Victoire: My Mother's Mother

FIVE

My mother was born on April 28, 1890, at four o’clock in the morning.

Victoire christened her Jeanne Marie Marthe. I have no idea what motivated her choice of this string of first names.

When she went into labor the evening before, Dodose Quidal, the midwife, looked in and then left, predicting the child would not come into this world just then. She proved to be right. The next time Dodose pushed open the door of her cabin, Victoire was expulsing her daughter in a flow of blood and fecal matter. We know that any birth is a butchery. The child weighed six and a half pounds. As soon as she emerged from her mother’s womb, she was beautiful, my mother. A skin as soft as a sapodilla, a mass of hair more curly than frizzy or downright kinky, at least to begin with, for things were to change when she was seven or eight, a perfectly oval face, a high forehead, sparkling almond-shaped eyes, prominent cheekbones, and a well-defined mouth. She was the spitting image of her father. Once Dodose had wiped her with a cloth, she laid her on her mother’s chest, where the baby greedily guzzled on a breast. It was then that Victoire burst into tears. For the very first time.

She hadn’t cried when Caldonia died.

She hadn’t cried when Dernier ran away. I use this verb, “ran,” although we will never know for certain whether Dernier ever knew about her pregnancy.

She hadn’t cried when the Jovials threw her out like a slut.

She hadn’t cried when Thérèse left for France barricaded in bitterness and hatred.

Was it then, through her tears, that she swore to her daughter she would watch over her and give her every possible chance in life so that nobody would ever trample on her daughter like they had trampled on her? Education, education, swear to God, would be her emancipation. Her daughter would be educated. She would sacrifice herself for that.

Dodose expressed amazement when she received the placenta in her hands. Piecemeal. Stained in red. Greenish in places. Foul-smelling. It boded no good. In fact, three hours later Victoire came down with a high fever. Dr. Nesty, a mulatto who had studied in Paris, called to the rescue, confirmed it was caused by an infection of the placenta. For days on end, despite leeches to draw out the bad blood and lemon hip baths, Victoire struggled between life and death. She was covered in sweat. She pushed aside Lourdes, who never stopped sobbing. She was delirious, calling for Caldonia and Eliette, her mother whom she had never known. Day in and day out the Dulieu-Beauforts’ carriage trundled along the clayey, never stony, tracks of Marie-Galante. A tearful Anne-Marie begged her mother not to abandon her poor cook. Mme. Dulieu-Beaufort, always at the disposition of charity, obeyed the word of God, who was speaking through her daughter. At her request, the priest at Saint-Louis came to confess Victoire and give her communion. Was it the effect of these last sacraments?

To everyone’s surprise, Victoire recovered.

On the eighteenth day of her illness, sitting next to her on the mattress of her kabann, Dr. Nesty took her hand, reassuring her she would live, but whispering that now that she was sixteen she would never see her blood again or have any more children. I think I can guess what Victoire felt. In our societies, even today, to be a mother is the only true vocation of a woman. Sterility means nothing less than dragging around a useless body, deprived of its essential virtue. Papaya tree that bears no papayas. Mango tree that gives no mangoes. Cucumber without seeds. A hollow husk.

Victoire’s pain and disappointment no doubt surged back toward her heart, which became a burning niche for Jeanne, the daughter whom the Good Lord in His mysterious ways decided would be the one and only. She never managed, however, to translate into acts the devouring passion she felt for her beautiful baby. None of those cannibal caresses like those of certain mothers who eat up their children with kisses. None of those absurd pet names. None of those intimate little games. Constantly busying herself around her baby, she remained silent as if shackled from inside. Her hands darted around with sharp, precise gestures, as cutting as machetes.

There were moments of gentleness even so.

She would make Jeanne delicious little dishes and was overjoyed at her appetite. When Jeanne wriggled and whimpered like any child trying to get to sleep, she would take the music box, turn the handle, and softly sing along while the little girl was lulled to sleep with the song from Carmen:

L’amour est un oiseau rebelle

THERE REMAINED, HOWEVER, one final station of her calvary.

