Who Slashed Celanire's Throat?: A Fantastical Tale

Cayenne: 1906

Hakim thought Guiana looked like the Ivory Coast. Same sweltering forests. Green and more green everywhere you looked. Rivers, now in slow motion, now suddenly raging torrents. Only the ocean was different, swamplike, without a line of breakers or rollers. Cayenne especially looked like Bingerville. The same smells of almond, mango, and palm trees. Here too seven months out of twelve the sky was like a wet rag oozing dirty water that overflowed the storm drains and soaked the streets. The houses of the administrators were identical. There were the same public buildings under their rusty roofs, the Governor’s Palace housed in an authentic Jesuit monastery, the bank and the transatlantic shipping company. In short, the same colonial ugliness encrusted amid the splendor of the forest like lice in a magnificent head of hair. The only difference: the buzzards, which ambled across the Place des Palmistes in Cayenne and perched on every available branch, were bigger and smellier than the African vultures. At first he couldn’t help comparing Cayenne to Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, where he had stayed weeks, perhaps months, perhaps years (it was all so muddled in his head) at the transportation camp. In contrast, Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni was a little jewel. The convicts had built such lovely little houses for the penitentiary administrators, they had christened it “Little Paris”! Men are such wonderful creatures! Even reduced to the scum of the earth, they continue to be artistic geniuses. They built magnificent edifices and designed and painted friezes, frescoes, and paneling. From the transportation camp Hakim should have been sent to the Ile Royale, one of the Iles du Salut. But the cells there were already overflowing. So they sent him to Cayenne, where he became, like so many others, a houseboy, a domestic. Houseboy to Monsieur Thénia, governor of the Banque de Guyane, who lived on the promontory at Saint-François. He did not know exactly when he began forgetting the charm of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni and started liking the wilder, rougher city of Cayenne. He knew the city inside out, from its mangrove swamps and grassy squares to its streets cluttered with handcarts and its magnificent clapboard facades. He wallowed in its few corners of sunlight, soaked up its trails of shadows, and got drunk on its stench. In short, he became attached to its atmosphere of gloom. The town only came to life at carnival time, but the gaiety didn’t suit it. Its smiles looked more like grimaces. Its bursts of laughter rang out like moans.

A few months after arriving in town, he was referred to a certain Papa Doc for a nagging dysentery. Papa Doc was doing time for rape of a minor, and his ten-year sentence had been commuted to life. He had built a shack made out of planks and corrugated iron within the prohibited zone along the seashore, but the authorities had turned a blind eye, since his reputation was known from Saint-Jean-du-Maroni to Mana, and from Ira-coubo to Organabo and Sinnamary. He was the living proof that saints ended up in the penal colony. On Devil’s Island he had treated the lepers. At Saint-Joseph he had cared for the insane. At Charvein he had saved the wardens and prisoners from epidemics of scurvy, yellow fever, and yellow jack. At the New Camp he had put the bedridden and the crippled back on their feet again and comforted the dying on their final journey. He cured every form of gut ache, even ankylostomiasis, which tears the intestines to shreds. And all that with remedies of his own invention. When he was on the Ile Royale they let him roam freely around the penitentiary, examining the plants with a makeshift magnifying glass, plucking and stuffing them into the bag he kept tied around his neck. He captured anacondas with his hands and made ointments out of their grease. Sometimes he could be seen braving the wrath of the ocean, defying the sharks, always lurking, attracted to the smell of meat from the slaughterhouse, and catching manta rays he would eviscerate on the spot. Then he would dry them, grind them, and pound them to make unguents, lotions, and poultices. At Cayenne he had not wanted to live like the former convicts who banded together out of common misery, pilfered by day, and slept in the marketplaces by night, where they quarreled, hurled insults at each other, and squabbled. He had continued to invent remedies and treat the “Creoles,” as the descendants of slaves were called, now free, yet worse off than they were during slavery, as was everyone else. Even the Indians and the Maroons, the Boshs, the Bonis, the Djukas, and the Saramakas came down from their villages to consult him. All of them put their trust in the power of his hands. He meted out his treatment free of charge or almost, in exchange for the joy of a little wild honey, a slice of grouper, an agouti, turtle eggs, or a gourd of cassava kwak. So from five in the morning the sick, dressed in identical rags, with skins of every hue, lined up in front of his door.

Where did he come from? From Guadeloupe. He must have once been light-skinned, high yellow or frankly mulatto. Now his skin wavered between brick red and muddy brown, with grayish fissures at the folds in his neck. He no longer had a hair on his head. Nor on his eyebrows. A kick from a screw had broken his nose and knocked out all his front teeth. Smallpox had pocked his face with purplish stains and indelible scars. Chiggers had eaten away his toes, making him limp. Nevertheless, there remained his deep brown eyes, mirroring his compassion. Nobody had heard the sound of his voice, as if the suffering and ignominy he saw around him every day had once and for all stifled his throat. He communicated with his patients through a language of signs and gestures, the same way he communicated with a hard-faced, wild-looking Galibi Indian woman who had stayed with him ever since he had cured her of a case of yaws. She cooked his meals with an expert hand and of an evening gave him pleasure, for there was still the hint of a generous and capable body under her rags.

As for Hakim, he tended the gardens at Monsieur Thénia’s, which was no small matter. He was up before dawn, and it was only at day’s end, around six in the evening, that he had time to sit down with Papa Doc, side by side, always in the same spot, on the pebbles on the shore, facing the ocean. Looking blindly out to sea, they drew on their pipes stuffed with excellent tobacco smuggled in from Oyapock. What lay on the other side of the dark line of the horizon? They could no longer picture it, no longer imagine the time when they had been free to come and go and roam wherever they pleased. When the breeze began to bite and make them shiver, they would make their way back toward the promontory of Saint-François, walking one in front of the other, breathing in the smell of brine. The hut had a single room and therefore only one hammock. So Hakim had hung his outside on the branches of a silk cotton tree. The Galibi Indian woman would be waiting for them on the doorstep, savoring her pipe as well. She had already lit the grease in the oil lamp and on the kitchen range was heating up the wretched meal she had prepared. All three would chew in unison, without a word between them, lost in their thoughts. Then the woman would clear the table, wash up, and put everything away before slipping into her hammock. The men went and sat outside in the darkness. They would down one, two, three, four glasses of rum and separate, teetering on drunkenness. Papa Doc would go and join the Galibi woman, and Hakim, somewhat disgusted, could hear them moan with pleasure.

“Even so! At their age and in their state!”

He himself believed his body had long vanished along with any desire. On nights when he was lucky, hardly had he closed his eyes than he would fall into an opaque, dreamless sleep. On other nights he would toss and turn like a man possessed until the early hours of the morning.

One evening, the moon was in its first quarter and an ylang-ylang tree was endeavoring to perfume the smells from the swamp and the mangrove. Papa Doc was sitting with Hakim among the roots of the silk cotton tree when a sound rose from his mouth. An eerie sound. Like an out-of-tune piano. A rusty clarinet. A muffled trombone. A punctured saxophone. Accompanied by a high-pitched shrill, the clack of a rara during Holy Week, and here and there, the tinkling of a bell. During all those years he had not spoken a word; it was only natural he had lost the knack!!

“I was twenty-three or twenty-four, a student at Pau, when Aurélie, a girl who was in love with me, gave me a book that was to transform my idea of medicine and change my life forever. It was a novel written by an Englishwoman, and Frankenstein was its name. It was the story of a scientist who got it into his head to create a human being and ended up fabricating a monster. He took an instant dislike to it, and this triggered a series of unfortunate events. This sad story taught me that medicine is more than just curing typhoid, amoebic dysentery, or lymphomas, and we have to look further and decipher the secrets of human nature.

