Who Slashed Celanire's Throat?: A Fantastical Tale

Peru: 1910

1

Sometimes Yang Ting thought of Guadeloupe as a woman he had loved but had given him nothing in return. He compared her to Paruera, the place where he lived, to Arequipa, the nearby town, and thought her fairer than anything around him. Neither the deep valley of the river Chili, nor the sparkling cone of the Misti volcano, nor the surrounding rim of snow-capped mountains, in his eyes could match the sweltering heat of Grande-Terre, the sugarcane plantations, the raging rivers, the banana groves, and the life-giving rain hammering on the zinc roofs at night. Ah! If only it were more tolerant, more open to others, that island would be a Garden of Eden! On the days he went into town, he didn’t look twice at the seventeenth-century cathedral, the University of San Augustin, the Monastery of Santa Catalina, and all the Inca ruins that were the pride of Arequipa. The entire journey, in fact, had been based on a misunderstanding. After the death of Pisket, Kung Fui had remained stricken by grief. He had adored his twin sister, and she felt exactly the same way about him. Now that she was gone, life had lost its meaning, and nothing mattered anymore. Ever since the aborted sacrifice, Yang Ting had only one thing in mind — put as many miles as possible between himself and Grande-Anse. Nothing now was to prevent the crafty little devils in the police, headed by Dieudonné Pylône, from snooping around the Blanc Galop and discovering the contract entered into with Madeska. While Pisket was alive, any escape had been impossible. She had been in no condition to leave Grande-Anse to begin a new life elsewhere! Once she was dead and buried, everything had changed. Taking advantage of Kung Fui’s pitiful state, he had decided to take control. He had been beguiled by a certain Aloysius, a braggart of a Frenchman, who worked out of La Pointe and offered contracts for Panama or land in Peru in the Colca Valley. Aloysius strongly advised him to go to Peru because of its large Chinese population. And, moreover, according to him, the Colca Valley was an extraordinary place. Cotton grew like a weed and you only had to bend over, pick it, and bag it to become rich.

But all that had been a scam. Nobody grew cotton any longer in this region of Peru. Finally liberated from slavery, the blacks had deserted the fields as they had everywhere else and were determined to have a good time in town. At Paruera, nature had reclaimed its empire, and all that the two companions had acquired with their inheritance was a hacienda in ruins under a roof of missing Spanish tiles standing desolate on barren terrain, spiked here and there with silk cotton and rubber trees. Furthermore, the nearest Chinese lived at least four hundred miles away. Kung Fui had very quickly sunk deeper into despair. At first, when he was not weeping for his beloved Pisket, he managed to put all his energy into clumsily wielding a pair of pruning shears and a machete alongside Yang Ting. After a few months, however, he no longer ventured out of doors. Soon he no longer left his room, no longer got out of bed, and remained addicted to his opium pipe. Left to his own devices, Yang Ting remembered the region of Port Louis where he had grown up. Refusing to give in, he set out to grow sugarcane instead of cotton. But he never managed to achieve his aim. On the haciendas of Peru, as on the plantations of Guadeloupe, the Chinese were feared and hated. The Indians didn’t want him as boss. They wanted a white boss, a white with sangre azul who spoke Spanish. He was nothing on this earth. With the help of some day laborers hired for the job, Yang Ting was reduced to growing cassava, corn, a little rice from the Andes, and raising sheep and fowl that he sold in the market at Arequipa, squatting among the Indians, looking like one of them under his dirty poncho. On weekdays Artemisa, the mulatto woman, cooked for him, patched up his clothes, and occasionally warmed his bed. As long as he had been in good health, life had been bearable. But age plus the icy winds blowing down from the mountains began to wreak havoc and misery on his body. Finally he sold the hacienda for next to nothing. Then he piled all his belongings as well as what remained of Kung Fui into a cart and left for Lima.

