Victoire

by Maryse Conde

  ELEVEN

  From the time Jeanne left for Versailles, Victoire’s life took on a more somber coloring. It was not just the gray routine of life, even grayer since the aborted dream of Martinique. It was the black of frustration and suffering that was slowly overwhelming her. She had trouble getting over her daughter’s bitterness and had difficulty understanding it. She plunged herself in her cooking while her talent reached a perfection of fantasy and inventiveness, even though the Walbergs were the only ones to profit from it since they no longer entertained at home. She knew only too well that Jeanne was ashamed of her. Consequently, against Anne-Marie’s advice, she refused to go and visit Jeanne in Basse-Terre. She could see herself in the visitor’s room, in the covered playground with her daughter under the gaze of the nuns in cornets. She would stick out like a sore thumb from the other parents, educated and well dressed white Creoles and mulattoes. How they would all look her up and down! How they would snigger behind her back! As a result, for one entire school year, mother and daughter communicated solely through the letters that Jeanne sent to La Pointe once a month and that Anne-Marie read out loud:

  My dear mother,

  My dear godmother,

  Dear Monsieur Walberg,

  I am very well except for a cough that starts especially in the evening because the air that blows down from the mountain is cool, almost cold. I had to buy two woolens chez Rivier. Yesterday the nuns took us to mass for the month of Mary at the Carmel church. It was five o’clock in the afternoon and not a soul in the streets. Every house had its shutters lowered. Apparently that’s how they live in Basse-Terre: behind closed shutters.

  With love and affection.

  ALL THE WHILE dreading the long school holidays, Victoire drew the little strength she possessed in the hope they would reunite her with her daughter. Alas! In June a letter informed her that Jeanne would not take her holidays until September. She had been chosen by the nuns to teach remedial French classes in July and August, an honor of distinction for a first-year pupil and a tribute to her intelligence.

  In her chagrin, Victoire transferred her little treats onto Valérie-Anne. She was in dire need of them, the poor girl, for she was growing up skinny and red-haired, her brother’s punching bag, ignored by mother and father alike. The affection that bonded Victoire to Valérie-Anne must have outraged Jeanne and aroused in her a blind jealousy. On the subject of Valérie-Anne, Jeanne, who was always restrained in her words, lost all proportion and could go on for hours:

  “A real bitch. Ever since the cradle. A flirt into the bargain. A nymphomaniac, I bet. She was always jealous of me, trying to appropriate what belonged to me. She would walk into my room without knocking and take my things.”

  She accused her of all the sins of Israel. Her former protégée, according to her, had transformed herself into a rival.

  Around the end of the year, Boniface bought an automobile, an event worth noting. Up till then he had been terrified of the first internal combustion engines. And then he had a craze for horses and mounted himself a handsome chestnut, an American Thoroughbred, which he raced occasionally at Dugazon. But one has to keep up with the times. He decided on a gleaming six-cylinder Cleveland, which he struggled to learn to drive, whose headlamps were as round as a pair of wide-open eyes. You should have seen him: the type of goggles that Charles Lindbergh later wore perched on his nose and wrapped in a flowing muffler as seen in Once Upon a Time in the West. This purchase of an automobile was followed by another one, the acquisition of a change-of-air house in Vernou in the hills of La Lézarde.

  The place was becoming fashionable and was soon to be the favorite spot of the bourgeois classes from La Pointe. A deputy governor of the colony, who in a single day had seen four of his eight children carried off by a fever, had built a house there for the months of July to October, when the climate in town was so deleterious. The idea of a change-of-air house in Vernou was odd at the time because for those who lived on Grande Terre, the actual island of Guadeloupe, as it was called, appeared to be a sinister back of beyond. Few of the inhabitants of La Pointe had ever ventured as far as Basse-Terre, capital of the island as decreed by the colonial authorities. As for the river Salée, it could now be crossed without mishap. After years of I don’t know how many drownings and accidents, a pontoon bridge called the Union Bridge had replaced the former Gabarre Bridge.