These were incredible times. So that there should be no mistake, the priests baptized on Sundays those infants born into the holy sacrament of marriage who slept blissfully in fine lace blouses. On Saturdays, it was the turn of the infants born in sin. These represented 95 percent of all the births. On Saturdays, lines of newborns, some of them choking from the heat, wailing in the arms of their godmothers, stretched as far as the street. But Saturday could not be the day for Victoire. Her sin was neither venal nor mortal. It was extraordinary. Her daughter was Satan in person. Father Amallyas, the priest at Grand Bourg, was a friend of Gaëtane’s and her confessor: purely for form’s sake, since the good soul had nothing on her conscience, except perhaps her liking for curaçao from Holland. He was also a friend of the mayor’s. He would stuff himself at Sunday lunch at the Jovials and turn a deaf ear to Fulgence’s speeches inspired by Voltaire. He thus refused to baptize Jeanne and in a confidential note dated May 10, 1890, he urged the priests at Saint-Louis and Capesterre to do the same.

Such unchristian behavior offended Rochelle Dulieu-Beaufort. How could a priest condemn an innocent child to eternal damnation? She turned once again to her friend the priest at Saint-Louis and begged him to ignore this shameful directive. Jeanne, dressed in a gauze robe and wearing a bonnet worn by the last of the Dulieu-Beauforts’ ten children, was baptized in the chapel at Maule. Anne-Marie and her younger brother Etienne acted as godmother and godfather.

There were no guests, not even Lourdes. No chodo custard, no cake. A drop of aniseed-flavored lemonade. With a pound of flour from France, Victoire made fritters and waffles. After the ceremony was over Anne-Marie, for once all smiles, improvised on her viola Souvenir des Antilles, a selection of Creole melodies composed by M. Gottschalk, the well-known pianist who, the previous year, had won fame during his tour of Martinique and Guadeloupe.

Such an act of cruelty aimed at her child was probably the last straw. It prompted Victoire to make a major decision: leave La Treille and Marie-Galante.

It is likely that Anne-Marie also gave her the idea, since she had moved to La Pointe following her marriage. Without her, under Rochelle Dulieu-Beaufort’s iron rule, Maule and Marie-Galante were nothing better than a prison.

Informed of the plan, Lourdes clapped her hands and offered to accompany Victoire. Oh yes! Leave! What had they to lose? A ramshackle cabin. Marie-Galante was going from bad to worse. We could even say she was dying. There was less and less work. The sugar factories were in decline. Let’s take Elie as an example. Exile had made him into a success story. Turning his back on the whims of fishing, he had found a job in a factory at Goyave specializing in the processing of ramie. There was only one point on which aunt and niece were in disagreement: Lourdes insisted on doing the rounds at La Treille to present her farewells. To go off in secret, without saying a word, would be nothing other than self-mutilation. Some of the inhabitants remembered her mother, Caldonia, and had witnessed her birth, tenth in line. Some had attended her christening. Others her first communion. Consequently, she would appropriate their memories in order to alleviate her uprooting. Victoire fiercely refused to hear of such a proposition. Never, never would she step into the homes of people who had humiliated her and hated her ever since she was a little girl. She could never forget their sarcastic remarks and the names of Ti-Sapoti and Volan they gave her. When she was lying sick at death’s door, how many of them had troubled to pay her a visit, say a prayer or a Hail Mary?

The only person she visited to explain why she was leaving was Rochelle Dulieu-Beaufort. It was then that Rochelle’s mean and cantankerous character got the upper hand and she heaped insults on her.

“What! Who will cook for me now?”

So that was how Victoire rewarded her for all the kindness she had shown her and her bastard child? She was truly a wretch, a dreg from hell who was hated by everyone on Marie-Galante.

I CAN SEE them on that morning of June 1890 as they leave their native land.

Victoire has wrapped Jeanne in a white baby’s cape and is hugging her close. The infant, who is hot under all this wool, is constantly fidgeting. She manages to wriggle free and pokes out her head, observing her surroundings with curiosity.

People on the jetty are guessing the weight of the wicker basket that Lourdes is carrying. Are they leaving for good, these shameless hussies, these dames-gabrielle? Let them take their loose living elsewhere so that young girls from good families can marry at church with veil and crown!

With not enough money for the steamship that leaves Grand Bourg every Wednesday for La Pointe, the trio settles down at the front of the schooner Arc-en-Ciel. The stern is reserved for merchandise, animals, piglets, chickens, and goats. Rocked by the breeze and the movement of the waves, Jeanne soon falls asleep. Lourdes bites into a danikite doughnut.