Whereas at first the colonizers were only interested in gold and precious metals from the Andes, their designs gradually shifted to the coast, once a barren strip of land squeezed between sea and mountains. Lima embodied the heart of this transformation. In some ways the capital was a welcome relief for Yang Ting. In Paruera his few contacts had been with the Indians, who seemed to be in perpetual mourning, whereas here the noisy crowds of blacks, Chinese, and mixed-bloods reminded him of his hometown in Guadeloupe. There wasn’t a single white family’s house where people of color didn’t rule as cooks, launderers, and gardeners. Huddled around the Plaza de Armas were the blacksmiths’ workshops owned by the mulattos whose reputation ran the whole length of the coast, while the streets echoed with the cries of the aguadores, the water carriers, straight from the land of Africa. In the evening around the glow of oil lamps black women sold tamales, anticuchos, and a host of spicy foods of a dubious nature. But on the whole the city disappointed him. As a result of numerous earthquakes, there were few reminders of a time when it was once called the Ciudad de los Reyes. He found himself in a small town shivering and muffled up in every season in layers of fog. An icy drizzle constantly seeped in from the ocean, soaking the cobblestones, the hordes of stray dogs, and the baroque facades of the few colonial dwellings. Two steps from the Puente de Piedra, in a blind alley of the mestizo neighborhood they called a callejón, he bought a modest little shack with no windows and one door for an opening. It was built of clay and straw and covered with a traditional tin roof. He also purchased two dozen donkeys for transporting lime and bricks to building sites, and hired by the month two gangly arrieros who drove them along, whip in hand, cigar in mouth. He had lost his delusions of grandeur. What mattered was survival, and this trade, however wretched it seemed, was a lucrative one. Nevertheless, he felt even lonelier than before and at a total loose end. Gone was the time when he was up before dawn, laboring with his day workers, plowing, sowing, harvesting, as well as taking care of the animals. In Lima, while Kung Fui was killing himself with opium, he had all the time in the world to kill. In his idleness he developed a liking for bullfights. Every Saturday he went to cheer the fledgling black capeadores and fervently applaud the exploits of the black toreador, Rafaël Martinez. He also regularly attended cockfights and concerts. Several times a week he used to go as far as the ports of Chorillos and El Callao to gaze at that lifeless gray expanse that had the nerve to call itself a sea. Behind his back, beyond that mass of black mountains, lay another sea, this one warm and welcoming, whose spray had solidified to give birth to his native land. Above all he got into the habit of spending hours and hours in the taverns, drinking chicha. His favorite was La Wiracocha, because of the singers who came in at midnight and captured the desperation of his heart with their gravelly voices. It was constantly filled with blacks and Chinese, driven half insane by alcohol and nostalgia for the lost paradise of their childhood homelands, those wicked stepmothers who had sent their children into slavery. Yang Ting, however, did not like talking about his early days. In Guadeloupe people had always treated him as an outcast from an orphanage and had never accepted the fact that his color made him just as much a Guadeloupean as the blackest of them. He spoke Kréyol, believed in people in league with the devil, and danced the gwo-ka. So where was the problem? In their opinion, Guadeloupeans could only be of African descent. He had been designated Chinese and as a result excluded once and for all! Leaving him behind like a bundle of dirty clothes, his papa and maman had vanished God knows where. He owed his life to the Christian charity of Madame Charmène Elysée. Madame Charmène Elysée was a vivacious mulatto woman who was not satisfied with taking care of her husband and twelve children. With the considerable fortune her white Creole papa had left her, she had opened an orphanage, which she poetically called the Drop of Milk. There she took in the countless fatherless and motherless infants picked up on the steps of churches, in streams, and at crossroads, yelling their hunger. It was among the litter of starved, abandoned, and wild little things who crowded into the refuge that he had got to know the twins Kung Fui and Pisket, as well as their little sister Soumathi. Helpers at the Drop of Milk were volunteers, well-to-do matrons, women friends devoted to Madame Charmène Elysée. Although they were quick to hand out punishment, they were also kindhearted and proved to be acceptable stepmothers. Among their protégés, however, they had singled out Kung Fui and Pisket as their whipping boys, a couple of depraved, dirty little vermin. Hadn’t they caught them at such a tender age doing filthy things in bed together! They preferred, by far, Soumathi, gentle and obedient, who had been quietly baptized Antonine, or Tonine. Although there was some truth in what they said about Pisket, who was a disagreeable, taciturn, and selfish child, giving off a smell to upset the boldest of noses, Kung Fui, on the other hand, was a most attractive young boy, full of brazen and comical ideas. He had quickly realized that sugarcane had been the black man’s burden and downfall, and he had no intention ending up the same way. So at the age of fifteen he left Port-Louis and tried a number of trades at La Pointe. Housepainter, laundryman, bricklayer, hawker, powder monkey, carnival moko zombie, and kitchen boy. Each time people made it clear they didn’t like his looks. As a result he went underground. He formed a gang with the ironical name of the Yellow Hand, which stopped at nothing in the way of robberies and even murder. It specialized in burning plantations. The blacks had sworn to bring the remaining white plantation owners to their knees and made lucrative deals with those who gave them a helping hand. Their method had been perfected down to the last detail. They waited for a moonless night. At eleven in the evening, when the countryside was fast asleep, they would invade the cane fields, pile heaps of straw in a number of different places, and set light to them. The flames would leap up in every corner, and bundles of sparks would explode in the darkness. Soon an orangey wall rose up to the sky, and no sight was more sublime. Obviously, the police thought otherwise, and Kung Fui as well as Ying Tang spent a good deal of their time in jail. Finally they decided to make themselves scarce and went into hiding at Grande-Anse. There, Pisket, who had no other talent, found work in a bordello. After three months of hanging around half-dressed girls and their body odors, Yang Ting had had enough and went back to La Pointe.

Yang Ting couldn’t help thinking of Soumathi — Tonine, if you prefer — as someone he had hurt. What had become of her? Gone crazy, probably. She had always been a bit cracked. She had accompanied him to the foot of the gangplank of the steamship Tourville, crying her heart out, pretending to take his promises at face value. Of course he’d soon send her the money for the fare, and then she would come and join them.

Soumathi — Tonine!

She had completely escaped his memory when at the age of twenty he bumped into her at a place called La Rose de Sable, a den for society’s outcasts situated on the Morne Miquel, where they smoked opium, drank rum, and the desperate gambled in the hopes of winning their way out of a life of hell. Tonine was no longer the little sister victimized by her siblings, sniveling and skinny as a stray cat. She was hardworking and well behaved, an apprentice to a seamstress. Her virtue did him the world of good. Furthermore, she worshipped him like the Holy Sacrament and confessed that she had always kept a place for him in her heart ever since their time at the Drop of Milk. Flattered by her confession, he soon moved in with her in a tenement yard on the Morne La Loge. But he was not made to live on love alone in a shack! As soon as Kung Fui called him back to Grande-Anse, he realized this juicy contract was their chance of a lifetime. Agénor de Fouques-Timbert was loaded. They weren’t going to relieve him of just a few crumbs of his fortune. They would get out of him enough to last for the rest of their lives. Tonine pleaded with him. The farther away they kept from sorcerers, diviners, and mischief makers, the better off they would be! Those people had formidable powers! And then she was a sentimental type. Selling, sacrificing your own baby, an innocent newborn! Yet another great idea of those two villains for whom jail was not good enough. Finally, when he threatened to leave without her, she had been so much in love with him that she followed him. As soon as they arrived at Bélisaire, he realized his mistake. Pisket and Kung Fui did absolutely nothing but spend their time lying in bed, drifting amid the smoke of their opium pipes. As for the money paid by Agénor de Fouques-Timbert, nobody ever saw the color of it. Pisket had locked it in a safe at the bank. All the work at the Blanc Galop fell on them. They had to soak, soap, and scrub the laundry, starch it, hang it out to whiten, and iron it. What’s more, it was poor Tonine who had to run around with a heavy tray on her head, making the deliveries. Not a minute’s rest! What kept Tonine going were the prospects for her child. If they ever got their share of the cake, they wouldn’t have to worry about his future. For she too had become pregnant. Yang Ting, however, was far from being delighted and looked moodily at the calabash of her belly under her shapeless dresses. Why did they have to saddle themselves with another stone around their necks when they already lived so miserably? For the first time during their life together she stood up to him. Even if Kung Fui did break his word and didn’t give them what he had promised, tété pa jin two lou pou lestonmak. The breasts are never too heavy for the stomach. She wouldn’t ask anything from anybody and would expect nothing from anyone. She would work hard for her boy — for it would be a boy; she could feel it — and give him the instruction and education she never had.

