Victoire (14 page)

Cream of pumpkin soup with garlic and shrimps

Stuffed chayotes

Grilled sea bream on saffron rice

Salad of spinach shoots

Coconut sorbet

Without a smile and dressed in the Martinican mode, Victoire is assiduously serving the dishes from table to table and removing the plates. At times, she goes over to Alexandre and they talk in low murmurs. He whispers the orders to her as if they are a secret.

Afterward, amid the rumbling of the volcano, they frenziedly make love.

T
EN
 

This long elopement had little effect on the relations between Victoire, Anne-Marie, and Boniface. Anne-Marie had an unending supply of romanticism that justified falling in love at first sight, something that she—alas!—had never done. She lived the passion through the intermediary of Victoire and reconstituted the affair in her imagination, since Victoire did not tell her very much.

After months of blinding love, the thought of her beloved Jeanne must have haunted Victoire. She ended up confessing to Alexandre, who went into a rage. How dare she keep secrets from him! Why should he look after this papaless child? It would be like eating someone’s leftovers. She let the storm subside, then returned to the attack. He was inflexible. She ended up leaving.

On the ship back home, she almost threw herself into the sea a hundred times. When the shores of Guadeloupe came into view, she wanted to die. Suddenly her decision to return seemed absurd. She was sacrificing herself for a child who would soon have a life of her own, from which perhaps she would be ruthlessly excluded.

Boniface, who was only too happy to get back a body to which he was so attached, forgave everything. He never put the slightest
blame on Victoire, content merely to ask her from time to time with a pathetic humility:

“Kon sa, ou té òbliyé mwen?”
(You never thought of me once all that time?)

It was shortly afterward, however, that relations between Victoire and Jeanne started to deteriorate seriously. Okay, they had never been very demonstrative. Neither of them seemed apt at those outpourings of tenderness that are natural between a mother and her only daughter. Yet a type of subterranean communication bound them one to the other like a secret passageway. From one day to the next all that ceased, replaced by a muted hostility, at least in Jeanne. It was expressed by mere nothings. Jeanne no longer allowed her mother to dress her and do her hair. She combed her hair as best she could with a mixture of water and castor oil and tied it in a bow on her neck. She picked out and slipped on her panties all by herself. Worse still, she who previously had a healthy appetite began to eat like a sparrow. In a single month she consequently lost twenty pounds, signifying therefore that she wanted nothing to do with earthly nourishment, as a way of punishing her mother, who placed so much importance on it. In a manner of speaking she refused any type of dialogue with her. At the same time, she professed to loathe music, especially Bach, Vivaldi, and Italian operas; in short, all the favorites of Anne-Marie and Victoire. From that moment on she always had her nose stuck in a book with an expression that seemed to say: “I’m the only one in this house who has other things on her mind than stuffing her face with food.”

Throughout her life she affected to despise material pleasures, especially the culinary arts. But was it really an affectation? All began probably by a banal adolescent revolt that gradually took root in reality.

Every Thursday at ten o’clock, in the study where Jeanne did her homework, Victoire persisted in bringing her a cup of vanilla-flavored chocolate that she never drank. One day, without looking up from her exercise books and manuals, she let out:

“I want to go to Versailles.”

Versailles was the name of the boarding school recently opened in Basse-Terre by the Sisters of Saint-Joseph-de-Cluny.

“Vèsaye?”
Victoire asked her in dismay.
“Pouki sa?”

Why? Jeanne did not take the trouble to open her mouth, since the answer was written all over her face: uncommunicative, evasive, stony, and stubborn. Basse-Terre was situated at the other end of the island. She wanted to get away from the Walberg household, from this circle of bourgeois white Creoles who despised her on account of her color and whom she despised on account of their lack of education. Above all, she wanted to get away from her mother, a dull-witted vassal who obliged her to live in their midst. If at that instant Victoire had burst into tears, thus revealing the extent of her chagrin, perhaps the rest of their lives would have been different. But as usual her oblique eyes showed no feelings. She laid the tray on the desk and without a word went out into the corridor. It was there, severely shaken, that she leaned up against the wall to stop herself from fainting. All day long, her heart bled. She did not confide her agony to Anne-Marie, who was deciphering a page of
Faust
by Gounod in her room while gobbling cashew nuts from La Désirade. She waited for nightfall to open her heart to Boniface, lying next to her in the Regency room. He was the only one who would consent to this extraordinary expense. Unhappy about having to part with his money, he pulled a face. Won’t Jeanne ever tire of studying? Wasn’t she content with what she knew already? The Versailles boarding school had an undeniable reputation. “The school places great care on education,” writes a report by the public education authorities. “We have found it to be sound, clean, with an abundance of healthy food.”

This, no doubt, explained the high cost of its tuition and accommodation. Disbursing such a sum was out of the question. At the same time Boniface was always anxious to please his Victoire. He hit on the idea of a compromise. Jeanne would have to sit for a competitive examination and win one of the school’s scholarships to finance her studies.

