The rainy season following Auguste’s birth was so wet that people remembered it for years to come. The tropical waves, not yet known by this poetical name but simply as “stormy weather” or “blows,” came one after another. The children of the needy maléré drowned while floating their roughly made rafts in the canal that had overflowed. One evening Anne-Marie urgently sent for Victoire.
Boniface was very sick.
For months he had suffered from agues, anginas, and hemorrhagic dengue fevers. At present a banal urinary infection was causing blood poisoning and the doctor believed he would not survive the night.
Braving the rain, Victoire ran frantically to the rue de Nassau, where she hadn’t set foot for over a year. On arrival she scrambled up the stairs.
Boniface was lying in the Regency room where they had spent so many nights together. When she came in, he regained consciousness and burst into tears. He was unrecognizable, all skin and bone. Perhaps she had never realized until then the place she occupied in his life nor the one he occupied in her heart. Boniface was a man of few manners, had difficulty expressing himself, was incapable of formulating the emotions she inspired in him, and was somewhat shy. All of a sudden she realized that her absence was killing him and that perhaps she too would die from it. However hard she deployed her panoply of bush teas, herb teas, decoctions, poultices, emetics, and purgatives, nothing helped and his condition worsened. After two heart attacks, he passed away.
If Boniface had been a beggar, nobody would have given him a thought. He had not accomplished anything memorable, nothing that would go down in history. By making money out of selling codfish, he had built up a considerable fortune: one of the biggest on the island.
As a consequence, a flotilla of white Creoles with the appropriate expression invaded his house for the wake. I say white Creoles because the island society was reluctant to integrate. Only two or three mulattos were to be seen amid the gathering. As for the blacks, the only ones present were the store employees from the Lardenoy wharf. Overdressed and ill at ease, they hastily recited a dozen rosaries in front of the corpse and hurriedly exited to soak their soles in the puddles. Everyone presented their condolences to Anne-Marie, half hidden under her mourning veils, surrounded by her two children, who, like their mother, had no idea what attitude to adopt. Boniface Jr. had theoretically loved his father but had never paid him much attention. Valérie-Anne was mainly frightened. Didn’t the dead come and tickle your feet? Anne-Marie, who had made no mystery of her lack of sentiment for her husband, felt merely that strange fear we all feel in the vicinity of death.
They ignored Victoire, the only person to be truly unhappy, haggard and red-eyed, who together with the servants handed round plates of thick soup and glasses of star anise, which the guests had no trouble emptying. They had a grudge against her. Why had she come back to the Walbergs? Was she intent on getting her share of the inheritance?
The following morning the rain intensified. The wind got up and carried off the roofs of the cabins in the outlying districts. This time five children drowned in the canal playing with their raft. Despite the terrible weather, in the afternoon the funeral cortege stretched as far as the eye could see. In a church filled to bursting, the priest showered with praise a man who had done nothing but earn money in the least creative way. Then the congregation set off for the cemetery. At the back of the funeral cortege, Auguste could be seen. He had not heeded Jeanne, who had refused to attend the funeral, but did not want to get himself noticed.
The death of Boniface created a gulf between Victoire and Jeanne that was never bridged. Victoire held a grudge against Jeanne for not being present either at the wake or discreetly at the funeral, like Auguste. She especially held a grudge against her for having demanded a certain behavior that was perhaps responsible for his suffering. When she thought of his solitary agony, she could not forgive herself for letting her daughter dictate to her such loathsome behavior. For letting herself be intimidated by reprimands that after all made no sense. What did Jeanne have against Boniface? As Anne-Marie never stopped saying, the Walbergs had brought her up. They had provided her with a comfortable roof over her head, food in abundance, and clothes. And above all an education. Was it their fault if they were white Creoles? Who among us choose our color, our parents, or our birthplace? When the will was read, she would have liked Jeanne to be consistent with herself and refuse the gift that Boniface had made her. Jeanne considered the hundred or so francs pathetic and saw it as proof of the contempt in which he held them. He left nothing, not a cent, not a patch of land, a jewel, or a piece of furniture to Victoire, with whom he had slept to his heart’s content for over twenty years. To her daughter he left a pittance. She accepted it because she told herself cynically that it was better than nothing from the slave drivers.
When after a two-week absence Victoire made up her mind to return to the rue de Condé, Jeanne did not reproach her for the time spent at the Walbergs. Yet she was secretly exasperated by what she called her morganatic widow’s expression. Victoire dressed herself in loose-fitting black, white, and mauve outfits, wore headties around her forehead in the same colors, and spent hours praying in church. In actual fact, Jeanne’s irony hid a violent feeling of remorse. She realized too late the extent of the blow she had dealt both Boniface and her mother by separating them by force. She wondered unfairly why in God’s name Victoire hadn’t rebelled, knowing full well, deep down, that Victoire had never rebelled in her life.
