Windward Heights

by Maryse Conde

  It was a lovely morning.

  7

  Death of the Wolf (continued)

  Irmine woke up with a start, as if an icy hand had touched her.

  She was alone in the middle of the bed. The shutters she had closed herself before going to sleep were open, and the light from the full moon was like a stream of milk flooding the wardrobe, the rocking chair and the locustwood bed that sailed over the crevices of the old floor. Nobody had lived at l’Engoulvent for ages and ages. So there was no room left for humans. Termites, caterpillars, bats, spiders and all sorts of insects, connoisseurs of silence and the shadows, had settled in. Disturbed by this intrusion, they showed their anger by a high-pitched, scarcely audible commotion, emitting a ticking and a tocking, a whooshing and a swishing. Irmine turned over on her side. It was in this very room, in this very bed, that back from Dominica she had laid beside Razyé, humiliated, ill-treated, two eyes not enough for her tears, but burning with a passion that years of insults had not managed to quell. Now that she had lost him, she had to admit that she loved him as much as that first day, when she had watched him climb down from his horse in front of the terrace at the Belles-Feuilles plantation. Yet could she say she had lost him, since she had never possessed him? He had gone to join the woman who possessed him, who led him like a bear-tamer. Well, that’s what he hoped. And that was why he had accepted his death so calmly, almost with a smile.

  She got up and ran to the window.

  She looked out again with surprising pleasure at the landscape she’d never forgotten in her worst dreams. Guinea grass had pushed up through the flagstones in the yard and a flowerless, fruitless guava tree grew gnarled and twisted in the middle. Beyond the ruins of the stables—a few brick walls, a few heaps of corrugated iron—nothing had changed. A few more thornbushes, a few more wild acacias, a few more columnar cactus and prickly pear, the savanna was the same arid wasteland stretching out under the white moonlight. The same trees were flattened by the fury of the wind and seemed on the verge of taking off in the direction of the sea to escape it. The sea, however, kept her freedom intact. Way down below, she dashed against the foot of the cliffs in her rage and swelled with waves as far as the shore of La Désirade.

  Some twenty years earlier, as an innocent young thing convinced that she was right, she had followed Razyé’s footsteps through this yard and of her own accord had locked up her youth in this rat-hole. How many tears had she shed on her pillow afterward! How many escape plans had she drawn up during the day, only to have them undone during the night! When her memory took stock of the years gone by, she had trouble counting the moments of happiness: the birth of her children, their first suck on her breast, their first kisses and little words of affection. All the rest had been nothing but suffering and solitude. Yet now that she found herself free, free to “start her life all over again,” as the simple-minded say, she realized that she had lost her inclination for life, like a sick person who recuperates too late to recover her appetite. And she even realized that in a way she regretted none of it. If she were given the power to be born again, she would re-live her life the same way. With the same man. In fact she regretted only one thing: not having been able to change Razyé. Perhaps she hadn’t known how to love him, for then she would have cured him of Cathy. Love is a miracle. It works in magical ways. Her thoughts went out to him, solitary as he always had been, once again abandoned by the world in a narrow, uncomfortable space under a layer of stony ground at the edge of the cliff, and her eyes filled with tears. She had the feeling that she also had turned her back on him. She had been able to sleep like an innocent child while he was wasting away in exile. She slipped on her clothes and crept out of the room. Two bedrooms opened onto the landing on either side of the stairwell that was now as black as an oven. One of them had been the late Justin’s. Perhaps if there was one thing she could reproach Razyé for, it was having forced her to share Justin’s bed, that rum-soaked wreck drifting on a sea of regret for his beloved. Fortunately, his illusions had dampened his manhood. Night after night he vainly attempted to plant his flabby penis between her thighs. When he had died, she had thanked the Lord with all her heart. The other room had belonged to Razyé. Here she had put the little girls who after much crying had ended up falling asleep. L’Engoulvent, with its smell of a freshly­ opened tomb, its spiders tangled in their webs in every nook and cranny, its bats hanging stiffly upside down in the window casements and the squeaking of its thousand invisible tenants amidst the dust, had woken all their fears—sure that spirits and werewolves were haunting the room, sure that under the bedcovers the people in league with the devil had folded up their skins and flown out through the attic windows with a great beating of wings. Hosannah had only been able to calm them down by chanting one of those old slave laments that the children of Africa used to sing in memory of everything they had lost. Irmine set foot on the first step of the stairs and the creak of the boards sent the rats scurrying between her legs, almost tripping her up. In the living room, the candle lit by Hosannah had long wept its last drip of tallow, but the moon was driving its shards of light through the holes in the walls. Under the kitchen range a couple of mongooses were watching over their litter and hissed furiously as she went by.