“I’m here for a crime I did not commit. I’ve told the lawyers, judges, jury, and every Tom, Dick, and Harry, over and over again, I am innocent. As innocent as the newborn fresh from his mother’s womb. But I’m not disgusted, I’m not embittered. Because there are at least two other crimes on my conscience that nobody suspects, except for the Almighty up in heaven. They’re the ones that landed me up in this hell. One day my sins caught up with me and consumed me with a raging fire. It’s the Good Lord’s justice. That’s why I bow down before Him, ask Him forgiveness, and accept His will.

“Like I’ve just told you, I’m no bush doctor, no leaf doctor. I did my medical studies at the university of Pau in France, the first Guadeloupean, a descendant of slaves, to set foot in a faculty of medicine for whites. You understand what I’m saying? I should be rolling in money with a doting wife and kids. And look where I am. I haven’t got a penny to my name. I’m dressed in red stripes with a black number on my chest. My father was a Royer Belle-Eau, a family of white planters who refused to pass their name on to me. But since he worshipped my mother, a seamstress, he sent me to school and paid for my education. But still I hated his guts. I dreamed of eating them in a salad, of making black pudding out of his blood. My mother wept every time I talked insanely about him. Because, after all, he was only concerned for my welfare. At Pau, Aurélie loved me although I was half black. I could have married her. Had quadroons with her. Whitened the race. But I didn’t want to. On the contrary, I wanted to blacken it. The race, I mean. Go back to Africa. Become a cannibal again. Climb back up my tree. That’s why I married Ofusan, a Wayana.

“The Wayanas were runaway slaves who had fled the plantation and settled on the slopes of the Soufrière volcano. When the whites finally got round to abolishing slavery, the Wayanas stayed put. The only difference, twice a week they came down to the villages to sell their garden produce. Hidden under their bakoua hats, you couldn’t tell the men from the women. Same blackness. Same shaved heads, same scarifications — everyone was scared of them. They didn’t speak Creole, but an African language, Kilonko. It was rumored brother slept with sister, and even with the mother. A real pig swill. When they had finished selling their stuff, they piled their baskets onto their heads and went back up the mountain. One day, they came to fetch me. A Wayana girl had slipped on a rotten mango amid the market filth. Her head had hit a rock so violently she had fallen into a coma.

“I had returned home to Grande-Anse two years earlier and opened my practice on the square in front of the church. There was no lack of patients. The sick came from as far away as Grande-Terre to consult me. They couldn’t get over seeing a mulatto, an islander like them, doing what I was doing. They begged me to go into politics, to run for a seat in the Conseil Général. I had other ambitions. I researched, I experimented. I had invented a cure for dengue fever. I had invented a way of replacing broken hips in older people with an artificial one. But Frankenstein remained my dream, and I too burned with desire to assemble the elements of life to produce my creature. In secret, I conducted experiments on rats, mice, and voles. That morning, I grabbed my bag and ran to the market. The Wayana girl was lying on the ground, her head dripping with blood. I had a great deal of trouble reviving her. She finally opened her eyes. I must confess I soon realized I didn’t love Ofusan. For me, she was a way of getting my revenge. On my father. On my mother, who had lived her whole life in servitude and adoration of the whites. On all those light-skinned girls she presented me with to whiten her blood. On the mulatto clique in Grande-Anse, who aped the very same families who had lashed their parents. On our wretched society, whose only concern was the color of money. Whereas poor Ofusan worshipped me. She was a saint. But men like me have no time for saints. They’re only interested in bòbòs, loose women who stink of sweat under their patchouli. For me, Ofusan learned to speak Creole and French, two languages the Wayanas despised. For me, she had herself baptized. She attended catechism classes. She took her first communion, and then on April 27 we were married before God and before mankind. Ever since our wedding night, making love to her had been a problem. Her purity repelled me. My member, always sprightly, had never, oh never, played tricks on me — you know full well up till this very day it has never let me down — it became as squishy as blotting paper soaked in water. In order to get the tiniest erection I had to imagine she was one of my whores lying in bed beside me.

“I should now give you a description of Grande-Anse. It lies on the windward side of the island, in the middle of the sugarcane basin. On one side, the green of the cane fields; on the other, the blue of the ocean. It used to be a fairly big agglomeration: a mess of cowpatlike huts piled into neighborhoods — Front-de-Mer, Bélisaire, Carénage, and Bas-

de-la-Source. What they called the town, Grande-

Anse itself, was the residential district. It was composed of the cathedral Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul, the balconied, mansarded houses belonging to a handful of dignitaries, the boys’ school for Christian instruction run by the monks, the girls’ day school run by the sisters of Saint-Joseph-de-Cluny, the Saint-Jean-

Bosco orphanage, city hall, the dispensary, and the police offices recently opened in a former rum purging station. All around it were the whorehouses. Whorehouses galore! There must have been at least a dozen. The black and mulatto women whom emancipation had liberated from the cane fields and the great houses, and who had nothing to fill their bellies with, flocked to them. As for the white Creole planters, they did the same and paid a fortune for what they had always taken free of charge. Behind every girl there was a black or mulatto pimp. On the side I was the physician to the most popular whorehouse in Grande-Anse, called the Ginger Moon. There’s a long story to it! My mistress at the time was a certain Carmen, a bòbò from Santo Domingo, matured by experience the way I like them, whom I had cured of a case of furunculosis. One day she came to ask for help. She was fed up selling her body to one and all. She wanted a rest and to get others to work for her. So she had the idea of opening a whorehouse and asked me to lend her some money. I accepted on one condition. I would be in charge of hygiene. The place would be spotless. Disinfectant and bleach. Every three months I would give the girls a checkup so they wouldn’t contaminate the customers with the chancre, clap, syphilis, and what have you. She said, You’ve got a deal, and we were on a roll. And what a roll! Sometimes the white Creoles would be lining up in the corridor. There were mulattoes too, whom I used to see take communion on Sundays beside their wives. As for the blacks, it wasn’t girls they fought over. Believe me, they had other things to think about at the time. One night, I had an urge to see Carmen. I shall never forget that night. It was in September. It was pouring down in bucketfuls, and the claps of thunder would have awakened the dead. Since d’Artagnan, my Arab stallion, was scared of lightning, I walked to the Ginger Moon, wading in water up to my stomach. Soaked to the skin, I was about to go up to see Carmen when a young girl came out of one of the rooms. I had never seen her before. She must have been fourteen or fifteen, in any case no older. No taller than a tuft of guinea grass. Certainly no bigger. Her skin was shiny black. Her hair, a stream of oil flowing down her back. Even so, despite her hair, she didn’t look like a coolie. Rather a hodgepodge of Chinese and black mixed in with Carib blood. The way she swept past me without even a glance, I can’t even begin to tell you the effect it had on me. I arrived quite out of breath and asked Carmen:

“Tiny. Slender. A spark on a bonfire. Who is she?”

“She burst out laughing. ‘The way you speak! It’s Pisket. She hasn’t been here a week. And already the men are mad about her. Do you want to try her?’

“And how! I had no sooner tried the girl, I was mad about her as well. I had to have her morning, noon, and night. She was my morning cassava bread, my noontime red snapper, and my evening bush tea. Soon, I could no longer bear another man touching her. I would have liked to lock her away and keep her all for myself. But I imagined the scandal it would have caused in Grande-Anse and all over Guadeloupe. A man like me whom everyone respected. Me, Dr. Jean Pinceau—”

Hakim gave a start, since the name rang a bell in the thick fog of his stupor.

