Victoire (20 page)

At last, Auguste could savor Jeanne’s body, which he had lusted after so desperately. There was no
griotte
to hang out the wrappers stained with blood. But she was a virgin, that’s for sure. I don’t know what my mother thought of her wedding night or any of the following nights. What I do know is that I never heard her broach the subject of sex—which is unusual, even exceptional in our islands—without some measure of disgust.

One week later, it was Boniface’s turn at the wheel of his Cleveland to take Victoire to the rue de Condé. He loaded onto his shoulder like a porter the trunk containing her old clothes. In this quiet neighborhood the intrusion of the Cleveland produced the same effect as in Le Moule: people came out on their balconies or on their doorsteps to contemplate this high-powered car. They had much to be amazed about. What was this white Creole doing at the Boucolons? Who was this mulatto woman with him? Jeanne’s mother? She looked like a woman from Les Saintes. Did she come from Terre-de-Haut? From that moment on, the gossip began to rage.

The unfortunate Boniface had put time to his advantage. Night after night, he attempted to prove to Victoire the sanctity of their relations. Since she listened to him without saying a word, he did not know whether he had convinced her. In despair he was prepared
to talk to Jeanne himself. He was not asking for much. Just so they would let him see his Victoire from time to time. But confronted with Jeanne’s impenetrable and contemptuous expression, he realized she would not listen to reason. So he kept silent and stumbled out of the house.

Jeanne had prepared for her mother the best room in the house: on the second floor, opening onto a balcony, since she did not want to relegate her to the attic under the roof like a servant. In order to climb into the four-poster bed
à boules,
you had to use a small pair of steps. The highlight of the furnishing was without doubt an oval cheval glass, surmounted by a decorative motif on an ornate frame, which gave a full-length reflection. The emotion and gratitude that such munificence could have caused Victoire was largely tempered by the conversation that followed. Jeanne calmly reiterated what she had already said in Le Moule. In the world she was entering, her association with a white Creole was unacceptable.
Intolerable.
No more commerce of the flesh or anything else. No mixing with company that might invite malicious gossip. Just as Caesar’s wife should be above suspicion, so the mother and mother-in-law of a Grand Nègre should be unassailable. The white Creoles were our enemies. They had subjugated and whipped their slaves for generations. They had only one desire at heart: humiliate the blacks by every means possible and reduce them to the level of animals.

Even if it had been said in Japanese, the effect of this short speech would have been the same. Victoire was incapable of understanding it. She did not know the meaning of the words “class” or “exploiters.” In her eyes, the Walbergs were not enemies: neither Anne-Marie nor Boniface. She didn’t dare say they were her friends. To use an out-of-date term that would have made Jeanne’s blood boil, they had always behaved like good masters.

I admit I have difficulty accepting the fact that Victoire relinquished Boniface so easily—her companion for twenty years who had given her pleasure, who had forgiven her infidelity, who had looked after her child, and who in a manner of speaking considered
Victoire his only reason for living. I refuse, however, to accept the theory generally acknowledged by the inhabitants of La Pointe that since Victoire could get nothing more out of Boniface, she shamelessly turned her back on him. I believe that once again the fear instilled by her daughter got the upper hand. She could not envisage for one moment standing up to her at the risk of displeasing her. There is no doubt whatsoever the thought of Boniface tormented her, denying her sleep. I can see her at night with her eyes wide open in the dark, tossing and turning in her bed, thinking of her partner. I can imagine her in the midst of her daily routine suddenly gripped by his memory and obliged to stop for fear of bursting into tears.

Boniface never came back to the rue de Condé and Jeanne could claim that his relations with her mother were now over and done with. At Christmas and New Year’s he faithfully sent Victoire expensive presents, one of which was one of the first radio sets of the time.

I find it surprising that Jeanne never intervened likewise in the relations between her mother and Anne-Marie. She probably dreaded Anne-Marie, knowing her to be a loudmouth, capable of making terrible scenes. The fact remains, however, that Victoire and Anne-Marie continued to meet every day on the Place de la Victoire. To my knowledge, Boniface respected Jeanne’s instructions and never came to join them.

L
IFE, THEREFORE
, was organized without Boniface.

