Victoire

by Maryse Conde

  We note that each time reference is made to the word “faithful.” We might very well ask ourselves to whom Victoire was faithful. Was it to Anne-Marie? To Boniface? Or was she pursuing her own private ambition that centered on Jeanne? Only Jeanne?

  Let us add that in the Antilles there is a time-honored practice where the white male marries the white female, but takes his pleasure with every mulatto or black girl he can lay his hands on. Slavery or no slavery.

  As for imagining an intimate relationship between Anne-Marie and Victoire, I refuse to believe it. If some people have no trouble going there, it is because the tradition of both masculine and feminine homosexuality is well established in the Antilles. There is abundant research to prove that the masters entered into such passionate and stifling relations with their domestic slaves that most of the latter preferred to work in the fields rather than in the house. At the end of the nineteenth century female homosexuality was still thriving. In La Pointe the zanmis were very open about their relations, living together, sporting the same costumes and dancing lasciviously during carnival. One of them by the name of Zéna composed a beguine for her beloved, which got the whole island dancing:

  Ninon, mwen renmé vou

  A la foli danmou

  Ninon, mwen renmé vou

  Kon foufou renmé miyel

  E kon bouch renmé bô

  When her beloved left her for another she lamented:

  Aïe, aïe, aïe, mwen vlé mò

  Pa ni soleye ankò

  La vi pa dous

  Mwen vlé mò

  I PREFER TO believe that Anne-Marie and Victoire fell head over heels into an exceptional friendship at first sight and remained accomplices to the very end.

  Was Victoire rewarded for her services?

  Mulatto women one generation before hers had no scruples fleecing their white lovers and mocking taboos. When they were forbidden to wear shoes they decorated their toes with diamonds given them by the very same lovers. It was obvious that Victoire had lost such a gift. Apparently she never had a penny to her name. When she thought it absolutely necessary, Anne-Marie had a shapeless golle dress made for her and bought her a headtie or a pair of shoes. Always the same model: embroidered velvet slippers. On the other hand, Anne-Marie devoted herself entirely to the care of Jeanne, who was always rigged out like a duchess, which later on entitled Anne-Marie to consider herself unfairly treated as a benefactress.

  Whatever the nature of the ties that bonded them together, Victoire and Anne-Marie wore their social status outwardly: Anne-Marie authoritarian and brusque, Victoire silent and constantly in the background. The servants on the rue de Nassau, however, in their terror put them both in the same basket and declared that Victoire was the worse of the two:

  “Victwa, sé pli môvé-la.”

  Likewise, throughout La Pointe the silhouette of Victoire trotting behind her haughty mistress, who was a head taller than she was, soon came to be loathed. The white Creoles thought she should be mistrusted like all mulatto women, “the women of no shame,” as they were called. It was said that they had always dreamed of “taking their revenge on their masters with the arms of pleasure,” according to the expression of the priest at Emberménil, Father Grégoire. As for the people of color, meaning mulattos, who were increasingly numerous, they took offense at the condition of one of their own. Slavery was over. To prostitute yourself for your master was a shame. Only the Negroes, too busy struggling for social ascension or survival, took no interest in Victoire.

  Both women’s lives seemed to be dominated by the same passion: God and music. Up till then, God, who had not worked any miracles for Victoire, did not mean much to her. It was on contact with Anne-Marie that she became religious. At least in her deeds.

  Every morning she would walk up the rue de Nassau to the rue Barbès, cross the Place de la Liberté, and climb up the steps of Saint-Pierre and Saint-Paul to attend five o’clock mass, the so-called dawn mass. Like the rest of La Pointe, this church was evidence of God’s power. One hundred and fifty years earlier it had been razed to the ground by Victor Hughes. Then an earthquake had destroyed it and it had been damaged by fire and a hurricane. Each time, it had risen from its ruins.

  As I have already said, Victoire clearly signified in her comportment that she was the subaltern. She followed Anne-Marie to the altar, three steps behind, and took communion after her. When Anne-Marie came out of Father Rouard’s confessional, Victoire would go in and kneel down. Yet they were both given the same three dozen rosaries. Such a light penitence! They surely hadn’t confessed they shared the same man and perhaps, at times, took pleasure in each other. Confessions are only made to institutionalize the lies.

