In August, taking advantage of Anne-Marie’s dentist appointment, Jeanne made an exception and set foot once again in the house on the rue de Nasssau to inform Victoire she was to be married the following month.
Victoire was in the kitchen cleaning a capon she had the inspiration to stuff with green papayas, cinnamon, and diced bacon.
“Pouki sa?” she asked, inspecting surreptitiously her daughter’s belly.
“I’m not pregnant,” Jeanne reassured her coldly.
That’s not the way we do things, her stuffy person and prim posture was saying. So why? What was the hurry? Why was she rushing into marriage? She had just reached twenty. With her physique, her prestige as an elementary school teacher, and, by no means insignificant, her salary, she was an enviable match. She had every freedom to choose and all the time in the world. Auguste Boucolon, Grand Nègre, admittedly could boast of never putting a foot wrong! Brought up by his mama, who was abandoned long before his birth by her seafaring common-law husband, he had proven to be unusually intelligent ever since the local elementary school. He was one of the first to win a scholarship to the Lycée Carnot. Moreover, he was considered good-looking. Supremely well attired. A genuine Beau Brummel with his choice of hats — fedora, boater, and pith helmet — as well as his well-tailored suits. But at the age of forty-two he was older than the mother of his betrothed and already balding, displaying a crown of graying hair. Furthermore, he was a widower, father of two small boys and an illegitimate daughter, conceived while he was a schoolboy, who worked at the registrar’s office at city hall and whose mother sold her produce in the market. All that wasn’t very romantic!
I was told that despite appearances he was not lacking in lyricism. Apparently, he confided in a friend:
“If I don’t have her I’ll kill myself.”
Going down on one knee, he was reported to have assured her:
“I will be the quilt of your life.”
Or else:
“Like Orpheus, I would descend to the ends of the underworld for you if need be.”
In his desire to please her, it was said he gave up a ten-year liaison with his mistress, who was convinced she would have a wedding band on her finger after his first wife died. Victoire, who was not at all thrilled by these wedding plans, did not even think of raising an objection. She knew full well she had no say in the matter.
Although the announcement of Jeanne’s wedding and her setting up house in La Pointe was to nobody’s liking, it drove Boniface to despair. For him it meant one thing: the end of his relationship with Victoire. Jeanne would require it. Furthermore, he knew Victoire was accustomed to obeying and secretly terrified by her daughter. She was not up to defending a love that her daughter considered intolerable and even more despicable than adultery. At night, he tried to win her over. But Victoire as usual didn’t say a word.
It was perhaps as a result of this distress, tension, and anguish that he contracted the illness, never clearly diagnosed, which was to carry him off so quickly. Anne-Marie had no qualms spreading the rumor that he was dying of a broken heart, from having been cast aside, something Victoire’s detractors were quick to believe.
In a threatening letter, Anne-Marie ordered Jeanne to come and officially introduce her fiancé. Weren’t Boniface and herself a sort of adopted parents? They had ensured her education and paid for her schooling. In short, they had made her what she was. They had even provided her with a dowry. Anne-Marie did not know that on his death Boniface had left a legacy for Jeanne. Consequently, to call the modest sum he had placed in her account a dowry was the product of Anne-Marie’s exaggerated imagination, which had no bounds. Jeanne grudgingly complied.
Auguste therefore had two magnificent bouquets of roses delivered, one for each of the mothers — the biological and the foster — chocolates for Valérie-Anne, and Havana cigars for the father and son. This did not prevent Boniface Jr. in his jealousy from refusing to attend and going to lunch alone at the Hotel des Postes, where his father had an account. It was at that time he sent Jeanne the letter that I have already mentioned. I don’t know whether she answered it. I discovered it over sixty years later in her personal papers.
On the said day, Auguste and Jeanne turned up at the rue de Nassau on the dot, unusual in our climate. Under the avid looks of the servants who were watching the scene from the yard, Auguste removed his boater and with a click of his heels kissed the hand of Anne-Marie.