  Outside was the stillness of the night.

  Irmine set off in the direction of the cliff. As might have been expected, the priest at Petit-Canal had refused to give his blessing to Razyé, a scoundrel, guilty of having stirred up social unrest and sown thoughts of revenge in the childlike souls of the former slaves. So she had taken her courage in both hands and recited all alone over the coffin the Twenty-Third Psalm.

  The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside the still waters.

  He restores my soul; He leads me in the paths of righteousness for His namesake.

  Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.

  Deep down she blamed herself for chanting these hollow words and paying homage to rites she no longer believed in. For there was no love lost between her and the Good Lord, so inaptly named, who spoiled some and destroyed others and shared out happiness and good fortune so unequally. What’s more she hated all those priests, round-shouldered and simpering, whom she had known since she was a child and who now despised her because she had married beneath her color. And yet she had a weak spot. She could not bear to bury the man she loved like a wretched animal. She arrived in sight of the graveyard, where the scrub grew among the rocks and pushed open what was left of the gate.She had respected Razyé’s wishes and the undertakers had lowered his coffin into Cathy’s tomb, beside her remains. She moved the flowers to one side and sat down on the gravestone. It was now inscribed with two names, one below the other, united as if on a marriage register.

  Yet she who had hated Cathy for all these years no longer felt jealous of this inscription. The two wooden coffins lay side by side, touching. In both of them there was nothing more than flesh and bones crumbling into dust. Her heart told her that Razyé was still forging on alone in his tunnel, his fists and hands bleeding from hammering against the wall that hemmed him in, more formidable than the Great Wall of China.

  It would be too simple if death avenged us for all the failures we accumulate while on earth; if, once in the other world, we could possess everything we wanted. Losers we are when alive, losers we remain in eternity.

  Suddenly she felt exhausted, tired to death, frightened at the thought of all those years she would have to live through, in even greater solitude. Without a man and his savagery to fill her days. Without those vague moments of tenderness that gave her hope for a brighter future. Her children would grow up. They would no longer need her. Even Fréda, who for the time being clung to her skirt and could only say her name. She would grow old. She was already old. She would die. She would set off for the cemetery and lie alone, alone as in life, for an eter
nity. She slid helplessly to the ground, feeling the scratch of the prickles and weeds through her clothes. She closed her eyes, swollen with water, and the night descended around her.

  A moonbeam caressed Gengis’s forehead so persistently that he opened his eyes. One of the window shutters was silhouetted against a large square of sky and the room was flooded with moonlight. Beside him Zoulou was snoring, his mouth open. He realized therefore that they had both ended up falling asleep in the foul-smelling room. After they had talked in whispers for some time to keep each other’s spirits up, he had remained motionless, a heavy weight on his chest. However hard he squeezed his eyelids tight, sleep didn’t come. On their black screen flickered the terrible events of these past days. The wake ceremony in the suffocating heat of the attic. All those strangers dressed up like Baron Samedi, with frock coats, canes, top hats, lugubrious expressions and appropriate words.

  “Oh yes, he was one hell of a man!”

  If that was the truth, why did everyone hate him like poison? Why did they say he was a devil?