  Sunday was the day for high mass.

  Thursday for Anne-Marie, a member of the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, was the day for calalu and rice. La Pointe at that time counted a considerable number of needy, the poor maléré as they were called. In fact, there were two distinct towns. The town of the well-to-do white Creoles and a few mulattoes, residing around the cathedral, and the town of the maléré, the Negroes cast out to the edges of the Vatable Canal district. Dug by a former governor in an attempt to drain the surrounding marshland, the canal had soon become a dumping ground. The traveler Toussaint Chantrans wrote in 1883: “The banks of the canal are nothing but foul mud where rubbish of all sorts rots and spreads a nauseating stench.”

  The maléré took only one meal a day consisting of root vegetables moistened with a little oil, together with microscopic pieces of beef, salt pork, or codfish for the luckier ones. With an apron tied around her waist, blonde like one of the Good Lord’s angels, Anne-Marie, assisted by Victoire, piously served the long lines of ragged individuals in front of the trestle tables set up on the sidewalk. On receiving their plateful, the maléré thanked profoundly their benefactress for the goodness of her heart before casting a malevolent gaze at Victoire.

  I have often asked myself the reason for this animosity. I think I now know why. Given her status as a servant, Victoire did not possess the aura of holiness that haloed the white master. Her presence was disturbing and humiliating.

  APART FROM THAT, they never missed vespers or rosary, Tenebrae or the month of Mary. In short, none of those many ceremonies that the Catholic Church contrives to devise for the greater happiness of its followers. At carnival, however, when the devil appears as a moko zombie dancing on stilts, ringing bells, and asking for coins, they would close doors and windows.

  I don’t blame Anne-Marie the same way I blamed Thérèse Jovial for having neglected to educate Victoire because Anne-Marie taught her music. For her it was the supreme form of expression. Ever since Boniface had started snoring in the very middle of Mendelssohn’s Concerto for Violin and a great many guests had dozed off at the same moment, Anne-Marie had taken this as a pretext not to perform in public.

  “It’s like casting pearls before swine,” she would say.

  Every afternoon she would lock herself in her room with Victoire. She taught her the rudiments of the guitar—a few simple chords over which my grandmother spread her childlike hands—as well as the recorder. But Victoire preferred to listen to Anne-Marie. They were usually personal compositions that she labored over, sending Délia to buy her pens, ink, and lined paper from the Simon Matureau store on the rue de la Liberté, now rue Alexandre Isaac. Apparently she composed beguines, rhythms that were becoming wildly popular in Guadeloupe as well as Martinique. I regret that these pieces have disappeared entirely. Thus, we shall never know whether Anne-Marie was a genius or merely a good musician.

  I can but imagine the emotions that inspired this strange pair in the heat of the afternoon as the town of La Pointe lay in its siesta under mosquito nets. They were in ecstasy under the torrent of trills and arpeggios. Anne-Marie, standing, frenziedly stroking her bow. Victoire seated in a rocking chair, cradling the guitar, humming in her reedy voice or dreaming silently like Gauguin’s Brooding Woman. As refreshment, they wou
ld drink aniseed-flavored lemonade.

  Like every lady of her station, Anne-Marie hardly set foot out of doors. Utterly drained after these sessions, she would sit in the back garden or on her balcony. She would watch the day as it drew to a close, the sky turning orange over the harbor and the darkening silhouette of the ring of hills. The stench that wafted up from the outlying districts upset her. In the meantime, Victoire had gone back down to the kitchen to prepare supper, only a tad more frugal than lunch. She then concocted some pâtés that she seasoned with rat poison and laid down on the sidewalk for the stray dogs. These dogs were the bane of La Pointe, running by day in aggressive, mangy packs. It was not unusual for them to attack small children. At night their yelping and dog fights made it impossible to sleep. To poison them was the only way to get rid of them, since the municipality did absolutely nothing. In the morning their stiffened corpses with bloodied muzzles piled up in the garbage carts that crisscrossed the town.

