Victoire: My Mother's Mother

EIGHT

One evening in April, shortly after sunset, the sky was ablaze with a glow through the persiennes.

“Yet another fire,” said Boniface, coming out onto the balcony in his pajamas without bothering to slip on his dressing gown. “Fortunately we have nothing to fear, since the wind isn’t blowing in our direction.”

He calmly went back to bed, where Victoire, rolled up in a ball, was waiting for him. They made love two or three times as they usually did each night.

The next morning La Pointe awoke amid the sound and the fury. Surging in from the outlying districts, the maléré had invaded the center of town. Groups of ragged individuals were gathering at the crossroads and filling the sidewalks, sobbing and moaning noisily.

The event was major.

At the age of thirty-eight Dernier Argilius had just perished in the fire that had broken out the night before at the offices of the newspaper Le Peuple. Apart from the rue Henri IV, the rue Barbès, the rue Sadi-Carnot, and a good part of the rue Schoelcher had been destroyed. If Jean-Hégésippe Légitimus had not been at the National Assembly in Paris, where he was a representative, they would have been mourning the assassination of two leaders, since the people’s anger had been aroused by the fact that this fire had been set on purpose by the white Creole factory owners. Under the pretext of political instability, their objective was to call the United States of America to the rescue and turn Guadeloupe into another Cuba or Puerto Rico. For the maléré, oblivious of the vicissitudes of sugar, enemy number one was M. Ernest Souques, owner of the Darboussier and Bellevue factories, and shareholder in the companies at Port-Louis and Sainte-Anne. In fact, it wouldn’t have taken much for them to accuse him of striking the match himself.

Victoire heard the news from the milk seller who came by every day at six thirty on the dot, balancing her tray of bottles on her head. As usual, she did not show any emotion and took in the news without blinking. Then, untying her apron, she went upstairs to dress. In the bedroom she held her head between both hands: when she was sixteen this man who had just perished had initiated her into sex. He had been neither tender nor affectionate. He would possess her brutally without a word, withdraw as soon as it was over, light a horrible Brazilian cigar, and, completely naked, bury himself in the newspaper. Sometimes, he would write an article. His Sergent-Major pen, dipped in mauve ink, scratched over the paper. He would look up only when the door creaked and she left to go.

“See you tomorrow!” he growled roughly.

It was an order, an assessment of his power.

“Silplètadyé!” God willing!” she murmured.

Nevertheless, she had taken pleasure in his arms and conceived. For the first and last time. As a sign of mourning she chose a black golle dress with white polka dots and a mauve headtie.

Passing the bedroom door of Anne-Marie, who was writing to Rochelle or Etienne, Victoire was tempted to inform her of Dernier’s death. But she guessed the caustic remarks she would make:

“One bastard less! The world will be better off without him. For goodness’ sake, you’re not going to shed tears over him!”

So she merely murmured through the wooden door:

“Mwen kale. I’m off.”

It’s always a surprise that the weather is beautiful when the heart is hurting or in distress. Outside, the sun was shining yellow in a blue sky washed of clouds. Gathering pollen from roses in the gardens and hibiscus in the hedgerows, the hummingbirds outdid one another with their trills. The western neighborhood of the town was a heap of smoldering, charred planks and corrugated iron. Since the rue Henri IV was nothing more than ashes and rubble, Dernier’s remains had been carried to one of his aunts, on the rue des Abymes. A sizable crowd was cluttering up the sidewalk, since he had been the darling of those who distrusted Légitimus. Wasn’t the latter colluding with the enemy, the white Creole factory owners? In actual fact, their fears were not unfounded. A few years later, Légitimus was to sit down at the same table as Ernest Souques to sign the Capital-Work agreement, considered by historians, except for Jean-Pierre Sainton, as treason.

People looked Victoire up and down. Where did this mulatto woman spring from? Who was she wearing mourning for? What was she after? A whiplash from a zambo? There were quite a few among the mourners. But given her determined look, they drew back and let her in.

Dernier had been so disfigured by his burns that out of respect for the family he had immediately been placed in a coffin away from the public gaze. In the only bedroom it was quite a crush. His family, a genuine tribe of picky head country bumpkins from Marie-Galante, was in tears. An aunt firmly held a bottle of volatile alcali under the nose of Dernier’s mother, who was on the verge of fainting. Since he had been a Freemason, members of the Egalitarians’ Masonic Lodge of Freethinkers complete with hats and black suits were swaggering next to the more slovenly looking representatives of the Republican Youth Committee and the Social Studies Club. There were a great many women. Uniformly dressed in garnet-colored dresses with leg-of-mutton sleeves, they belonged to the association of the True Daughters of Schoelcher. Numerous kids too, claiming to represent the association the Children of Marianne. Except for the latter, everyone was drinking heavily and the level of rum in the demijohns was getting dangerously low. Those who had had the most to drink were sobbing shamelessly.