  The scent of the gardenias had been more pungent than all the other flowers. The following morning the undertakers’ men, indifferent and almost grinning, jostled the enormous coffin down the stairs, banging it against the wall at every turn. The journey from La Pointe to Petit-Canal seemed endless in the sun and the dust, with the dogs barking and the children running behind the carriages. All the while, wrapped in her veil, Irmine acted the weeping widow, to such an extent that he felt like shaking her like a plum tree. What was she crying for exactly? For the man who treated her as you wouldn’t think of treating an animal? He could remember how almost every day the commiserating Hosannah had applied compresses of arnica to her swollen, smashed face. Like the other children, he could still hear the insults and the contempt Razyé showered her with as soon as he set foot in the yard. And all those women their father had no scruples bringing into the house and whom you could hear clucking away at some ungodly hour. One night he had come face to face with Razyé and one of these women on the first-floor landing. Razyé was wearing one of his tight-lipped, taciturn expressions, but the woman was painted up like a carnival float and showed him all thirty-two teeth in a smile. Then she stroked him with her hand that stank of patchouli and cried:

  “Mi bel ti moun, mil” (What a lovely little boy!).

  Razyé II had avenged them all when he made love to one of their father’s mistresses. They never tired of hearing him embellish and embroider the story of how he had made her feel like a real woman and how, under his rule, she had called out for her papa, her maman and asked forgiveness from the Good Lord. Unfortunately, one fine day, Razyé had uncovered the secret and Razyé II had had to run for his life. He got a message through to them that he was hiding near Saint-Louis on Marie-Galante, and Gengis dreamed of going to join him.

  Gengis hated his father. This was a constant subject of argument with Zoulou, who took his father’s side and invented all kinds of reasons and circumstances to mitigate his guilt. It was because a woman had deserted him, it was because of the evil in black men’s hearts, it was because of the racism of the white Creoles. It was one thing, then another that had turned him into Satan himself. As for Gengis, he felt none of this compassion. Every minute of his life he raged at the absurdity of his name. He had learned in an encyclopaedia that it was the name of a khan in Mongolia who had gone down in history for his massacres and fearsome character. He had read over and over again the all­-too-succinct accounts of the rapes, murders, burning and looting his namesake had committed. Insidiously, this monstrous heritage his father had imposed on him while he was too small to fight back was seeping into his blood and turning him into a monster as well. That’s why he was rebellious, violent and always up to mischief. He tortured blackbirds and wood pigeons in the yard. He terrorized his younger sisters, especially Cassandre with her irritatingly chubby cherub-like face. He wished he could have raped and tormented women, as Razyé had done before him. In his dreams he roamed the streets of La Pointe on busy market days and stationed himself at the crossroads. Not content with a few punches here and there, he brandished his cutlass, slashing everyone who didn’t run fast enough. The storm channels grew red with blood. The heaps of corpses were piled sky high. He didn’t attack just the white Creoles for the sake of justice, but the Indians, the mulattos and the blacks, especially the blacks who think they are untouchable victims and never stop harping on the evil that’s been done to them. He burnt the great houses and the cabins; the cane fields as well as the coffee and banana plantations. He put Guadeloupe to the fire and the sword. For whatever their color, men do not deserve the life they are given.

  At one point, seeing his mother’s grief, Zoulou had start­ed to cry as well. As for Cassandre, girls have no character of their own and always do what you expect them to do. He alone had remained dry-eyed. Even when the bearers had lowered the coffin to the very bottom of the grave, even when they had thrown in a few withered flowers at this late hour and shovelled in rocks, even when Irmine in a faint voice had recited the Twenty-Third Psalm.

  He carefully got out of bed so as not to disturb Zoulou and went over to the window. He wondered if he could be really awake, seeing his surroundings transformed by the moonlight. The bleak landscape had turned into the fantasy land of a watercolor. The sky merged with the earth in a golden color. The desolate savanna became a mysterious realm of blue where horsemen galloped, their soft scarves wrapped around their heads. The shriek of the insects, the hissing of the mongooses and the barking of the stray dogs harmonized in unison with the voice of the sea.

