by Maryse Conde
Hosannah came and whispered that Fréda, her last-born, was crying to be fed. She had to get up and pass behind Razyé II, breathing in his smell that she would recognize anywhere. It was also Razyé’s, whose cologne, pumice stone and shaving-cream he stole unashamedly. She made her way up the ill-lit staircase, covered with a threadbare chintz carpet, and on the second-floor landing bumped into Razyé. Ever since they had brought Justin-Marie’s body into the house, Razyé had locked himself in his room in the attic. At regular intervals he sent one of the children to buy a bottle of rum or absinthe. Noises could be heard, but you couldn’t tell whether it was sobbing or swearing. You don’t live for almost twenty years with a man without knowing him. Irmine knew he was suffering. But she could not understand a suffering that was unflinching, that made him hard of heart and arrogant of mind. Because of his grief, he would incite more workers to go on strike, set fire to more cane fields and sequester their owners. He would sow even more evil around him instead of deciding to mend his ways.
She stopped in front of him and murmured: “Won’t you come and spend a last moment with him?”
He stumbled and held onto the wall. Then he looked at her pityingly.
“Aren’t you tired of conceiving nonsense? Nonsense and babies, that’s all you’re capable of conceiving. That’s not him down there, and wherever he is, he doesn’t care a damn about those at his wake.”
“What do you know?” she retorted.
He pushed her aside and then swaggered down the stairs, lurching left and right. Once at the bottom, he found his balance and turned toward her.
“I know one thing and that’s for twenty years I’ve been looking for her everywhere and never found her.”
So there they were, back to Cathy!
Disheartened, Irmine swept into her room. Nothing, ever, was going to cure Razyé of his obsession. Of his sickness. But what, for goodness sake, did this Cathy have that other women didn’t have? Three breasts? A belly button covered with mother of pearl? A golden pudendum that oozed benzoin instead of salty water? Irmine recalled she had no conversation, always looked as though she was bored, danced the waltz as if in a frenzy, and when she wasn’t paying attention spoke terrible French. Even so, twenty years after her death she was holding two men at her mercy: Aymeric and Razyé. Life is unjust.
Irmine’s room had the most rudimentary furnishings: a table next to a window draped with a calico curtain, a chair, a rocking chair and a chest of drawers with a metal pitcher and basin. Fréda’s cradle was placed next to her bed and under the mosquito netting the baby was screaming her lungs out. She was a strong little girl who already looked like her papa, dark-skinned as well, with very black, slit, almond-shaped eyes. Irmine took her in her arms and showered her with kisses, while the infant greedily ran its mouth over her cheeks looking for her breast. Why had she brought her into this world from which there was no escape, which she would leave feet first after having been dealt so many of life’s blows? The inevitable suffering allotted to this innocent child made her head spin, and such a vision together with her grief set her crying again. She was still crying when Razyé II pushed open the door. In great agitation he had come to announce that Aymeric was downstairs with Marie, his wife.
“Aymeric?” she repeated, as if she had trouble believing it.
Then she pulled herself together. After all, there was nothing surprising about it. He had come to pay the respects that death requires of us all.
“Did you ask Hosannah to serve them something?” she asked, flustered. “You know how she is!”
Instead of replying, he shut the door behind him and enquired: “It seems Papa has made him lose all his money. They even say he will have to sell the Dargent factory to the colonial authorities. What’s going on between them?”
“What a silly question!” she said nervously. “You know full well your papa works for the Socialists. They’re out for the planters!”
He shook his head.
“It’s not just that. There is something more personal. I want to know what.”
She looked up at him and like a seer she knew he would never have anyone to comfort him or avenge him for so many hurtful words, senseless beatings, spankings, unjust punishments and for a childhood devoid of warmth and light. She felt guilty and her tears fell twice as fast. He came and knelt down at her feet and laid his cheek on her breast that Fréda had abandoned. It was as if he had become an infant again, suckling her breast to start over a new life with her.
“You never thought much of me,” he murmured tenderly. “You always preferred Justin-Marie who wasn’t even your son. Why? Because he was fairer than me? Almost white? What do the whites have that we don’t? They’re no better looking nor stronger. Their hearts are no warmer and their love no better.”
Razyé had said the very same words, she recalled. She was ashamed of herself.
As he repeated his question: “Why?” she clasped his face between her palms and gave him his first mother’s kiss.