On the rue de Condé everything revolved around Jeanne’s teaching. She would get up at four in the morning, leaving Auguste lounging in bed. At that time, I don’t know why, she had given up daily mass, something she was to take up again only after Victoire died. She gave the final touches to her lessons and finished correcting the homework. Then she did an hour’s gymnastics in order to
lose weight. Abdominals especially. Or else, dressed in one of her husband’s old pair of shorts, she would run as far as the harbor. Showing off her legs at her age was a bold step and the churchgoers coming home from first mass looked at her reproachfully. Her reputation for being odd started to be without precedent. Everything she did caused a sensation. What was this idea of running to lose weight? A woman should be proud to show off her curves, a sign that she is being spoiled at home.

Back at the rue de Condé, she would shower—Auguste’s running water was his pride and joy—dress, and rig herself out with jewels. She would down a huge bowl of coffee, without sugar, prepared by Victoire, who had been up since dawn. We should say in passing that this coffee without sugar was another oddity on an island with such a sweet tooth. Then she left for school. It was seven o’clock, the sun had begun to open wide its eyes, and Auguste was scarcely out of bed. She was keen to arrive at school ahead of time so that she could write on the blackboard in her fine, well-rounded writing the math problems or questions of grammar.

Since there was no lacking in household staff, two servants and a
mabo
for Auguste’s two boys, Victoire found herself in the same situation as in Le Moule: she had nothing to do all day. This time, she took the bull by the horns and tried hard to invent things to do for herself. She supervised the housework, tracing the dust over the furniture with her finger. When the servants came back from market, she inspected their baskets, weighing again the pork for casserole on an old pair of Roberval scales and checking every cent of the expenses. In the afternoon, she would mend clothes, sew buttons on shirts, and darn socks, things that Jeanne, brought up by the Walbergs as a young lady, was incapable of doing. Then she made sure the washing was well starched and ironed, ruthless about creases in Auguste’s shirt cuffs and collars. Very soon the servants began to loathe Victoire, who was always on their backs. She was the cause of a stream of girls being taken on a trial basis, hired, then dismissed, all uttering the same complaints as they turned in their
aprons: the mistress thought she was God’s gift to mankind, but the mother was worse: a real shrew.

As for meals, Auguste was not much different from Jeanne. He was capable of lunching off a slice of yam soaked in a spoonful of olive oil and rubbed with a piece of cod or smoked herring, a souvenir of his childhood as a
maléré.
Victoire however gave him the taste for fine cooking. Henceforth, he sat down at the table for lunch with a napkin around his neck like a child and was served grilled lobster tails or smoked chicken in lemongrass under the disdainful eye of Jeanne, who pecked away at her purslane salad.

“My favorite dishes,” he recalled, on the rare occasions when he talked about his mother-in-law, something he was always reticent to do, I don’t know why, “were not the complicated ones of her invention where she mixed all sorts of spices, sweet and sour, meat and seafood. It was the way she made a simple fish broth with tench and grunt, rice, cow peas, and a sliver of salt pork. For me that was a feast.”

Auguste was the only one in the household to be spared criticism by the servants and the neighbors’ gossip. They pitied him, rather, having to live with such a mother-in-law and married to a shrew he was incapable of taming. In actual fact, contrary to what people thought, he was somewhat hard-hearted and indifferent to anything that didn’t concern Jeanne or himself. He never shared his wife’s idealism on the values of secular education nor the generous aspirations of the Grands Nègres who claimed to lead the entire Race onward. His only concern was to make money. He spent his time satisfying the obscure dreams of a child born in a hovel on the Morne à Cayes and finished up brandishing his cutlass, dressed in khakis, and playing the gentleman farmer and banana planter on his property in Sarcelles.

The round of visits to the Grands Nègres in La Pointe, however, was just as imperative as in Le Moule and also took place on Sunday afternoons, since high mass at the cathedral of Saint-Pierre and Saint-Paul took up the mornings, dress preparations and gos
siping in front of the church included. Edgar Littée, a bourgeois mulatto, had the idea of capturing on film daily scenes in the life of this society of mimicry in La Pointe: a riot of drapes and wide-brimmed hats, little boys dressed in sailor suits and the girls in frilly dresses. Here and there a black face, if we don’t include the
mabos,
the nursemaids. In La Pointe the club of Grands Nègres was more closely organized. Its members all lived in close proximity to one another, in a neighborhood situated symbolically far from the white Creoles, but also far from the stench of the outlying district where the
maléré
lodged.

