FOUR


On January 1, 1889, when thirty-four loyal Légitimus followers sat down to lunch, Fulgence introduced his protégé, the new elementary school teacher at Les Basses. Dernier Argilius, the youngest and last son of a poor farm laborer’s family from Saint-Louis, bore his name, since his parents wanted the Good Lord to know that finally they had had enough. After fourteen children, and four who had died, they no longer wanted His heavenly gifts. Dernier was one of the first holders of the colonial diploma and a member of the Republican Youth Committee. It was rumored he was a former Légitimus party militant, a zambo. After the elections he had apparently been seen patrolling the streets and brandishing a stick, threatening people with light skins. There is a photo of him in a book by Jean-Pierre Sainton, a Guadeloupean historian. The requisite very black skin, a head of thick, frizzy hair curling over a domed forehead, a determined look, a broad nose, clearly drawn lips, and dressed in a tight-fitting frock coat. His expression is arrogant and mocking. On bel nèg! as the saying goes. Women devoured him with their eyes, lingering surreptitiously over the treasure that fitted tightly in his impeccable woolen trousers.

He wrote editorials in Légitimus’s broadsheets. I discovered one: “We are hungry, we are thirsty, we are barefoot, we have no work; we have no home, we survive thanks to the grace of God. Our families are impoverished. Our women have lost their beauty, bruised under the heel of destitution.”

My reason for reproducing this piece of grandiloquent prose at the risk of boring my reader is because I would like to ask a question that I deem important. Dernier Argilius has gone down in history like Jean-Hégésippe Légitimus as an ardent defender of the illiterate oppressed Negroes emerging from the belly of slavery. When he died tragically in 1899, the entire island went into mourning. Ever since then, theses, monographs, and biographies have been written on the subject of this role model and martyr. My question, then, is what is an exemplary man? Is it only his writings, his public speeches, and his gesticulations that count? What weight does his personal life and private behavior carry? Dernier Argilius took advantage of I don’t know how many women, wrecked the life of at least one of them, and engendered I don’t know how many bastards who grew up without a father. Doesn’t that count?

From the very minute Thérèse’s and Dernier’s eyes met, sparks flew that set their bodies on fire. During lunch he drew up a chair to her left and whispered pell-mell all the clichés of a miserable childhood, a humiliated adolescence, and a passion for the Race from a very early age. During dessert, she sat at the piano and accompanied him as he thundered out with his bass voice the old political favorites; all the guests joined in with a frenzy exacerbated by the alcohol ingurgitated:

Nou voyé on blanc alé


I pa fè annyen ban nou


Voyé on pwèmyé milat


I pa fè annyen ban nou


Voyé on dézyèm milat


An nou voyé Léjé alé pou I défann no z’entéré


An nou voyé Léjé alé pou I monté o Pawlèman!

In the meantime, their blood was boiling with excitement. They were soaked with the burning sweat of desire. If they had been free to do so, they would have rushed into Thérèse’s bedroom and, flouting bourgeois preliminaries, gone into action. Instead, they had to wait one long week, the time it took to elude Danila’s vigilance and especially that of Gaëtane, who would be constantly warning her daughter:

“Pa ti ni konsomasyon san bénédisyon.” (No consummation without a benediction).

Dernier, however, was not entirely blinded by passion, if passion there was. He devised a project that was approved by the party cadres and comrades in La Pointe with whom he corresponded regularly. Together with Thérèse, he would be in charge of an association that aimed at teaching political awareness to the laboring masses on Marie-Galante by way of the arts. He proposed calling it “A Call to the Arts, Citizens.” Thérèse preferred “A Call to the Arts, New Citizens.” But Dernier thought the adjective useless, even redundant, and his decision prevailed. Literary nights, poetry evenings, and music recitals were held one after another in the newly painted town hall, but apart from the usual handful of Fulgence’s and Gaëtane’s friends, it remained hopelessly empty.

For the festival of Sainte-Cécile, Thérèse managed to have the philharmonic orchestra shipped over from La Pointe. The forty-three musicians in their blue and white uniforms and white helmets lined up in front of the town hall and played to perfection excerpts from Meyerbeer’s work. Apart from a few ragged urchins chewing on grabyo koko candies, not a peasant, farm laborer, fisherman, or worker took the trouble to turn up. Thérèse was so mortified she agreed to go along with Dernier, who suggested they concentrate their efforts on the school. At least there the audience is captive. The school principal, M. Isaac, an uptight mulatto, had hardened prejudices, but he feared Légitimus’s people and complied with every request.