They had brought bunches of white lilies and anthuriums that Hosannah did not know where to put. Finally, one of the children thought of using the ewers filled with water, and everyone was greatly relieved. Yet neither Aymeric nor Marie realized the embarrassment they caused with their flowers and elegant clothes. Marie had followed her husband to the wake because it seemed the right thing to do and because he looked so ill that she did not have the heart to leave him. Despite her dutiful words to the family, she was very close to hating Justin-Marie for having contaminated Aymeric and she cursed the day he had turned up on the estate. Now she looked around her in horror. Razyé, as everyone knew, was one of the richest men on the island. He bought the plantations from the white planters in difficulty, divided them up and sold the parcels of land at a profit to the black farmers greedy for land. He also lent money with interest and was accumulating a fortune in the gambling dens of Morne-la-Loge. Yet here was his house as bare and wretched as the humblest of cabins and here were his children all skin and bone and badly dressed. She felt she was in the den of some fiend whom she feared would loom up at any moment.
As for Aymeric, he had eyes only for Justin-Marie’s coffin, a Mount of Olives to him. He had not dared look at the face behind the glass pane, convinced he would read reproach, for he was certain that he was to blame for everything that had happened. If he had not returned home, Justin-Marie would still be alive. But he had abandoned him, and behind his back the enemy had triumphed. Consequently he felt his sickness to be a well-deserved punishment and welcomed his dizzy spells, fainting fits and constant fever with satisfaction. He had categorically refused Doctor Vercors’s recommendation to travel to St. Moritz or the Swiss Alps for the air. Besides, how could he pay for such a trip? Once his workers had been paid off, he would be left with practically nothing. He would have to sell off the factory and think of working elsewhere. Try his hand at the saltfish and lard business, like so many others of his class. The thought revolted and exhausted him, as if his time was up and all he had to do was disappear gracefully. Farewell, one and all! Leave this world. Slide gradually into the earth’s womb. Meet up with those who had left before him: his mabo, his mother, his father and some of his children. Cathy and Justin-Marie. Justin-Marie and Cathy. Strange how he associated Cathy and Justin-Marie in the same sorrow and grief, as if they were the same person. As if she had lain down a woman, slept and woken up a few years later, with all the grace of an adolescent, to seduce him again.
While getting up to greet his sister he almost fell, his head was spinning so much. He noticed the children were giggling at him. He didn’t care!
Let them laugh, let them go on laughing. They did not know what lay ahead for them. They would see when they were his age and life in its wickedness had dealt them the blows of which she alone had the secret.
10
The Farewell Ceremony (continued)
Razyé was in bed wi
th Mona, his favorite prostitute for the past ten years. But that night she had had to give up trying to arouse him and his member lay limp and wrinkled like a turkey’s neck. Unashamed and oblivious, his thoughts were far away, far from this naked woman, from this bed with its crumpled sheets, this wooden cabin and this ill-famed neighborhood of La Pointe. Could he be dreaming? He seemed to be lost in an unknown land where everything took on the color of night. Although his eyes could distinguish nothing through a wall of darkness, his ears could hear. And they heard her laugh. And they heard her jeer.
She rejoiced no end at the trick she had just played on him. She had disappeared, reappeared, only to disappear again before he had time to understand what was happening. Now she was leaving him with a broken heart again, with a second body to watch over, mourn and bury. What had he done to deserve her anger? To his knowledge, he was beyond reproach. Not a single moment of a single day went by without his flowering her grave in his memory. Since she had left him, nothing mattered anymore. Neither women. Nor children. Nor material gain. He had lost all interest in the wealth he accumulated from his evil calculations. He could have gone without it and remained like Job, sitting among the ashes, empty-handed. But the dead are probably more vindictive than the living and take umbrage at trifling peccadillos.
