by Maryse Conde
But Cathy covered this answer with a stream of words, cries and hysterical laughter.
“I shall think it a dream tomorrow. And yet I know it’s not a dream because in all these years I haven’t dreamed of you even once. Not once! Even in my dreams you abandoned me. Where have you been? Your heart is really like a rock, a boulder, a cliff in the middle of your chest to have left me so long without news. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I think I shall go mad with happiness. When did you get back? Where are you living?”
“At l’Engoulvent,” he managed to get in.
“At l’Engoulvent!” she exclaimed. “You have made your peace with Justin?”
Razyé laughed. Gradually the happiness he felt at seeing Cathy, and especially the effect his return had on her, illuminated his entire countenance and he was transformed.
“I wouldn’t say that. I’d say he thinks he’s found a drinking companion.”
Then he asked, almost in a whisper: “So you’re married?” At the tone of this question, a mixture of reproach and extreme tenderness, Aymeric broke in.
“Cathy, are you going to serve the tea or are we going to stand here and take root?”
Cathy pulled herself together.
“Let’s sit down. Let’s sit down. Razyé, sit down here beside me. Let me hold your hand because I don’t want you to disappear again. Let me introduce you to Irmine, Aymeric’s little sister.”
Irmine, the last of the seven Linsseuil daughters waiting to be married, had just completed her studies with very poor marks at the Catholic boarding school of Saint-Joseph de Cluny at Versailles. She had a reputation for being impertinent and capricious. What exasperated Aymeric was the way she looked at Razyé. Her eyes sparkled with curiosity and excitement, like a child peeping at something she had been told not to.
He choked on the second cup of chocolate that had just been served him, almost suffocated, and got up furious.
“I apologize, I don’t feel very well.”
Then he turned to Razyé, who was watching him in amusement. “Stay, make yourself at home.”
Ever since he was quite small, the vexations of his mind had translated into sicknesses of his body. A bad mark at school and his temperature soared. A scolding from his papa and he lost his voice. He closed the door on Cathy’s exclamations of joy that felt like daggers, and mounted the huge stairway lined with potted ornamental palms that led to his mother’s quarters. He found her sitting in a rocking chair, wearing twisted leeches for earrings, for with old age her blood was thickening in her veins and Doctor Louisor constantly prescribed for her castor oil and bloodletting.
“Misfortune has just entered this house,” he said darkly, as he sat down.
Madame de Linsseuil did not answer. For her, misfortune had entered the house of Belles-Feuilles a long time ago, in the shape of Cathy; she had only to count the number of calamities that had befallen them ever since she had come to live with them. Two years ago, just before Christmas, during a family outing to the waterfalls at Moreau, the son of Amedee, her husband’s brother, had broken his neck on a boulder. The following Palm Sunday, Eléonore, her first cousin, had fainted in church shortly after the Agnus Dei and had died in the tilbury that was hurrying her home. On 15 August, her eldest daughter’s twins had drowned in a pond under the eyes of their nursemaid. Three days later, a fire had started in the cane fields and left a hundred acres scorched, bristling with burnt stumps. At the church in Petit-Canal there was a nigger priest who sat down in the confessional and gave communion like a white man. What worse could happen?
“This Razyé has come back,” he explained gloomily. “Well dressed, from head to toe. If it weren’t for his color, his face would let him into any respectable salon.”
One of the bloated leeches detached itself from the ear of Madame de Linsseuil and dropped onto her satin peignoir. She slipped it into a glass jar, commenting: “Well, he must have changed then. I caught sight of him once at church with the late Hubert Gagneur and he looked like Satan in person.”
She hesitated.
“With the reputation he’s got around here, aren’t you going to stop him from setting foot inside this house?”
Aymeric shook his head.
“It’s impossible. You know that Cathy loves him as if he really were her brother.”
Her brother? Come now! But Madame de Linsseuil cherished her son too much to let herself say what she thought in the secret of her heart.
Cathy lay with her eyes wide open in the dark, overwhelmed by the violence of her emotions.
