Wonder

by Dominique Fortier

  When he left the village of Le Prêcheur to settle in Saint-Pierre a month later, he had grown a sparse beard and developed new calluses on his hands, not from the sharp edges of shells but from the varnished leaves of coffee trees; his hair and clothes had the woody aroma of the roasting greenish beans that would be infused to obtain a brew the pickers drank morning and night, scalding and thick as molasses. He also had banknotes in his pockets.

  The night he came back to town, he went to the Blessé-Bobo tavern in the port and saw Gontran de La Chevrotière, who didn’t recognize him. Leaning on the bar with associates dressed like himself in velvet and lace-trimmed shirts, everyone fairly tipsy and thrilled to be slumming like this, the popinjay was busy greeting each of his own rejoinders with a roar of laughter.

  The room was crammed: sailors back on terra firma after long months at sea; clerks, vendors, and labourers from the area, here to spend their day’s earnings on cool beer and spicy rum; a few tourists, white, black, brown, and beige men with courtesans’ gowns forming bright spots amid the noisy and multicoloured mosaic. One of the girls, a mulatto with very brown skin and delicate features, was sitting at the bar, straight-backed, smile plastered on her lips, eyes alert, her slender waist hugged in a red dress with a flared, ruffled skirt like the corolla of a hibiscus blossom that begins to crumple as soon as it opens.

  Gontran approached her, walking in what he hoped was a comical way, but hesitant because he was intoxicated; to the great amusement of his companions, he plunged his hand into the bodice of the young woman. She shook him off with one brisk movement but he grabbed her by the waist and, to hurrahs, planted a resounding kiss on her mouth. After Baptiste saw Gontran’s fingers climb again up the flounces on the bright red skirt, he got up reflexively, felt in his belt for the knife he’d been using since childhood to open oysters, slice mangoes, and cut off the heads of fish, then noted the surprise painted on Gontran’s face as the youth brought his hand to his side, where a red stain was spreading. Baptiste met the girl’s gaze, at once incredulous and grateful; she had dropped her smile as if getting rid of a mask.

  A circle formed rapidly around Gontran de La Chevrotière, stretched out on the ground, shrieking like a stuck pig, while Baptiste went calmly back to his seat, where he had time to finish his molasses beer before the gendarmes arrived to handcuff him.

  He was assigned to a bright cell furnished with an iron bed where he spent idle days, sitting or lying down, following the activities of the police force, inhaling the smells from the port, and, most of all, through a window striped with broadly spaced bars, gazing out at the sea. Having discovered that the metal rods were set in a cement made of sand and crushed shells that the salt air turned to dust if it was rubbed even a little energetically, he quickly dislodged three bars, which allowed him to go out once night had fallen. He paced the streets, had a drink, looked at the girls, and came back before dawn, in time for the first inspection by the new guard starting his shift. At that time he was served a jug of cloudy water, a hunk of bread, and a thin soup with a few shrivelled scraps of vegetables, which he stretched out all day, knowing he’d get nothing else to eat. He would be careful to take sustenance during the night, but the alcohol he poured down his throat, which left a burning sensation in his gullet, gave him a cruel thirst, and more than once, without a thought of shame, he begged an indifferent guard to bring him something to drink – a request that was always ignored. At sunset, as soon as he had left his cell he rushed to the water tank next to the police station, plunged in the wooden spoon attached with a cord and took long swigs of sun-warmed water in which floated the smell of wood and sometimes a few whitish nits he later imagined with a shiver of disgust writhing in his stomach.

  Why escape like that every night? Unquestionably because of his longing for freedom, a need to prove to himself that he was not exactly a prisoner, that although he was behind bars every morning it was partly because he had chosen confinement or at least was not its helpless victim. In that case why choose to come back and slip inside these four walls? Why not instead embark on a ship bound for Dominica or Saint Lucia, or simply walk to the village of Le Prêcheur? If he returned to his cell every morning it was not because he’d heard that Gontran de La Chevrotière had been operated on twice and hadn’t yet started walking, nor because the girl hadn’t come to see him, she who could have testified in his favour during the trial for which the date had not yet been set. Simply, when the dawn rose after his first nocturnal escape, when the sun was glowing red above the port, staining the sky with the pinks and purples seen in the cavities of shells, it had occurred to him that he had nowhere else to go.

