by Maryse Conde
Anne-Marie was the first to sound the alarm when the morning after the wedding her faithful Victoire did not tap on her door. She had to wash her hair herself. As for the caterers, waiters, and employees of O’Lanyer and Sons who embarked on the Topaze for Saint-Pierre at the end of the afternoon, they noticed that Alexandre was missing and had to set sail without him.
On the evening of the fourth day, those who remained in the vicinity of Le François organized a search party for the missing couple. In vain. Boniface looked a sorry sight. His grief even softened the heart of Anne-Marie, who dabbed his tears like a maman.
“Bon dyé!” he gasped. “O Lord, if she dies, I die too.”
“Who’s talking about dying?” she berated him.
Anne-Marie decided not to leave, which put her hosts in a predicament, since they were anxious to get back to Saint-Pierre. She did not know how she would explain Victoire’s absence on her return to La Pointe and imagined all sorts of lies in her head: Victoire had wandered off into the woods and been bitten by a poisonous trigonocephale snake. The thick groves around the Walberg plantation were swarming with them. Most unlikely. Let’s try something else: Victoire had been tempted by the offer of a restaurant owner who had proposed a small fortune for her to work in the kitchen. Quite implausible too. So what could she invent?
After almost two weeks, her hosts were at the end of their tether and she had to resign herself to set off back home again with Boniface.
Back on the rue de Nassau, she briefly explained to Jeanne in disbelief that her mother was staying in Martinique for a time. Then, clutching her to her heart, she burst into tears, which had the effect of terrifying the child. What was her mother doing in Martinique? She must be dead and they were afraid to tell her. Jeanne began imagining Victoire carried away by a huge wave or struck by lightning or crushed by a tree.
Life resumed its usual routine.
Or almost.
By way of letters from friends and relatives in Martinique, the affair soon reached the ears of the bourgeois circle of harpies in La Pointe, who gleefully badmouthed Victoire. They let fly at her, calling her bòbò, slut, a debauched individual, and a heartless mother who disrespected respectable households at the most sacred of times. At the sisters’ day school, Jeanne heard snatches of these stories, each more revolting than the last. The nuns pretended to take pity on her and were lavish with their consolation. Their compassion, however, was worse than their contempt.
Fortunately, back home, it was another story.
Here again I have nothing juicy to offer. Under the white skins of Anne-Marie and Boniface, deep down beat the heart of a normal man and woman. Both fretted about the poor abandoned child.
“We shall have to tell her the truth in the end,” sighed Anne-Marie.
“Wait a bit! She’ll come back!” maintained Boniface, who wanted to keep hope alive. Despite the odds. Despite the silence and the passing months.
They did not think for one moment of abusing or abandoning her. On the contrary! They were more considerate toward her than ever, especially Anne-Marie. At Christmas they gave her a gold bangle, her first jewel.
Polite society had begun to forget about Victoire, who had disappeared for over a year, when one fine morning with a wicker basket on her head she pushed open the door to the house on the rue de Nassau and quite simply cried out “I’m back” to the stunned servants:
“Mi mwen.”
She went up to the Regency room to unpack her things without bothering to answer Anne-Marie, who was bombarding her with questions. At noon, contrary to habit, she went to fetch her child from school. Jeanne, who had recently dreamed of her mother turning purple from being suffocated by a boa constrictor around her neck, saw her suddenly turn up at the gate, surprisingly spruce, the mask of a young girl tacked onto her face. She almost ran to embrace her but, taking control of herself, merely asked how she was:
“Ou bien mèsi?”
As a result, tongues started wagging again. Some vital information was passed on. It was rumored that Alexandre Arconte was not what he made himself out to be. Instead of an upstairs-downstairs house, he possessed merely a modest two-room shack. Instead of a tidy sum in the bank, he hadn’t a penny to his name. Venal Victoire had realized her mistake. Beauty does not put food on the table. Leave Boniface for this fly-by-night? Reason had taken the upper hand.
These events had a tragic epilogue.