But he had betrayed her.

One evening at La Wiracocha he had just sat down with his drinking companions when a waitress brought him his glass. He was about to down it without another thought when he changed his mind and looked up. He got the impression he had been kicked full in the chest. Reeling from the shock, his teeth chattering, he stood up, gasping for breath, and stammered in his poor Spanish, “For Christ’s sake, where did you come from?”

The girl quietly explained she was a china-chola from Urubamba, come to seek her fortune in the capital. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen. Petite, slender, yet well built, with pretty curves exactly where they should be. A shiny black skin. Slit eyes. Her hair, a stream of silk. Since he had left Guadeloupe, Yang Ting had given up womanizing. Artemisa, the mulatto woman, had done more than half the work in seducing him. Suddenly his member vigorously reminded him of its presence. Burning with the desire of a sixteen-year-old, he dashed over to the owner, who was casually keeping an eye on the rum guzzlers from the bar.

“Jesus, is she yours?”

Jesus shrugged his shoulders.

“Who? Amparo? She’s not my type!”

All these years of solitude had changed Yang Ting’s character. He was no longer what he used to be. His own desire scared him. He dared not approach Amparo, struck by her staggering resemblance to Tonine — minus her gentleness and vulnerability, of course. This girl looked as though she had guts, knew what she wanted and what she was doing. He watched her pirouette across the noisy, smoke-filled room, carrying her tray on her shoulder, wipe the tables with one sweep of her cloth, laugh, joke, and firmly extricate herself from the groping hands of the rum guzzlers. Occasionally he got the impression she turned toward him with a little half smile and encouraged him. Then he got hold of himself. What could an old bag of bones like himself be possibly imagining?

Around two in the morning, he got up and left. He had never seen such a night. Black as the ass of a Kongo slave. Up above, a wretched little crescent of a moon illuminated next to nothing. He slogged through the dark to his neighborhood callejón. When he reached home, a scream that made his blood run cold sobered him up on the spot and made him dash inside with all the energy he could muster. Kung Fui, usually nailed to his bed in a perpetual stupor, lost in his dreams, was lying on the floor, as dead as he possibly could be. There was no sign of a wound. His features had been contorted in terror that only some terrible aggressor could have caused. Yang Ting grabbed a machete. But however hard he searched the four corners of the house, tore outside, and paced up and down the neighboring streets, nothing moved in the funereal darkness.

Yang Ting wept bitterly.

Kung Fui may have become a mindless, apathetic, and blind deadweight, but he represented Yang Ting’s last link with the land of his past, his deepest, inner self. It was his entire childhood, his youth, his dreams, and his hopes that were about to be buried. He had admired him, worshipped him, served him like a slave, and never been able to refuse him anything. Not a thing.

One night, a few months after arriving in Bélisaire, Kung Fui had hammered on the door of the room he shared with Tonine and dragged him to his quarters. What a sight! The musty room stank of urine and excrement. Pisket, lying half unconscious on the filthy bed, was losing her blood in great gobs. A miscarriage! Fearful of indiscreet gossip, Kung Fui had called neither doctor nor midwife and was stifling his sister’s moans with a pillow. In the dawn’s early hours she finally ejected her fetus. Then for some unknown reason she stopped bleeding. Kung Fui looked as though he would go crazy. He wept, stammered, and fumed. All his grand plans had been shattered. An individual like Madeska would not let them off lightly. Kung Fui would have to reimburse him his money, which meant slipping back on the dog collar of misery. Unless…unless…Suddenly an idea germinated in his highly imaginative mind, and he looked up. Unless they chanced upon a surrogate belly! Since Yang Ting looked puzzled, hoping he hadn’t heard right, Kung Fui went on to explain: a belly for sale, for God’s sake! So many girls forced into an unwanted pregnancy would be only too willing to get rid of their bun in the oven on the cheap. So the two accomplices began scouring the bordellos of Grande-Anse but came up empty-handed, plagued by bad luck. And Madeska was beginning to suspect something! It was then that Kung Fui pleaded with him. Tonine was going to give birth in a month or two, wasn’t that so? They would tell Madeska some story or other. Who can predict exactly when a woman gives birth? Yang Ting, knowing that Tonine would never accept such a scheme, laid down his terms. They wouldn’t tell her anything. They would make her believe the baby had died soon after it was born. And the deal was made!