All around her the shadows of the room, curtained off in heavy repp, locked her in like a tomb. She could hear the spasmodic breathing of Aymeric as he lay with his back to her in bed. He had declared himself sick with fever and a servant had had to bring him a tea of soursop leaves. She was no fool. All this had been caused by Razyé, the return of Razyé. How tiresome men were. Good Lord! What was he blaming her for? For having shown her happiness at finding the man she thought she had lost forever? Had she ever kept her feelings for him a secret? If he loved her as he said he did over and over again, if he wanted her to be happy, he should not have received him so coldly, with a worried, forced expression, but with a burst of friendship.
She slipped out of bed.
Under her feet the century-old floorboards creaked. At night the old house groaned and shook and resonated with all the sounds of its secrets locked in its dressers and cupboards. Rapes, murders and theft of all sorts. Sometimes it would wail like a widow or a maman separated from her infants. Sometimes it jabbered like a madwoman.
Suffocating, Cathy quickly crossed the bedroom and went out onto the landing. An oil lamp that was always kept burning downstairs cast grotesque shadows on the framed portraits of Linsseuils in rows along the walls.
Cathy entered her sons’ bedroom and immediately caught that smell of children coddled, lotioned and perfumed that had never been hers. However hard poor Nelly Raboteur had worked on her, she had still smelled rancid and sour. As a wild young girl her skin cracked like pottery that had stayed too long in the oven. She would scratch herself, and the scratches would become infected under the scab and swell with pus and dead skin. She had Iotas, fungus spots, all up her legs and sunburn all over her face. Her hair tied in two braids was singed, spiked with stickseed and tiny prickles. Sometimes when she scratched her head she would crush lice under her half-mourning nails. From mounting Toussine without a saddle her buttocks were hard and calloused. She urinated standing up, legs wide apart, the way she had seen Razyé do it, and sprayed the jet of urine onto the mad ants that went crazy. On Sunday mornings, when Nelly made her sit down in a tub and scrubbed her with a bunch of leaves, the water turned black. Razyé was even worse, and Nelly used to hold her nose when she picked up his clothes.
It must have been because of these differences that her children were so foreign to her. When the nursemaid brought them to her, their hair shining with brilliantine, wrapped in velvet and English embroidery, harnessed like parade horses, she hardly dared touch them. The color of their skin, the blond down on their heads and the blue of their eyes fascinated her. Was it really her who had made these little dribbling darlings with porcelain cheeks? Frightened by her reticence, the children did not dare approach her. Their papa got all the attention. They ran to him as soon as he was within reach. They clung to his trousers and passed their hands with great delight over the bumps and hollows of his face. Yet, during the first months of her pregnancies, she had been so happy! The body that had wanted to die seemed to be reconciled with her since it was bringing back life. With a feeling of guilt she caressed Isidore’s and Déodat’s tiny hands. How soundly they slept! They didn’t need her any more asleep than they did when awake.
She went over to the window. A thin crescent moon in its first quarter barely lit the drive of royal palms, the lawns, the flower beds and in the distance the swell of sugarc
ane that rippled as far as the horizon. The great house stood on top of its hill like an island in the middle of the ocean or a lighthouse on its rock. It was then, through the darkness, that she distinctly saw a black horseman as straight as an I on his black horse.
It was Razyé! It was him!
Her first reaction was to rush out and join him as she used to do so that they could gallop the whole night through to the end of their desires. In the sky, the moon would have given way to the sun before they had quenched themselves. Then her common sense prevailed. How could she just get up and leave her husband to his cold feet and cotton night shirt in the conjugal bed? Well might we ask how he would receive her on her return and what excuse she would give to justify her absence. As if he reproached her for pondering and hesitating, the horseman disappeared as quickly as he had come.
Cathy was shivering and she decided to return to her room. Suddenly she was gripped with apprehension. Why had Razyé come back? Why was he living at l’Engoulvent? Something told her that all this was a bad omen and that he had not come as a Christian to turn the other cheek to those who had offended him.
On the landing, a white shape almost made her shriek, then she recognized her little sister-in-law, a braid down her back, in her boarding school nightdress.