  The Walbergs’ change-of-air house was magnificent. It stood out from the rest by one remarkable detail: an outside spiral metal staircase. The house was situated to the left of the present Route de la Traversée, next to the small factory called Vernou Jalousy. Once Boniface Sr. had been buried, to prevent it from falling into the hands of her son, Anne-Marie sold it to her cousins the Desmarais, who in turn sold it to a mulatto magistrate. Today it is almost a ruin, squatted for years by a colony of reddened-lock Rastas who grow ganja in the immense garden where once flourished orchids, trumpet flowers, and the proud canna lily.

  Boniface drove Anne-Marie, Victoire, and Valérie-Anne there in early July. It was a genuine expedition. The servants left the day before by diligence. As early as five o’clock in the morning they loaded the car with trunks of linen and hampers brimming with victuals. Victoire held the provisions on her lap. At that time the roads were narrow ribbons made slippery by the slightest rain. Once they had left Petit Bourg, under Boniface’s inexperienced hands the Cleveland slid, skidded, and jolted, getting bogged down along the winding track that crossed the forest.

  To the right and left the ebony, silk cotton, gum and manjack trees, every variety of mahogany and acoma, parasitized by hundreds of creepers, epiphytes, and wild pineapples, jostled one another amid a riot of light to dark green. From the undergrowth came the harsh caws of the numerous parrots that used to be a common sight on the island, and the trills of the hummingbirds. Sheets of boiling or icy water fell from invisible heights with a deafening roar and splashed onto the track, making it even more impracticable.

  Anne-Marie was snoring. She had not appreciated the purchase of this change-of-air house. Not only because she made a point of honor to disapprove of all of Boniface’s decisions, but above all, as we have already said, because she loathed the countryside. For her, it was all mosquitoes, mabouya geckos, and crazy ants. Victoire, on the other hand, somewhat to her surprise, took a liking to Vernou; it was as if you had been transported to another planet, so different from the implacable glare of Marie-Galante. All day long, a metallic gray sky sat low on this mass of green. The rain never tired of falling. Not the raging, torrential rain like the frequent thundershowers in La Pointe. But a penetrating drizzle. A rain that never let up.

  After lunch, while Anne-Marie was taking her siesta, Victoire would leave for a walk with Valérie-Anne. They would delve under the canopy of trees, winding along twisting paths through the forest and the giant tree ferns. The child was a good walker. They often walked as far as the chapel at Fontarabie. The modest wooden edifice would loom up as white as a ghost between the mossy trunks. Victoire and Valérie-Anne never met anyone there. Yet the invisible supplicants who had preceded them had lit candles and piled bunches of heliconia, lobster claw, and torch ginger flowers at the feet of the plaster saints. Sometimes, when it wasn’t raining too hard, Victoire would take Valérie-Anne to swim in the pool at Prise d’Eau that was crossed by a rudimentary bridge. Oxen came down to drink there. Neighboring kids came to splash around. Women filled buckets they perched on their heads and men fished for crayfish. The individuals of both sexes, even the children, looked like scarecrows: in rags, a muddy skin, riddled with scurvy and kwashiorkor. While the little girl plunged into the icy water in panties and blouse, Victoire took off her shoes and dabbled her feet. She too would have liked to go for a swim. But the thought of baring her white body seemed shockingly indecent to her. So she sat there thinking of Jeanne, torturing herself over and over. She had wanted a better life for her daughter than one of abject poverty. She had wanted to give her a future and help her climb
the social ladder. She now blamed herself for lacking audacity. There was the example of this woman nicknamed Mama Accra who was making a small fortune selling very ordinary cod fritters to sailors and dock workers. She was the talk of La Pointe.

  Dusk and its sudden darkness brought them back to Vernou.

  When they arrived, Maby and Délia had already set candles in the candlestick holders and placed earthenware pots in which lemongrass was burning to drive away the mosquitoes. Anne-Marie was sight-reading some Bach in her room. Valérie-Anne huddled up against Victoire in fright. A wall had closed in around the house, thick and impenetrable. Oh God! What was that on the branch of the ylang-ylang tree? What was that galloping along the road? Was it Man Ibè’s three-legged horse? It sounded just like it: clippity-clop, clippity-clop. It was hardly more reassuring inside. The flickering from the candles drew a carnival of grinning faces on the walls. The childless mother cuddled in her arms the motherless child, and other tales welled up in her heart as she remembered the nights with Caldonia:

  Sé té an madamm ki te ni an ti bolòm . . .