Madeska, the diviner, divined nothing. Likewise, the hell-hound of a midwife he dispatched for the occasion. When she arrived, Yang Ting claimed the premature birth had taken them by surprise and that the baby, a girl, had popped out on her own to see the world for herself. They handed the infant over to her, wrapped in a rag, and the dirty trick was done. Tonine took it quite differently, however. She did not believe a single deceitful word of the tale they were spouting and realized straightaway they had handed her baby over to Madeska as a substitute for Pisket’s. Beside herself with anger, she threatened to go to the police. After so many years her screams still echoed in his head—“Assassins! Scoundrels! Thugs!” He had called her a nutcase, punched her, then abruptly showered her with kisses.

At three in the morning the remains of Kung Fui began to give off a foul stench. From a waxy yellow his pockmarked, swollen face changed to gray while thick sooty streaks streamed over the sheets. At noon, unable to bear it any longer, Yang Ting went to look for some wood to make a coffin. The few zambos he managed to muster recoiled from the stench. Soon he was all alone assembling and nailing the planks. But the afternoon heat made the stench unbearable. It was as if the coffin were porous and the smell of decay seeped out through a thousand invisible cracks. Yang Ting gave up the idea of a wake. At four in the afternoon he decided to get it over with and asked his arrieros to carry his companion to the graveyard. No flowers or wreaths, please. The funeral cortege was composed of half a dozen veiled women clothed in black, mouthing prayers, who never miss an opportunity to woo death.

Shortly after having buried Kung Fui, Yang Ting, who had never had trouble sleeping, found it impossible to get his sleep back. He began to have the same grisly dream. Kung Fui wrenched him awake with a hand as cold as death’s. Gripped by an eerie anguish, Yang Ting followed him across a barren landscape dotted with meteorites, lit meagerly by a sliver of a moon. At the end of their journey a wide-open coffin was waiting for them. He went up behind Kung Fui and looked inside. On a bed of unspeakable filth strewn with rotting livers, gizzards, and intestines lay a baby, a little girl, with her throat slashed.

Until then Yang Ting hadn’t given a thought to the infant he had surrendered to the mischief maker’s knife. His very own child? Unlike Tonine, he had never wanted her and consequently felt no responsibility whatsoever toward her. Suddenly he sensed he had committed two crimes — one against Tonine, whose motherhood had been stolen, the other against the innocent victim, who had not asked to come into this world and who had been martyrized as soon as she opened her eyes. Incapable of falling asleep in the blackness of the night, he argued with himself, spent hours endeavoring to justify his behavior, as if he were facing a tribunal. Okay, he had acted wrongly. Yet his act, however dark it had been, had ended happily. The police had picked up his little girl, and then Dr. Pinceau had rescued and adopted her. At the present time she couldn’t be lacking for anything. She was surely enjoying a better life than she would have with impoverished parents like Tonine and himself. But however hard he repeated this argument to himself over and over again, he finally realized he was atoning for his dual crime with a life of failure and solitude. The money it had procured him was cursed, and he would never stand to gain from it.

As a result, he was now a regular visitor to La Wiracocha, downing more and more glasses of chicha to chase away the bitter taste of his life. As a rule, when he arrived, the tavern was still deserted except for a few blacks gambling illegally. He would sit down in a corner and systematically get drunk. One afternoon when Amparo set down the chicha in front of him, her expression was unmistakable. Despite his decrepitude, the young girl had taken a liking to him.

People in Lima still talk about it to this day. If you go in for a drink at Juanito’s in Barranca or at the Brisas del Titicaca near the Plaza Bolognesi, they’ll tell you about it, adding numerous unverifiable details. They will tell you a storm was raging the evening Amparo left with Yang Ting. Frightened by the wind, which had already uprooted the centuries-old mahogany trees in the plazas, the inhabitants of Lima’s poor neighborhoods never gave up nailing down their doors and windows. They will tell you that the waves of the ocean swept away the homeless sleeping on the sidewalks and flooded the second floors of the houses along the malecón. They will tell you the heavens opened and poured gallons of water over the streets and pavements.

The regulars had always been suspicious of Amparo, who had suddenly turned up out of the blue at La Wiracocha. In answer to their questions, she said she came from far away, from Urubamba, which explained why nobody had heard of her family. But her sly looks and cheeky smile did not go down well, and nobody appreciated her sharp tongue, especially from a waitress. Soon all the men boasted they had slept with her, whereas in fact nobody had.

That evening thirty pairs of eyes saw her untie her apron and walk out arm in arm with Yang Ting around ten o’clock. Behind their backs, tongues began to wag. Some of the regulars wondered whether Yang Ting had heard of the incident in the valley of Canete, when over a thousand Chinese had been massacred in a single day because one of them had dared lay hands on a zamba. Others had no scruples making offensive comparisons between the sexual performance of the Chinese and the blacks, who were more hot-blooded, more virile. And others recalled that the Chinese were nasty pieces of work, making up whole battalions in the Chilean army.