During these tense times, Victoire continued her visits to the Grands Nègres as if nothing had happened. The only change in behavior was that she practically no longer opened her mouth and botched the weekly dinners. The guests politely swallowed the tasteless dishes, wondering what had gotten into the outstanding cook they once knew. One day she served a young rabbit with tamarind and aged rum that was absolutely inedible.
An incident that might seem comical occurred one Friday evening during the course of one of these suppers. While Victoire had disappeared into the kitchen to arrange a dish, Madame Aristophane, who was a bit scatterbrained, asked:
“Jeanne, why is your maman so sad? Who is she in mourning for?”
There followed a deathly silence that Auguste hastened to fill with one of his never-ending anecdotes. Later on, it needed a lot of tact on his part to get Jeanne to forgive the scatterbrain.
“She did it on purpose!” she sobbed. “She asked it on purpose to hurt me!”
The servants took advantage of this newfound freedom to sow their wild oats. A certain Bergette spent her time in a slanging match with her lover in the corridor to the sounds of “slut” and enough kouni à manman aws to make you shudder. To end it all, the lover hit her over the head with a bottle and left her in a pool of blood on the sidewalk in front of the house. Victoire remained passive and indifferent to these dramas.
Day and night alike, she kept turning the same thoughts over and over again in her head. What a belt of corpses she wore around her waist! What evil eye had she been dealt with to lay to rest all those who came into contact with her? Dernier, Alexandre, and now Boniface. When she was little, people at La Treille accused her of being in league with the devil and a bloodsucking soukouyan. It was probably true. She looked at herself in the mirror and what was hiding behind her pale complexion, her slit eyes, and rounded forehead frightened her.
Little Auguste, Anne-Marie, and music continued to be her only source of comfort. She could no longer part with the little boy. She had composed a lullaby for him without which he could never get to sleep.
Ti kongo a manman
Ola ti kongo an mwen.
I have no idea what she felt listening to the outdoor municipal concerts because, unlike I could with cooking, I could never imagine what music meant for her exactly. The orchestra from a frigate, La Minerve, that had come over from Fort-de-France for an Offenbach festival, performed The Tales of Hoffmann, La Belle Hélène and once again The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein. As for Anne-Marie, she entertained Victoire with her chatter. Anne-Marie had declared war on Boniface Jr. She had got it into her head to have him interned in the Camp Jacob hospital on the pretext of his inordinate fondness for alcohol. A cousin who was on the board of directors was prepared to issue her with a medical certificate. Needless to say, all these endeavors came to nothing. When it came to intrigues, Boniface Jr. won hands down.
When Jeanne told Victoire she was pregnant again, the announcement was greeted with indifference. Victoire’s heart was not in it.
Fortunately, Jeanne felt as fit as a fiddle during this pregnancy and did not need Victoire. This time, nothing brought them together. Neither the bush teas, the perfumed baths, the little treats, nor the massages or the caresses. Jeanne, who had gone back to hard-boiled eggs and tomato salad with one or two sardines in oil as a bonus, now slept beside her husband. She valiantly never missed one day of school.
On July 1, 1912, after a delivery that lasted a mere two hours, Dr. Mélas placed in Victoire’s indifferent arms her second grandson.
“Yet another boy!” Auguste groaned, who had given up hoping for a daughter.
Patience! His wish would be granted a little over two years later, and the father who had been indifferent to all his children showed a passionate and blind devotion to this baby girl.
The second son, christened Jean, was truly as splendid as a star, like his mother said, light-skinned in memory of his grandmother, with almond-shaped, languishing eyes and well-defined, sensual lips that he embellished later on with a Cuban-style mustache. During his teens he was the darling of the girls and nicknamed Bel Ami by his classmates. Beauty, alas, is not necessarily a synonym for happiness. During the Second World War, when he was fresh out of medical school, former intern of the Hôpitaux de Paris, his promise of a brilliant future was cut short. Jean was arrested by the Germans one evening while returning home to his studio apartment on the rue de Lille. He died of cold and hunger in the concentration camp at Birkenau. Was he in the Resistance? Was his only crime the fact of being black? I have no idea. I know nothing about this brother. All I know of him is a photo, a real one this time, of a young black dandy with a long white scarf wound round his neck, a gray fedora shading his feminine eyes, a cigarette between his fingers, smiling at the wonderful life he thought was waiting for him. The date: July 1932. He was twenty years old.
It was unusual for a woman at that time to leave her young children and travel for pleasure. And yet that is precisely what Jeanne did. During the long vacation Auguste and Jeanne went on the honeymoon they had had to postpone twice. They embarked on the ocean liner for France. They planned to spend two months in the City of Light and leave their four little boys in the care of two maids and three mabo nursemaids under Victoire’s supervision. That was when Jeanne discovered the métropole.
I do believe that France and Paris were truly the loves of her life. Traveling by train to the Mont Saint Michel, she contemplated in raptures the passing landscape as she pressed her face against the window. In Paris she chose the apartments where we used to spend her annual leave on the basis of the districts with which she had mysteriously fallen in love. She had a particular fondness for the seventh arrondissement and Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where we stayed on several occasions.