by Alec Waugh
Sometimes friends from Fort de France would join us. Suddenly, at about seven o’clock, there would be the hooting of a horn, the flash of lights along a drive, and up the steps a shouting of “We’ve brought some ice; and some new Sophie Tucker records. So we’re hoping that we’ll be welcome.”
These visits were always unexpected; such visits always are in Martinique. During our first weeks we invited people for fixed days, made preparation and kept meals back for them. But we soon learnt that in Martinique, when people say “We will come out on Wednesday,” they usually mean “some time in the middle of the week.” So after a while we said, just vaguely, “Come out when you’d like a bathe.” And sometimes they did and sometimes they didn’t. And when they did it simply meant the adding of an egg or two to the omelette or the opening of another tin. And we would bathe and chatter and play the new Sophie Tucker records and dance on the balcony in a moon-silvered dusk. But whether friends came out or not, by half-past ten the bungalow was quiet and asleep.
§
Into Fort de France we went as rarely as possible. For that is about the first thing that travel teaches one: that life in a town is just not possible. Of the many tropical towns that I have visited, Penang is the only one in which I should be happy to make a home. It would be surprising, indeed, if it were otherwise. The population of every tropical town is either commercial or administrative. Everyone has a definite reason for being there. There is no leisured class to create an interior world that exists for its own amusement. Since the majority of such towns are of recent growth, there are no interesting buildings, no picture galleries to be seen. In consequence, there is absolutely nothing for the unoccupied tourist to do till offices close at five o’clock and companionship is again at his disposal.
Fort de France was no exception. It is a pretty town. From the balcony of the club you look out over the green stretch of the Savane. On your left is a flanking of yellow houses; to your right the blue water of the harbour, the masts of schooners, the red funnels of cargo boats and liners. In front of you, circled by sentinel palms, is the white statue of Josephine, her face turned southwards to the Trois Ilets, where she was born. Fort de France is easily the prettiest town in the Leeward and Windward groups, and it was charitable of fate to divert northwards the cyclone that in the autumn of 1928 raged over the Antilles. At Guadeloupe there was little that cannot be rebuilt. And over Guadeloupe the cyclone raged very mercilessly.
“Heaven knows how we shall get into port to-morrow,” said the captain of the Pellerin on the eve of our arrival. “I don’t know what there’ll be to recognise it by.”
Yet, when we did arrive, Pointe à Pitre seemed very little different from the picture that my memory had formed of it. I had only spent a day and a night there on my way toward Panama, but those few hours had left an ineffaceable impression of dejected squalor. With its straight, puddle-spotted streets, its wooden and tin houses, garnished with slipshod balconies, it always looked as though it were about to fall to pieces. It reminded me of the kind of small town in an early Keystone comedy, that was destined every inch of it to be knocked down in the last hundred feet of film. The cyclone, instead of altering Pointe à Pitre, seemed to have put it in harmony with itself. In the same way that when you set side by side a photograph of a landscape and a modern painting of it you say of the photograph, “That’s what it looks like,” and of the painting, “That’s what it really is”; so I walked through Pointe à Pitre, remembering Pointe á Pitre as it had been sixteen months earlier, as I paused before the battered houses, the piles of masonry and iron, the spreadeagled balconies, the uprooted trees, the twisted bandstand, the unroofed and unclocked cathedral, on to whose floor through innumerable apertures the rain was pouring; “Yes,” I kept saying to myself, of this melancholy provincial town through which the business of life in market and shop and office was continuing in unaltering indolence. “This is how it really is.”
It was not till we got out of Pointe à Pitre into the country that we realised what the cyclone had really meant. The effect there was extraordinary. The countryside, with its coconut palms lopped and uprooted, gave the impression of a face that has not been shaved for several days. Like a blunt razor the cyclone had passed over it. As I drove through the wrecked landscape towards Basseterre I thanked Heaven very humbly that it had spared the green Savane, and the white statue and the palm trees guarding it; that in all its beauty and friendliness Fort de France should be waiting there untouched to welcome me.