At 2 p.m. the din of conch horns could be heard, belonging to the strapping Negroes over six feet tall from the Socialist Federation of the Grands-Fonds, whom everyone feared. They took charge of the coffin, shifting it from one shoulder to the other, then set off for the cemetery, for Dernier had never had time for the church’s holy sacraments. Like all the socialists at that time, he was violently anticlerical and wrote in Le Peuple that religion was man’s stupidity.

The funeral cortege was unending. The Workers’ Chorale, who opened the procession chanting socialist hymns, was threading its way between the graves, dug at ground level and marked out by the white rocks of the Bergevin graveyard, while the tail end of the cortege was still trailing along the rue des Abymes. Almost right up until evening, in front of the open grave, following the hymns, came a series of speeches that all expressed the same despair. Ah, the mold was broken. There wouldn’t be men of that caliber anymore.

Victoire listened. She wondered what her life would have been like if Dernier’s passion for the disinherited had materialized into an interest for her own destitution. If this vayan nèg, this valiant Negro, who had advocated free schooling for all, had taken her hand to decipher the letters of the alphabet. Does caring for the forest prevent you from looking after each and every one of its trees? What else does love for humanity signify if not love and respect for every human being? That is why deep down in her heart when she thought of Dernier she felt an immense bitterness. She couldn’t help thinking that it was the hand of justice that had lit the fire.

Night had fallen when she arrived back at the rue de Nassau.

It was an evening of entente cordiale. Boniface Jr. had joined in Jeanne and Valérie-Anne’s games. The three children were running after one another in the back garden, uttering Siouxlike shouts. Victoire drew her daughter against her and to Jeanne’s great surprise kissed her. Such a show of affection was rare. She was tempted to tell her:

“Papa w sòti mò.”

But had her father in fact just died? For her, hadn’t he died before she was born, nine years earlier, when, without bothering to tell a soul, he had boarded the steamship and put an ocean between himself and two women with whom he had gone through the gestures of lovemaking?

She kept silent. But from that moment on she took Jeanne to the cemetery at Bergevin every All Saints’ Day. The socialists had clubbed together to give Dernier the tomb he deserved: a ponderous monument of cement and freestone. There was always a crowd around it, praying, lighting candles, changing the water in the vases, and replacing the wilted wreaths and bouquets with fresh flowers; a crowd of inconsolable individuals uttering heartrending cries. Jeanne had no idea why she was there. While her mother knelt down on the cold stone and lost herself in prayer (what was she asking God for?), Jeanne told herself stories to kill time. All she had to do was look around her. Trees everywhere. Flamboyants of an indecent red. Casuarinas. Mango trees loaded with fruit that nobody dared fight over with the dead. The number of funeral processions entering the gates impressed her. It was as if the inhabitants of La Pointe were dying like flies. Here a well-dressed, even opulent-looking, light-skinned family was following a small white coffin. A child. Their child? A daughter? A son? Born into happiness and great expectations. A christening awash with chodo custard and gateau fouetté. Death does not spare the affluent.

A few alleys over, next to a grove of mango trees, a black family in tears was burying Linda, the apple of their eye: 1880–1899. Committed suicide out of love. The man she worshipped had abandoned her. So she gulped down a massive dose of tincture of laudanum. Commit suicide for a man? What stupidity! As for Death, she didn’t need much persuading; she’ll make do with any prey.

When the chicken hawks began to spread their wings in the night air, the tombs would be glowing from the candles lit by an infinity of devoted hands. Her mother stood up, dusted off her knees, and led her by the hand back to the rue de Nassau. This protective gesture no longer made much sense. The daughter had recently grown taller and bigger than her mother.

Jeanne ended up guessing why year after year Victoire took her to this grave, and she understood that Dernier Argilius must be her father. She took no pride in the fact. There is no reason why she should have. She mentioned it to nobody and never sought to make herself known to his family. The fact that he abandoned her mother, that he never for one moment bothered about the fruit of her womb, and let her, Jeanne, grow up in the charitable care of a family of white Creoles seemed to her the perfect illustration of this male tendency to maintain a heroic posture without assuming the real human duties that are often obscure and insignificant.

Dernier Argilius was nothing but a whited sepulcher.

Without seeking to excuse him, one question remains, however: Did he know about his daughter? Did Victoire have the courage to confess to him her condition? This presupposes an intimacy that perhaps never existed between them. He took her, withdrew, and went his way. He never asked questions, and not being very talkative, she never confided in him. However, even if he had been aware of her pregnancy, it is unlikely that Jeanne’s destiny would have changed. Up till very recently our men were like sowers, carelessly sowing the first field they came across. Sociology and literature are full of stories illustrating this machismo. “The condition of the Antillean woman” has become an indispensable topic of interviews, dissertations, and theses.

All that is in the process of changing, like Antillean society itself. What will our American students have to write about in the coming years?