
There were no guests, not even Lourdes. No chodo custard, no cake. A drop of aniseed-flavored lemonade. With a pound of flour from France, Victoire made fritters and waffles. After the ceremony was over Anne-Marie, for once all smiles, improvised on her viola Souvenir des Antilles, a selection of Creole melodies composed by M. Gottschalk, the well-known pianist who, the previous year, had won fame during his tour of Martinique and Guadeloupe.
Such an act of cruelty aimed at her child was probably the last straw. It prompted Victoire to make a major decision: leave La Treille and Marie-Galante.
It is likely that Anne-Marie also gave her the idea, since she had moved to La Pointe following her marriage. Without her, under Rochelle Dulieu-Beaufort’s iron rule, Maule and Marie-Galante were nothing better than a prison.
Informed of the plan, Lourdes clapped her hands and offered to accompany Victoire. Oh yes! Leave! What had they to lose? A ramshackle cabin. Marie-Galante was going from bad to worse. We could even say she was dying. There was less and less work. The sugar factories were in decline. Let’s take Elie as an example. Exile had made him into a success story. Turning his back on the whims of fishing, he had found a job in a factory at Goyave specializing in the processing of ramie. There was only one point on which aunt and niece were in disagreement: Lourdes insisted on doing the rounds at La Treille to present her farewells. To go off in secret, without saying a word, would be nothing other than self-mutilation. Some of the inhabitants remembered her mother, Caldonia, and had witnessed her birth, tenth in line. Some had attended her christening. Others her first communion. Consequently, she would appropriate their memories in order to alleviate her uprooting. Victoire fiercely refused to hear of such a proposition. Never, never would she step into the homes of people who had humiliated her and hated her ever since she was a little girl. She could never forget their sarcastic remarks and the names of Ti-Sapoti and Volan they gave her. When she was lying sick at death’s door, how many of them had troubled to pay her a visit, say a prayer or a Hail Mary?
The only person she visited to explain why she was leaving was Rochelle Dulieu-Beaufort. It was then that Rochelle’s mean and cantankerous character got the upper hand and she heaped insults on her.
“What! Who will cook for me now?”
So that was how Victoire rewarded her for all the kindness she had shown her and her bastard child? She was truly a wretch, a dreg from hell who was hated by everyone on Marie-Galante.
I CAN SEE them on that morning of June 1890 as they leave their native land.
Victoire has wrapped Jeanne in a white baby’s cape and is hugging her close. The infant, who is hot under all this wool, is constantly fidgeting. She manages to wriggle free and pokes out her head, observing her surroundings with curiosity.