  One picture haunts Jeanne’s memory: that of her mother impassively preparing these macabre meals with the same hands that prepared feasts for the living. Initiated into Greek and Roman mythology, the child thought she was seeing one of those Fates who presided in turn with equal impartiality over the birth and death of humans.

  As you can see, life at the Walbergs was fairly monotonous. I wonder whether such monotony was not often burdensome, whether Victoire was not often tempted to slam the door and go back to her own people, their pleasures, and their exuberant, violent forms of entertainment.

  The opulent upstairs-downstairs houses or those with yard and garden on the rue de Nassau soon petered out and gave way to the Vatable Canal district. Although by day it was neither lovely to look at nor cheerful to behold, this all changed in the evening. The district became a fairylike realm of sleazy dives and rum shops aglow with alcohol amid the din of dominoes and rough shouts. The dances began early Saturday and the shameless bòbòs would lift their petticoats over their velvet thighs as they danced the roulé, gragé, mendé, and lewoz.

  But this class to which she belonged had rejected her from early childhood. Because of her color. This color, without money or, failing that, without education, is nothing but a curse. Once she pushed open the door of one of these dives, a niggerman would be bound to mount her like a tambouyé, his drum. Afterward he would turn his back on her like Dernier did.

  We learn, thanks to L’Echo pointois, that sometime in November 1890 Victoire accompanied Anne-Marie to a concert in the Bobineau Hall, rue Barbès. L’Echo pontois had replaced L’Illustration, dead and buried, and likewise claimed to represent polite society. Anne-Marie wanted both of them to hear Léo Delibes’ Lakmé interpreted by the Capitole troupe from Toulouse. This story of a young Indian girl and an English officer sounded interesting. Anne-Marie’s presence that evening caused a sensation. She was eight months pregnant and at that stage it was indecent to be seen in public. People wondered where her husband was and considered it out of place for her to attend a social evening alone with a servant.

  We do not know what Victoire thought of the concert. But we do know that Anne-Marie was disappointed. She complained in a letter to her beloved Etienne that the acoustics were bad and in the tenth row where she was seated she could hardly hear a thing. The opera itself did not appeal to her. As for that melody which had been given such a glowing tribute in the Courrier mélomane, commonly called the Bell Song—“Where is the young Hindu girl going”—she declared it highly overrated.

  WE DO NOT know for certain what Victoire’s feelings were, sharing her bed with Bèf pòtoriko.

  Everything leads us to believe that she first obeyed Anne-Marie and agreed to relieve her of a loathsome conjugal duty. Yet gradually she grew attached to Boniface and in my opinion ended up loving him. Proof of this was her grief when he died.

  Boniface was not devoid of a sort of coy charm. He had, therefore, always been his mother’s favorite, taking precedence over his more handsome brothers. I have to say in all truth that most people thought it was simply a calculation on Victoire’s part. She saw in him nothing but a rich “stepfather” for her daughter.

  Let us dream a little.

  Was Victoire sensual? Was she fond of lovemaking? Everything points to the affirmative.

  Nevertheless, men at that time bothered little about women’s pleasure. Women themselves seldom expected to reach a climax. Boniface thrust himself into Victoire four to five times a night. She had an orgasm somewhat by chance. Afterward, they slept in each other’s arms, united by a fear of the dark, a survival of their childhood. When it rained or the wind blew, they felt especially close. The sleigh bed rolled like a sailboat on a swell of blackness. Boniface clutched Victoire against his heart as they waited with bated breath and open eyes for a break in the weather. At the end of the nineteenth century, earthquakes were a common occurrence. For no reason whatsoever, a muffled groan would rise up from the depths. The wooden house would vibrate and crack in all its joints. Objects would fall to the ground. Pictures would fall off the wall. Then everything returned to normal. It was more frightening than anything else, and night resumed its unwavering march.