Thérèse and Dernier then decided to form a choral society. Unfortunately, they were unable to come to an agreement. As a feminist, lest we forget, Thérèse insisted on including women’s voices and singing the famous “Hallelujah” chorus from Handel’s Messiah. Dernier, who was against mixing the sexes, was all for teaching the same songs that the socialists sang in the Workers Chorale in La Pointe.

Marie-Galante, however, was impatient to hear about their engagement.

Some indiscretions had revealed their affair. It’s true the lovers hid nothing. They galloped on horseback across the island to their trysts, Thérèse’s butt strapped tight into an old pair of her father’s trousers and her hair straightened with a hot iron and held in place by a net. They would meet in a cabin belonging to one of Dernier’s brothers. In order to make up for its modest surroundings, Dernier had brought in a bed made of locust wood and an oval mirror in which it was whispered the couple gazed at their reflection before the act of penetration. Despite all that, people were understanding. Firstly, because the sin of love is not a sin. And then putting Easter before Lent is no crime! Who hasn’t committed it? In fact, what marriage can claim to have escaped concubinage or béni-rété? The young girls who hoped to be bridesmaids had selected their gowns from the Printemps catalog. Others got help from dress patterns. Thérèse, an artist to her fingertips, drew her wedding dress on sheets of ecru paper and showed the sketches to her mother’s dressmaker, who shook her head, helpless.

“An pé’é jen pé!” (I could never manage that.)

Against all expectations, on December 23, 1889, Dernier Argilius slipped onto the steamer for La Pointe. A little surprised, Thérèse, however, did not worry inordinately about this trip. She knew he loathed celebrating Christmas in the Catholic manner. Like his political mentor, he dreamed of combining December 24 with the anniversary of the death of Victor Schoelcher, combining the savior of the black race with the liberator of the Jews. She only began to suspect the truth when some good souls came to inform her that Dernier had emptied his house in Les Basses of all his papers, clothes, and, above all, the books in his library. Utterly distraught, she ran over to Monsieur Isaac, who confirmed that Dernier Argilius had left Marie-Galante for good, and good riddance! At the request of Jean-Hégésippe Légitimus, he had turned his back on teaching to devote himself entirely to journalism. Later on he was to become director of the newspaper Le Peuple.

Thérèse went down on both knees to beg Fulgence — the outraged father who threatened to write straightway to Légitimus to tell him of his protégé’s unspeakable behavior — to remain silent. She reminded him that there had never been a promise of marriage in the true sense of the term. When she finally managed to get him to promise to stay put, she swallowed a whole bottle of what she thought to be arnica. In actual fact it was a purgative that Gaëtane had concocted with cassia and castor oil. Her entire body became inflamed. She defecated for a whole week and almost died: dehydration, sudden drop in blood pressure, and everything else. She regained consciousness only to be blinded by a photo on the front page of L’Emancipation: Dernier Argilius piously leading a pilgrimage to the Schoelcher museum, inaugurated with great pomp two years earlier, in front of a crowd of ecstatic workers. She fainted once again. After a month, she came through, but was so weak that Léonora Bilé, a Congolese, skillful in the art of herbs, came every day from Trianon to massage her wasted body with coconut oil macerated in balata bark.

It’s a common fact that misfortune never comes singly. Thérèse was gradually recovering from this abominable desertion when they discovered that Victoire, who as usual never said a word, never divulged a thing, was hiding a belly under her shapeless golle dresses. Danila, who had been spying on her for weeks, had noticed that she no longer washed her bloodstained rags once a month. To be honest, she had been nurturing deep down an unspeakable intuition. When she confided her suspicions to Gaëtane, the latter expressed her doubts. Didn’t Victoire take communion every Sunday at eight o’clock mass? Would she dare commit such a mortal sin? In order to back up her accusation, Danila had to force the unfortunate Victoire to bare the still modest yet incomparable calabash of a belly with a darker stripe down the middle and topped by an enormous tumbler of a belly button.

Pregnant!

For whom? By whom?

Like Oraison with Eliette seventeen years earlier, Fulgence was called to the rescue from his office at the town hall and unbuckled his belt. Victoire was less resilient than her mother. After five bloody lashes on her shoulders, she let it out, the name that Danila had not dared pronounce.

Thérèse fell into a swoon.


NOBODY WILL EVER know anything about the relations my grandmother Victoire had with Dernier Argilius.