And yet, lovely though it is, Fort de France is intolerably hot. Set in a basin of hills, its very excellencies as a harbour make it the less habitable. Not a breath of air reaches it. Everyone who can afford to, lives out of town, in the cool and quiet of the hills. Not only is Fort de France extremely hot, it is also very noisy. The streets are narrow, the cars are many. The chauffeurs drive with the recklessness, but not the skill, of Parisian taximen. When cars were introduced into Northern Siam the sense of speed was so intoxicating to the Laos that in Chiengmai artificial bumps were raised in the main streets to force the chauffeur to drive slowly. I have often wished, as I have seen disaster approaching me at every corner, that the authorities in Fort de France would take the same precautions. But it is doubtful if it would have much effect. If the roads were so bumpy as the scenic railway in San Francisco, I think that the Martiniquaises would continue to rush their fences, trusting blindly in the immunity of one-way streets and a hand rhythmically pressed upon a horn. All the time horns are honking. It is one’s last, it is one’s first, impression of Fort de France. Long before evening one’s head has begun to ache.
The casual traveller, with nothing definite to occupy him, finds his attention concentrated exclusively on the incessant noise. Only during the week-ends is there systematised entertainment.
§
Every Sunday morning there was cock-fighting. It was worth seeing once. The Gallodrome was a wooden building, arranged in five galleries. On the top gallery there was a piano and a bar. You paid five francs at the door. The pit was about twenty feet across. For the first minute and a half a fight is thrilling. The cocks are introduced to one another by their owners: they are placed on the edge of a circle five feet apart. The instant they are let loose they fly at one another. Quite often in that first leap, with a single blow, one of them is killed. For a moment or two it is a whirlwind of blows and feathers. But after that minute it grows uninteresting. The cocks do not, as in the North of England, wear spurs. They peck wearily at the back of each other’s necks. The chief interest is in the audience: in the half-castes and negroes who bounce excitedly in their seats, who shriek encouragement to the animals, who shout their odds across the pit.
Nominally the fight is to the death; actually it is as long as the cocks will fight. After a quarter of an hour or so they stand, blind and weary, gasping and indifferent, the fight forced out of them. Their owners take them by the wings and place them at the edge of the circle, facing each other, five feet apart. They make no movement. Inside that circle there is a smaller circle. Again the animals are lifted by their wings. They are within a few inches now of one another. They do not move. The crowd yells fiercely. Then suddenly one pecks forward. The other turns away its head. The fight is finished. Pandemonium is released. The negroes jump in their seats and shriek with excitement, waving the francs that they have lost or won, while the owners carry away the cocks, scrape the skins of their heads and legs with a small pocket knife, slit the congested flesh about the neck and pour lemon juice over the wounds, and hope for equal or greater fortune in the following week.
Within five minutes another fight has started.
Cock-fighting is the chief sport in Martinique. Every district has its fight on Sunday.
In the villages there are no cock-pits. The negroes form a rough circle round the cocks, and as the fight moves the circle follows up and down the length of the village street. From a distance it looks like a scrum in Rugby football. Children perch themselv
es on verandahs and on the roofs of cabins; they shriek with laughter when the cocks fall into a gutter or stumble over a more than ordinarily misplaced cobble-stone. It is a hilarious business. But to see cock-fighting at its best you have to see it at the three big centres, at Trinité, St. Pierre and Fort de France. In the same way that, although there is a Festa of some sort in every village on the six or seven Sundays before Lent, to see carnival at its best, you have got to go to Fort de France.