  At four in the morning, the first up, Victoire slipped on a wòbakò and crept into the kitchen. Around five, Maby and Délia, still fuddled with sleep, joined her and began filtering the coffee. Maby had replaced Flaminia, whom Boniface had finally sent back to Marie-Galante. Victoire insisted on preparing herself the didiko that Boniface took to his store on the quai Lardenoy for his ten o’clock break. It was her way of continuing to communicate with him. She knew he was fond of blan manjé koko and filled his meal tin with it. She then crossed the yard that was still in the shadows to the washroom reserved for the domestics.

  The house on the rue de Nassau was one of the first to have running water, although other facilities were lacking for a long time to come. The WC, for example. Until 1920 the servants still decanted the contents of the tomas into the sanitary tubs during the predawn hours.

  Victoire had always loved water. In La Pointe she took delight in discovering the rain. Not the quick shower immediately dried by the sun in Marie-Galante. But the never-ending rain that empties the streets; hammers on the zinc roofs; lashes against the persiennes, the verandas, the wrought iron of the balconies; refreshes the houses; and sprouts dreams in damp beds.

  Naked, she would crouch against the rough wall of the stone basin above which dripped a tap. She would wash her long, straight hair that during the day she rolled into buns bristling with pins under her headtie. She would rub her body with a bunch of leaves, lingering over her private parts, surprised at the pleasure she felt. Already sovereign, the sun was climbing into the sky. She went back up to the room where Boniface, wide awake, still lazed in bed, and dressed for mass.

  She then joined Anne-Marie at the foot of the stairs. The day they were to take communion they didn’t have breakfast. Other times they drank coffee.

  Outside, the sun was shining with its artful eye. The day was just beginning.

  SEVEN

  January 15, 1891, was a date to remember.

  First of all, Boniface Walberg Jr., born nine months after Jeanne, was christened in the cathedral of Saint-Pierre and Saint-Paul in front of an assembly of white Creoles. Boniface Jr., who had inherited his mother’s beauty, was nevertheless conceived under an unlucky star. His life went up in smoke like cigarette paper. Later in life, he married a white Creole from Dominica who died giving birth to their first child. Two years later he married a young girl who also died, from complications of an extrauterine pregnancy. After that he grew old on his own, sleeping with his maids.

  Although I cannot prove it, I suspect he was strongly attracted to my mother, who returned the compliment without ever admitting it. He would have been only too keen to continue the tradition initiated by his father of sleeping with the Quidal women, but she refused. When she married my father, Boniface wrote to her as a frustrated lover accusing her of selling herself out to respectab
ility. There was no doubt she didn’t love the man she took for a husband. I don’t know whether my mother ever answered his letter.

  Second, on the occasion of this christening, Victoire’s talent as a cook was revealed to one and all.

  Why then?

  Probably because Anne-Marie had had enough of the hostility that surrounded her only friend yet spared her. She wanted to thumb her nose at the narrow-mindedness and arrogance of polite society.

  “I’ll make them drool,” she was heard to say.

  Among the papers my mother kept was issue 51 of L’Écho pointois, where right in the middle of a laudatory article appears the menu for this christening banquet, lyrically composed like a poem and probably sent to the newspaper by Anne-Marie:

  “The occasion was held at the Walbergs, a Roman feast, the work of a genuine Amphitryon. Judge for yourselves:

  Black pudding stuffed with crayfish

  Whelks on a bed of wild spinach and dasheen leaves

  Lobster with green mangoes

  Pork caramelized with aged rum and ginger

  Rabbit fricassee with Bourbon oranges

  Chayote gratin

  Golden apple gratin

  Green banana gratin

  Purslane salad

  Three sorbets: coconut, passion fruit, and lime

  Creole gateau fouetté

  What bold imagination, what creativity presided over the elaboration of these delights! Dear reader, isn’t your mouth already watering?”

  IN THOSE DAYS servants were passed around and exchanged like coins. They were borrowed and returned and never asked for their opinion or paid the slightest wage. From that day on Anne-Marie was bombarded with requests on visiting cards from the most eminent families. Could she loan Victoire for a christening, a birthday, or a wedding? Each time she had great pleasure replying in the negative. Since it is a well-known fact that desire is aroused if it is not reciprocated, Victoire’s reputation increased with every refusal. Those who had disparaged her the most, in a total about-face, coveted her and dreamed of appropriating her for themselves.