What was Victoire thinking during the never-ending crossing? Did she realize she was seeing Marie-Galante for the very last time? The odds are that she was oblivious to the splendid panorama: the islands of Les Saintes playing dice on the velvet of the ocean, the colored ridges of the Soufrière volcano, and the gauzelike scarves of clouds. Her only thoughts were for Caldonia and the days spent with her. Did she regret turning her back on this flat island where lay the graves of her mother and grandmother?

As a precaution against seasickness she had brought along some lemons. Her tense fist became sticky from squeezing the slices as she unconsciously forgot to put them in her mouth.

Since the wind was brisk, they arrived early midafternoon at the entrance to the harbor at La Pointe through a difficult narrow passage where the isles of Cochon, Pitre, and Montroux drift

toward the headland at Jarry. At that time, one side of the Place de la Victoire, devoid of wharfs, came to rest on a quiet beach while the other three sides were lined by the trees of liberty, the sandbox trees planted by M. Victor Hughes. In the neighboring streets, cases and bundles of merchandise were piled up in front of the stores amid heaps of packing straw and canvas. True to their habits, a crowd of loudmouthed and ragged dockers stared at the young girls. Lourdes was offended by the catcalls and lewd invitations, whereas Victoire kept walking, head lowered, hugging her child to her heart.

Once again they didn’t have enough money to pay for the coach that traveled from La Pointe to Goyave in two hours and forty-five minutes. They had to make do with one of the sailboats that linked up with Petit Bourg by way of the Petit Cul-de-Sac. Since they were to set sail at dawn, they had to sleep at the house of a certain Sigismonde Quidal on the road to Les Abymes, who asked next to nothing for the room and pig-foot soup.

They left at four in the morning, the baby muffled up to her eyes, the adults shivering in the cool of the predawn. They had been kept awake by the chimes of the church of Saint-Pierre and Saint-Paul. They had just dropped off when the din of the night soil carts and the smell of their contents abundantly spread over the sidewalks once again interrupted their sleep. At La Pointe, the town’s sanitation services resembled Rio de Janeiro’s, a city that didn’t have cesspools either. Excrement was poured into barrels, the contents of which were then thrown into the sea.

On the other side of the bay, nestled up against the mountains, the busy streets of Petit Bourg hinted at the crowded town it is today. Lourdes and Victoire did not linger and set off for Goyave, carrying the baby in turns as they walked the six or seven kilometers. Victoire was frightened by the roar of the rivers and gullies that wound under the rope bridges, as well as by the stifling thickness of the vigorous vegetation ready to swallow her up: all types of trees whose armpits were eaten away by wild pineapples, creepers, orchids, tree ferns, and shrubs. This landscape was so different from the flat cane fields of Marie-Galante, dotted here and there by windmills. At times they were forced into the ditch to avoid the oxcarts, trundling along amid the cracking of whips, the swearing of the drivers, and the creaking of the axles.

The town of Goyave was nothing more than a hamlet. A few cabins scattered along the seashore. But it took them hours to find Elie’s. Fortunately, at the church that had been totally destroyed by the 1843 earthquake and rebuilt in stone, the asthmatic priest was kind enough to give them directions. They had to walk along the railroad tracks, used for transporting the cane to the Marquisat factory in Capesterre, until they reached the entrance to the beach at Sainte-Claire. Dusk was falling when they finally knocked on the right door.

Alas! Bobette was giving birth to her twelfth child.

You would have expected it to be a mere formality, to go off without a hitch, as the saying goes. Far from it. The poor woman was losing pints of blood and screaming like an animal in agony. Some matronly neighbors were busy carrying scarlet-stained sheets and calabashes of water. The following morning Elie was a widower, father of Eliacin, the fifth son, a pale crybaby of a boy who never got over the death of his mother. Elie suffered a lot. In his own reserved way, he had adored his Bobette. It’s true she was no longer very lovely. It’s true she had become fat, enormous even, from giving birth, and from eating breadfruit, dombwé dumplings, and thick soup. Even so, she had meant a lot to him.

The next morning, they were getting ready for the wake ceremony when a tilbury jolted into the sunken lane. A young woman got out. Blonde, perfumed, dressed like a princess out of a fairy tale, it was Anne-Marie Walberg. You can imagine the effect this visit had on the wretched surroundings. People gaped in embarrassment.