That story has been erased. Deleted from memory. But I want to know.

I want to know how they communicated their desire, where they met and how many times. How did they manage to hide on an island where nothing is secret? Was Victoire pregnant straightaway? What drove her to him? Did her chaste adolescent heart become inflamed at first sight during that famous New Year’s lunch? Didn’t she have any consideration for her godmother, Thérèse, whose passion for Dernier was common knowledge? Or did she want to take revenge on her arrogance? Years later Thérèse told some close friends:

“Despite everything I did for her, she was always jealous of me. I could see that in her eyes, but I never took her seriously.”

She claimed that Victoire never felt anything for Dernier. All she was looking for was a man of standing, “a valid father.” She called her an ungrateful wretch, calculating and manipulating. I don’t believe a word.

As for Dernier, nobody will ever know why the man who possessed the most desirable young girl on Marie-Galante bedded also one of the most destitute. Nor why he turned his back on both of them at the same time.

I can therefore only use my imagination.

It wasn’t rape; that I’m certain of.

For her future son-in-law, whose heart she wanted to win through his stomach, Gaëtane used to send over a series of small dishes. At noon Danila would pile the plates on a tray that she covered with an embroidered napkin. With the tray on her head Victoire would trot off to Les Basses, which was then a densely populated suburb on the outskirts of Grand Bourg. She never found Dernier at home. He could be found either at the schoolhouse helping out the dunces, or downing neat rums at the Rayon d’Argent rum store with the party’s farm laborers. She would push open the door, which was never locked (in those days a burglary was unheard of), and arrange the plates on the table. That too was a moment of liberty that she made the most of. In order to comply with his political opinions, Dernier lived in a modest two-room cabin. The place, however, was unique. Books! Piles of books! Everywhere you looked. Piled up on the floor. Stacked haphazardly on shelves along the walls. Some were dog-eared. Others were annotated. Yet others were in shreds. You sensed that their owner loved them and read them. Not like Fulgence, who kept his leather-bound volumes in a mahogany glass cabinet and never touched them.

What a magical object a book is! Even more so for someone who can’t read, who doesn’t know there are bad books that are not worth sacrificing whole forests for.

Victoire would turn them over and over again in the palms of her hands. Sometimes she opened them and studied the signs that were indecipherable to her. She regretted her ignorance. Yet her heart did not hold Caldonia to blame. All she wanted to remember was Caldonia’s tenderness. Living a life of solitude, she could constantly hear Caldonia’s grumpy, affectionate voice repeating the riddles whose answers she knew by heart but pretended to search for:

“On ti bòlòm ka plin on kaz?” (A little man who fills the whole room.) A candle.

One day. The heat was suffocating. Dry lightning streaked the sky. The sea was glowing like a gold bar being smelted. With tongues hanging out, the dogs did little else but sniff one another’s backside and seek the shade. Livid, the anole lizards puffed up their dewlaps on the stems of the hibiscus. Victoire arrived at Les Basses soaked in sweat. For once, Dernier was at home. He had taken off his frock coat and, shirt wide-open on his hairy chest, he was fanning himself with a newspaper. She greeted him shyly in a muffled, slightly hoarse voice.

“Ben l’bonjou, misié!”

He inspected the tray, tasted the food, made a face, shrugged his shoulders, and exclaimed in Creole:

“What bunch of heartless individuals sent you out in this heat?”

Victoire remained expressionless. Did she share his opinion? He disappeared into the bedroom and came back with a towel that he threw at her.

“Go and wash your face in the washroom,” he ordered.

“Washroom” was a fancy word for it. A trellis fence marked out a space behind the cabin where a half-empty water jar and toiletry utensils could be found. Victoire obeyed and went outside. He came out onto the doorstep to stare at her with his arrogant eyes. Out of modesty she hesitated to undo her headtie in front of him. When she finally made up her mind, her black hair immediately tumbled down to her shoulders.

“What’s your name?” he shouted.

“Victwa, misié!”

“Where’re you from?”

“La Treille, yes!”

She filled a basin, washed her face and neck, dried herself, then went back inside. He had settled back in the rocking chair and looked up to stare at her with sustained attention, caressing her breasts with his eyes. Under this fiery gaze, she picked up the dishes from the day before and got ready to take her leave.

It was then that he stood up and walked over to her.

“You’re in too much of a hurry!”

He took her by the arm.

Did they make love that day? It’s unlikely.