“What did you say your name was?” he asked.

“Pinceau. Funny name, isn’t it? It’s the name of my mother’s family, a family of talented free blacks since the early eighteenth century. The Pinceau men were locksmiths. The women, seam-stresses and milliners…. So I didn’t dare do anything more about it and merely settled Pisket in a room next to Carmen’s in the attic. She had her own washroom with her pitchers and basins. I paid a servant to cook, wash, and iron her clothes. Believe me, Pisket was a real character. I never knew where she was born, who her parents were…. At first I didn’t even know her real name. Pisket was a nickname she had earned because she was so slender. She was all skin and bones. Carmen knew no more about her than on the day she picked her up while she was making love on a plot of waste ground in Grande-Anse. The fact was, she seldom uttered a word, barely a sound came out of her mouth. You never knew whether she was happy or upset, whether she liked doing it, whether she wanted more. A real autist. It was probably that which got me so excited. I never knew whether she was fond of me or what her feelings were. I had to have Carmen watch her. For as soon as I had my back turned, she took in men. Not for money. Not for pleasure. Just like that. Like a machine. It made me so angry! Can you imagine, me jealous of a bòbò! But she always managed to outsmart Carmen and put a man in her bed. There was this Kung Fui, a Chinese half-caste like herself, a weird guy, who was always in her room and even slept in her bed. When I got angry, she vowed he was her brother! There was also a third rogue, more Chinese than black or Indian, always in their company, but who never stayed at the Ginger Moon. What’s more, Pisket smoked opium. However often I smashed her instruments and broke her pipe, she would always begin again. She was allergic to hygiene too. She was like a cat: hated water. When she got too funky, I would stuff her in a tub of hot water. I would scrub her shoulders and her you-know-what with a bunch of leaves. But there was nothing I could do about it. I wallowed in her filth.

“Alas, my happiness didn’t last. After a few months I realized she was not menstruating. She was so ignorant, she didn’t know what it meant. I had to explain it to her. Can you believe she jumped for joy, someone who didn’t care a damn about anything. A baby! A baby! For the first time, she was happy. But I was in a predicament, to tell you the truth. A baby with a bòbò! And first of all, was it my child? Despite my words of warning, Pisket had slept with a great many other men. I don’t trust those teas and decoctions women take for an abortion, so I proposed operating on her. Oh, nothing complicated. No need to be frightened. She didn’t say anything, and I took that to mean yes. Three or four days later, she disappeared.

“I can remember it as if it were yesterday.

“It was December 22, to be exact. Lights and Christmas carols in every home. The children from the Saint-Jean-Bosco orphanage had decorated a giant crèche, which they had placed in front of the high altar in the cathedral, and folk from Grande-

Anse came to admire baby Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the ox, and the donkey. I had gone up to her room and found it empty. She had taken all her stuff. Nobody had seen her leave. Nobody knew where she had gone.

“I wanted to die, but had little luck. I began by accusing Carmen of not keeping an eye on her. That was unfair; she had no reason to distrust Pisket, since she never set foot outdoors. One of the girls told us that the day before she had surprised her with Kung Fui near the cathedral deep in conversation with Madeska, a notorious mischief maker who was friends with a certain Madone, Pisket’s only friend. This struck her as being odd. What could she be doing with such an individual? Except for Madone, all the girls used to run and hide when he turned up. They were scared of him. What’s more, he was fat and filthy as a hog in his African boubou. Obviously Carmen didn’t have the courage to kick him out. But that didn’t tell me where Pisket had gone. Where should I look for her? On Grande-Terre in the vicinity of La Pointe? Over by Basse-Terre? Among the cane fields? On the mountain slopes? In the waterfalls or along the rivers?

“In desperation I haunted the places of ill-repute. I mounted d’Artagnan and scoured the countryside. I interrogated the rum guzzlers and players of dice, checkers, and dominoes. I visited one by one the whorehouses on the windward side of the island and dragged the whores from their beds. I lost my appetite for everything. I was a real bag of bones. Don’t laugh, I suffered like I had never suffered before. People were convinced I was working too hard and begged me to take a rest. Don’t ask me how long this hellish state lasted. I was like a drug addict in withdrawal. Then finally I snapped out of it. I conducted more and more daring experiments, endeavoring to transplant rabbit hearts into mongoose and vice versa. In particular I began a crusade against opium. I have to tell you that at the time there were as many opium poppy fields in Guadeloupe as there were cane fields. The plant had been introduced by those Asian workers come to replace the blacks in the plantations. They dried the seeds themselves from the poppy flowers.

“Old Chang, for instance, owned an opium den right in the middle of the Bélisaire district, which, by the way, was thick with Chinese. When the police had had enough, they raided the den, rounded up all the customers, and threw them in jail. After two days they had no choice but to set them free, since there was no law against smoking opium. You could count us on the fingers of one hand, those of us who protested that opium was far more dangerous than rum. I began writing columns in Le Courrier de la Côte au Vent. I worked together with a childhood friend of mine, Dieudonné Pylône, the police commissioner. I opened a small center for treating drug addicts that I called the Refuge of the Good Shepherd. In short, because of all the fuss I made, they awarded me the medal for social merit. More and more, people took me for a role model. They were so adamant I should go into politics, I ended up creating a party that I prosaically called the People’s Party. Unfortunately, I never won an election. The absurdity of my situation, I am convinced, must have stuck out like the Soufrière volcano: me a bourgeois belonging to an old family of freed coloreds, I dared to speak in the name of the slaves.

“One morning I was in my surgery, about to operate on a small boy for tonsillitis, when Carmen sent urgent word that Pisket had reappeared. I left the child laid out on the operating table and ran outside like a madman. Yes, Pisket had come back. But not the Pisket I knew! A zombie. She now smoked as many as fifty opium pipes a day and had reached the stage of bondage. She could no longer stand on her own two feet, walk, or eat, and it was Kung Fui who did everything for her. He of course had reappeared, together with his Chinese friend. Eyes wide open, at night she had hallucinations and sometimes screamed like a hog having its throat slit. At that stage, all my learning was to no effect. She gradually drifted into a state of terminal cachexia, and one morning, while I was leaning over her, the life went out of her.

“You can’t imagine what happened next. No doubt because of the opium she had consumed, her body turned rotten in next to no time. She passed away at five in the morning when dawn mass was being said. At eight, she reeked to high heaven. At noon, the stench made it impossible to remain in the house. A thick juice, as black as tar, oozed from her private parts, which liquefied, and stained the bedsheets. I had to run to the undertakers. The undertaker quickly cast a lead coffin, which he placed inside a second ironwood casket. But the smell! You can’t imagine! During the wake we had to beat off the swarms of blowflies, bigger than beetles, that settled on everything and everyone. The removal of the body was a great relief. The priest, of course, refused to give her the extreme unction. But I had a tomb built in which we buried her on Sunday, August 30, the day of Saint Fiacre. The bad talkers of Grande-Anse were not surprised to see me in deep mourning because of my work with the drug addicts. They thought I was trying to show the young people an example of what not to do. Little did they guess that the sun had set forever on my life and that I was laying my only love to rest. I envied Kung Fui, who had nothing to hide and was crying his heart out as he followed the hearse, propped up by Yang Ting — that was his name, I remember now. A nasty piece of work he was, you only had to look at him, but you couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. I didn’t give him long to live either. He was already an old bag of bones, as yellow as saffron. Emaciated. Eyes dilated — red and swollen. A certain Tonine was also walking behind the coffin. They said she was Pisket’s sister. I had never seen her before. I remember she looked a lot like Pisket except for that shy, gentle expression, which Pisket never had. A few weeks later, grave robbers came and opened Pisket’s coffin and scattered her remains. All her fleshy parts had been eaten by worms. Only the skeleton was left, but broken into a thousand pieces. It was all the more surprising, since grave robbers as a rule go straight for the tombs of the white Creoles and make a beeline for the jewelry, gold necklaces, cameos, gold chokers and beads of the women, and the pocket watches, the rings, and the bracelets of the men. What did they hope to find on a wretched prostitute? And yet the biggest surprise was yet to come. One morning I got a letter from a notary in Grande-Anse informing me that Kim Lee Fui — that was Pisket’s real name — had left me and Kung Fui an inheritance. She had left a considerable sum of money in the Crédit Colonial and a laundry in her name, Le Blanc Galop. We then discovered she hadn’t gone very far. To Bélisaire. She hadn’t gone into hiding. She had opened this laundry on the ground floor of her house, where she employed not only her so-called brother and the inseparable Yang Ting, but also two Chinese and the girl called Tonine, who was the close friend of this Yang Ting. Instead of looking under my very nose, I had gone looking for her as far away as Basse-Terre. Pisket had made pots of money! I didn’t understand how she had amassed such a fortune, nor why she left me half. Obviously, I refused every penny of it and gave my share to Kung Fui, who pocketed it and vanished from Guadeloupe with Yang Ting. And no one was any the wiser.