  “I’M CONFUSED,” SAID THE SENIOR MONSIEUR de La Chevrotière, who then took a swig of Armagnac for comfort.

  Sitting in a well-padded armchair in the stylish office of his friend and colleague La Tour-Major, he looked at the four men gathered around him, none of whom seemed to share his agitation. His mind at ease about the health of his son Gontran, who was still hospitalized but, he’d been assured, out of danger and would soon recover all his faculties – whatever that meant – he now had time to devote to more pressing matters, notably the election of his friend Charles-Zéphyrin de La Tour-Major to the position of deputy. Just then a muffled growling could be heard from outside and his fingers clenched the brocade armrest.

  “Yet it couldn’t be simpler, my dear fellow: we do nothing,” said La Tour-Major, looking straight ahead and with a hint of irritation in his voice.

  “I agree absolutely,” said Edmond Desmarteaux in the smug tone of one who has made a brave and difficult decision.

  “But …” insisted La Chevrotière feebly, from a need to be reassured yet again rather than to raise a true objection, “is there really no danger?”

  “None at all,” confirmed La Tour-Major.

  “None,” repeated Desmarteaux, full of authority.

  Mount Pelée had been rumbling for a while now, almost imperceptibly at first, then more and more loudly, until no one could ignore it, although nobody knew exactly when it had started. On the streets, in simple houses and elegant dwellings, from private clubs all the way to the gilded salons in the governor’s residence, to the stalls in the port, to the ships arriving at or leaving the island, people commented with interest but with no particular fear on the events on the mountain, as they would have done for any meteorological phenomenon – a cloudburst, a hailstorm – or astronomical one – a comet or a lunar eclipse – seen as uncommon but not exceptional. For Mount Pelée had always been at the heart of the lives of the people of Martinique, accustomed whenever they turned their heads to finding its massive silhouette standing out against the horizon, a form as familiar as that of a big sleeping dog one might step over absentmindedly without thinking it could bite. Its very name testified to a kind of amused familiarity; it was peeled, that is bald, like the paunchy uncles or salesmen people pointed at, laughing, when their backs were turned, as bald as the governor under his wig in days gone by.

  Admittedly, the volcano was neither dead nor extinguished, everyone knew that, but its bursts of activity were too rare, too weak, too decorative to be taken seriously. All the more so because this time they were happening in the midst of a crucial election campaign. It pitted Charles-Zéphyrin de La Tour-Major, a powerful white béké whose family had been in Martinique for three generations and owned nearly one-fifth of the land on the island, who had held the position of deputy on the General Council for twenty years and intended to give it over when the time came only to his son who, for the time being, was still in short pants, against Maurice Larue, an obscure individual from Saint-Pierre who’d been able, no one knew how, to amass the support needed to take on the formidable outgoing deputy and who claimed that he would regulate the work hours and salaries of plantation workers and establish a great many other regrettable measures in the name of some vague principles of equity and humanism. Aside from his harebrained schemes, Larue’s complexion was not absolutely white, wh
ich to La Tour-Major added insult to injury. It was natural then for this fascinating political joust to displace in his guests’ concerns the mood swings of a temperamental mountain.

  “With a little luck, those half-savages will think the mountain is angry and they’ll be too busy trying to pacify it with the help of God knows what sacrifices to even consider going to vote,” observed Larrivée coldly.

  That idea seemed to gladden everyone.

  “Basically, these minor eruptions are a very good thing,” concluded La Chevrotière, who wanted one last swig of Armagnac, but noticed too late that his glass was empty and took instead a gulp of air which made him cough a little.