When I returned to Pointe-à-Pitre after an absence of twenty years, I realized I had practically never crossed the Vatable Canal. All I knew of the town was the narrow quadrilateral where I had been brought up. I had to go back and discover its shacks, its yards, and its storm channels swarming with guppies.

In actual fact, the members of the club of Grands Nègres were never very many in number. As the years went by, it became increasingly difficult to join. It was no longer just a question of education or being one of the first physicians or first teachers. Apart from the basic rules of occupying a certain position in society, living in an upstairs-downstairs house, speaking only French, and having been at least once to France and stayed in Paris, more subtler edicts were proclaimed. Monsieur Cabriou, for instance, magistrate, who roared with laughter in the most vulgar way, displaying the pink velvet of his uvula, and whose wife sat on enormous buttocks, was excluded forever. More than in Le Moule, Victoire loathed these visits. Alas, she was forced to accompany Auguste and Jeanne on every one of them, walking three steps behind them. She sat without a smile or a word, never answering questions, turning her glass of grenadine round and round in her hands. Soon an even more terrible ordeal loomed.

Together with a group of Grands Nègres, Auguste planned to establish a bank, the Caisse Coopérative des Prêts, which was the exact name for this institution that in fact was quite modest. The members
of the future board of directors decided on a weekly dinner with their wives. Wasn’t sitting round a table for a meal the most convivial way of getting to know one another? Auguste and Jeanne, who had an outstanding cook at home, offered to be the hosts for such gatherings. I believe the idea was Auguste’s; he was afraid that his mother-in-law was finding life on the rue de Condé somewhat empty. Like at Anne-Marie’s, Victoire found herself in the position of a writer forced to honor a commission from her publisher. Very quickly, her work weighs heavy on her, becomes unbearable and a chore. For cooking, like writing, can only blossom in an atmosphere of total freedom and cannot stand constraints. The devil with rules, treatises, manifestos, and poetic arts. Paradoxically, Jeanne was constantly on her back, overwhelming her with suggestions.

“How about cooking your splendid stew of crayfish in lemon and green mangoes? Or your guinea fowl with currants and honey?”

“No! Whatever they pretend, those people have no palate. Just do a chicken fricassee served with a gratin of green golden apples.”

“No! Rather pork with saffron and coconut milk served with Creole rice.”

Victoire complied, without sulking and without betraying any grudge. It would have been all right if she could have stayed in the kitchen with the servants facing the dishes she had contrived to cook. But once again Jeanne forced her to get dressed, sit in the drawing room with the guests, sit down at the table with them, and listen to an incomprehensible conversation in which she was incapable of taking part. However much the guests heaped compliments on her, she got the feeling she was not in her place. The devotion that Jeanne showed her at those meals appeared to her ostentatious and theatrical. She was convinced it was nothing but a smokescreen designed to conceal to what degree she was ashamed of her. So she hunkered down at the end of the table, silent and sickened, offering the sight of her profound distress to one and all.

“Poor Madame Quidal! You do feel sorry for her!” commented the diners back home with a full stomach, having eaten their fill.

“What can you expect with a daughter like that. She’s a real pain!”

We would be wrong in thinking that Jeanne, like Anne-Marie at the time, got any pleasure out of these weekly gatherings. For her too, but for different reasons, they were torture. It was not just the smell from the mounds of food that turned her stomach together with the sight of the so-called distinguished guests stuffing themselves greedily, Auguste worst of all. What an appetite he had! It was because she was the youngest of the group. They treated her like a child who meddles with grown-up affairs instead of minding her own business. She suggested for instance that the future employees of the Caisse Coopérative des Prêts wear badges with their names on them. A ridiculous idea! Some of them had known the first Madame Boucolon, Antoinette Sambalas, and hinted that she was far better than the second. Less beautiful. Less elegant. Less educated, that’s for sure—she was merely a salesgirl in the haberdashery department of the store Au Dernier Chic—but that didn’t mean she wasn’t less adorable, less agreeable, and she knew where a woman’s place was.