The Sugar Islands (5 page)

It was not till we got out of Pointe à Pitre into the country that we realized what the cyclone had really meant. The effect there was extraordinary. The countryside, with its coconut palms lopped and uprooted, gave the impression of a face that has not been shaved for several days. Like a blunt razor the cyclone had passed over it. As I drove through the wrecked landscape towards Basse Terre I thanked Heaven very humbly that it had spared the green savannah, and the white statue and the palm trees guarding it; that in all its beauty and friendliness Fort de France should be waiting there untouched to welcome me.

And yet, lovely though it is, Fort de France is intolerably hot. Set in a basin of hills, its very excellencies as a harbour make it the less habitable. Not a breath of air reaches it. Everyone who can afford to, lives out of town, in the cool and quiet of the hills. Not only is Fort de France extremely hot; it is also very noisy.
The streets are narrow, the cars are many. The chauffeurs drive with the recklessness, but not the skill, of Parisian taximen. When cars were introduced into Northern Siam the sense of speed was so intoxicating to the Laos that in Chiengmai artificial bumps were raised in the main streets to force the chauffeur to drive slowly. I have often wished, as I have seen disaster approaching me at every corner, that the authorities in Fort de France would take the same precautions. But it is doubtful if it would have much effect. If the roads were as bumpy as the scenic railway in San Francisco, I think the Martiniquais would continue to rush their fences, trusting blindly in the immunity of one-way streets and a hand rhythmically pressed upon a horn. All the time horns are honking. It is one's last, it is one's first, impression of Fort de France. Long before evening one's head has begun to ache.

The casual traveller, with nothing definite to occupy him, finds his attention concentrated exclusively on the incessant noise. Only during the week-ends is there systematized entertainment.

Every Sunday morning there was cock-fighting. It was worth seeing once. The Gallodrome was a circular wooden building, arranged in five galleries. On the top gallery there was a piano and a bar. You paid five francs at the door. The pit was about twenty feet across. For the first minute and a half a fight is thrilling. The cocks are introduced to one another by their owners: they are placed on the edge of a circle five feet apart. The instant they are let loose they fly at one another. Quite often in that first leap, with a single blow, one of them is killed. For a moment or two it is a whirlwind of blows and feathers. But after that minute it grows uninteresting. The cocks do not, as in the North of England, wear spurs. They peck wearily at the back of each other's necks. The chief interest is in the audience: in the half-castes and negroes who bounce excitedly in their seats, who shriek encouragement to the animals, who shout their odds across the pit.

Nominally the fight is to the death; actually it is as long as the cocks will fight. After a quarter of an hour or so they stand, blind and weary, gasping and indifferent, the fight forced out of them. Their owners take them by the wings and place them at the edge of the circle, facing each other, five feet apart. They make
no movement. Inside that circle there is a smaller circle. Again the animals are lifted by their wings. They are within a few inches now of one another. They do not move. The crowd yells fiercely. Then suddenly one pecks forward. The other turns away its head. The fight is finished. Pandemonium is released. The negroes jump in their seats and shriek with excitement, waving the francs that they have lost or won, while the owners carry away the cocks, scrape the skins of their heads and legs with a small pocket knife, slit the congested flesh about the neck and crown, pour lemon juice over the wounds, and hope for equal or greater fortune in the following week.

Within five minutes another fight has started.

Cock-fighting is the chief sport in Martinique. Every district has its fight on Sunday.

In the villages there are no cock-pits. The negroes form a rough circle round the cocks, and as the fight moves the circle follows up and down the length of the village street. From a distance it looks like a scrum in Rugby football. Children perch themselves on verandas and on the roofs of cabins; they shriek with laughter when the cocks fall into a gutter or stumble over a more than ordinarily misplaced cobblestone. It is a hilarious business. But to see cockfighting at its best you have to see it at the three big centres, at Trinité, St. Pierre, and Fort de France. In the same way that, although there is a
festa
of some sort in every village on the six or seven Sundays before Lent, to see carnival at its best you have got to go to Fort de France.
[I wrote this before I had seen films of the carnival in Trinidad.]