  On hearing this strange music he was flooded with an emotion he had never felt before. He leaned over and saw his mother hurriedly cross the yard, her greying hair floating down her back, her shapeless robe pulled tight over her portly figure. He realized how she had changed since the time when she used to lean over his cradle and take him in her arms to whisper sweet nothings. For the first time, perhaps, he felt pity for her. Where was she running as fast as she could? Was she going to meditate on the grave of her tormentor?

  He could see all too easily how she was going to spend the rest of her life. She would padlock herself in the mourning of widowhood. She would offer up prayers to the Good Lord for the departed. By cleaning out her memory, she would convince herself he had not been such a bad husband.

  He went down the stairs in turn, oblivious to the commo­tion his presence was causing. But when he walked out into the yard and looked left and right, Irmine had disappeared. Once again everything around him had been transformed. Suddenly, the moon had been snuffed from the sky and replaced by an ebony blackness. Crawling on its belly like a python, it had stealthily extinguished the stars and blotted out the space above the savanna and the sea. And yet Gengis could see as if it had been daylight. As if his senses had been stimulated, his sight sharpened and his hearing quickened, like the day he had smoked Indian hemp with Zoulou. He could make out every spike on the thistles, every thorn on the trees and every rock embedded in the earth. He could hear the slightest sound, from a procession of ants under the roots to the dry flap of the wings of a flight of chicken hawks over La Désirade in the distance. He hesitated, a little frightened, then ran as fast as his legs would carry him, his feet touching his behind, zigzagging across the scrubland.

  Someone was sitting on one of the tombs.

  Even at this distance he needed no one to tell him it was the silhouette of his father. Sitting motionless, Razyé was dressed in his funeral attire, his watch chain hanging across his stomach and his white shirt contrasting with his frock­ coat. His clothes were all crumpled as if he had slept in them, his shirt collar was open and his hair oddly tangled. Father and son looked at each other. Strangely, the sight of Razyé had not sent the usual little shiver of fear and hatred down Gengis’s spine. He got the feeling that from now on there was nothing more to fear from him—neither his blows, nor his insults, nor his sc
orn. It was as if he had become his equal, even his superior, as if the roles between them were reversed, as if he were facing a child.

  He walked up to him. Razyé turned his head and remarked: “It’s not you I’m waiting for!”

  Gengis, who the moment before had felt grown up, was suddenly ashamed of standing there, barefoot in his too tight pajamas and stammered: “Who are you waiting for? Maman?”

  Razyé laughed as if he had just heard a good joke and shook his head.

  “No, it’s not her either.”

  He remained silent for a while and then continued (from the way he talked Gengis felt the words were not meant for him and he would have done better to leave).

  “In fact I don’t even know any longer why I’m waiting. I’m stuck here like a rock in a patch of ground. Soaked by the rain, dried by the heat. I watch the sun rise then go down behind the jagged line of mountains, then come up again. I see the clouds scurrying one behind the other in the sky, sometimes as white as spilt milk from an overturned calabash or the orange blossom in the hair of a young bride; at other times, as blue as the enamel of the sea below, then purple like a bishop’s robe and finally black, a shade I know well since it colors every day of my life. One day, when I was at my wits’ end, someone advised me to drink some rum. I listened to him, I drank some rum, but its fire turned to ice inside my body. Someone else told me to have children, they’re the remedy for everything—mourning, solitude and even death. So I did. Four, five, six, I’ve lost count. But I felt nothing for these little heaps of flesh. Sometimes I couldn’t even look at them, they made me so angry and disgusted. I also smoked herbs that make you talk off the top of your head, but nothing came out. I kept my head and all my grief that stuck in my throat like the bone of a red snapper. Now I’m here and I don’t even know any longer why I’m waiting. I can see a path stretching out in front of me. I have to follow it, but I know it leads nowhere and in the end I shall be back where I started. I am tired. I wish it were over.