At dawn Yang Ting’s arrieros, who had come to pick up their instructions for the day, were surprised to find the doors and windows of their boss’s house smashed in. The modest dwelling sitting under its cluster of trees could not possibly hide any treasure likely to attract bandoleros. With machetes handy, they cautiously walked around the house before going in. Yang Ting’s bedroom was a vision out of hell. It was as if a furious battle had been waged. The walls and floor were smeared red with blood. The blankets and bedsheets were in shreds. Yang Ting’s body was naked, covered with bite marks, deep gashes, scratches, and bruises. But the horror was capped by the sight of his male member, which had been ripped off and stuffed into his half-open mouth like a cigar. The regulars from La Wiracocha crowded into the police station to make their statements, and the police ran around looking for Amparo, who was probably the last person to see Yang Ting alive. To their amazement nobody with this name lived at the address she had given — Jirón Paruro 394. Although they repeated her description over and over again to the men, women, and even the children, none of the callejón’s inhabitants had ever seen the likes of her. They looked for her in vain throughout the city of Lima, going through the labyrinth of its shacks with a fine-toothed comb. A court summons was then issued the length and breadth of Peru, and the police in Chiquian, Pisco, Ica, Ayacucho, and Cuzco were put on high alert. After a year they reluctantly closed the matter. She must have slipped into Chile or Bolivia, whose borders with Peru were wide open. In order to recuperate the cost of burying Yang Ting, even though he had been thrown like a dog into a common grave, the municipality of Lima helped themselves to his house. They did it up very cheaply and rented it out to some Chinese railroad employees who cleared out in fright after only one week. Every midnight a terrible racket broke out in the two bedrooms — moans, screams, groans, and the sounds of a struggle. The next tenants did not stay longer for the same reasons. Neither did the next. Soon the rumor spread, and nobody wanted to live there. The house finally fell into ruin, and it came to be known in the neighborhood as the Casa de Los Espiritus, the House of the Spirits. During the daytime people quickened their step along its sidewalk. At night they made a wide detour by the Calle Las Dallias to avoid it.

In our countries, where imagination reigns supreme, popular curiosity is not satisfied with a mystery. Everything has to have an explanation, preferably supernatural. Mama Justa, a black woman from the region of Ica on the south coast known for the clairvoyance of its seers, soon furnished one. After having drunk a cup of worm-grass tea, which sharpens the vision, she fell asleep and had a dream in which she saw Yang Ting as a young man on his island, unrecognizable with a full head of hair and a perfect set of teeth. The life of shame he had led there was revealed to her, and when she awoke, the whole matter became crystal clear. She then told his story to anyone who cared to listen. The young Yang Ting had committed a crime against two women — a terrible, unspeakable crime, worse than a robbery or a murder, which has a motive and never fails to have extenuating circumstances; one of those crimes which nobody can forgive, not even the most generous-hearted. He thought he was safe in Peru, where he had been hiding for fifteen years, turning into an old bag of bones. But that was an illusion! You can run and hide wherever you like; the earth is not big enough, God’s justice has eyes like a hawk, you can never escape your sins.

One of the victims on whom he had wreaked so much harm had taken the shape of Amparo and got her revenge.

2

This voyage to South America that Thomas de Brabant had counted on to change his wife’s mood was not the success he had hoped for, since it was dramatically cut short by illness.

In order to satisfy a last-minute whim by Celanire, Thomas had to completely rearrange the order of things, and the journey had started with Peru instead of ending there. Given such short notice, he had quickly studied the country’s three major regions — northern, central, and southern Andes. In Lima they stayed at the Hotel Raimondi, one of the capital’s most luxurious establishments, famous for its azulejos as well as its carved, gilded ceilings. Very quickly it became obvious that Celanire’s interest in Peru was extremely limited. She seemed to forget all about Flora Tristan. She never as much as glanced at the travel accounts or historical narratives Thomas had obtained, nor even leafed through a magnificent work of art entitled The Andes: From Prehistoric Times to the Incas. Thomas endeavored in vain to arouse her interest in a minority of African descent in Peru that was as dynamic and fascinating as other such communities of the Americas in Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, and Haiti. His life with Celanire had, in fact, completely transformed him, and he had become an ardent defender of black cultures. He had so much to tell her about Peru after reading the major work by Enrique León García called Las razas en Lima: Estudio demográfico with the abundant help of a dictionary. Alas! She paid no attention whatsoever to what he was saying.

So what in fact did she do?

She disappeared for days on end and even a good part of the night. It was as if she were looking for someone. She was seen scouring the working-class neighborhoods situated on the other side of the Puente de Piedra. She bought nothing during her endless rambles, and apparently had little liking for all those trivial knickknacks tourists are so fond of, such as altarpieces, miniature clay churches, poker-worked calabashes, and gold or silver filigree jewelry, for every evening she returned to the hotel empty-handed. Only once did she make a purchase, bringing back a dog-eared little book for which she said she had paid a small fortune—La bruja de Ica. It was the extraordinary tale of an eighty-year-old black witch, Jesús Valle, a slave belonging to the former marquis of Campocumeno, who had great trouble preventing the workers of a hacienda from transforming her into a living torch.

Forsaken and abandoned by his wife, Thomas came to detest Lima, and his mood turned morose. Compared to the blazing sun of Guadeloupe, the garúa became unbearable, and Thomas remained holed up all day long under the gilded ceiling of his room, reading grammar book after grammar book with the aim of improving his Spanish. A maniac for organization, he also began preparing the next step of the journey. So much for Bolivia! It was too far south! After Peru they would head north, traveling via Ecuador and Colombia. To get there they would take a horse-drawn carriage as far as Pucallpa. There they would embark on the Rio Ucayali, then the Rio Marañón, and finally the royal Amazon. He had been assured that throughout the journey the landscape would take their breath away, not only his but his entire family’s. As a result, he filled Ludivine’s head over the dinner table with a description of the dazzling sights they would soon be seeing. After passing a spectacular landscape of fields rising in terraced rows up the sides of the mountains in the manner of the Incas, their boat would sail between sheer walls of granite, masked here and there by the thick foliage of the tropical forest. Thomas could embellish these descriptions as much as he liked; Ludivine, who thought him a terrible bore, did not listen to a single word. She was bored by Lima — at her age they are bored by everything — and sulked in front of her ceviche de camarones, a speciality that the chef was particularly proud of. Deep down, Thomas wondered why Celanire had insisted on bringing her along. She completely neglected the teenager in Lima, and the girl was left to her own devices for days on end. Only once had she taken her to mass in the cathedral and had her admire its collection of gold-embroidered chasubles. To him such behavior seemed quite out of line.