  Ah, if only she had nestled her child against her breast like this! If only she had played her lullabies on the guitar! The truth was that Jeanne had always intimidated her. Even as a baby in her cradle gorged with milk, Jeanne would raise her little head and look at her with gleaming eyes. She was her daddy’s daughter. Not hers. She belonged to that world of audacity, ambition, moral strength, and intelligence. Not hers: the one where the servants know only how to say Yes, Master.

  At the end of July, the two Bonifaces arrived and brought a change of routine. They could no longer bear the oven that La Pointe had become. The end of the dry season had been terrible. As a result of the heat, fires had devastated the outlying districts and burnt two or three large families to a cinder. In a single night seventeen children had perished. The health services now feared another outbreak of yellow fever. Consequently, those who had the means fled to take refuge in the vicinity of Saint-Claude because of its altitude and the proximity to the Camp Jacob hospital. The actual truth was that Boniface Sr. found he had been deprived of his beloved Victoire far too long. As for Boniface Jr., he had had enough of his daily trips to the store on the Lardenoy wharf. Once he was in the constant company of his mother, however, he regretted his decision.

  Four weeks later, in early September, it was Jeanne’s turn to arrive from Basse-Terre after a ten-hour carriage drive to Petit-Bourg. There she had completed her journey in an ox cart. The driver succumbed under the weight of a trunk whose contents of books she proudly displayed on the shelves of a deux corps bookcase. Guy de Maupassant. Stendhal. Balzac. Flaubert. Baudelaire. She showed little emotion on seeing her mother, whom she hadn’t embraced for over a year, and she did not scold her for never visiting her at the boarding school. On this point, they understood each other without saying a word. However, at dinner—an extravaganza of conch and crab invented by Victoire in her honor—Jeanne proved she had a soft spot to anyone who doubted it. She had spent all the money she had earned from her remedial courses to buy a gold choker from Luigi Venutolo, the finest jeweler in La Pointe, which she clasped around her mother’s neck. It was the first piece of jewelry that Victoire possessed, except for a pair of Creole earrings and a chain, neither of which had much value, a gift from Anne-Marie or Boniface. It brought tears to Victoire’s eyes. Yet all she could do was whisper a thank-you with head lowered:

  “Mèsi!”

  Then mother and daughter embraced awkwardly. After that, Jeanne ripped at her mother’s heart by refusing to taste her dish. She insisted she was not hungry, was utterly exhausted, and withdrew very early to the room she had been allocated.

  Jeanne was never to set foot in Vernou again. Not that she did not like the area. The first thing she did when she decided to build a change-of-air house with my father was to choose a spot at Sarcelles, only a few miles from Vernou in the district of Petit-Bourg. It was because during this stay she accumulated a store of bad memories. She found the situation utterly unbearable. Although large, the house did not have the arrangements or configuration of the one on the rue de Nassau. All the rooms were on the same level with a wraparound veranda and no attic. Maby and Délia slept in a small cabin at the bottom of the garden. Amid this promiscuity, together with the casualness of the holidays, the masks were off. Jeanne could not bear seeing Victoire and Boniface go into the same bedroom holding a candle. The four-poster bed of locustwood where they slept seen through the half-open door made her vomit. At night she listened for every creak in the wood. Her frenzied mind mistook the groan of the wind for her mother’s moans of pleasure, and in the morning she would stare at her in disgust. She was no different than a courtesan, a woman who sold her body, except that those Italian women were usually excellent poets, whereas Victoire couldn’t even read. Her mood translated into her refusal to feed herself, which perhaps today we would call anorexia or something similar. At mealtimes she would ostentatiously push her plate away after one or two mouthfuls and claim that the delicious smells of basil, ginger, and saffron that emerged from the kitchen made her feel sick. She disliked Valérie-Anne’s pranks. She could not stand Anne-Marie’s and Victoire’s musical sessions. Anne-Marie’s viola got on her nerves and the faltering chords of her mother’s guitar and recorder exasperated her.