I believe on the contrary that she was frightened; frightened by his touch, by this male smell that was filling her nostrils for the first time. She wriggled free, secured the tray on her head, and made a bee line for the town. People who saw her shoot past strained their necks. What was this crazy girl running after? Sunstroke, that’s all she could hope to get.

Danila’s suspicions were aroused from the very first day. Monstrous suspicions. Amid the ensuing misfortune, she grouched that her heart had warned her before everyone else.

She was putting the final touches to a sea urchin stew when Victoire came charging in, red and sweating. She was coming back from Les Basses, Danila remembered. What was she running away from? No use asking her, she wouldn’t answer. Danila noticed her hands trembling as she clumsily put away the plates she had brought back, even more awkwardly than usual. She almost fell flat on her face while crossing the yard. In charge of seasoning the salad, she mixed up the salt and pepper servers. While clearing the table, she crossed the knives and forks under Gaëtane’s very eyes and earned a sharp reprimand to which visibly she paid no attention.

Then she left untouched her more modest meal (no hors d’oeuvres or dessert), which she took with Danila in the kitchen. She sat daydreaming, her chin resting on the palm of her hand, before tackling the washing-up and breaking two ramekins in one go.


ONE MORNING, SHE who was generally mute as a blowfish, started humming a song while putting the wash to bleach. An old wake ceremony song that Oraison used to sing at La Treille, each time accompanied by bursts of laughter that flew from all sides. An old melody that Caldonia liked:

Zanfan si ou vouè


Papa mò


Téré li an ba tono la


Sé pou tout gout


Ki dégouté


Y tombé an goj a papa

In her amazement, Danila, who was busy kneading the batter for vegetable marinades, grated her left middle finger, mistaking it for a chunk of pumpkin.


IF PEOPLE HAD eyes to see — but people are blind, that’s a fact, and can’t see farther than the end of their noses — they would have noticed one thing: that Victoire’s beauty, up till then questionable, argued over, even contested, burst into the open.

Here she was suddenly less sickly, less adolescent. Not in the least bit little Miss Sapoti. A head of hair as thick as the Black Forest. Surreptitiously, her portliness made her breasts heavier and rounded her shoulders. Her overly pale complexion took on a velvety texture and darkened.

Danila, made perspicacious by her hatred, was the only one to notice this metamorphosis, which was even more suspect since Victoire no longer touched her food. What nurtured her were the kisses, the caresses, and the sweet words breathed into her. From where?

From a man, no doubt.

There is nothing like love to make a woman as beautiful as that. It’s not only the feeling. But the act. Making love.

What man are we talking about?

Danila refused to imagine the unimaginable or a fortiori speak the unspeakable. As her nurse, mabo Danila had held Thérèse over the baptismal font. She had wiped her behind, washed her menstrual-stained undergarments. She had no proof whatsoever, but wanted to shout at her:

“Watch out! Open both eyes! You think she’s a child, but she’s not the child you think she is. She’s a perverted little thing. A female of the first degree!”

Fifty years later, on her deathbed, Danila was still racked by remorse. She beat her breast: “Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.” For hadn’t she heard whisper that Dernier was an incurable womanizer? Under the guise of literacy lessons, Dernier received a constant stream of peasant girls. Some rumors had it that he was the father of Marinette’s son, who worked at the Folle-Anse plantation, and also Toinette’s, who toiled at Buckingham. Yet she hadn’t told anyone of these rumors. Not even her confessor. What was holding her back? The fear of hurting her beloved Thérèse. And now look what happened!

Her heart had jumped, that’s for sure. But in the end, what purpose had it served? Nobody had come out of it unscathed and she had not protected the girl she worshipped.


WHAT DISGUSTS ME in all this is that Victoire was never considered a victim. I can excuse Thérèse, who was blinded by her own grief. But as for the others, there was not a moment of compassion. Victoire was just sixteen. Statutory rape. Dernier was twice her age. He was educated, and a respected, even well-known notable. Everyone treated her like a criminal. I like to think that she hid her tears in her attic, revolted by her pregnancy, but not complaining, crushed by her solitude and convinced of her insignificance. Perhaps too she was expecting Thérèse to say something, but she never did.

“Here we are the two of us, both taken for a ride. At least you carry the future in your womb. Me…”

Fulgence demanded Oraison come and take back his daughter. She had disrespected the sanctity of his home. Oraison turned up at eight in the morning — he hadn’t gone to sea that day — flanked by Lourdes. Informed of her crime, he flung himself on Victoire and gave her such a slap that she fell to the ground, her mouth covered in blood. He then vented his anger by kicking and punching her. Under the terrified gaze of Gaëtane, Fulgence had to hold him back.