“Dieudonné Pylône was right to be intrigued. He put Mangouste, one of his assistants, on the case; like his nickname, Mangouste was as cunning as a mongoose. He went and prowled around Bélisaire, but turned up nothing. The neighbors had never seen Pisket’s face, since she never went out, never even attended mass. One morning they had seen Le Blanc Galop all shut up. They couldn’t care less what happened to Pisket, Kung Fui, Yang Ting, Tonine, and the two employees. Dieudonné was about to close the case when the manager of the Crédit Colonial sent him a confidential memo stating that Pisket’s money had been deposited by a rich white Creole, a certain Agénor de Fouques-Timbert. What was the relationship between the bòbò and the planter? Dieudonné and Mangouste thought Agénor should be interrogated. But they were apprehensive. At that time the eyes of the whites drilled into ours. They finally picked up enough courage and set off for the plantation. The story of the Agénor de Fouques-Timbert family is part of the history of Guadeloupe. It was an open secret that the Fouques-Timberts had black blood in their veins. For that reason, some of the white Creoles refused to have anything to do with them. Nevertheless, they were perhaps the richest planters on the island. Not only did they escape bankruptcy following the abolition of slavery, but Agénor was clever enough to modernize and expand his sugar factory. He was the first to have replaced the so-called Père Labat system with modern sugar-making technology. Megalomaniac, he planned to invest in a large factory on the windward side of the island, which would rival that of Darboussier. To increase his fortune and his whiteness, he had no scruple marrying Elodie, the only daughter of Emmanuel des Près d’Orville, who was hunchbacked and so ugly that nobody wanted her despite all her papa’s money and estates on northern Grande-Terre. Even so, she gave him seven fine children, all boys. Nothing was lacking, except a position in politics. It nagged him like the urge to piss. One morning he began stomping for votes. With no trouble at all he was elected to the Conseil Général. At the time, you see, it was a lucrative affair. The Conseil Général was in complete control of taxation. It was there to protect the rich. Agénor’s secretary received Dieudonné and Mangouste on the doorstep and told them anything that came into his head. That Agénor was in the habit of making gifts to institutions and the underprivileged at Christmas. That he had Pisket on his list of charities. They didn’t believe a word of it, but they didn’t dare pursue the matter. And yet they sensed they were on to something.”

Hakim cleared his throat.

“And Pisket’s baby, your child, what became of it?”

“There’s nothing to prove it was my child! But I’m not a complete scoundrel. When they reappeared, I asked Kung Fui what had happened to Pisket’s pregnancy, since she was no longer in a position to answer for herself. He replied that she had had a miscarriage, which didn’t surprise me. Opium had become her only food, and her body was unable to nourish a fetus.”

“And what about Ofusan?” Hakim insisted.

“You oblige me to return to the scene of my crime. For pity’s sake, you’re making me live it all over again. Where we come from, our wives are used to being neglected and spending their nights all alone in bed while their husbands are out having a good time with their mistresses. If they have the nerve to complain, they are beaten. Ofusan was not used to that. She did not come from a society like ours, where the male is God incarnated. What’s more, she didn’t have a friend in the world. Nobody could say anything bad about her, that’s a fact. She was beyond reproach. At confession every Friday. On her knees at the altar every Sunday. Plus vespers, rosaries, and the month of the Virgin Mary. Despite all that, she was only barely tolerated at Grande-Anse. They never forgot her family were Wayanas, maroons, black as sin, who on weekdays sat in the market.

“One morning in early September, the seventh, the feast day of Sainte Reine — I can remember it as if it were yesterday — shortly after Pisket’s death my friend Dieudonné Pylône rushed into my surgery in a frenzy. He was carrying a kind of package in his arms. He unwrapped the bloodstained cloth and revealed a baby. A baby girl, a few hours old or a day at the most. A plump little body, her tiny almond slit between her thighs, her umbilical cord neatly cut under a scab of blood. But horrors, I’m not kidding, her head was hanging on by a thread. A blunt instrument — a machete, a cutlass, a butcher’s knife, or garden secateurs — had virtually sectioned it from her body. The baby had completely drained itself of blood through this hideous wound. Clinically she was dead. Her heart had stopped beating. Her encephalon showed no signs of life. Anyone else would have called a priest. But I saw the opportunity I had been waiting for. Defy nature and coax back life like a docile bitch into the body she had deserted. While I was frantically preparing my instruments, Dieudonné told me the story. He had been chasing a common thief in the infamous neighborhood of Bas-de-la-Source when he stumbled upon this mutilated baby at the Calvaire crossroads, lying amid rusty nails, pieces of iron, shards of mirror, and red rags. Visibly there had been a sacrifice. He had gathered up the little victim and dashed to find me.

“To give you a better idea, remember what happened forty years after the abolition of slavery. Society was still reeling, and you were witness to all sorts of horrors. Virtually nobody had profited from emancipation. It had ruined most of the white Creoles. As for the former slaves, none of the promises made them had been kept. No schooling, no work, just poverty. The indentured Indian workers who had replaced them were a dead loss. As for the Chinese, they were worse. They systematically bled the island dry with their robberies, their rapes, and their banditry. They had raided a munitions depot at Fort Saint-Charles and, armed and masked, would hold up and rob carriages, attack the great houses and homes of the rich. There was a thriving traffic in newborns. The black and mulatto women were fed up with letting their men have a belly for free. Those babies that were not left in orphanages were sold. Or else they were kidnapped, and for a small fortune the evildoers would perform human sacrifices for those who wanted to succeed in business or politics. Sheep, fowl, and black bulls from Puerto Rico were no longer enough. It had to be babies. Babies, and nothing but babies, and more babies. For instance, everyone knew where Madeska, the mischief maker who made the fortune of the most powerful politicians, got his money from. Oh, it was a dreadful time. You were ashamed to be a Guadeloupean.