Less than two weeks after Victoire returned home, on May 8, 1902, Mount Pelée started belching fire. With a wave of her magic wand, the wicked fairy turned the pearl of the Antilles into the ghost town visited today by tourists and souvenir hunters. Not one survivor, except for Cyparis, saved by his solitary confinement. Among the thirty thousand victims of the catastrophe there were Philimond and his young bride, most of the wedding guests, the musicians, the caterers, the domestics, and Alexandre. If she had stayed with him in Martinique, Victoire would have suffered the same fate.
Boniface and Anne-Marie had trouble getting over the fact that a year earlier they had danced with a group of morituri, whereas Victoire got the impression of having escaped the arms of a cadaver. She never forgave herself for having left Alexandre when the most terrible danger was looming behind him. Night after night she saw herself making love to a mummy who unwound his bandages one by one, revealing a putrescent flesh. She believed too that she had been punished for having abandoned her daughter for so long. In short, she was in agony. On May 20, 1902, Anne-Marie sent Etienne a letter containing this terse sentence: “Only her faith in God is keeping our faithful Victoire alive.”
I hardly need say that this little-known, badly elucidated incident aroused my curiosity to the fullest. Although we know for sure that Philimond Walberg and his wife perished together with the aristocracy of Saint-Pierre, that the offices of O’Lanyer and Sons, rue Victor Hugo, were destroyed from top to bottom, there is nothing to prove that Alexander was in town on that day. Perhaps by chance, with the help of good luck, he had traveled to Fort-de-France or Le François on business the day before or the day before that. My task proved to be arduous. All I could find in the newspapers of that time, archived in the Schoelcher Library in Fort-de-France, were advertisements for wines and liquors by O’Lanyer, father and son. No mention of Alexandre Arconte. I was about to give up my research when a student from Martinique working on one of my books sent me an e-mail. Her name: Denise Arconte.
Yes, Alexandre was the elder brother of her grandfather, who unfortunately perished in the catastrophe. She had no information of a possible liaison with a girl from Guadeloupe. She thought he was married to a certain Louise Girondin, who, together with their three children, had perished with him. At the most she knew he owned a restaurant in Saint-Pierre called Le Gargantua, something quite unusual for the time, when tourism was unheard of and people ate at home. My research turned up nothing on Le Gargantua.
All that we have left is our imagination.
One evening I pushed open the door to Le Gargantua. Modest. Not much room. Background music: Martinican beguines—“Bavaroise,” “Marie-Clémence,” “Agoulou.” Five or six tables occupied by some sailors from Venezuela. Alexandre carries his virility proudly with prominent attributes. I look at the menu. Prix fixe. Fairly simple.
Cream of pumpkin soup with garlic and shrimps
Stuffed chayotes
Grilled sea bream on saffron rice
Salad of spinach shoots
Coconut sorbet
Without a smile and dressed in the Martinican mode, Victoire is assiduously serving the dishes from table to table and removing the plates. At times, she goes over to Alexandre and they talk in low murmurs. He whispers the orders to her as if they are a secret.
Afterward, amid the rumbling of the volcano, they frenziedly make love.
TEN
This long elopement had little effect on the relations between Victoire, Anne-Marie, and Boniface. Anne-Marie had an unending supply of romanticism that justified falling in
love at first sight, something that she—alas!—had never done. She lived the passion through the intermediary of Victoire and reconstituted the affair in her imagination, since Victoire did not tell her very much.
After months of blinding love, the thought of her beloved Jeanne must have haunted Victoire. She ended up confessing to Alexandre, who went into a rage. How dare she keep secrets from him! Why should he look after this papaless child? It would be like eating someone’s leftovers. She let the storm subside, then returned to the attack. He was inflexible. She ended up leaving.
On the ship back home, she almost threw herself into the sea a hundred times. When the shores of Guadeloupe came into view, she wanted to die. Suddenly her decision to return seemed absurd. She was sacrificing herself for a child who would soon have a life of her own, from which perhaps she would be ruthlessly excluded.