  BAPTISTE’S ESCAPADES WERE DISCOVERED WHEN he was caught slipping back between the bars of his cell at dawn on his fifth day of captivity. Not sure if he should be punished for his repeated escapes from prison or for having, so to speak, broken his way in, officials decided to treat him with redoubled severity, and the prisoner was moved to a far less comfortable jail, one from which there was no way to escape.

  The dungeon was stifling, as if all the air had been withdrawn. Unpleasant condensation dripped off the half-metre thick walls, which were marked in places by a sticky, greenish goo that could have been the blood of the stones, flowing since the dawn of time in the silence and the dim light. Over the years the mortar had been covered with a kind of silvery lichen, rough to the touch, that seemed to be half-plant, half-mineral.

  When he first saw this new prison, Baptiste could only think of a tomb. The bulky stone structure was topped with a vaulted roof; its crude ventilation hole, along with a tiny window, constituted the only opening aside from a door with a hatch in it. A small bright circle moved slowly across the ground, following the angle of the sun, a kind of sundial in negative, the blade of light indicating the hour of day on a shadowy surface. To learn how much time had elapsed he could also count on the cathedral bells of Notre-Dame de Bon-Port that slowly sounded the twelve strokes of noon, later on the angelus and vespers. No other sound passed through the thick walls, and soon the prisoner was grateful for the metallic rustling of the feet and antennae of the cockroaches that shared his cell, without whose ceaseless swarming he would have feared he’d gone deaf. For the first time in his life he did not hear the familiar breathing of the sea. The world no longer existed.

  Baptiste thought he was still asleep but was already nearly awake, waving his hands in front of his face, trying in vain to brush away a swarm of buzzing flies and to dispel the acrid stench that caught at his throat. The all too familiar smell had followed him throughout his childhood, when he shared a straw mattress with the youngest of his cousins, Siméon, who wet their bed every night, a smell that soaked his too-short trousers, his well-worn shirts, his too-frizzy hair. Of the whole family, no one had hair as bushy, as finely frizzy, or skin as black.

  His uncle and his aunt were decent folk who discharged their Christian duty in exemplary fashion, looking after this child who wasn’t theirs, giving him food and lodging and asking in return only that, instead of going to school like other boys his age, he spend his days on the beach, gathering mollusks and shellfish from which his aunt would make the soups she sold at the market. The last piece of meat or fish at the very bottom of the pot, the smallest and stringiest, was always reserved for him. He was allowed to sit at the table to eat after all the others had finished their meal. And his aunt made sure she gave Raoul’s clothes to Baptiste once they were threadbare, when it would have been so easy to throw them out. Sometimes at nightfall he was even allowed to try to decipher a few lines in the textbooks of his cousins, who burst out laughing at his hesitations, while every Sunday they lent him a pair of shoes to wear to church where he could not, however, sit with the rest of the family as the pew was not big enough, and had to stand at the back of the nave. Decent folk, indeed.

  Preferring to spend his time on the street rather than with his aunt and uncle, often only coming home for supper, Baptiste had learned the labyrinthine lanes of Saint-Pierre so well that he could have found his way blindfolded. He could pilfer a ripe papaya or a fragrant piece of cheese from a stall whenever the urge struck him, sure that the wronged merchant could never catch him in the maze of winding streets that lacked both traffic signs and official names but were designated by colourful nicknames: Duel Alley, Stairway to Heaven, Road to Hell – the last two famous for their brothels.

  As no one was concerned about his comings and goings, he liked to stroll around the port, where a gaudy crowd milled about, made up of sailors, their hides tanned by salt and sun; girls whose long lace petticoats showed under their slightly too-short skirts, giving people a view of little pointed boots splotched with mud; stray dogs; merchants jabbering a mixture of languages. Of these, Baptiste had learned enough to designate in more than a dozen patois, pidgins, and Creoles, certain essential notions which transcended borders and cultures: sea, eat, money, rum.