  Plus Boniface Jr.’s advances.

  Well hung like his father, but rougher and more enterprising, he was always touching her, groping her breasts and buttocks. One morning he managed to enter her room, where she was reading La Chartreuse de Parme in bed. He greedily planted a kiss on her mouth while his hand undid his fly. What a pity for my story he did not take her by force! Unfortunately, nothing serious happened. She fought him off. They remained staring at each other, both panting with desire. But Jeanne would have died rather than admit it.

  Another time she went with her mother and Valérie-Anne to Prise d’Eau. Boniface Jr. caught up with them unawares, and since the weather was fine he went for a swim. At the time the mere idea of nudity was improper. The beauty of this athlete’s body parading his assets that were difficult to conceal aroused in Jeanne an emotion she felt to be shameful. In a rage, she returned home to Vernou alone.

  Thereupon, Jeanne imagined that in order to humiliate her Anne-Marie was encouraging her son. This seems unlikely given the little interest she showed in her son. In fact, she only spoke to him when they were bridge partners. Jeanne, however, felt really humiliated—or quite simply jealous—when looking out of her bedroom window in the predawn she saw Boniface Jr. creep out of the maid’s quarters. He was sleeping with one of them, but which one? Délia was at least ten years older than he was and mother of a multitude of children. Maby was just a kid. In his eyes, therefore, she was nothing but black meat he could take for pleasure as he wished. Not an ounce of feeling in his propositions. Moreover, she was convinced a white man could never love a black woman. Only lust and concupiscence could exist between them.

  In fact, the holidays ended unpleasantly for everyone. It was the very height of the rainy season. That year there were no hurricanes or gales, but the rain intensified. Torrents of water poured monotonously from the sky. The gutters overflowed. The garden was transformed into a muddy lake. The rain put an end to the walks through the forest or swimming at Prise d’Eau. They would drink grogs with heavy doses of Féneteau les grappes blanches rum. As a distraction, relatively speaking, on Sundays, braving the bad weather, the family would drive down to the church in Petit-Bourg where Boniface had negotiated the hire of a pew in the center aisle. The Walbergs huddled together on the bench under the inquisitive looks of the natives: Anne-Marie and the two Bonifaces displaying their ostentatious devotion as notables and declaiming in a loud voice the words in Latin; Valérie-Anne, bored to death; Victoire, crushed by the silent hostility of her daughter, barely containing her tears; Jeanne having no time for the Confiteor, the Agnus Dei, or the Sanctus, but beating her breast instead and repeating:

&nbs
p; “I hate them! I hate them!”

  The only distraction.

  Because they kept on meeting them in front of the church, before or after mass, the Walbergs discovered they were related to the Rueil-Bonfils, owners of the Roujol factory on the outskirts of Petit-Bourg. This factory is now defunct. When I was a child it still existed but already looked a ruin. I often cycled over there. I can remember its blackened, dilapidated silhouette, a wreck washed up in the midst of an ocean of cane fields.

  One Sunday, the Rueil-Bonfils invited the Walbergs for lunch in their opulent house beside the factory, and it soon became a ritual. The Rueil-Bonfils tribe could easily have figured in a French sitcom: the mustached grandfather in a wheelchair; the grandmother, hale and hearty, also with a mustache; an aunt, an old maid, with dangling ringlets held in place by a black velvet ribbon; a libidinous uncle, mentally handicapped, who exposed himself to little boys; the dignified father; the mother, a platinum blonde; a dozen children, including a little blind girl who played the piano four-handed with her twin brother. They would all sit down together after mass. As soon as Victoire arrived, she would docilely tie on an apron and join the other servants around the charcoal burners in the kitchen. Meanwhile, Jeanne would go and sit with the visitors in the drawing room or in the garden, weather permitting. With her black skin, she was looked upon as a curiosity by the Rueil-Bonfils, who practically blamed the Walbergs for treating her as an equal. She had to confront a barrage of questions that were a mixture of paternalism, hypocrisy, and racism.

  So she was at boarding school at Versailles! And studying for her elementary school certificate?

  No! Studying for the superior school certificate!

  And she studied Latin as well?