It is obvious that Anne-Marie and Victoire, who were at an age for conspiring and scheming in secret, had agreed to meet up at Goyave. The former had assured the latter that, newly wedded to a man of prominence, she was in a position to help her. There remained, however, a number of questions concerning this shocking behavior. Out of respect for her uncle’s mourning, couldn’t Victoire have postponed her plans? No way. The two accomplices did their whispering on the doorstep. Then Anne-Marie went and kneeled at the side of the deceased, laid out on her bed, and squeezed into her best dress. In the meantime, Victoire gathered up her old clothes and cradled Jeanne in her arms. At first nobody could understand what was going on. Their eyes were opened when both women climbed into the tilbury. The concert of “Oh, Good Lord!” alerted Lourdes, who came out with the foreboding of misfortune. On seeing her, Victoire sat the child on her lap and made her wave with one of her tiny hands.

That was how Jeanne said farewell to her origins of Marie-Galante.

She was never to return to her native island. She was never to know any member of her mother’s family. Her mother never described to her La Treille or Grand Bourg and she never spoke to us, her children, about it. Is that why Marie-Galante in my imagination signifies a mythical land, a lost paradise waiting to be repossessed? I had lost my placenta there, buried under a tree I could no longer find. Elie was often tempted to force his way into the Walbergs’ home. But feelings about distance were different then. La Pointe, which is situated at a mere twenty or so kilometers from Goyave, seemed to be on the other side of the world. Elie got the impression it could only be reached after a voyage as long and perilous as that taken by Christopher Columbus’s caravels, the Niña and the Pinta.

He renounced such an undertaking. I know that later on one of his sons managed to draw closer to Jeanne. Occasionally, he would turn up at mealtimes. He was the only one who forced open the barriers erected by our family.

MORE THAN TWENTY years after the event, Lourdes, who had settled down in Goyave, married a fisherman and produced ten children, still lamented:

“Victoire, she was my little sister. Sésé an mwen. Her child, she was my child. Ti moun an mwen. It’s as if she came out of my womb. When she turned her back on us like that, I wanted to die. And then I understood. What she wanted for her child was an upstairs-downstairs house made of concrete and wood. Behind it, a hurricane shelter. In the bedroom, a four-poster bed and a stool to climb up into it. That’s what she wanted and that’s what she got. But you don’t trample on the hearts of one’s family for all that nonsense. Just for that. It might be all right to insult the living. But you should never disrespect the dead! Can you imagine! Bobette was lying on the other side of the wall. Victoire left without even kneeling to whisper a good-bye. I’ll say it again, you don’t disrespect the dead. Otherwise they take their revenge and their revenge is terrible. You can’t escape it, even if you run in every direction like a rat smoked out from a cane field. That’s why, I’m pretty sure, she never knew a single day of happiness. You can’t have a wicked heart and be happy.”

Elie was more temperate, even though Victoire’s behavior had sickened him, he whose feelings had already been so hurt. On that day he had lost not only his wife, but through Victoire and Jeanne all that remained of his beloved twin sister, Eliette. Stoical, he shook his head:

“Life is an Arab stallion. It throws us to the ground one after the other. If the cane doesn’t kill you, something else will. Wicked heart? No, I don’t think Victoire had a wicked heart. She simply was looking for a better life for her child and that’s what we all want. Isn’t that right?”

In this discussion I will try and excuse Victoire. Anne-Marie promised to come to her aid by procuring her a job as a cook. Not only was it a way of rescuing her, but also of ensuring a roof for her child. But Anne-Marie had no use for Victoire’s ragtag relations of field Negroes, country bookies, and boo-boos. She didn’t want them on her floor. Victoire, who was in no position to protest, had to accept her conditions. I have to admit too that Caldonia’s death, Dernier’s desertion, and all the vile deeds of Marie-Galante had hardened her heart. She had loved her grandmother so much that, deprived of her warmth, she withdrew into herself. As for the island that had treated her so badly, she returned the compliment.

AROUND 1892 LA Pointe, “the yellow city,” numbered a little under twenty thousand souls. Prosperous in spite of her incredible filth, she had been the prime victim of natural catastrophes. We may recall that after the February 1843 earthquake, rear admiral Gourbeyre, then governor of Guadeloupe, addressed the following dramatic message to his ministry in charge: “At the moment I am writing to you I have learned that La Pointe no longer exists.”