“Irmine!” she exclaimed. “You gave me such a fright!”
“I can’t sleep,” Irmine murmured. “Cathy, tell me about Razyé.”
“Razyé?” Cathy scoffed. “It’s difficult to talk about attachments formed when you are children. But don’t go by his looks or fancy French. He’s a person without education or culture. A kind of soubarou, a wildman of the forest, a runaway slave. I’m sure he’s never opened a book in his entire life, and though he knows how to count, he can hardly sign his name.”
Irmine shrugged her shoulders.
“What’s that to me? Do you think my French is so good or that I’ve read a lot of books in my life? He’s not like any of those wimps they want us to fall in love with . . . I bet he . . .”
Thereupon, she bent over and whispered into Cathy’s ear.
By way of an answer Cathy sent her flying down the stairs.
She got up, furious, but at that moment the lamp downstairs went out, and the stairway was plunged into darkness.
8
A Forest Sojourn
Every year during the second two weeks of August, on the recommendation of Doctor Louisor, Aymeric took Cathy to Dolé-les-Bains to take the waters. The old doctor, who had taken care of her since her wedding, was worried about a persistent cough that plagued her every evening at dusk and heartbeats that the slightest distress quickened or on the contrary slowed down. Usually Cathy looked forward to this forest sojourn. She loved the hotel at Dolé-les-Bains, slumbering amidst its thick vegetation like the castle of Sleeping Beauty. She adored the same old suite she occupied with her husband on the first floor. The front windows looked out onto the islands of Les Saintes, prettily arranged in a semicircle on the silky blue sea. The back windows almost touched a dark green tangle of trees, creepers and vines. Way up above, the formidable volcano stood watch, a pipe between her teeth like a shrew. Breathing an air so different from that of Grande-Terre, cooler, damper and softer, Cathy always felt like another person, no longer estranged or tormented, but in harmony with herself, almost happy. That year, however, she could not bear the thought of being separated from Razyé, having just found him again. Without even consulting Aymeric, she invited Razyé to accompany them.
They set off at first light in a rented carriage with Irmine, Lucinda Lucius, two other servant girls, the children and their mabo.
Inside the carriage the atmosphere was tense. Ever since the incident on the landing, the two sisters-in-law no longer spoke to each other unless they had to. As for Aymeric, he was turning the same questions over and over in his mind. Should he have stopped Razyé coming with them? Shouldn’t he have put his foot down as a husband? Only Razyé watched the landscape go by, hiding behind the smoke of his Havana cigar, as if nothing was the matter.
Once past the River Salee, the scenery undergoes a sudden transformation. The traveller enters the actual island of Guadeloupe, still named Basse-Terre, and he leaves behind him the arid landscape of limestone bluffs spiked with prickly pears, the salt-colored sandy coves and the white madreporic cliffs. The air is heavy with the taste and smell of rain. The damp sky lowers and darkens. Then the outline of the mountains becomes apparent, now grey, now dark green, lying across the horizon like a herd of lazy cows. The first banana groves appear and the vegetation becomes thicker and thicker. Soon, it is the realm of the candlewood, the mastwood, the red mahoe and the mastic trees that soar to the clouds.
The journey took almost the entire day. They rumbled over rivers hiding under shaky bridges, and at bends in the road, villages loomed up, wedged between sea and mountain. They arrived at Dolé-les-Bains when the light was fading and the fireflies had started to glow. As usual, however, Cathy had not given enough thought to what she was doing. Never at Dolé-les-Bains had they received a negro guest, and it required much persuasion by Aymeric for the hotel management to accept a man of color. Finally they carried his bags to a storage room under the roof.
In order to make up for this humiliation, which he accepted with his usual impassiveness, Cathy threw herself around his neck, without even waiting for her trunks to be carried up.
“Come, let me show you the forest. I come here so often I know the name of every plant, every tree and every creeper by heart. I can tell you the name of the candlewood and mastwood tree or the oilcloth flower, the goosefoot creeper and the morning glory.”