The day before they were due to leave for Pucallpa, Thomas had Ludivine stay behind in the dining room and tried to get her interested in the Paracas and Nazca cultures. He was telling her how in the sixth century the whole of Peru had been the scene of a major upheaval when Celanire came and joined them. She was unrecognizable — almost frightening to look at. Her complexion had turned sallow. Her eyes, usually so sparkling, had glazed over, circled by octopus-colored rings as big as a hand. Her cheeks were sunken, her walk unsteady. It was as if she had just waged a battle that had completely drained her. She collapsed onto a chair and contorted her face into a smile for Ludivine. She seemed incapable of uttering a single word. Her hands were shaking, and the precious anthropomorphic clay jar that Thomas wanted her to admire slipped from her grasp. She sat staring stupidly at the pieces scattered over the floor. After a while, still without uttering a sound, she withdrew to her room. One of the most striking features of Thomas’s character, like that of so many men, was his obstinacy. A few minutes later, when he went up to his room to find Celanire collapsed on the bed, as if felled by an invisible hand, it did not occur to him to change their plans. Celanire spent a bad night. In her sleep he could hear her moan and cry out even, and had great trouble waking her up.

Around five in the morning the de Brabant family finally managed to leave the Hotel Raimondi and was seen off by a host of bellhops already up and about. Outside was total darkness. A sliver of a moon slumbered on its back above the rooftops, which were flattened like pancakes. The carriage quickly drove through the outskirts, left the city behind, and, turning its back to the sea, galloped toward the mountains in the shape of upturned funnels. A bitter wind frayed the blankets of fog unfurled against the black sky.

After they had journeyed for an hour in a subterranean darkness, the mountaintops began to turn pink, and gradually the tiny silhouettes of peasants appeared in the distance. Some of them scampered down the steep slopes as if in child’s play, bent double by their enormous loads. They were probably on their way to sell their corn and beans in the nearby markets. Others emerged as dots on the immense patchwork of fields, driving their oxen in front of them. Farther on miniature herds of sheep and cows gamboled, chased by dogs and children wielding sticks. Her left hand tucked into Thomas’s paw, Celanire seemed to be fighting to keep her eyes open and wore a mask of extreme drowsiness. Thomas carried blindly on as if he were oblivious to her condition, and in the glow of a lantern read to her a poem dedicated to Pachamama translated from Quechua:

Calling your name,

I crawl toward you, Mother Earth,

On bloody knees,

Here I am, Mother Earth,

Scattering flowers of “panti,”

I bow to you, Mother Earth,

Golden nugget, rainbow robe,

Star flower, Mother Earth.

When he had finished, she managed to murmur a few words of admiration. Then she curled up in a corner, immediately fell asleep, and began to snore. Thomas had no other choice but to continue reading in silence. In the meantime Ludivine was passing the time as best she could with a card game. One of the waiters at the hotel had taught her the secrets of a game of patience, and she was annoyed she could never get it right.

They hardly ever drove through a village. As far as the eye could see stretched the mosaic of fields. Around one in the afternoon the coachmen drew to a halt in the small town of La Oroya. They were taken to an inn called the Blue Ceiling, a peculiar name, since the place was whitewashed. In spite of its elegant appellation it was nothing but a dusty, unswept tavern. Celanire, who usually surprised everyone by wolfing down tons of cakes, whole chickens, and platters of red meat, while remaining as slim and lithe as a gazelle, did not touch a thing. She pushed her plate away with a tired hand and dolefully asked for a glass of milk. Just as the grouchy mulatto waitress slammed it down in front of her, Celanire slipped off her chair and collapsed on the earthen floor. It was all over in a few minutes. In the time it took for Thomas to stand up in a fright and for the mulatta to grab a bottle of chichi and skillfully pour a few drops between her clenched teeth, Celanire had already opened her eyes again. But what eyes! Two bottomless holes devoid of any gleam of life. Her brow was covered in sweat, and her body was as limp as a rag doll. The waiters hurriedly carried her behind a curtain into a room crawling with flies adjoining the restaurant while one of them ran to fetch the only doctor in the place. Through the window Ludivine could see people walking to and fro on the sidewalk, oblivious to the fact that Celanire was so sick.

Around four in the afternoon, when Thomas was beside himself with waiting, the doctor, an Indian half-caste strapped in a military-style riding habit, arrived, clutching his black leather bag. Thomas antagonized him considerably by throwing himself on him, babbling in French, and forgetting every word of Spanish he had ever learned. By way of an answer the doctor articulated every syllable of his Spanish, signifying clearly that he was not French-speaking. Finally the two men found themselves on common ground, speaking a sort of pidgin English. The doctor was categorical. Celanire’s asthenia was a complete mystery to him, and he had never seen such a serious case, except in instances of dysentery when the patient drains herself from top to bottom. The only thing he could think of was to give her a shot of camphorated oil so that her heart did not give out. It was obvious she couldn’t continue such a risky journey, and he advised them to return straightaway to Lima to consult with a specialist.

To her dying day Ludivine would never forget the return journey over unfamiliar roads in a carriage suddenly transformed into a hearse. Daylight was fast dwindling. An icy wind blew down from the encircling mountains, which became increasingly oppressive. The horses galloped on, snorting and whinnying like mad, and flocks of buzzards flapped along the branches of the trees, shivering as they huddled against each other. Celanire seemed dislocated. At the same time she had never looked so beautiful as her husband hugged her in his arms, as fragile as a cameo. Suddenly Ludivine realized how much Celanire meant to her. She wondered whether her feelings toward her weren’t to a large extent tinged with tenderness. She had always imagined she hated this woman, who perhaps had killed her mother. But she had been constantly wrapped in her affection. From an early age it was Celanire who had taken care of her when she was ill, dried her tears, calmed her tantrums, who had given her the taste for a certain type of music, a certain type of poetry, and taught her it was not a curse to be born a woman. What would become of her if she lost her? If she lost too that overriding obsession to unmask her identity and bring about her punishment? What meaning would there be to life if there was nothing left to do but drink, eat, sleep, get married, and have children? Surprised at herself, she began to cry as she hadn’t cried for ages.

