Crossings

by Alex Landragin

  I knew Hortense would ensure I have no opportunity to approach Jeanne before her departure. My best chance at a crossing would be to devise some plan that would allow me to credibly leave with them. On the eve of their departure for New Orleans in the company of the overseer, Champy, gathering together all the little courage at my disposal, I put my plan into effect: I reluctantly hauled myself to the summit of the grand staircase and, after several minutes of hesitation, abandoned myself to gravity’s cruelties in such a way that my front teeth were knocked out in the fall. As blood was gushing out my mouth, and with my golden teeth clutched in my hand, it was decided I would go to New Orleans instead of Champy, have my teeth attended to and subsequently see to the auction of Jeanne and Berthe at the slave market. I would be gone for a week. I will never forget the stricken look in Hortense’s eyes as she kissed me on the cheek. Perhaps she somehow sensed we were saying goodbye.

  As I sat with the two women in the buggy that would take me down to the jetty, Desire approached, gave me Jeanne’s and Berthe’s ownership titles and said in a whisper that I might sell them separately if the price was better. He turned away without farewelling his daughter – who, as usual, betrayed nothing of her thoughts or feelings – or her mother, whose distress was clearly etched upon her face.

  The boat trip to New Orleans took all the rest of that day and a good deal of the next, a bone-shaking, nauseating journey on the steamboat Phoenix, whose boiler was too powerful for the boat’s frail frame. A terrible tremble shook us throughout the journey. Down the river we rattled, through burning fields of sugarcane, with thick smoke billowing into the sky all around. I spent the entire journey in a fog of laudanum to dull the pain in my mouth, which only made my seasickness worse.

  Having arrived in the port of New Orleans, I immediately took two rooms in a hotel by the river and went directly to a shipping agent and asked for two tickets on the next boat to France. A steamboat bound for Marseille was scheduled to leave three days hence, I was told, so I bought two first-class passages there and then. I returned to the hotel and found Jeanne and Berthe locked in the room where I had left them. I reassured them that they would not be sold and showed them the tickets I had just purchased.

  We spent the following two days running endless errands in preparation for our journey. I went to the dentist and had my broken gold teeth replaced with new gold teeth, which I charged to the Desire plantation. Then I hocked an array of precious objects I had stolen from the Desire plantation. I accompanied the mother and daughter to various Creole clothiers, buying dresses and luggage and such provisions as would be needed for their journey, all of which I charged to the Desire plantation. And I bought a small hammer, which I also charged to the Desire plantation. The morning of our departure, we returned to our rooms after breakfast and I told the women the time had come for their escape to freedom. I took all the money Desire had given me and placed it on the table beside the window. I removed my wedding ring, signet ring and fob watch and did the same. I took my old gold teeth and added them to the loot, piling all these riches together. All this, I said, was theirs, and they were greatly pleased.

  ‘Before I grant you your freedom,’ I said, ‘there is one small matter we must attend to, after which you will be free to go.’ I turned to the mother. ‘Berthe,’ I said, ‘I would like you to leave me alone with your daughter for a short while.’

  Berthe looked at me pleadingly, tears filling her eyes.

  ‘I insist upon it,’ I replied. ‘I cannot let you go until you grant me an hour alone with your daughter. I promise you nothing untoward will occur.’

  Berthe let out a single sob before regaining her composure. She looked sorrowfully at her daughter, whose eyes returned the look with just as much sorrow.

  ‘Please, Maman,’ said Jeanne, her voice shaking, ‘do what monsieur asks.’ The women embraced and Berthe, with a heavy sigh and tears trailing down her cheeks, left. Jeanne was standing in the middle of the room with an expression that betrayed no feeling. I took my last bottle of laudanum in hand and swallowed its contents.