Mary mother of Jesus! Where on earth did these Negroes learn such things?
Jeanne took off her cotton gloves to show her engagement ring, a good-size diamond, purchased by catalog from the Belles Pierres store in Reims, the French affiliate of a factory in Antwerp. While drinking the Bollinger champagne before the meal, Auguste elaborated his plans and discreetly introduced himself as a good match: a six-room town house and enough to buy a change-of-air house given his solid bank account. It was Anne-Marie who responded, and without her realizing it, unless it was deliberate, her short speech was deeply hurtful. She recalled that without her, without Boniface especially, Jeanne would not have achieved her uncommon status and would probably be speaking a heavy Creole, hiring her services to some bourgeois family, scrubbing their floors and emptying their chamber pots. In exchange for so much kindness she was merely asking for a little respect and gratitude.
Pale with rage, Jeanne had to drink a toast with her.
Victoire had cooked a meal whose menu unfortunately nobody has kept. She arranged it in a lavish dinnerware set as if it were a cooking competition, but left it up to the servants to carry in the dishes. For once, she sat down at the table, to the left of Boniface, as the second Madame Walberg, with Anne-Marie on his right. Auguste laid down once and for all the tone of his relations with Victoire. Given their similar ages, relations should have been fraternal. There was, however, never any intimacy between them. Deep down, she had little sympathy for him, considering him not good enough for her jewel of a daughter, like all mother-in-laws. As for him, we shouldn’t be under any illusion. He despised her. Beneath his easygoing manners, he was intolerant, a militant black like all the Grands Nègres, convinced that sexual relations by a woman of color with a white Creole constituted an intolerable scandal. If Fanon had already written Black Skin White Masks, Auguste would have certainly appreciated the pages on the complex of lactification. The only agreeable element was when he spoke to Victoire in Creole; in his mouth the language he had also used to speak to his mother took on a different and intimate inflection.
Creole, he seemed to indicate, is our mother tongue, our common link. Let us be proud of it.
Those gathered for this meal didn’t have much in common. Fortunately, except for Anne-Marie, who was never at a loss for words, Auguste was capable of talking for two, three, or even four. This feature of his character became increasingly unbearable for Jeanne as she herself became gradually more taciturn and haughty. He spouted anecdote upon anecdote. He told the story, for instance, of how as a student at the Lycée Carnot in 1889 he had been sent to Paris with other Guadeloupeans and Martinicans to visit the Universal Exhibition. He described the amazement of the Parisians when they entered a café or restaurant. How certain customers in a panic rushed for the door. Everyone noisily expressed their astonishment that they knew how to handle a knife and fork. Children cried when approached. Others were bolder and came and rubbed their cheeks to see if the color rubbed off. There were happier moments in the evenings when they went and danced the beguine wabap in the Paris dives. His look of nostalgia gave the impression there were other moments of pleasure that he did not mention out of respect for Jeanne. Anne-Marie, who still harbored the regret in her heart of not having completed the years at the conservatoire in Boulogne, inquired about his thoughts on the City of Light. He made a face.
“You know what Jean-Hégésippe Légitimus said about it?”
Anne-Marie and Boniface confessed their ignorance.
“But you know who Jean-Hégésippe Légitimus was, don’t you?” he asked with a sudden insolence, staring at them with his sparkling eyes.
How could Anne-Marie and Boniface not know that his Terrible Troisième party had sounded the death knell of the white and mulatto supremacy in Guadeloupe? They stammered a timid yes.
“He said,” Auguste declared, “that Paris was too cold and the streets were too busy.”
Thereupon he burst out laughing amid the terrified silence at the mention of the name of Légitimus. This was the only false note, albeit minor, we admit, during the entire meal.
The servants then served coffee and cognac in the back garden. Boniface, who had always had a liking for botany, had planted some Tristellateia australasiae, whose glowing yellow flowers looked like a multitude of tiny suns.