“My eyes had never seen anything so hideous as this baby with her throat slashed. I set to work. The operation lasted seven hours. I had to reconnect the severed arteries, veins, nerves, and tendons. For that I used the sharpest needle and the softest catgut. Then I sutured the flesh. I grafted a strip of skin taken from her thigh onto the jagged suture that twisted around her neck. I was sweating profusely. My heart was thumping, but my hands were steady. I needed blood to irrigate my work. I transfused the blood from two chickens that I sent Ofusan to fetch as fast as she could. The whole time I felt that here I was at last emulating my hero Victor Frankenstein, and it spurred me on. I too was equal to the Creator, and when the child began to sneeze and cry I was overcome with pride. What I didn’t predict was that Ofusan, to whom I confided the baby for motherly care, became obsessed with her. In her solitude she looked upon the child as a gift from the Good Lord to console her for her barren womb. She begged me to adopt her. How could I refuse her? So we adopted her. Registered her officially as our daughter on September 24, the feast day of Saint Thècle, under the name of Celanire Jeanne Pinceau.”

“You said Celanire Pinceau?”

“That’s right, Celanire Pinceau. Celanire was my mother’s name, whose memory Ofusan wanted to honor. Not that Mother treated her very well. Behind her back she called her ‘tar girl.’ May God bless her soul!

“In the meantime my friend Dieudonné instructed Mangouste to go and interrogate Madeska, who knew a thing or two about children in the region with their throats slashed. Mangouste stumbled into a house of despair. Madeska had just fled, abandoning women and children. Every day now for years he had gone for a dip in the sea at the same spot. He would lay his clothes under the same almond tree. Since he couldn’t swim, he never went very far. That very morning, much to their surprise, the fishermen had seen him hoist his fat body and potbelly into a fishing boat and row frantically in the direction of Montserrat. What was he running away from? That was anyone’s guess.

“All these signs hinted to us, Dieudonné and me, that Celanire had not been sent by the Good Lord, but by Beelzebub himself. As for me, I was wondering how we were going to get rid of her, especially as I had brought her back to this world. Unless murder was committed, there didn’t seem to be an answer. And there was my wife going into raptures over her, embroidering baby clothes, decorating her bedroom, gurgling silly names, and looking so much younger. I didn’t dare tell her what I suspected.

“I have to say that Celanire was a beautiful baby. The older she got, the more beautiful she became. She was so lovely that once they tried to steal her. One day the nursemaid was walking her along the seafront when a young girl came up and begged her to let her cuddle the divine little angel in her arms, which she naively accepted. The young girl then ran off and almost got away. People said that Celanire looked like me, only darker, since it is always said children take after their adopted parents. Like Frankenstein, I soon came to loathe the creature I had created. Don’t ask me why. I took a dislike to everything about her. Above all, I couldn’t bear to look at her obscene scar, purplish as an infibulated labium, which was a constant reminder of what I had done! I asked Ofusan to hide it, and she got into the habit of tying silk or velvet ribbons around the child’s neck. The terrible thing was that despite this aversion, which I had trouble hiding, Celanire took a special liking to me. Her chuckles and gurgles were directed at me, something that Ofusan suffered agony over. Because, oddly enough, the child never showed her any affection. This gave Ofusan the opportunity to invent another excuse to torture herself. If nobody loved her, it was because the ancestors, her maman and her papa, had put a curse on her. She had to make peace with them again and ask their forgiveness. She subsequently concluded she had to return to her mountain home. The way of life there was less corrupt. She could bring her daughter up in a healthier environment. I have to confess that I exploded on hearing this litany of insanities. One morning, when I couldn’t take it any longer, I told her in no uncertain terms that if she wanted to go back to her boon-docks, I wouldn’t lose sleep over it. And above all to take her Celanire with her! I could do without her even more. Stung to the quick, she decided to leave the next morning. Okay, I said, just like that. Good-bye, farewell, and good riddance!

“The following day I lost her.

“The next morning she went to the market to inform her own people she was returning home when a dog, a huge Cuban hound, like those used to hunt down the maroons in olden times, black, as big as a calf and strong as an ox, leaped on her, clawed her face, and sunk its teeth into her neck. She died on the spot while the hound, its chops dripping with blood, vanished before anyone could make a move. It’s this second crime I am paying for today. The cur is me. I killed Ofusan as clearly as if I had been the one commanding it to sink its jaws into her throat. And the saint got her revenge, because I found myself lumbered with this child I couldn’t stand and who was to be my downfall. If I had had any sense, I would have left her at the Saint-Jean-

Bosco orphanage. Or else with a scalpel I would have undone my surgical masterpiece and sent her back to the hell she deserved. I couldn’t, because of Ofusan. In memoriam.

“My friend Dieudonné Pylône began to get suspicious. That dog, that Cuban hound, had nothing to do with the scrawny, mangy pack of stray dogs that roamed the market. None of the sellers or customers had ever seen it scavenging the garbage. Where did it come from? Was it really an animal? Wasn’t it rather an evil spirit? I was unable to help him solve the mystery.

“Ten years went by. My friends urged me to remarry. In their opinion, I couldn’t raise a young girl all on my own. Many a young wench made eyes at me, for without boasting, I was still a handsome man. A full head of curly hair, a good set of teeth. But I wasn’t interested. At the age of thirty-three I had finished with sex. Women of the night or well-bred young girls, it was all the same to me: nothing interested me any longer. I kept clear of making medical experiments. I immersed myself in politics. With no success, as I’ve already told you. That scumbag Agénor de Fouques-Timbert beat me twice. Even so I made a name for myself electioneering against assimilation, which all the other parties at the time were hankering after.

“Looking for someone to take care of Celanire, both as a nursemaid and a bodyguard, for that crazy woman was still prowling around her, I hired a certain Melody. Knowing myself as I did, I hadn’t hired her because of her references; she didn’t have any. It was because she was so ugly and cross-eyed that even the devil couldn’t have made me make love to her. That woman, in whom I confided everything, became so devoted to me that I ended up treating her like a close member of the family until that day when she dealt me the coup de gr ^ ace.

“In 1894 Celanire was ten years old. Still just as pretty and, as they kept telling me, just like me but blacker! She was a child with a most pleasant nature. Happy, cheerful, and amusing, inventing all sorts of stories. Not scatterbrained, however, extremely intelligent. Top of her class. At home she would pester me with questions I couldn’t answer: ‘Why don’t girls get more schooling and why are they considered inferior to boys? Why do men cheat on their women? Why do they beat them? Why are there so many illegitimate and unwanted children with no maman or papa?’ Contrary to the custom at the time, I told her outright she was an adopted child whom I had operated on to save her from dying. Sometimes I caught her looking at her monstrous scar in front of the mirror. Her eyes would brim with tears, as if she were wondering who her real parents might be. She had got it into her head that they must have given her away because they were too poor to raise her, and this afflicted her deeply. She swore that when she was older she would do everything to find them and build them a palace for their old age. In fact, she was beyond reproach. For most families, she would have been their pride and joy. But my feelings toward her hadn’t changed. It was something beyond my control; I couldn’t stand her. She had the loathsome habit of constantly calling me ‘darling little Papa,’ pestering me with her little treats, entering my surgery without knocking with cups of hot chocolate and slices of marble cake, kissing me on the neck, and rubbing herself up against me like a cat. Every evening, when she was tucked up in bed, I had to read her a story and end it with a kiss, and this was a pretext for all kinds of unbearable cuddling and fondling on her part. Precocious as she was, she had her first period early that year. And she would chatter about it right in the middle of a meal in front of the guests, as if it were our little secret. ‘Darling little Papa, I’ve got the curse…I can’t go swimming today!..Darling little Papa, I’ve got stomachache, you know why?…Darling little Papa…’

“I was livid. From one day to the next, a boil as big as the knob on a cane swelled up on her groin. I had no other choice but to examine her, and she openly offered herself to me. You think I’m lying? I swear I’m not. Too many loose women have swooned in front of me for me not to know their little game, and this child was doing it to perfection. It happened one morning in her room. I was wondering whether to lance her boil when she began to roll her eyes, wriggle, uncover her budding guava breasts, and guide my hand into the most inappropriate places. In response to my protests, she moaned: ‘Darling little Papa, take me. I love you so much!’