  ‘Now, Jeanne,’ I said, sitting on one of two bentwood chairs I’d placed opposite each other, ‘this is what I would like you to do.’ I took her by the wrist and dragged her close to me, handing her the hammer I had bought the previous day. ‘I want you to use this to knock out all of my teeth, making sure you retrieve all of them and let none of them fall down my throat.’ A look of panic flickered across her face. ‘Yes, it will hurt, but that is not your concern. I won’t get angry at you. I won’t punish you. I want you to do it. In fact, I insist on it. Come now.’ I tilted my face towards her and opened my mouth wide as I had at the dentist two days earlier. If Jeanne had any hesitation, she of course showed nothing of it. She simply gave a little nervous sigh and began hammering. I made such a commotion that Berthe opened the door a little to see what was happening. I waved her away with one grunt and, with another, urged Jeanne to continue. When she was done, she washed the gold teeth in a glass of water without a word and placed them with the other precious things procured thanks to the unwitting generosity of Desire Michaux.

  I felt as beaten up as after a flogging, and spent some minutes hunched over, blood drooling from my mouth. Admittedly, I might have made things easier on myself by crossing with Jeanne first, and then chiselling the gold teeth from Feuille’s mouth, but I was determined to inflict no needless suffering on the girl, considering that what I was about to do was cruelty enough. It would be a blind crossing, and she would inherit a broken body, but I appeased my conscience with the thought that at least it was the body of a free man, a white man, a wealthy man. It would be assumed that he’d been the victim of a violent robbery.

  I could hear Berthe fretting outside. My bloodied mouth was throbbing and swollen and I could not speak, so it was with gestures and grunts that I instructed Jeanne to sit on one of two chairs. Then I locked the door.

  {23}

  Jeanne Duval

  Born 1822

  First crossing 1838

  Second crossing 1864

  Date of death unknown

  ON A FROSTY day shortly before Christmas 1864, around noon, there was a knock at my door. I lived, at the time, in a small room I shared with a ragpicker in Batignolles, a dreary worker’s suburb outside the Paris city wall. That day I was alone, which, at this advanced stage of my life, was how I spent most of my days, reclining on the bed or on a tattered divan in a corner of the room, reduced to infirmity by the pox. I had, several months earlier, suffered a paralysis of the left side of my body. Such a simple task as answering the door was beyond my capacities.

  When the door opened, I saw in the gloom of the landing the silhouettes of two slender women. Entering the room in their wide dresses, they gladdened it like two upturned bouquets, the first of iris purple and the other of lily white. I invited them to be seated on the divan, which they approached hesitantly before accepting the invitation. In the pearl-grey light that entered the room through a single dirty window, I noticed how exquisitely dressed they were. For warmth, they were draped in furs of fox and ermine, which they did not loosen upon entering as, despite the stove, it was barely warmer inside than out. The woman dressed in mauve wore a veil over her face, which she did not raise. The other had a young face of rare beauty, with alabaster skin and great wide turquoise eyes set far apart. Under the little hat she was removing was a mane of chestnut hair, tied in two chignons at the nape of her neck, with ringlets covering her ears. The other’s hair was, like her face, hidden by a veil, and when I invited her to remove it she replied most politely that she preferred to leave it on if it was all the same to me.

  My visitors introduced themselves. The one dressed in purple who would not remove her veil was Mademoiselle Édmonde, while the pretty one introduced herself as Mademoiselle Adélaïde. They spoke in turns, shyly, hesitantly, almost in whispers, as if overawed by a great occasion. They did not tell me their family names but it was evident, by their demeanour, thei
r dress, their manners and speech, that they were of the most rarefied provenance, and that such rooms as the one in which I lived were unknown to them. The demoiselles said they were relieved to have finally found me, as some people believed me already dead, while others claimed I had left Paris for the tropical climes of my birthplace.

  ‘As you can see, I am very much still alive and here,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid I only have tilleul to offer you.’ When she saw the difficulty with which I heaved myself from my mattress, Mademoiselle Adélaïde offered to boil the water and prepare the infusion. As she busied herself, I asked Mademoiselle Édmonde why it was they had come. She explained they were readers of Charles Baudelaire, and they wished to meet his muse, the woman who had inspired his greatest poems. Such was their fondness for Charles, in fact, that they had founded a society devoted to his work, which naturally enough they had called the Baudelaire Society. They had written to Charles care of his publisher in Brussels, she said, expressing their admiration for his poems, but they had received no reply. So they had begun making enquiries among his friends – Courbet, Manet, Champfleury, Madame Sabatier and so on – in an attempt to find me. They had even engaged the services of a private detective for the purpose.