Finally the horses arrived on the sprawling outskirts of Lima, where the wretched of every color were crammed together. The din of their hooves woke the roosters, who, thinking it morning, began to crow. Once they had crossed the Puente de Piedra, there was a sudden crackling of fireworks, and yellow and silver streaks zigzagged across the sky. Our weary travelers realized that this third Saturday in February was also the first day of Carnival, and that the population of Lima was jumping for joy. Dancers disguised as devils dressed in extravagant costumes adorned with hawks’ feathers, bulls’ horns, and snake tails cavorted around their carriage. On the Plaza de Armas, groups of black musicians played the tejoleta. Amid a general outburst of commiseration, Thomas found his suite again at the Hotel Raimondi. Clutching Celanire like a baby, an old black servant climbed the grand staircase and carried her up to the second floor while another went to fetch the best doctor in town. Ludivine lay down on a corner sofa. Exhausted, she very quickly fell asleep. But her sleep was disturbed by repeated images of bloody piles of dead fowl lying plucked and eviscerated in a cockpit. She finally opened her eyes and saw a man with oily hair and a conceited look in deep conversation with her father. Dr. Iago Lamella seldom paid house calls, especially after eight in the evening. But when he heard it was a Frenchman, he made an exception, because he had studied in France, was a frequent visitor to Paris, and had great admiration for the birthplace of the Rights of Man. And then his governess had been French. He was explaining to Thomas in a laboriously refined French that after having examined Celanire, he remained extremely perplexed. He could diagnose no illness. The liver, the kidneys, the heart and the lungs, every organ in the body, was in perfect working order. The blood and the lymph were circulating freely. It was simply as if the patient had lost all her strength. All her vital functions had slowed down, and if this continued, the outcome was anyone’s guess. He suggested massive doses of cod-liver oil and shots of camphorated oil in order to reactivate the organs.

However improbable such a treatment may seem, it had an effect. Around midnight Celanire emerged from her wasting disease. She opened her eyes as distant as stars and in a tiny voice clearly said:

“Thomas, take me back to Guadeloupe. I have nothing more to do here.”

The port of Lima is called El Callao, and it isn’t much to look at.

Fishermen’s boats bob on the milky, melancholic sea next to a few old steamships whose hulls are eaten away with rust. Thomas had had the good fortune to find two first-class cabins de luxe on board the SS Pachacamac leaving for Esmeraldas in Ecuador. From there he hoped to continue on to Cartagena in Colombia by land, then sail to Caracas in Venezuela, and finally find his way through the Caribbean to Guadeloupe. At dawn they set sail out of the harbor, and all the passengers assembled on the shiny wooden decks to gaze at the sinister Fronton jail, where during the wars with Chile so many enemy soldiers had been tortured. Then the open sea began to parley with the ship’s prow as it tore through its belly. Traveling first-class on the SS Pachacamac, you rubbed shoulders with the usual crowd of tropical aristocrats, owners of haciendas and fincas who had made their fortune from sugarcane, cotton, and coffee, and who all had their hands stained with the blood of black slaves. Their black or mestiza nurses accompanied them in fourth class but came up to join them at six in the morning to look after their spoiled, pasty-faced children. There were also a few priests traveling to Rome and some retired generals. The news that the wife of a senior French civil servant, confined to her cabin, needed constant nursing, quickly spread around the ship. As a result numerous good souls came to offer Thomas their help, although he had never asked anyone for anything. He received them in the small sitting room adjoining the cabin so that he could keep an eye at the same time on the lifeless shape that was his wife. He agreed to Madame Eusebio because no sooner had she entered the cabin than Celanire aroused herself out of her comatose state, propped herself up against her pillows, and held out her arms, smiling like a child who finds a familiar face waiting for her after school. Madame Eusebio looked like nobody on this earth. She was from Borbón, a small town in Ecuador at the mouth of the Rio Cayapas inhabited mainly by descendants of African slaves. In Quito she had looked after the five children of a Peruvian diplomat, who had been so satisfied with her services he had taken her with him to Lima. Suffering from homesickness, she had saved up enough money and was now returning home.

Quite frankly, she was ugly, but nevertheless she possessed a piquant sort of charm. Her teeth, perhaps a little too large, were of an impeccable ivory; her cheeks were dotted with warts, much like birthmarks, and her bulging eyes emitted a powerful magnetism. While she hugged Celanire passionately up against her, whispering words of Spanish in her ear, Thomas stood staring at them, hopping from one foot to another in astonishment. Where had the two women first met? By way of explanation Madame Eusebio peremptorily indicated he should leave. Dumbfounded, he closed the door behind him and went to join Ludivine, slumped in a chaise longue on the deck. To while away the time Ludivine was making an effort to read, but Madame Bovary, Eugénie Grandet, and Le Père Goriot, all those books her father had recommended as masterpieces, made her yawn, and she sat there blinking and staring at the dazzling lid of the Pacific clapped over the ocean depths.