On the other side of the bed Mona looked at him with concern, mistaking his gloom for anger. She had never seen him like this. What was he hiding from her? Did he know that last week she had made love to his son? She had met Razyé II at the bar Au Rendez-vous des Amis, where every day at sunset she came to drink one or two glasses of absinthe with her best friends. A regular gossip column was this Rendez-vous des Amis. Everything got discussed. The contract on capital and labor. Police beatings. The destruction of the printing presses at La Vérité and Le Libéral. Boisneuf’s imprisonment. Réache’s defeat. But especially gossip as mouthwatering as crab pates, such as: Mademoiselle L’herminier got married in white while everyone knew she had a bun in the oven or, the Lariviere’s baby looks awfully black and the Foumeaux’s awfully white. Marriage is a real merry-go-round! The boy was prowling around the tables with his hands in his pockets, so like his papa that people jumped and looked round, thinking they’d gone back twenty years. He didn’t have a cent to his name and Boisdur, the owner, who didn’t like people coming into his bar to drink the air, was wondering how to get rid of him when she intervened. She had gone up to him, as if to reason with him.
“If your papa found you here,” she whispered. “I bet he wouldn’t be too happy.”
He laughed and his teeth gleamed as white as porcelain.
“I’m not crazy,” he answered. “He left for Marie-Galante yesterday. Didn’t you hear things are heating up over there?”
She invited him to sit down and without knowing quite how, one thing led to another and she ended up with him in her bed. She had laughed at him a little.
“What? A big boy like you, and you’ve never done it before?”
Afterward, she hadn’t thought any more about it, realizing how much her affluent clientele of fifty- and sixty-year-olds, wheezing, pot-bellied and often balding, had made her forget the real taste of love. Even Razyé was no longer what he used to be and sometimes stalled in full throttle! She had tried in vain to get him to talk about himself, his childhood, his poor unfortunate maman and his brothers and sisters. All he could find to say was that he was dying of hunger. So to calm his craving she had given him the remains of some fig é twip and while he was wolfing it down in the kitchen, she murmured somewhat ashamedly, with a lump in her throat: “Will you come back and see me?”
Too busy licking his fingers to speak he nodded but never came back. All week long she had waited in vain. In her impulsiveness she thought of going down to the forge where he worked. Then she thought otherwise, sure the little urchins would follow her from the bottom of the Mome-a Caye to Les Abymes shouting their usual jibes: Zouelle! Mi an danm gabwiel! Besides, she had no idea how the boy would react. You need good reasons to lose your self-respect. The following days, the absinthe and the rum at the Rendez-vous des Amis had got the better of her lovesickness.
In actual fact, Razyé was miles from suspecting any of this. If he had had the slightest inkling of what had gone on in his absence, nobody could have predicted the violence of his reactions. He could very well have knocked Mona senseless just as he could have strangled his son with his own hands. Like the time when he found Mona in bed with a mulatto deputy and he had gone to fetch a cutlass to hack them to pieces. He had been like a wild animal and it had taken all the males of the neighborhood to bring him under control.
He got up and without saying a word began to slip on his clothes.
“Where are you going at this hour of the night?” she murmured, growing more and more worried. “You’d be better off staying put and resting your body next to mine.”
He did not take the trouble to reply, grabbed a bottle from the bedside table and swigged down the remainder of the rum. After that he seemed better, more focused, as if he had found his inner self. He delved into his pocket, threw her a few banknotes, the usual pittance with which he rewarded all her trouble, and headed for the door in more or less a straight line. Outside, the jaws of darkness swallowed him up, and he began to walk down the hill.
It was that time of the month when the moon is a pale sliver floating in and out of the clouds. Nothing was visible. Only the rasp of the sea could be heard, for everything seemed to be colored with Indian ink: the sky, the trees, the house-fronts, the stray dogs and the cunning cats. As in the dream he had just had, Razyé groped his way along, guided by the sounds of the night. The rum swiggers lurching out of the rum shops did not recognize him. They took him for a spirit in search of wicked deeds and crossed themselves. When he passed by the cathedral, St. Peter jangled his keys and huddled up in his alcove, while there was a great rustling of wings up above from the bats who had been disturbed in the gutters. In the Canal district, lights gleamed through the shutters of the Saint-Jules hospice, for suffering and death know no peace. The sisters were comforting the dying with lighted candles under the shadow of their cornets.
Razyé turned into the dead-end known as the Impasse Gaget, where Madhi lived with his wife and sons in a cabin that had nothing extraordinary about it, except for a few wicker baskets hanging in the branches of a mango tree for the spirits. He knew from experience that on a night such as this the kimbwaze would not be asleep. For on such a night, he who uses his ears can hear. He can hear the words of all the departed who inhabit the other side of existence, coming and going, bumping into each other, fidgeting in the invisible world, squabbling, yearning for the earth, cursing over and over the infidelities of the living. It is on such a night you can call out to them and trick them into telling you their secrets. Razyé had not been mistaken. Hardly had he tapped on the door than Madhi came to open it. He was holding a candle whose straight steady flame lit his face from below, leaving his eyes and the top of his head in darkness.