  Mademoiselle Édmonde’s discourse ended as Mademoiselle Adélaïde approached with her pot of infusion and three cups. I was embarrassed – I did not possess two cups that looked the same, nor saucers on which to place them. But, judging by the smiles on the faces of the young ladies, my cups were of little interest. They beheld me as if I were on display in a museum, saying nothing, waiting for me to respond. I took several small sips from my infusion. ‘So,’ I finally said, ‘Charles has readers?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Mademoiselle Édmonde from behind her veil, ‘although we are more than readers – we are devotees, acolytes, disciples. Though small in number, our devotion has no limits. We are determined to ensure that his work shines forever. We think Monsieur Baudelaire is a great genius.’

  ‘Greater than Hugo?’

  ‘Without a doubt.’

  ‘So Charles was right.’ I reached forward stiffly for a lump of sugar.

  ‘Let me help you,’ said Mademoiselle Édmonde, taking my cup, dropping sugar into it and stirring.

  ‘What do you desire of me?’ I asked.

  The two young women looked at each other momentarily and smiled. ‘Only to meet you and to learn about you,’ replied Mademoiselle Édmonde. ‘Nothing of you is known, other than what is in the poems.’

  ‘That is already too much.’

  ‘Please,’ said Mademoiselle Adélaïde, giving me a doleful look with her wide green eyes, ‘we have gone to great lengths to find you. Tell us about yourself. Tell us your story. We will not betray your confidence. We may even be able to provide assistance, make your remaining days more comfortable.’

  I thought about this a moment. ‘Do you know the painting by Courbet known as The Painter’s Studio?’ Mademoiselle Édmonde replied that she had been taken to see it at the Palais du Louvre as a girl, and that many of the figures in it had been friends of her parents. ‘I’ll tell you something about that painting you may not know: I was once in it. I, Jeanne Duval, a mere slave girl who can barely read or write, was portrayed standing among France’s most brilliant men – Champfleury, Proudhon and the others. Charles is also in it, seated at the right of the painting, reading a book. When Courbet first painted it, I was depicted standing by Charles’s side. What had I done to deserve this great honour? I had been his muse – his grande taciturne, his Black Venus.’ I sighed as memories I had long fought to smother began to resurface. ‘And yet, when Charles told me about the painting, I fell into such a fury that the very next day he went to Courbet and told him that I was to be removed from it, erased, painted over. Courbet did what Charles asked, but if you look hard enough, you can still see the trace of my image, hovering like a phantom over Charles’s right shoulder as he reads his book.’ I looked directly at the two women. ‘That is how I wish to be remembered. As a ghost.’

  ‘Don’t you desire what you deserve?’ asked Mademoiselle Édmonde from behind her veil.

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘Immortality.’

  ‘Immortality is a curse.’

  My two interlocutors were silent for a moment before Mademoiselle Adélaïde asked, in as sweet and imploring a tone as I have heard, ‘Please, madame, tell us your story.’

  I had never breathed a word of my life story to anyone other than you, Koahu, but now that I was living in the shadow of death I yielded to the temptation of finally unburdening myself. ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘But I warn you, the telling will take all day. It is a tale full of wonders, many of which you will not believe. You will consider me mad, but your opinion is, I assure you, of no consequence to me. If I say anything to which you wish to object, I pray you keep your outrage to yourself. And you must make me a solemn promise that you will never repeat what I tell you, nor commit it to writing.’ The women agreed to my terms. After they’d sent their coachman out to bring us cakes and coffee, I began to tell them the tale of the albatross.

  I began by telling them about us, Alula and Koahu, and our lives on the island. I related the tale of our crossings with Joubert and Roblet and our subsequent separation. I recounted the crossing with Feuille and Feuille’s life on the Desire plantation. Finally, I told them about the crossing with the slave girl Jeanne. The two women sat side by side, holding each other’s hands as they listened.