  Songs and pieces of music rose up from the boats from Europe and the Americas that were moored at the long wooden jetties. Baptiste had gradually learned to identify the accents, just as he could tell from inhaling the aromas that came from their holds if the boats were transporting spices, fabrics, or slaves, a trade that – outlawed fifty years earlier – was nonetheless still flourishing. Without ever needing to be warned, he steered cautiously clear of those.

  Baptiste opened his eyes at the break of dawn. A slight breeze was coming in the tiny window. He unfolded his aching legs, got up and, with a few steps, crossed the dungeon, shoulders stooped, head down, like a man who has lost something. The silence seemed even deeper than in the dark of night, and he tried to whistle two or three notes simply to hear any sound beside that of his own breathing and his feet on the ground, but his lips were too dry. The jug of water brought to him the day before was nearly empty. He took a cautious sip, not knowing when it would be refilled or replaced, and for a second he wondered if he’d simply been left there to die. Automatically, he slipped his hand into his pocket but his fingers touched only fabric so thin it was frayed. He lay down and curled up in the middle of the cell, directly under the opening, from where he could spy a patch of grey sky turning pink, humming quietly a tune the coffee pickers sang to cheer themselves up in the midday sun.

  “I HAVE COM …” BEGAN MONSIEUR DE LA Chevrotière, who came to a halt like a statue, puffed out his chest and produced a fantastic sneeze, after which he began again, ever so faintly tearful: “I have complete confidence,” brandishing the study prepared by the “scientific commission” set up specifically to scale Mount Pelée, see what was going on there and write a report that would calm troubled minds – and at the same time confirm that an election would be held despite a persistent rumour that it would be put off until a date as yet undetermined.

  For more than a week now a very pale grey ash had been falling onto the city, bleaching roads, houses, even passersby who hadn’t thought to take an umbrella or a parasol. In Martinique, for the first time in centuries, there were no longer Blacks or Whites, all being covered with a fine powder such as duchesses and courtesans used to sprinkle on their faces and their wigs.

  The inhabitants of the small villages scattered at the foot of Mount Pelée were flocking into town, sure they would be safe there. The water in the cascade rushing down the mountainside was now as grey and dense as molten lead; the animals that drank there were afflicted with horrible diarrhea and when it was over they would sometimes lie on their sides and never get up again. Before long the dust falling from the sky covered them, turning them into statues of horses, goats, and dogs.

  The gentlemen from the scientific commission, at that moment sitting with the cream of the island’s bourgeoisie and sipping cool white wine, hadn’t exactly climbed to the mountain top, having been stopped along the way by toxic vapours from the vents, bothered by the sweltering heat that soaked Mount Pelée, their progress hampered by streams of steaming mud, combined obstacles any one of which would have been enough to make them
turn on their heels which, incidentally, were shod in kidskin boots. They had not thought it necessary to inform La Tour-Major of this detail, but had they done so it wouldn’t have changed anything. As they had written in the report now being passed from hand to hand they had been able to observe:

  1. That none of the phenomena to date were in the least abnormal but, on the contrary, were identical to the phenomena observed in every other volcano;

  2. That the volcanic craters being for the most part open, the vapours and mud would continue to expand, as had already happened, without provoking earthquakes or ejections of eruptive rocks;

  3. That the numerous detonations frequently heard were caused by explosions of vapours in the chimney and not at all by a collapse of the terrain;

  4. That the streams of mud and hot water were confined to the valley of the Blanche River;

  5. That the relative positions of the craters and valleys running to the sea indicated that Saint-Pierre was absolutely secure;

  6. That the blackish waters flowing in the Des Pères, Basse-Pointe, Prêcheur, and other rivers had preserved their ordinary temperature and owed their abnormal colour to the ashes they carried.

  The result, they declared, was that “Mount Pelée was no more dangerous to Saint-Pierre than Vesuvius was to Naples.”

  Magnanimously, the members of the commission guaranteed that they would continue to follow the situation – from a reasonable distance – and to keep the population informed.

  “Not at all worried,” concluded Monsieur de La Chevrotière.