“Did you manage to speak to her?” Razyé enquired in an urgent voice. “What did she tell you? Tell me.”
But Madhi, like all those of his kind, did not like to be rushed. He closed the door behind him and silently led Razyé into the little windowless room, its walls decorated with chromos and spirals of colored strips, where he performed his devotions. He blew out the candle and only the light of an altar lamp was left to confront the darkness.
11
Madhi’s Tale
I know I’ve lived ten lives, I’ve lived a hundred lives before I came to live this one. I have been a toad in the mud, a slug on the rotten wood of the trees, I have been wild pine growing in the armpit of the candlewood tree and quetzal bird feeding off fruit redder than my crest. I have been a dairy cow, I have been a goat, I have even been a woman and had two children.
Two sons, I think.
I have lived in many countries. In Chi
na. In Japan. In Belarus. Sometimes I remember all these lives, these loves and misfortunes, and there is a great commotion in my head and I have to stand still, without breathing a word, until it’s over. I came into this life one day when the sky was black with all the evil the Good Lord is capable of. A great wind was blowing the cabins to pieces and with one hand lifting up the sullen oxen, left tied to their stakes in the savanna. My maman went into labor while she was trying to patch up the tin roof and I dropped to the ground in a torrent of dirty water and filth of all sorts. I was wearing a tight grey membrane around my forehead and my newborn eyes could already see all the suffering stored up for our race. When the wind had quietened down and people had put back up what had been blown down, my maman took me one Saturday to church. They sang a Te Deum and then the priest baptized me. My maman wanted to give me the two first names of Dieudonné-Bienvenu since she had laid to rest yet another daughter, Azuela, the Lent before. All she had was me. But I never wanted those names. Ever since I was little I knew I was Madhi, which means the Chosen One, the One Chosen by the Invisible.
At the age of three I heard voices. Lying in bed beside my maman, I watched a magnificent ballet above my head. Baron Samedi, all dressed up in a black frock coat and tails, black glasses and top hat, was leading the dance. At six I was conversing with Baka M-, who knew all the workings of heaven and earth. One hot and sunny day I went for a swim in the River Rose and found him floating naked, his sex as long as a donkey lash wrapped around his waist. He was waiting for me. After the swim he took me back to his cabin and made me drink a calabash of manchineel tea that gives clairvoyance. I studied with him for eight years. At fifteen my spirit flew to a deep cavern in the plain of Castaneda, among the round huts of the Indians, where the pigs and the dogs are as black as the men. There were assembled the greatest masters of the invisible from every corner of the earth, in front of whom the world bows like a scythe: Melchior, who worked in Cuba and had not yet committed the sin for which there is no remission, Ciléas Ciléas, the Elder, who worked here on Grande-Terre, Déméter the Wise from Fonds-Saint-Jacques in Haiti, Escubando the First from Santo Domingo, and many others. In the morning the mist festooned the jagged edges of the cavern and the dawn shone bright as the sun. We spent seven days and seven nights in palavering, asking any question that came to mind. How far can you walk behind a soul once it has left its body? The soul must cross seven rivers, that’s for sure. Which one is the point of no return? Is the deceased present at the ceremony nine days after his death, or is he too far along the road to the other world? Who really eats the sticky rice, the ground corn and the rum for the sacrifices: the living or the dead? We exchanged recipes for magic baths, the names of plants, cabalistic signs and words. And then each of us returned home the way we had come. I left the cordillera of the Andes and their slopes of steel. Carried by the wind, I roamed on the crest of the clouds and I saw the Caribbean, island after island, lying beneath me like a willing female with its hills and lush valleys green with sugarcane. The whites were idling on their verandas in panama hats. The blacks were wielding their cutlasses, their chests shiny with sweat. The loaded ox carts jolted over the rocks while the factories spat out their venom, black as smoke. I knew it wouldn’t last, that the pendulum would swing the other way for the whites. Yet I still couldn’t see any happiness lighting up our lives. Once the whites were finished, the blacks would trade their accounts with the drivers and overseers for unemployment benefits.