Today ocean travel is coming back into fashion. People pay a fortune to cruise slowly from one point of the globe to another. But at that time travel by ship was boring, and everyone dreamed of a faster mode of transportation. On board there were very few distractions. During the day the men played endless games of billiards. In the evening they sat down to poker before crowding into the bar to wet their mustaches in the crushed ice of their cocktail glasses. The women badmouthed each other behind their backs and rivaled in elegance at dinnertime, which was occasionally followed by a cotillion that alone broke the monotony of the journey. Every Saturday they danced the waltz or the foxtrot. At night they huddled under their blankets on chaise longues and peered into the dark for the sign of a light on the coast. The farther north they sailed, the greater the number of birds that flocked slowly across the sky. But nobody looked up in that direction. These landlubbers felt they had been tossed by the waves from time immemorial and had lost touch forever with their familiar surroundings. They imagined they would never get rid of the peppery, bitter smell of the sea, which irritated their nostrils.

From that moment on Madame Eusebio never left Celanire’s cabin. From morning to night it was filled with the smoke from the mysterious plants she burned. She barred Thomas from entering, and he was reduced to wandering the deck at all hours of the day, lighting up Havana after Havana in the smoking room and downing glasses of port in the bar. Sometimes the captain took pity on him and invited him to his table for meals. But Thomas never failed to launch into endless tirades against the conquistadors who had devastated the Amerindian cultures. He also extolled the merits of Simón Bolívar and regretted that his dream of building the Gran Colombia had never been realized. Moreover, he meddled in politics, daring to criticize President Eloy Alfaro and saying it served him right if the crowd had recently torched him like a carnival puppet. Blathering away in this fashion, he appeared to forget that his traveling companions possessed the courtesy of the Spanish and that his Gallic outspokenness risked offending them. In short, the captain ended up leaving him to lap up his soup all alone in his corner. At night he went and slept on a mattress in his daughter’s cabin that the stewards had laid out on the floor. He quickly realized that here again his conversation bored Ludivine to tears, and he took comfort in his beloved poems translated from Quechua. Since he had lost his sleep worrying over Celanire’s condition and read until dawn, he wrapped the only lamp in the cabin with a green shawl so as not to disturb the young girl. In the early hours of the morning, while she was still asleep, he slipped on his clothes without washing.

We don’t know whether Madame Eusebio treated Celanire with the medication recommended by Dr. Iago Lamella. Cod-liver oil? Shots of camphorated oil? It’s highly unlikely! She did exactly whatever came into her head. We do know with certainty, almost down to the last detail, the diet she had her follow. Twice a day she went down into the heat of the kitchens, tied an apron around her waist, and began preparing her patient’s food tray. The most incredible stories began to circulate about her behavior, spread by the chefs and kitchen boys. For them there was no doubt Madame Eusebio was a bruja, worthy of those witches from the southern coast of Peru. More than milk, she needed blood and more blood, a never-ending request for blood. Sometimes she curdled it with rock salt, sliced it, then steamed it in a pan sprinkled with chopped parsley. Other times she filled vials of it, which she wrapped in her mantilla as a precaution against prying eyes. She searched for offal, liver, hearts, and brains and above all, filet steaks, which she cut into fine strips like carpaccio. Despite his aversion for Madame Eusebio, Thomas very quickly ascertained the results of such a treatment. In a few days’ time, Celanire emerged from her drowsiness. In the morning she would leaf through some illustrated magazines and in the afternoon appear on deck, leaning on the arm of her nurse. She would shuffle over to the railings, close her eyes, letting the ocean breeze caress her face, then totter back and lie down on a chaise longue. While Madame Eusebio wrapped her legs in a plaid rug, she would exchange a few words, which got less laborious by the day, with her husband and stepdaughter. Her interest in her traveling companions and for life on board returned. What music did they dance to at last night’s cotillion? What was Ludivine reading? Had she managed to play her Beethoven on the piano in the smoking room? Then she went back inside her cabin as soon as the wind freshened. The entire first class waited for these moments, however short they were. Although the women turned their noses up at her color, the men lathered themselves up into a frenzy over the contours of her breasts, the curve of her hips, and a glimpse of her ankle, seized once more by their age-old fascination for the morena. Of course there was always that wretched kerchief tied around her neck. What did it hide? Thereupon the most outlandish stories began to circulate. At the age of sixteen Celanire had been doused with acid by a lover she had scorned. Aiming for her eyes, his hand had trembled with rage, and he had drenched her throat. This had occurred somewhere in Africa, a few years before she married Thomas. The latter had used his influence as governor and had the guy shipped to a penal colony. He was probably still there. Or else they claimed that as a child she had almost ripped her head off with a skipping rope and had been patched up by the best surgeon in Guadeloupe, who had then raped her. And so on and so on…But the one thing that emerged from all this gossip, where bits of truth had been crudely stitched on to bits of legend, was that Celanire was a woman best not to meddle with. In her time, as the Peruvians say, she had waltzed with Lucifer and danced the polka with Marshal Castilla. They pitied Thomas, regarding him simply as the incarnation of the perfect cuckold.

Celanire improved every day during the two-week voyage. Once they reached the coast of Ecuador, she was fully cured.

Perhaps it was the effect of the illness, but from that date on Celanire’s character radically changed. Up till then she had been the life and soul of the party, full of energy, always on the move, a little person whose company, after all, was somewhat tiresome. She slowed down, wrapped herself in thought, and became languorous. Her eyes lost their sparkle and deepened. She let others express their opinions and listened to them. She seemed to be constantly hiding inside her things, which were giving her food for thought. Her language too became more moderate, reflecting her new mood. She began to repeat that she needed a new aim in life to continue, a new reason for living.

At Esmeraldas Celanire and Madame Eusebio wept greatly at the moment of separation when Madame Eusebio set off in the direction of Borbón. Yet once again Ludivine couldn’t help noticing what she called her stepmother’s indifference, even her hypocrisy. The carriage that bore Madame Eusebio away had no sooner turned the corner of the Avenida La Floresta than Celanire stretched like a cat, grinning in seventh heaven at regaining her health.