§
For the actual carnival I was at Dominica, And there it was a subdued affair. Two years earlier there had been trouble, a police officer had been beaten very nearly to death. Dominica is a curious place. Once a French possession and geographically a French possession still, it is in feeling more French than English. It is Roman Catholic. The natives speak Creole. Smuggling, that the police are powerless to check, is constantly carried on between Martinique and Guadeloupe. Dominica is the Ireland of the Antilles. It is the loveliest of the islands, and it is the most difficult to manage. It should be prosperous, but blight after blight has fallen on the crops. First coffee was destroyed. Then when the lime industry was established—Dominica is the centre of Rose’s lime juice—a disease struck that. The country is very mountainous. When Columbus was asked to describe the island he crumpled up a sheet of paper and tossed it on the table. The roads are so bad that fruit cannot be profitably marketed. Dominica is a constant drain on the Imperial Government’s exchequer. The more money that is spent there the less settled does life become. Anything might have happened in Roseau during that wild week of carnival had not a gunboat providentially and unexpectedly arrived in harbour. Many stories are told in explanation of that gunboat’s presence. It is said that an admiral expressed a wish for grape fruit. There was no grape fruit, he was told. Where could grape fruit be got? Nowhere nearer than Dominica. Could any excuse be devised for sending a gunboat there? Papers were consulted, an American courier had passed two days before. There might be a mail there. That was sufficient excuse when an admiral was hungry. And so at the very moment when Roseau was in the hands of the rebels a gunboat appeared in the harbour. There was no fighting. The crowds dispersed, the sailors were not even aware that there had been any trouble. The sight of the gunboat was enough. In five minutes order had been restored. That evening the admiral ate grape fruit before consommé.
Probably the story is untrue. But the arrival of the gunboat was no less providential on that account. In the following year the carnival was forbidden. And when I was there, though the carnival took place, no sticks were carried, and at six o’clock the streets were cleared. It was an orderly affair. It lasted for two days. In the morning from the hour of nine the streets were patrolled by small groups of men and women with masks and costumes, a drum at their head, at their back a crowd of ecstatic urchins. The costumes were as various as the local store and local wit permitted. There were pierrots and pierrettes, there were sailors and there were cowboys, there were men dressed as women, padded with footballs to give their skirts the effect of a Victorian bustle. Some tried to make themselves appear attractive, the majority tried to make themselves as plain as possible. In Fort de France there were occasional satirists. One afternoon a group of men, dressed up as women in skirts five inches long, had paraded the streets singing “Malpropre baissez la robe.” Most of the songs that are sung at carnival are impromptu references to some local event. The chief song at Roseau commemorated an attempted suicide.
Sophia, drink wine and iodine.
Why, why, Sophia?
During the afternoon Roseau echoed the name Sophia. Every shop was shut. Half the population was “running mask.” The stray groups that had shouted down the streets during the morning had joined up into a solid phalanx, seventy yards in length, that marched backwards and forwards, singing and dancing, cracking whips; while separate bands of twenty to a dozen girls, dressed uniformly, marched with small orchestras to solicit alms. Each band represented something. One band dressed in yellow represented Colman’s mustard, another Titbits, a third, hung with red, white and blue, carrying plates of oranges and maize and bread-fruit, “Dominica Produce.” It was the Martinique carnival on a small scale, exceeded by it in the same way that in its turn Martinique is exceeded by Trinidad. If you want to see street carnival go to Port of Spain. But if you want to see that of which street carnival is the symbol you will stay in Fort de France. In white-run sections of the world I never expect to see a more astounding exhibition than the Bal Lou-Lou.