Monsieur Roumegoux’s services were once again called upon. Since Boniface Jr. had turned out to be a dunce and managed to keep the store’s books as best he could, and Valérie-Anne, despite her mother’s hesitations, had been entrusted to a private institution, the family no longer had need of his tuition. Anne-Marie begged him to come back. Every day he turned up at the rue de Nassau to give Jeanne her algebra and geometry lessons (her weak points), teach her a little English—he had lived in Roseau in Dominica—and discuss literature, for despite her young age she showed a very sound judgment. For instance, she adored the short stories by Guy de Maupassant. Monsieur Roumegoux introduced her to the writer he admired above all: Baudelaire. He gave her this quotation from
Les Paradis artificiels
to reflect upon: “Common sense tells us that earthly matters have very little relevance and that true reality can be found only in dreams.”

On May 19, 1906, Jeanne was the first black girl to pass the examination with the mention “Excellent,” which opened the doors to the Versailles boarding school.

I
N ORDER TO
symbolize the farewell she was making to a certain way of life, she insisted on traveling alone to Basse-Terre. No chaperone, if you please. Since Victoire was afraid of her traveling on the steamship
Hirondelle,
which had overturned several times, she insisted she take the more reliable diligence over land, which took seven hours to travel between La Pointe and Basse-Terre, following the Windward Coast via Capesterre. For an entire week, she silently cross-stitched Jeanne’s initials, JQ, on a trousseau generously provided by the Walbergs: six single sheets, twelve terry towels, and twenty-four cotton panties. The nuns didn’t do things by halves. She was dying to talk to Jeanne, but didn’t know how to go about it. It was from that moment on, I believe, that she began to fear her daughter’s secretive and impenetrable character. What lay behind this face, so pretty, yet so cold?

The morning of Jeanne’s departure, Victoire secured her daughter’s two heavy wicker baskets on her head and accompanied her as far as the chamber of commerce, where the diligence began its journey.

I can see them now.

How different were the circumstances of this departure from the one in Marie-Galante sixteen years earlier, when the mother was trying to protect the daughter. This time it was the daughter fleeing the mother. Jeanne is walking in front, dressed in the elegant Scotch plaid uniform that the nuns demanded—pleated skirt flapping around her ankles, blouse buttoned up to the neck, patent leather pumps with a low heel, and a smart white Panama hat. She is tall, slender, and aloof. Something in her expression puts a stop to the racy jokes by the ragamuffins who are already idling in the streets. Hard on her heels, the mother with her headtie, heavily loaded, dressed in her shapeless dress with a leafy pattern, looking like a servant. The moment has come to climb into the diligence. The daughter brushes her mother’s cheek with a cold kiss and hurriedly climbs into the vehicle. A few minutes later, the carriage lurches off with a creaking punctuated by the coachman’s shout: “Forward!” The mother stands motionless, head lowered, at the edge of the sidewalk. She doesn’t see her daughter making a farewell gesture to her at the carriage door. She senses she is losing her and wonders what caused such a separation. What is she guilty of? What mistakes has she made? She gave her the best schooling and best education possible. The weapons she used, questionable, despicable perhaps, were the only ones within her reach. Was that why her child was rejecting her?

She retraces her footsteps. All around her the streets are bustling with activity, filled with the pleasant smell from the droppings of the horse-drawn carriages. Servants are on their way to market.

“Corossol doudou,”
shouts a fruit seller sitting at the crossroads.

In the dining room, Anne-Marie, bursting out of her orange dressing gown, is savoring her cup of chocolate and array of cassava breads.

“I pati?”
she asks.

Yes, she’s gone. All morning long, Victoire is plunged sadly in the preparation of a curried skate
colombo.

I have never seen Anne-Marie with my own two eyes, although the picture of this obese musician has constantly haunted my imagination. I have collected the bizarre rumors that circulated about her. At the end of her life, almost destitute as a result of her son’s dissolute existence, she holed herself up in her room on the second floor of the house on the rue de Nassau, surviving thanks to the goodness of her daughter. All that remained were a few pieces of rich-looking furniture, flotsam from her life of splendor. She could no longer get downstairs. Folds of fat prevented her from wedging her viola under her chin. Her pudgy fingers could no longer handle her bow. She apparently owned an old phonograph and listened to operas from morning to night while tirelessly nibbling on
rahat-loukoum
, stuffed dates,
grabyo koko,
grilled peanuts, and candies such as
douslets
and
sik a koko têt roz
.

E
LEVEN
 

From the time Jeanne left for Versailles, Victoire’s life took on a more somber coloring. It was not just the gray routine of life, even grayer since the aborted dream of Martinique. It was the black of frustration and suffering that was slowly overwhelming her. She had trouble getting over her daughter’s bitterness and had difficulty understanding it. She plunged herself in her cooking while her talent reached a perfection of fantasy and inventiveness, even though the Walbergs were the only ones to profit from it since they no longer entertained at home. She knew only too well that Jeanne was ashamed of her. Consequently, against Anne-Marie’s advice, she refused to go and visit Jeanne in Basse-Terre. She could see herself in the visitor’s room, in the covered playground with her daughter under the gaze of the nuns in cornets. She would stick out like a sore thumb from the other parents, educated and well dressed white Creoles and mulattoes. How they would all look her up and down! How they would snigger behind her back! As a result, for one entire school year, mother and daughter communicated solely through the letters that Jeanne sent to La Pointe once a month and that Anne-Marie read out loud:

My dear mother,
My dear godmother,
Dear Monsieur Walberg,