If he wanted to kill his child, let him do it elsewhere. There would be no bloodshed on his floor.

Without a farewell, without a thank-you, and, most significantly, without a penny, Victoire left the home where she had toiled for over six years, hugging the wicker basket containing the loose golle dresses and matador robe that Thérèse had forgotten to take back.

Poor Thérèse was in agony. Her monogrammed sheet pulled up over her head, she had been weeping and sobbing since the day before. She refused to open her door to Gaëtane, who was primarily concerned with the humiliation.

“Oh my goodness! People will laugh at us.”

“Oh Lord! How will I be able to look at people at high mass?”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, mercy on us!”

Thérèse did let Danila in; she was carrying a woman weed herb tea. Thérèse took the cup with trembling hands.

“I pati?”

Danila nodded that Victoire had left and there followed a long, uncomfortable moment.

Two months later Thérèse booked a category two first-class cabin on board the Louisiane, a steamship belonging to the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique. With no regard for her parents’ grief, whom she was never to see alive again, she journeyed to France, where she lived for the rest of her life. Something was broken inside her. She had lost her savoir-faire and her assurance. She bought a two-bedroom apartment on the rue Monge, opposite the Lutetia amphitheater, and earned a mediocre living by giving music lessons to children of the colored bourgeoisie. Accompanying herself on the piano, she would hum the well-known melody that was still very topical:

J’ai pris mon coeur, j’ai donné à un ingrat,


A un jeune homme sans conscience


Qui ne connait pas l’amour


Ah! N’aimez pas sur cette terre


Quand l’amour s’en va, il ne reste que les pleurs!

She kept quiet about that period of her life. As a rule, seated at the piano, she would sum it up thus with her sweet, broken voice:

“I nursed a viper in my bosom and it bit me. My life is over. That’s all I can say.”

Sometimes between scales she became worked up and asked in a tone of despair:

“Why? Why me? I did nothing to deserve such a blow dealt by fate. I was pure. A virgin. Naive.”

She never married.


ORAISON WAS WALKING in front, his chest puffed out in anger. Wretched females whose bellies bear nothing but shame upon shame! Behind him came Victoire and the sympathizing Lourdes. On leaving the town, where the Maurice Bishop Center now stands, Lourdes linked arms affectionately with her niece, who nestled against her side. Unfortunately, at that very moment, Oraison turned round and caught their gesture of affection. He sent them both flying, one to the right, the other to the left. Victoire lost her balance, fell into the ditch, and twisted her ankle. Thank God, her baby was unharmed.

In the space of a few years, La Treille had undergone major changes. Half of its inhabitants had emigrated to the mainland of Guadeloupe, leaving their cabins to go to ruin. Cut grass and sensitive plants filled the once Creole gardens. The trees were overgrown with creepers. The white blossom of the Santo Domingo briar rivaled the lilac flowers of the gliricidia. No longer were there oxen grazing under the hogplum trees. No longer any oxcarts, arms lowered, waiting to be loaded. There reigned an atmosphere of desolation. When Oraison had been in such a hurry to move in with Isadora, Félix, Chrysostome, and Lourdes had not tolerated the insult to the memory of Caldonia. In unison they moved to a cabin at the other end of the hamlet. Then Félix and Chrysostome each set up house with a woman and went their separate ways. Since Félix was Victoire’s godfather, that was where Oraison brought the criminal, throwing her at his feet with a kick. Félix had given Victoire her baby formula; he had given her piggybacks and carved oxcarts from an avocado pit. Victoire was not the first and would not be the last to push in front of her the belly she got on credit. It was a mode that was here to stay, and stay for a long time, that’s for sure. Deep down in his heart, Félix believed she should be spared. Blame should be placed above all on the wickedness of these Grands Nègres, these sermonizers, who were no better than the small-time blacks, even the maroons. But Destinée, his companion, couldn’t put up with this slut under her roof and he had to give in.

Lourdes asked for nothing better than to inherit Victoire. But money was cruelly lacking. How could she feed yet another mouth? After much reflection, they came up with an idea.

Up till then, Victoire had escaped the bondage of working in the sugarcane fields. Now it was the only way out. Since she had never handled a hoe or a cutlass, she would offer her services as a cane bundler. All they needed to do was make a dress and mittens from pieces of jute and old rags. The two women labored all night and in the gray of the dawn set off for the plantation.