“Disgusted, I dealt her two slaps; I had never laid hands on her till that day, and rushed down to my surgery. My patients commented on how I looked. I felt sicker than they did. What was I going to do with Celanire? How could I get rid of her? At lunchtime, she didn’t come down. Melody, whom I always believed to be on my side, announced she had a fever. At dinner, same thing. At night, I couldn’t get to sleep. I tossed and turned. I could hear her moving about over my head and talking to Melody. Suddenly I was frightened, like a homeless person who knows the hurricane is heading straight for him. I was right, because two days later the police came to handcuff me in my surgery in front of my flabbergasted patients. Dieudonné Pylône preferred to resign rather than be mixed up with this masquerade.

“Me, Dr. Jean Pinceau, I was accused of sexually abusing Celanire, my adopted daughter. Melody, my faithful Melody, was a witness for the prosecution. Alarmed by the child’s behavior of crying for no reason and losing her appetite, she described how she had plied Celanire with questions. After weeks of her insisting, the child ended up telling her the truth. Encouraged by Melody, Celanire finally went and revealed everything to the police. When I heard Melody churn out all that nonsense, I got the impression I was dreaming. Worst of all, the jury believed every word of it!

“My trial lasted over a year. I became a cause célèbre, the subject of conversation of every bourgeois and country yokel, every white, black, and mulatto. If you read the papers from Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Guiana for the year 1894, I made front-page news. Few of the columnists called me a common pedophile. Instead, they reported my career record: brilliant student in France, successful medical experiments, an antidrug crusade, and unmatched devotion to my patients. Ah! Dieudonné was a loyal friend during these tough times!

“Because of me, he left the police force, became the head of my defense committee, and had petition upon petition circulated. But it wasn’t easy for him. Because of the color of my skin! As a mulatto, I’m too light-skinned. The masses would have mobilized for a black. Nobody felt like defending a guy whose class is traditionally an ally of the white Creoles. Dieudonné adamantly repeated that I was not being sentenced for rape, which was a ridiculous accusation for anyone in his right senses. Who was this Melody whose testimony was so damning? A real mystery. Before she worked for me, no decent family had hired her. Nobody on Grande-Terre or Basse-Terre had ever set eyes on her. What I was paying for, Dieudonné asserted, was my nationalistic stand. During the last electoral campaign I had openly canvassed for the end of French tutelage. Poor guy, he did what he could. He had no idea that at meetings the presence and encouragements of a cheering crowd has the effect of a rum punch, and you say anything that comes into your head. At heart, I’ve always been a bourgeois, a small-time bourgeois.

“My family didn’t want her, as you can imagine; they were scared of her. So the court entrusted Celanire to the sisters of Saint-Joseph-de-Cluny, who sent her to the Sisters of Charity in Paris for her education.

“After I was sentenced, I was transferred to Grande-Terre. From Grande-Anse a prison cart took me to Petit-Bourg, where, shackled hand and foot, I embarked on the sailboat linking the town with La Pointe. Along the Lardenoy wharf Dieudonné had managed to muster a few demonstrators shouting ‘Free Pinceau!’ But most people had come out of curiosity to gaze at the likes of a future convict. There were a good many high-society ladies under their lace parasols who looked me up and down. The jail at La Pointe was the most revolting place you could imagine. Obviously it was nothing compared to what we saw in the penal colony, but believe me, it wasn’t a pretty sight. It was the first circle of hell. This is the last. The prisoners were piled in eight or ten to a cell, where in the dark the mosquitoes had the feast of their lives. Once a day the guards gave them a ration of green bananas. Once a month they were lined up in the yard, given a piece of rough soap, and hosed down. The rest of the time they fought as best they could not only with the mosquitoes, but also with the rats attracted by all this filth. No need to tell you that with so much diarrhea, the holes for doing your business were filled to overflowing. I can’t begin to describe the stench! Oddly enough, in the high-security area we were slightly better off — only four individuals to a cell. I found myself with a Chinese guy who had hacked a woman to pieces, a black who had raped his sixty-year-old mother before slitting her open, and an Indian who had sent his father’s head flying with one swipe of a cutlass. In the evening all these poor devils wept like little children. All shouted they were innocent and gave their own version of their story. They then sodomized each other by way of consolation. Nobody could escape it. I even ended up rather liking it.

“On Christmas Day, 1895, I sailed on the Biskra for Guiana in a raging sea. All around me my traveling companions were vomiting left, right, and center. Although I had never been known for aggressive or disruptive behavior, they locked me up in a blazing hot cell, one they reserved for violent prisoners, right above the boilers. Throughout the entire voyage I was unable to stand upright, which explains why to this very day I walk hunched over, bent in two. On arrival they began by thrashing me, considering it arrogant on my part to ask to be transferred to the camp at Saint-Louis to treat the lepers. They didn’t understand I felt like a leper myself. Birds of a feather flock together.”

“So you haven’t heard from Celanire since she was a child? You’ve no idea what became of her once she left Guadeloupe?”

“No. The last time I saw her was at the courthouse in Grande-Anse with Melody, when her mouth uttered those outrageous things which everyone took to be gospel truth. Even I was troubled by what she said. I began to wonder whether my sex, which has always had a mind of its own, had not won the better of me. Perhaps unknowingly I had gone up to her room and committed the horrors she accused me of. After all, how could an innocent mind invent such terrible things? Where would she have got such ideas? What Satan had put them in her head? Then I regained my senses. I was innocent. Celanire must be twenty-four or twenty-five by now. I imagine she is capable of driving the most serious, the most virtuous, guy out of his mind. I am positive she continues her mischief making, and I tell myself I am somewhat to blame. If I could have loved her, if, when Ofusan died, I had been there for her, treated her like my daughter, it might have curbed her wicked instincts. At the end of the day, perhaps all she needed was a little love from me.”

“Unfortunately,” murmured Hakim, “you couldn’t be closer to the truth. I have met her, your Celanire. Far, far from here. In Bingerville, in deepest Africa. It’s her, it’s the same person you’re describing, there’s no mistake about it. Her beauty you’ve described so vividly, her black-black skin, her long, oiled hair, the terrible scar around her neck, especially that scar. You can’t forget that scar once you’ve seen it. It haunts you. It must be terrible for her not to be able to get rid of it. It’s funny, Celanire talked about you all the time in the most affectionate terms. ‘Darling little Papa’ here and ‘darling little Papa’ there. She claimed you were dead, and she had never managed to get over it. She also described her island of Guadeloupe, which, in her eyes, was the most perfect place on earth. She swore she would return there one day to clear up some unfinished business. I dread to think what exactly, since she wreaks evil wherever she goes. I know for sure, without being able to prove it, that she is the cause of my suffering. It’s her and nobody else who has brought down misfortune on my head. Tonight, my friend, I’ll tell you my story, and you can judge for yourself.”