He was mistaken; La Pointe was born again like a phoenix from its ashes. But it was still not out of the woods. In September 1865 a powerful hurricane devastated it once again. Six years later a fire destroyed it entirely. As a consequence Boniface Walberg, heir in 1889 to his uncle Ludovic, who had returned to France given the difficulties of the sugar industry, reinforced with masonry the house on the rue de Nassau, a little outside the center on the western outskirts of town. He even went so far as to cast a concrete slab on the roof, which had the annoying habit of flying off at the slightest blow of wind, and then cover it with slate tiles. His house was now a replica of his store, whose facade stretched twenty meters along the quai Lardenoy, adjacent to the businessmen’s club where they held the most magnificent of balls. The house on the rue Nassau had one particular feature: a secret garden at the back, hidden from prying eyes, like certain houses in London. Behind the kitchen and the washhouse there were almost a thousand meters of lawn where a large-leafed licuala and two blue palm trees grew. Anastasie, Uncle Ludovic’s wife, had planted some pomegranate trees with bright red flowers.

We note that the name of Boniface Walberg was listed in the General Business Almanac, which included the names of the most important merchants. His employees, whom he treated with a rare correctness at a time of inequality, had invented the half-affectionate, half-mocking nickname of Bèf pòtoriko because he was short-legged, thickset, with a forehead hidden under a fringe of hair as black as the coat of a bull from Puerto Rico. They credited him also with a member that would not have been out of place on such a creature. If you believed the gossip, the dames-gabrielle from a bordello on the Morne à Cayes, which he frequented regularly before his affair with Victoire, avoided him, fearful of his iron rod. Underneath this appearance he was in fact someone unsure of himself, timorous, even fainthearted. He had let himself be hoodwinked into marrying Anne-Marie Dulieu-Beaufort, who had brought him as a dowry nothing more than a violin, not even a Stradivarius, a mundane instrument purchased for a few francs at an instrument maker’s in La Pointe. Authoritarian, and a head taller than he, she intimidated him to such a degree that he made love to her only on the fifth night of their marriage. It had been a fiasco. Ever since, he had been such a rare visitor to her bed that when in exasperation she announced she was pregnant, he was close to thinking it was another machination of the Holy Ghost.

He started eating dinner alone, having learned that his wife had gone to Goyave without telling him, as usual.

“Goyave? What on earth is she doing in Goyave?”

Flaminia, the servant, had no idea.

Those who know their geography know that the river Salée is the name of the stretch of sea that separates Grande Terre and La Pointe from Basse-Terre and Goyave. A barge operated as a ferry to cross it. Anne-Marie and Victoire had to wait their turn for two full hours, stuck between numerous carriages.

When they arrived at rue de Nassau it was already dark.

Holding his spoon midair, Boniface looked at the strange trio that came into view. Anne-Marie, regal, wearing a low-cut dress revealing the cameo jewel nestled against her ample breasts; a small, frail mulatto girl wearing a black-and-white-check madras headtie whose pale eyes were boring into him; and a chubby baby who was exhausted by the trip, going by her shrieks.

“This is Victoire, our new cook.” Anne-Marie made the introductions with an air of authority.

Oh, Boniface said to himself, befuddled by Victoire’s gaze, so we needed a new cook. Flaminia wasn’t enough.

“À vòt sèvis, mèt!” the mulatto girl murmured in Creole, in a voice that, like her gaze, sent shivers down his spine.

Before he had had time to emit the sound of an answer or pronounce a banal “ka ou fè” greeting, the trio had left the room and swept up the stairs.

Flaminia reappeared carrying the cod brandade and red beans.

“She’s putting her in the Regency room,” she hissed.

She hated Anne-Marie, whose spitefulness outdid her own. In her youth, she had brought Boniface up during his childhood on Marie-Galante, been one of his father’s mistresses, and kept house for him while he was a bachelor. For him, she had left the scents of her island for this filthy town that stank of excrement and dead dogs and where the dames-gabrielle shamelessly traded their charms.

The room they half jokingly called the Regency room, the loveliest in the house, was situated on the third floor. It owed its name to two Regency-style armchairs with lion’s feet and a sofa in the same style, mounted likewise on lion’s claws, which served as a bed.

More than anyone, Boniface dreaded Anne-Marie’s moods and stinging repartee. He kept mum about the extravagant idea of attributing the Regency room to a cook and her brat, thus deserving once more the pet name Flaminia had given to him, Pontius Pilate.

Disgusted, Flaminia showered him with a look of commiseration.