It was harvesttime.

The sun was still hiding coyly in a corner of the sky. Yet already dozens of men and women in rags were busy working. The carts drawn by oxen drained of their force trundled through the cane pieces. Not anyone can be a cane bundler. The job is carried out by federations, genuine convoys of olden times, made up of elderly women, even very old women, who are too worn out for weeding and clearing.

Did José the foreman, a mulatto himself, take pity on Victoire’s belly?

Whatever the case, he accepted her request, and under a sun growing bolder by the minute, she braved exhaustion, the sting of the cane, and dizziness in order to deliver her bundles of sugarcane.

It was Lourdes who was so happy! Hoisting up her skirt over her bow legs the color of kako dou, she indulged in so much tomfoolery that she managed to get a smile out of Victoire.

Coming after so many bad days, the evening was blissful. And the following night even more blissful.

Alas! The following morning, no sooner had they set foot in the field than a song rose up amid the laughter and vulgar jibes. It was about a mulatto girl, a slut fallen on hard times, who, after having had her fill of men, stole the bread out of the mouths of her poor black neighbors. Victoire took to her heels and fled.

This was the first and last experience my grandmother had of the cane fields.

Even so, she never gave up. Despite the condition of her rounding belly, she was constantly looking for work. Shortly afterward, her real life began. I next find her as a cook in the service of Rochelle Dulieu-Beaufort, the wife of the owner of the sugar factory at Pirogue. Cook! Let us confess it was a bold claim, since at the Jovials, we may recall, all she ever did was help Danila. Yet from the very first day her destiny took shape. She proved to have an incomparable gift. She won over the Dulieu-Beaufort family with a cream of pumpkin and black crab soup. The Dulieu-Beauforts symbolized the reversal of fortune undergone by certain white Creoles. They had in turn grown tobacco and indigo and set up a coffee plantation, which, according to them, produced the best coffee in Guadeloupe. One of their relatives, a friend of Dominique Guesde who, like him, was a dilettante writer, had invented the slogan:

Sèl kafé di kalité, sé kafé Gwadloup. (The only quality coffee is coffee from Guadeloupe.)

Alas, in the wake of a hurricane, Marie-Galante lost all its coffee and cotton plants. The family had now turned to sugar while in La Pointe Monsieur Souques was preparing to nose out all the factory owners with his Darboussier plant. They were thus living sparingly at Maule. In their elegant house made of solid wood with a roof of wooden tiles, Rochelle rationed the oil and rice for meals and lit only one paraffin lamp to light twelve rooms. Victoire was unable to present any references and what’s more was pregnant. No problem! Two excellent reasons to underpay her!

The Dulieu-Beauforts had managed to engage their eldest daughter, Anne-Marie, a sixteen-year-old beauty, to Boniface Walberg, whose ups and downs in the sugar industry had prompted him to become a trader on the quai Lardenoy in La Pointe. Outraged at being sold to a man she despised for his lack of musical education, Anne-Marie locked herself in her room with her viola and played and played.

Strange, this passion for music in a materialist family! A loving godmother, on noticing her unusual ear for music, had given her a violin on her fourth birthday. She slept with it tight between her legs. It was the first thing she grabbed hold of on wakening. She had forced her parents to send her to the conservatoire in Boulogne, near Paris. Besides the violin, she was learning to play the guitar and the recorder when the family ruin obliged her to return to Marie-Galante. Ever since, she had made a good job of making herself loathsome to everyone.

Anne-Marie didn’t take long noticing the new cook. Not because she could rustle up a sublime gumbo, a creamy concoction obtained by adding additional okra leaves, but because twice she had entered her room unexpectedly and surprised Victoire, holding her viola to her shoulder.

“Do you like my music?” she had asked, surprised.

“Oui, mamzel,” Victoire had whispered.

Do the blacks have an ear for things other than the bamboula? If yes, this would back up Anne-Marie’s theory that there should be no hierarchy between different types of music. Those who called the gwo ka, bèlè, merengue, or mazouk a lot of bamboula, in other words primitive music, exasperated her. Their rhythms were different from a sonata or a symphony, that’s all. However, she hadn’t had time to verify the exactitude of her audacious point of view since Victoire, pushing in front of her a belly that now could not be ignored, had run out.

Thus was born a solid, mysterious relationship that must have exasperated and set quite a number of people talking. It was only to end with the death of Victoire, called to God long before Anne-Marie, who ended her life obese and ninety years old. But we will come back to that.

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