For the actual carnival I was at Dominica. And there it was a subdued affair. Two years earlier there had been trouble; a police officer had been beaten very nearly to death. Dominica is a curious place. Once a French possession and geographically a French possession still, it is in feeling more French than English. It is Roman Catholic. The natives speak Creole. Smuggling, that the police are powerless to check, is constantly carried on between Martinique and Guadeloupe. Dominica is the Ireland of the Antilles. It is the loveliest of the islands and it is the most difficult to manage. It should be prosperous but blight after blight has fallen on the crops. First coffee was destroyed. Then when the lime industry was established—Dominica is the centre of Rose's
lime juice—a disease struck that. The country is very mountainous. When Columbus was asked to describe the island he crumpled up a sheet of paper and tossed it on the table. The roads are so bad that fruit cannot be profitably marketed. Dominica is a constant drain on the Imperial Government's exchequer. The more money that is spent there, the less settled does life become.

Anything might have happened in Roseau during that wild week of carnival had not a gunboat providentially and unexpectedly arrived in harbour. Many stories are told in explanation of that gunboat's presence. It is said that an admiral expressed a wish for grapefruit. There was no grapefruit, he was told. Where could grapefruit be got? Nowhere nearer than Dominica. Could any excuse be devised for sending a gunboat there? Papers were consulted; an American courier had passed two days before. There might be a mail there. That was sufficient excuse when an admiral was hungry. And so, at the very moment when Roseau was in the hands of the rebels, a gunboat appeared in the harbour. There was no fighting. The crowds dispersed; the sailors were not even aware that there had been any trouble. The sight of the gunboat was enough. In five minutes order had been restored. That evening the admiral ate grapefruit before
consommé.

Probably the story is untrue. But the arrival of the gunboat was no less providential on that account. In the following year the carnival was forbidden. And when I was there, though the carnival took place, no sticks were carried, and at six o'clock the streets were cleared. It was an orderly affair. It lasted for two days. In the morning from the hour of nine the streets were patrolled by small groups of men and women with masks and costumes, a drum at their head, at their back a crowd of ecstatic urchins. The costumes were as various as the local store and local wit permitted. There were pierrots and pierrettes; there were sailors and there were cowboys; there were men dressed as women, padded with footballs to give their skirts the effect of a Victorian bustle. Some tried to make themselves appear attractive; the majority tried to make themselves as plain as possible. In Forte de France there were occasional satirists. One afternoon a group of men, dressed up as women in skirts five inches long, had paraded the streets singing ‘Malpropre baissez la robe'. Most of the songs that are sung at carnival are impromptu references to some local event. The chief song at Roseau commemorated an attempted suicide.

‘Sophia drink wine and iodine
Why, Why, Sophia?'

During the afternoon Roseau echoed the name Sophia. Every shop was shut. Half the population was ‘running mask'. The stray groups that had shouted down the streets during the morning had joined up into a solid phalanx, seventy yards in length, that marched backwards and forwards, singing and dancing, cracking whips; while separate bands of twenty to a dozen girls, dressed uniformly, marched with small orchestras to solicit alms. Each band represented something. One band dressed in yellow represented Colman's mustard; another
Tit-bits
; a third, hung with red, white, and blue, carrying plates of oranges and maize and breadfruit, ‘Dominica Produce'. It was the Martinique carnival on a small scale, surpassed by it in the same way that in its turn Martinique is surpassed by Trinidad. If you want to see street carnival go to Port of Spain. But if you want to see that of which street carnival is the symbol you will stay in Fort de France. In white-run sections of the world I never expect to see a more astounding exhibition than the Bal Lou-Lou. [
The Bal Lou-Lou exists no longer.
]