For in fact the sun had risen, brightening the sky, a patch of crumpled cloth above the eternally muddy sea. Papa Doc had needed the entire night to unravel his sad story. Since the Galibi woman had already left to sell her wares at the market he set about heating up some watery coffee, which he poured out equally into tin mugs. The two men dunked their pieces of cassava, drank, and ate, both locked in identical thoughts. How amazing life is! There they were, side by side, sharing the same fate, victims of the same Celanire! Each of them had been born and had lived on opposite sides of the world, one in the Americas, the other in deepest Africa. Each of them had been separated by so many lands, oceans, and mountains! Did it mean they were going to die together? What nature of spirit was driving their common enemy? Why was she bent on doing evil from sunrise to sunset, from north to south? What caused her rage? What did she want to destroy in the world? Reluctantly, Hakim set off for Monsieur Thénia’s house. Out of the two, he was perhaps the more shaken. In dismay he realized he wouldn’t be able to tell his story before nightfall, and he felt something he had not felt for a very long time. Certainly not since he had been in Cayenne, where he lived as if in a daze. In fact he got the impression he had been born in this patch of forest and that the memory of what he had left behind had been erased from his mind. Had he ever been anything else but one of life’s rejects, thrown into the last circle of hell? That morning, his memory returned, and with it, the memory of the terrible injustice he had been a victim of. Abandoned by his father. Spurned by his family. Rejected by society. But suddenly another thought crossed his mind, interrupting his litany of woes. What if, like Papa Doc, he was paying for a crime unbeknown to him? Hakim had seldom thought of himself as a pervert. Fondling Bokar had not left him with a feeling of guilt. On the contrary, it had given two lonely, tortured teenagers a taste of happiness. Simply the death of his beloved had convinced him that because of something abnormal about him he was never meant to be happy. For the first time, he realized he was a degenerate who deserved the most terrible punishment.

In the past the promontory at Saint-François was known for its unhealthy vapors, rising up from the white and black mangrove trees soaking in the brackish, snake-infested waters, and capable of causing deadly diseases. Then some convicts had cleaned up the area and built dwellings for the notability. Monsieur Thénia’s house was the most remarkable of them all. As a safeguard against the risk of fire, the governor of the bank had shipped a metal framework from Bordeaux. The building’s slender columns and its numerous apertures gave it an impression of airiness. But people did not just admire the zinc friezes, the scrolled consoles made of iron, or the elaborate balustrades. They went into raptures over the gardens. Hakim, who had under his orders a horde of gardeners, the ‘banished,’ as the convicts were called, simply common-law criminals but paradoxically the most dangerous type, had them hoe, weed, rake, and graft until they were ready to give up the ghost. He had invented an irrigation system of pulleys and paddle wheels. In his new frame of mind he realized that morning that unconsciously he had taken as inspiration the gardens at the Home for Half-Castes in Bingerville. The bamboo grove, the hibiscus hedges, the clumps of crotons, the beds of periwinkles, the English lawn, and the aviary where all sorts of nocturnal and diurnal butterflies, as striking as those in the Ivory Coast, beat their powdery wings — nothing was missing.

He now understood that his entire past was embedded deep inside him. Nothing had been exorcized. Bingerville and the never-ending rainy season. Koffi Ndizi. Thomas de Brabant. Betti Bouah. Every one of these ghosts was alive and well and living inside him. Papa Doc’s story had opened the door of their jail, and now, liberated, they were prowling around him.

Among his team of gardeners were three Arab convicts, Mimoun, Rachid, and Ahmed, who were serving a sentence for peccadillos committed in their bled. They spoke to no one, didn’t mix with either black or white, and all the convicts knew they only had intercourse among themselves. When he approached them, Hakim was aware of something being triggered inside him. He realized his old passions were not dead. He looked the three men straight in the face. Blackened by the sun, as angular as a vine stem, tattooed from top to bottom, Mimoun was certainly the handsomest. Trembling with a secret emotion, Hakim assigned him his day’s work. Mimoun listened to him without saying a word, walked away, then, turning to his companions, said a few words in their gravelly, hermetic language and all three of them burst out laughing.

Hakim hung his head. Mimoun had seen through him. No, he hadn’t changed. He would never be cured of what he carried inside him. He would never be anything else but what he was.

He had such a reputation as an expert gardener that in the afternoons Monsieur Thénia lent him to the colonial administration to weed the public squares and plant jasmine and mignonette. On his way to the town center each day he would meet processions of escaped convicts, their numbered prison uniforms in tatters, returning to the fold at gunpoint. The dream of escape was the convict’s obsession. The idée fixe was freedom. Although the men knew only too well that the end of the line would be Charvein or the Ile Saint-Joseph for life, they never gave up trying. There was the story of a convict who had escaped twenty-four times, had been recaptured twenty-four times, and on his last trip to his cell slit his belly open with a cutlass. Since Hakim no longer had any dreams, he had never tried to escape. When he was at Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni he had been told about the gold that lay hidden upriver. Boats loaded with gold diggers on their way upstream would pass the convict vessels. It was said that the gold formed in the heart of the Tumuc Humac Mountains, then the rainwater washed it down along the riverbeds, where it glittered supreme, the object of the gold diggers’ lust. So sometimes he pictured himself as a marauder, scraping the sand and the gravel, pocketing his gold nugget. Yet what would be the point? Even if he managed to sell it, what would he do with the money?

When the eye of the sun began to droop low in the sky, Hakim hurried to go and join Papa Doc. All he wanted was to start telling his tale; he wanted it to be his turn to tell his story, which he now saw in a different light. He was cursed before he was born because of those wicked instincts planted inside him. When he arrived at the shack, the Galibi woman, her hands reddened with blood, was busy scaling a skewer of grouper fish. Crouching a few steps away, a Saramaka, as tall as a mapoo, a bow and arrows slung on his side, holding a cutlass, was waiting for Papa Doc. The latter no sooner appeared than the Saramaka leapt to his feet. The two men embraced like old acquaintances. Then the Saramaka began to explain in his grating, incomprehensible (at least to Hakim) tongue that he had traveled all this way because a terrible epidemic was ravaging his village. Countless villagers were being carried off. Men, women, and children were burning with fever and bleeding to death through every orifice. Papa Doc nodded. It sounded very much like hemorrhaging dengue fever, which he had successfully treated in the past at Grande-Anse. While he was quickly collecting together his vials and unguents, Hakim was seized by an irresistible compulsion. To hell with Monsieur Thénia’s garden: he would follow the two men, even though he knew full well that any unjustified absence was immediately reported to the penitentiary administration. The price he would have to pay for absconding might very well be landing up again on the Ile Royale.

They left Cayenne in total darkness under a delicate, lusterless moon that was emerging from its sleep. To reach the river, they first had to cross the banks of the Cayenne, then wade for miles with mosquitoes on their heels across a swamp, through soft mud strewn with tree trunks whose rotten stench grabbed them by the throat. It was almost daylight when they arrived at the spot where the Saramaka’s pirogue was bobbing patiently, half hidden by the thick vegetation on the bank, to which it was leashed by two stakes. A whitish vapor wafted over the surface of the water, apparently dormant under its duvet. Soon the current picked up speed, and the boat sped along like an arrow. The Saramaka and Papa Doc, perfectly at home on this shaky, precarious craft, silently manipulated their paddles, and Hakim envied them their quiet assurance. Once the river slowed down, narrowed, and they glided between two sheer cliffs. Flocks of birds flew from one wall to the other. Then the waters widened again. At noon the sun pitched itself vertically, and all at once the smoldering sky burst into flames. In agony, Hakim slaked his thirst as best he could by drinking the river’s muddy water in the cup of his hand. At one point, the Saramaka pointed out amid the mangrove trees a solitary hut standing on the bank, fringed with white sand and teeming with equally white birds.

“Mami Wata,” he cawed.

Hakim knew the legend. It existed in the Ivory Coast as well. A siren with long, shiny hair spends her days swimming in the river depths. At night she emerges and retreats to her house on the bank. There she sings song after song, so melodious they sound like a heavenly concert. But woe betide the traveler who hears her and approaches her house, for she throws herself onto him and drags him down to her watery palace, the better to devour him.