Boniface, who was only too happy to get back a body to which he was so attached, forgave everything. He never put the slightest blame on Victoire, content merely to ask her from time to time with a pathetic humility:
“Kon sa, ou té òbliyé mwen?” (You never thought of me once all that time?)
It was shortly afterward, however, that relations between Victoire and Jeanne started to deteriorate seriously. Okay, they had never been very demonstrative. Neither of them seemed apt at those outpourings of tenderness that are natural between a mother and her only daughter. Yet a type of subterranean communication bound them one to the other like a secret passageway. From one day to the next all that ceased, replaced by a muted hostility, at least in Jeanne. It was expressed by mere nothings. Jeanne no longer allowed her mother to dress her and do her hair. She combed her hair as best she could with a mixture of water and castor oil and tied it in a bow on her neck. She picked out and slipped on her panties all by herself. Worse still, she who previously had a healthy appetite began to eat like a sparrow. In a single month she consequently lost twenty pounds, signifying therefore that she wanted nothing to do with earthly nourishment, as a way of punishing her mother, who placed so much importance on it. In a manner of speaking she refused any type of dialogue with her. At the same time, she professed to loathe music, especially Bach, Vivaldi, and Italian operas; in short, all the favorites of Anne-Marie and Victoire. From that moment on she always had her nose stuck in a book with an expression that seemed to say: “I’m the only one in this house who has other things on her mind than stuffing her face with food.”
Throughout her life she affected to despise material pleasures, especially the culinary arts. But was it really an affectation? All began probably by a banal adolescent revolt that gradually took root in reality.
Every Thursday at ten o’clock, in the study where Jeanne did her homework, Victoire persisted in bringing her a cup of vanilla-flavored chocolate that she never drank. One day, without looking up from her exercise books and manuals, she let out:
“I want to go to Versailles.”
Versailles was the name of the boarding school recently opened in Basse-Terre by the Sisters of Saint-Joseph-de-Cluny.
“Vèsaye?” Victoire asked her in dismay. “Pouki sa?”
Why? Jeanne did not take the trouble to open her mouth, since the answer was written all over her face: uncommunicative, evasive, stony, and stubborn. Basse-Terre was situated at the other end of the island. She wanted to get away from the Walberg household, from this circle of bourgeois white Creoles who despised her on account of her color and whom she despised on account of their lack of education. Above all, she wanted to get away from her mother, a dull-witted vassal who obliged her to live in their midst. If at that instant Victoire had burst into tears, thus revealing the extent of her chagrin, perhaps the rest of their lives would have been different. But as usual her oblique eyes showed no feelings. She laid the tray on the desk and without a word went out into the corridor. It was there, severely shaken, that she leaned up against the wall to stop herself from fainting. All day long, her heart bled. She did not confide her agony to Anne-Marie, who was deciphering a page of Faust by Gounod in her room while gobbling cashew nuts from La Désirade. She waited for nightfall to open her heart to Boniface, lying next to her in the Regency room. He was the only one who would consent to this extraordinary expense. Unhappy about having to part with his money, he pulled a face. Won’t Jeanne ever tire of studying? Wasn’t she content with what she knew already? The Versailles boarding school had an undeniable reputation. “The school places great care on education,” writes a report by the public education authorities. “We have found it to be sound, clean, with an abundance of healthy food.”
This, no doubt, explained the high cost of its tuition and accommodation. Disbursing such a sum was out of the question. At the same time Boniface was always anxious to please his Victoire. He hit on the idea of a compromise. Jeanne would have to sit for a competitive examination and win one of the school’s scholarships to finance her studies.
Monsieur Roumegoux’s services were once again called upon. Since Boniface Jr. had turned out to be a dunce and managed to keep the store’s books as best he could, and Valérie-Anne, despite her mother’s hesitations, had been entrusted to a private institution, the family no longer had need of his tuition. Anne-Marie begged him to come back. Every day he turned up at the rue de Nassau to give Jeanne her algebra and geometry lessons (her weak points), teach her a little English—he had lived in Roseau in Dominica—and discuss literature, for despite her young age she showed a very sound judgment. For instance, she adored the short stories by Guy de Maupassant. Monsieur Roumegoux introduced her to the writer he admired above all: Baudelaire. He gave her this quotation from Les Paradis artificiels to reflect upon: “Common sense tells us that earthly matters have very little relevance and that true reality can be found only in dreams.”