  After I’d told them these tales, I requested a pause. I was not used to such exertions and my head was dizzy. It was midway through the afternoon. The sky would darken in an hour or two. The ladies waited in respectful silence, chewing their cakes and sipping coffee politely, worried that I would revoke the privilege they’d been accorded. But now that I’d begun, I would not be stopped. The tales poured out of me, one after the other, like pearls on a necklace.

  I took up my own story in the moments following the crossing with Feuille. When one has crossed into a new body, I explained, there is always a period of familiarisation with it – with its history and idiosyncrasies. The manner in which the soul adheres with the new body is never quite the same. What’s more, the body’s memories do not come all at once. Rather, in the first few hours there is a flood of them, triggered by countless exterior sights, sounds and smells. Over the next few days, the stream of memories slows so that by the third day they are but a trickle. Some memories are deeply buried and can surface weeks, months or sometimes years after a crossing.

  Having just crossed into the body of this girl in that New Orleans hotel room, I turned to take one last look at my previous body, that of Feuille. He sat directly before me, a ghastly sight, his mouth encrusted with streaks of dried blood, the result of the removal of his gold teeth before the crossing. In his grey-blue eyes a dazed new soul was now blinking timorously in perfect ignorance of what had just occurred. The guilt occasioned by my act of thievery stabbed me into action. I gathered together all our belongings, including the money and gold that would launch us into our next lives, and stepped out into the hallway, where Mother was anxiously waiting. Upon seeing me she burst into tears and hugged me. The sight and touch of her prompted a hailstorm of memories in me so great and vivid I almost fainted. I composed myself and told her not to cry but to rejoice, for now we were free.

  During our passage to Marseille, I accustomed myself to my new mind and body, glad to be rid of both the venality and the seasickness I had known as Feuille. And I discovered the extraordinary power that lay in the body of a desirable young woman. As the number of men on board vastly outnumbered the women, many of them directed their attentions towards me with indefatigable zeal. The thought crossed my mind on more than one occasion to make another crossing with one of them, for it would be surely more advantageous to me to be a white-skinned man than a dark-skinned woman, but now that I was once more a woman I did not covet manhood. After Feuille, there was something redemptive about being Jeanne
. Although given to episodes of melancholia, she was resilient and composed. The great cruelties she’d already witnessed in her short life had endowed her with an aloofness that acted as a protective shell. And so, as Jeanne, I remained unmoved by the gallantries I was paid. Those men that fell in love with me aboard that steamer were only the first in a long line of those who loved me unrequitedly. I myself have only ever once fallen in love, and it was with you, Koahu. I remained for the most part in our cabin, attending to Mother, who was wretchedly sick the whole voyage and pining for the plantation. I thought it prudent to take a protector, on the rare occasions I ventured out of the cabin, to shield me from the excesses of my most ardent admirers. I chose for the purpose Louis Meyerbeer, a man of business based in Lyon. A middle-aged father of seven, he was garrulous, shrewd and unfailingly polite. He sat beside me at every meal and offered all kinds of useful counsel about what to do with my newfound liberty. He advised me to travel to Paris, the most extraordinary of cities, he claimed. There, I could cultivate my gifts and use my beauty to advantage, for an attractive woman of talent had better prospects in Paris, he said, than just about anywhere else in the world. I found Louis thoroughly persuasive – the young woman in me yearned to see something of life and society, and as I’d long since abandoned hope of ever finding you again, Koahu, or of finding a means to return to Oaeetee, I decided to take his advice.

  Having arrived in Marseille, I found the port no less squalid than when I’d last passed through, as Joubert, more than two decades earlier. And so within days of our arrival in Marseille, with Louis as our chaperone, we travelled upriver by steamer to Lyon. We farewelled Louis there and continued by diligence to Paris, a journey of a little over a week. Although we’d bought tickets for inside the coach, several of our fellow passengers objected to travelling in such close proximity to us, and my mother and I were thus forced to travel on the roof, beside the driver. Everywhere I went, I found myself an object of curiosity. I could attract a crowd solely on the basis of my skin colour and my freedom, for slavery had yet to be abolished in the kingdom.