Toward the end of the afternoon they swung away from the center of the stream and finally landed. As they stepped out of the canoe, their feet sank into a sticky humus that stuck to their soles. They had to walk for a good hour before the ground became firm again. Daylight was fast fading. A bitter smell of bruised vegetation reached their nostrils as the Saramaka hacked their way through the poisonous flowers, the lianas and wild plants. At a bend in the path the village loomed up in a clearing. Hakim was not surprised to find the same charming appearance as the villages in the African bush! The ground was covered with fine sand. Large huts perched on stilts were arranged in a semicircle. All around the forest had been cleared and neatly planted with plots of tobacco and cassava. Now he was convinced it was the hand of Europe that defaced everything, blindly imposing its architecture and its discipline. There was only one dark side to the picture: surrounded by mourners, a dozen bodies lay unburied, waiting for the night to be carried to their final resting place. Without wasting any time, Papa Doc entered one of the huts. Hakim climbed into a hammock hung under a carbet. As night fell, the clouds of mosquitoes became bolder and joined the bats in flight. Insects and birds, emerging from every tree branch, chirped, warbled, and screamed. In the distance monkeys burst into laughter, while some animal howled in response. The music they composed was enough to frighten the most intrepid.

Hakim could not help shivering, as if he had caught a fever, and he wondered what had got into him to follow Papa Doc to such an inhospitable spot. Just then the Saramaka women, who had finished their cooking, brought him a copious dinner of haunch of venison and freshwater fish. Every one of them had an infant clinging to her side who was intrigued and frightened by this stranger. Hakim could not touch his meal. Instead, he greedily sucked rum from a bottle, something he seldom did.

He finally fell asleep.

Hardly had he done so than a young Saramaka woke him. In a daze, Hakim first thought it was Kwame Aniedo. The same jet-black skin, the same hair tied into small braids, above all the same smell, the smell he could not forget, a mix of sweat and vegetable fat. Then he realized his mistake. This one was darker, not so tall, slightly built, with filed teeth. Smiling, the young man placed a finger to his lips and motioned him to follow. He obeyed and stumbled to his feet. As fast as his senses returned, the more frightened he became. He was sure he would never forget that night. Sheer pandemonium! A sinister drumming was unable to cover up the screams of the women mourning. Pyres burned in front of the huts silhouetted against the dark backdrop of trees. Their eerie glow exaggerated the flickering shadows of the men and women who with heartrending wails were burning their dead. The young Saramaka left the village and fearlessly plunged into the forest. By magic, every noise stopped on their approach, and they walked on in muffled silence. Soon they reached the river, rippling with tiny iridescent waves in the darkness, and climbed into one of the small boats anchored among the mangrove trees. Straining with all his muscle power, the Saramaka paddled against the current, and after an hour they landed on the other bank. They cautiously set foot on dry land. Then suddenly the moon emerged from its hiding place and illuminated every nook and cranny of the landscape. Blinded by its glare, Hakim got the impression he was living a nightmare and thought he recognized the spot. The isolated creek. The wreath of mangrove trees. The wattle hut, its doors and windows mysteriously closed. It was the home of Mami Wata! The Saramaka, however, still smiling, motioned to him to wait and climbed back into the boat. He remained alone under this glare of moonlight, even more frightening than the dark, listening to the fading sound of water lapping as the boat disappeared into the night. He couldn’t say how long he waited, standing motionless and paralyzed on the sand. Finally the boat returned, and he could make out two shapes. Next to the Saramaka was Papa Doc who did not seem to be afraid of being where he was. The only sign something was wrong was that Papa Doc, who had been so nimble up till now, almost stumbled as he set foot on the shore. When Hakim saw his friend, his terror vanished and his serenity returned. He knew what awaited him, and it was no coincidence they were both together in this place. The two of them were going to live their final adventure.

One morning some gold diggers paddling upriver discovered the bodies of Hakim and Papa Doc near a jetty. They were scarcely recognizable, swollen by their long immersion, drained of their blood by vampire bats, and half eaten by birds of prey and ants. They came to the conclusion that the two companions must have left Cayenne by night and tried to reach one of the villages along the river for one of those illegal card games, the only means for a convict to get cash to buy cassava flour, one or two liters of rum, cans of sardines, and, if they were lucky, some black-eyed peas. Unfortunately, on the way there, their boat must have overturned. Although convicts, both Hakim and Papa Doc were baptized Christians. The gold diggers brought them back to Cayenne, where the duty of the penitentiary administration was to find them a final resting place. They planned to throw them into the communal grave. But they misjudged popular opinion.

United in life, Hakim and Papa Doc were separated in death. Nobody was affected by Hakim’s death; he was, after all, nothing but a convict like so many others, and had never made a name for himself. He seemed good only for growing flowers. Nobody understood why he was such close friends with Papa Doc and why he had followed him deep into the forest to their death. Papa Doc, however, was a living god to the hundreds of wretches he had cared for in the poor districts of Cayenne. As soon as they learned the news of his death, they marched to the penitentiary building and demanded the body. Then they carried his rough pine coffin to his shack on the Saint-François promontory. Meanwhile the Indian and Maroon villages along the rivers emptied, and long processions of canoes converged on Cayenne, swelling the crowds streaming toward the shack. Breaking with the legendary impassiveness of the Indians, the Galibi woman was weeping hot tears for her man. She was frantically talking with those of her tribe who had come to console her. There was something unnatural in his death, there was something mysterious about this business. Among the numerous Saramakas present at the wake, not one of them looked like the beanpole who had dragged Papa Doc off a few days earlier. None of them had heard of a terrible epidemic, neither on the Oyapock nor on the Approuague. The only three convicts from the French Caribbean, two from Martinique and one from Guadeloupe, obtained leave from Charvein, where the prisoners had forced the warders to fly the tricolor at half staff. They had never met Papa Doc. But his body was their property. After all, they were from the same island womb. Too bad if there was not enough rum or thick soup! They would make do with a wake, and the farewells would be heartfelt and passionate. One of them grabbed a flute, another a mandolin, yet another a guitar, and they played mazurkas and beguines from their native land. Then, with his tongue loosened by a little rum, one of them grew bold and improvised as a storyteller.

Soon the traditional words reverberated:

Yé krik, yé krak

Yé mistikrik, yé mistikrak

A pa jistis à nonm ka konté

Ta là, sé la jol i té yé

Kan mem, sé té an mal nèg

Se té an nèg doubout.

These loyal followers of Papa Doc refused to let his body be thrown into the communal grave as if he were a common mortal. They found enough money to buy him a burial plot and erected a tomb, which they covered with black-and-white flag-stones, in the very middle of the cemetery on the promontory at Saint-François reserved for high-ranking officials. It’s odd that in his book on the penal colony Albert Londres does not devote one line to Papa Doc, who was a real character in his time and left his mark on people’s memory. To prove it, even to this very day, the descendants of the convicts have not forgotten him, and every All Saints Day his tomb is lit with candles in his memory. In 1960 a delegation of nationalist militants traveled from Guadeloupe and laid claim to the corpse. Taking up the arguments of Dieudonné Pylône, they asserted that Papa Doc had in fact been banished as a political opponent. According to them, he was one of the first to have demanded independence for Guadeloupe. But the colonial authorities categorically refused to accept their request, and the delegation returned home empty-handed.

Ever since, the Guadeloupeans, who come to let off steam at the carnival in Cayenne and admire the costumes of the touloulous, have made the graveyard a place of pilgrimage and laid fresh flowers on their compatriot’s tomb.