On May 19, 1906, Jeanne was the first black girl to pass the examination with the mention “Excellent,” which opened the doors to the Versailles boarding school.
IN ORDER TO symbolize the farewell she was making to a certain way of life, she insisted on traveling alone to Basse-Terre. No chaperone, if you please. Since Victoire was afraid of her traveling on the steamship Hirondelle, which had overturned several times, she insisted she take the more reliable diligence over land, which took seven hours to travel between La Pointe and Basse-Terre, following the Windward Coast via Capesterre. For an entire week, she silently cross-stitched Jeanne’s initials, JQ, on a trousseau generously provided by the Walbergs: six single sheets, twelve terry towels, and twenty-four cotton panties. The nuns didn’t do things by halves. She was dying to talk to Jeanne, but didn’t know how to go about it. It was from that moment on, I believe, that she began to fear her daughter’s secretive and impenetrable character. What lay behind this face, so pretty, yet so cold?
The morning of Jeanne’s departure, Victoire secured her daughter’s two heavy wicker baskets on her head and accompanied her as far as the chamber of commerce, where the diligence began its journey.
I can see them now.
How different were the circumstances of this departure from the one in Marie-Galante sixteen years earlier, when the mother was trying to protect the daughter. This time it was the daughter fleeing the mother. Jeanne is walking in front, dressed in the elegant Scotch plaid uniform that the nuns demanded—pleated skirt flapping around her ankles, blouse buttoned up to the neck, patent leather pumps with a low heel, and a smart white Panama hat. She is tall, slender, and aloof. Something in her expression puts a stop to the racy jokes by the ragamuffins who are already idling in the streets. Hard on her heels, the mother with her headtie, heavily loaded, dressed in her shapeless dress with a leafy pattern, looking like a servant. The moment has come to climb into the diligence. The daughter brushes her mother’s cheek with a cold kiss and hurriedly climbs into the vehicle. A few minutes later, the carriage lurches off with a creaking punctuated by the coachman’s shout: “Forward!” The mother stands motionless, head lowered, at the edge of the sidewalk. She doesn’t see
her daughter making a farewell gesture to her at the carriage door. She senses she is losing her and wonders what caused such a separation. What is she guilty of? What mistakes has she made? She gave her the best schooling and best education possible. The weapons she used, questionable, despicable perhaps, were the only ones within her reach. Was that why her child was rejecting her?
She retraces her footsteps. All around her the streets are bustling with activity, filled with the pleasant smell from the droppings of the horse-drawn carriages. Servants are on their way to market.
“Corossol doudou,” shouts a fruit seller sitting at the crossroads.
In the dining room, Anne-Marie, bursting out of her orange dressing gown, is savoring her cup of chocolate and array of cassava breads.
“I pati?” she asks.
Yes, she’s gone. All morning long, Victoire is plunged sadly in the preparation of a curried skate colombo.
I have never seen Anne-Marie with my own two eyes, although the picture of this obese musician has constantly haunted my imagination. I have collected the bizarre rumors that circulated about her. At the end of her life, almost destitute as a result of her son’s dissolute existence, she holed herself up in her room on the second floor of the house on the rue de Nassau, surviving thanks to the goodness of her daughter. All that remained were a few pieces of rich-looking furniture, flotsam from her life of splendor. She could no longer get downstairs. Folds of fat prevented her from wedging her viola under her chin. Her pudgy fingers could no longer handle her bow. She apparently owned an old phonograph and listened to operas from morning to night while tirelessly nibbling on rahat-loukoum, stuffed dates, grabyo koko, grilled peanuts, and candies such as douslets and sik a koko têt roz.