Twice a week, on Saturdays and Sundays, there is a ball, or rather there are several. There is the Palais and the Casino. But it is at the Select Tango that you will see it at its best. There is nothing to tell you that you are to see anything extraordinary. At the end of a quiet street facing a river there is a large tin building. You pay your twelve francs and you are in a long room hung with lanterns and paper streamers. A gallery runs round it, on which tables are set, and at each of whose extremities there is a bar. It is rather like a drill-hall. And as you lean over the balcony you have the impression that you are at a typical provincial palais de danse. You see the kind of people that you would expect to see. On the gallery there are one or two family parties of white people. The white women will not dance. They will look on, and they will leave early. In the hall below are a certain number of your Frenchmen of good family with their dusky mistresses. There will be some white policemen and white soldiers; but for the most part it is a coloured audience of shop assistants, minor officials, small proprietors; typical provincial dance-hall. And at first in the dance itself there is nothing that you would not expect to see in such a place. The music is more barbaric, more gesticulatory; but that you would expect to find. As the evening passes, as the custom at the bar grows busier, the volume of sound increases, but that, too, you would expect. That you have seen before. You grow tired and a little bored. You begin to wonder whether it is worth staying on. Then suddenly there is the wail of a clarionette. A whisper runs round the tables: “Danse du pays.” In a moment the galleries are empty.
It is danced face to face. The girl clasps her arms round the man’s neck. The man holds her by the hips. The music is slow and tense. “Le talent pour la danseuse,” wrote Moreau St. Mery, “est dans la perfection avec laquelle elle peut faire
mouvoir ses hanches et la partie inférieure de ses reins en conservant tout le reste du corps dans un espèce d’immobilité.” The couples appear scarcely to move. In a dance of twenty minutes they will not make more than one revolution of the room. They stand, close clasped and swaying. The music does not grow louder or more fast. It grows fiercer, more barbaric. The mouths of the dancers grow lax; their eyes are clouded, their movements exceed symbol. “La danse s’arrive et bientôt elle offre un tableau dont tout les traits d’abord voluptueux deviennent ensuite laxifs. Il serait impossible de peindre la’chica’1 avec son véritable caractére et je me bornerai à dire que l’impression qu’elle fait est si puissante que l’africain ou le créole de n’importe quelle nuance qui le verrait danser sans émotion passerait pour avoir perdu iusqu’aux derniéres étincelles de la sensibilité.”
That is on ordinary evenings. During carnival it is fantastic. A stranger arriving at the Select Tango at one o’clock in the morning would imagine himself mad. He would not believe it possible that in a white-run community the payment of twelve francs at a public turnstile would admit him to such a Bedlam. He would imagine that such spectacles were held behind doors as rigidly guarded as those of the Bal des Quatre Arts. The noise is deafening. The galleries and hall are crowded. Most of the girls are masked. They wear gloves and stockings so that not an inch of dark skin appears. Some of them, it is whispered, are white women in disguise. They might well be. It is a dance in which caste and blood are alike forgotten. Everyone is drunk; not with alcohol, but with music. People are dancing by themselves. They shriek and wave their arms. They seize a partner, dance with her for a moment, then break away. A girl will be dancing by herself. “Un danseur
s’approche d’elle, s’élance tout à coup et tombe au mesure presque à la toucher. Il recule. Il s’êlance encore, et la provoque à la lutte la plus séduisante” The young Frenchmen in the arms of their mulatto mistresses will parody and exaggerate the antics of the negroes. A woman embraced between two men will be shrieking to friends up on the gallery. In the thronged centre of the ball couples close-clasped will stand swaying, their feet and shoulders motionless, a look of unutterable ecstasy upon their faces.
But it is not possible to describe the Bal Lou-Lou. The only phrases that would describe it are incompatible with censorship.
§
Once every five days or so we went into Fort de France, and it was always with a feeling of excitement that we began the day. It was fun after five days of bare legs and open throats to put on trousers and arrange a tie. The seven-kilometre drive assumed the proportion of high adventure; which in point of fact, with a chauffeur such as ours, it was. We felt very like country cousins coming up for a day’s shopping as we deposited with the head waiter of the Hôtel de la Paix a list of groceries and a vast wooden box in which to store them. There was the excitement of discovering at the photographer’s how many of the snapshots we had taken during the previous weeks were recognisable comments on the landscape. And by the time that was finished it would be half-past eleven.