Then she dragged him away in a fit of laughter.
When she returned to the hotel, the stars were hanging in their usual spot in a crepe-de-Chine sky. The air reverberated with all sorts of sounds: the croaking of frogs and toads forever thirsting after the soft rainwater, the song of the hot springs as they flowed under the vegetation, and the lament of the gullies as they furrowed the belly of the earth in every direction. Was it as late as that?
She took fright. Picking up her skirts, she dashed up the stairs leading to the first floor. On entering the salon only Irmine was to be found, melancholically drinking lemon-grass tea in the company of Lucinda Lucius.
“Where’s Monsieur?” she asked the servant girl, out of breath.
But before the latter could answer, Irmine wailed: “I would like to be out walking in the forest too.”
“I’d like to see you,” Cathy jibed. “You who can’t put one foot in front of the other, you’d be falling and stumbling over the roots.”
Irmine started to cry.
“Is the whole stay going to be like this? Will you go on keeping Razyé to yourself like you did this evening?”
Cathy sat down in front of her.
“Now listen to me,” she said in a serious tone of voice. “I’ve already told you to get Razyé out of your head.”
“Why?” the other shouted. “Because you want him all to yourself?”
It was Cathy’s turn to shout.
“What do you want? A child in your belly? Is that what you want?”
Irmine shook her head with disgust.
“You say he’s your friend, and that’s how you speak of him? It shows the sort of person you are. You’re nothing but a hypocrite, a viper’s tongue.”
Cathy threw herself onto her, clawing her, and they both rolled on the ground like two slave girls fighting over the same man. On hearing such a commotion Aymeric came out of the bedroom, pale and haggard, so distressed had he been by Cathy’s behavior.
“What on earth is going on?” he thundered.
Cathy got up and grudgingly had to explain to him what had happened. He then turned to Irmine and said roughly:
“For one of you to be crazy about him is quite enough. I’m not talking about his color. The Lo
rd knows that in my eyes a negro is no different from a white or a mulatto. But he’s an individual without a name, without an education and without any virtue whatsoever. We don’t know what he does or how he earns his living. I no longer want to hear his name mentioned in my presence.”
Cathy, who had never seen her husband in a temper, was stunned.
As a result of this incident, the stay went wretchedly, and only the children profited from the change of air. Aymeric read in his room from morning to night and thus devoured the complete works of Victor Hugo in two weeks. Cathy no longer dared leave the salon and embroidered an entire table-runner in cross stitch under the watchful eye of Lucinda Lucius. As for Razyé, he carefully oiled his rifle every day and went off to slaughter the thrushes, partridges and woodpigeons that abounded on the upper slopes. He would return to his room mid-afternoon and emerge an hour later for a long walk in the forest. When finally he got back to the hotel, the oil lamps had been lit and the guests were eating in the dining room. Everyone looked up to watch as he sat down alone at a secluded table and noisily lapped up his soup. After the meal he went and joined a crowd of no-good individuals who played cards for money in the dives at Trois-Riviéres, and pocketed the money he won from beating them all hollow.
Lucinda Lucius, however, could see with her own two eyes that Irmine, at first in a foul mood, grew increasingly cheerful as the days went by. She would get up humming the tune to various biguines, and it was a Ban mwen an ti bo here and a Doudou ki jou? pa jodi la! there. At lunch she nibbled at her food, had a short siesta, then at the end of the afternoon disappeared under the tulip trees in the park. When she got back from her interminable walks her face was red and flushed. Lucinda Lucius decided to get to the bottom of things.
9
Lucinda Lucius’s Tale
The great house of Belles-Feuilles is the jail of my life. That’s where I was born, where Estella, my maman, was born before me, and Fanotte, the maman of my maman, as far back as Fankora, my Bambara ancestor, who was captured by some “mad dogs in the bush” outside the walls of Segu while she was returning from washing her clothes as white as cotton in the waters of the Joliba. Her wedding with a nobleman from the house of Diarra was to be held three moons later. Instead of which she found herself captive, a wooden collar around her neck, being forced to march to the tip of Cap Vert.