Twice a week, on Saturdays and Sundays, there is a ball, or rather there are several. There is the Palais and the Casino. But it is at the Select Tango that you will see it at its best. There is nothing to tell you that you are to see anything extraordinary. At the end of a quiet street facing a river there is a large tin building. You pay your twelve francs and you are in a long room hung with lanterns and paper streamers. A gallery runs round it, on which tables are set, and at each end of which there is a bar. It is rather like a drill-hall. And as you lean over the balcony you have the impression that you are at a typical provincial palais de danse. You see the kind of people that you would expect to see. On the gallery there are one or two family parties of white people. The white women will not dance. They will look on, and they will leave early. In the hall below are a certain number of young Frenchmen of good family with their dusky mistresses. There will be some white policemen and white soldiers; but for the most part it is a coloured audience of shop assistants, minor officials, small proprietors; a typical provincial dance hall. And at first, in the dance itself, there is nothing that you would not
expect to see in such a place. The music is more barbaric, more gesticulatory; but that you would expect to find. As the evening passes, as the custom at the bar grows busier, the volume of sound increases, but that, too, you would expect. That you have seen before. You grow tired and a little bored. You begin to wonder whether it is worth staying on. Then suddenly there is the wail of a clarionette. A whisper runs round the tables:
‘Danse du pays.'
In a moment the galleries are empty.

It is danced face to face. The girl clasps her arms round the man's neck. The man holds her by the hips. The music is slow and tense. ‘
Le talent pour la danseuse,'
wrote Moreau St. Méry,
‘est dans la perfection avec laquelle elle peut faire mouvoir ses hanches et la partie inférieure de ses reins en conservant tout le reste du corps dans une espèce d'immobilité
.' The couples appear scarcely to move. In a dance of twenty minutes they will not make more than one revolution of the room. They stand, close clasped and swaying. The music does not grow louder or more fast. It grows fiercer, more barbaric. The mouths of the dancers grow lax; their eyes are clouded, their movements exceed symbol.
‘La danseuse arrive et bientôt elle offre un tableau dont tous les traits d'abord voluptueux deviennent ensuite lascifs. Il serait impossible de peindre la
chica
¹
avec son véritable caractère et je me bornerai à dire que l'impression qu'elle fait est si puissante que l' Africain ou le Créole de Nil Error'importe quelle nuance qui le verrait danser sans émotion passer ait pour avoir perdu iusquaux dernières étincelles de la sensibilité.'

That is on ordinary evenings. During carnival it is fantastic. A stranger arriving at the Select Tango at one o'clock in the morning would imagine himself mad. He would not believe it possible that in a white-run community the payment of twelve francs at a public turnstile would admit him to such a bedlam. He would imagine that such spectacles were held behind doors as rigidly guarded as those of the Bal des Quatre Arts. The noise is deafening. The galleries and hall are crowded. Most of the girls are masked. They wear gloves and stockings so that not an inch of dark skin appears. Some of them, it is whispered, are white women in disguise. They might well be. It is a dance in which caste and blood are alike forgotten. Everyone is drunk; not with alcohol but with music. People are dancing by themselves. They
shriek and wave their arms. They seize a partner, dance with her for a moment, then break away. A girl will be dancing by herself.
‘Un danseur s'approche d'elle, s'élance tout à coup et tombe au mesure presque à la toucher. Il recule. Il s‘élance encore, et la provoque à la lutte la plus séduisante
.' The young Frenchmen in the arms of their mulatto mistresses will parody and exaggerate the antics of the negroes. A woman embraced between two men will be shrieking to friends up on the gallery. In the thronged centre of the ball couples close-clasped will stand swaying, their feet and shoulders motionless, a look of unutterable ecstasy upon their faces.

But it is not possible to describe the Bal Lou-Lou. The only phrases that would describe it are incompatible with censorship.

Once every five days or so we went into Fort de France, and it was always with a feeling of excitement that we began the day. It was fun after five days of bare legs and open throats to put on trousers and arrange a tie. The seven-kilometre drive assumed the proportion of high adventure; which in point of fact, with a chauffeur such as ours, it was. We felt very like country cousins coming up for a day's shopping as we deposited with the head waiter of the Hôtel de la Paix a list of groceries and a vast wooden box in which to store them. There was the excitement of discovering at the photographer's how many of the snapshots we had taken during the previous weeks were recognizable comments on the landscape. And by the time that was finished it would be half-past eleven.