Victoire (21 page)

As you can see, life on the rue de Condé was not exactly pleasant. Auguste, who in his time had been quite a lad, had turned over a new leaf. After school was over, he was always home reading his newspaper or watching the crowd in the street from the balcony. In private he did not bother Jeanne with his stories, since she took no interest in them. The one exception to his staid ways was his Montecristo cigars he ordered from Cuba, on which he had his initials, AB, printed on the ring. As for Jeanne, she never stopped working. She would buy the teacher’s answer books and immerse herself into the key to exercises. As for Victoire, she dreamed. About what?

As you can see, there was no music or reading. My father ordered books, a little like he ordered champagne, from the House of Nelson, who shipped the entire works of an author. All of La Fontaine. All of Molière. All of Lamartine. These were hardbacks with a white cover. Once he had arranged them on the library
shelves he never touched them again. I can recall having read at the age of ten all the plays of Victor Hugo.
Le roi s’amuse
made a deep impression on me.

A
T THIS TIME
, apart from Anne-Marie, Victoire began to keep company with a person who could have been of great comfort to her. Alas, the relationship was short-lived.

Her name was Jeanne Repentir, and she was somewhat of an eccentric. She had arrived from New Orleans five years earlier and had opened a dressmaker’s shop under the name of the Golden Thimble, a modest sign hung on the door of a modest lodging. Jeanne Repentir quickly became the darling of the black and mulatto coquettes of La Pointe, since with the help of a little dark girl from the outlying districts, two mannequins, and a few patterns from the
Modes et Travaux
collection, she managed to give an inimitable touch to her creations.

Victoire had accompanied her daughter one day for a fitting and the two women had got along well with each other.

They had a good many things in common.

Both from Marie-Galante, they had left their native island very young and had never returned. They had no idea what white man had fathered them, though Jeanne Repentir liked to claim, with no grounds whatsoever, that he was a Basque country gentleman with a double-barreled name as long as your arm. But what would a Basque country gentleman with a double-barreled name as long as your arm be doing in Marie-Galante at the end of the nineteenth century? In any case, I could find no trace of him in the archives. They were so light-skinned that even the eye of a Guadeloupean, expert in detecting the slightest degree of color, could be mistaken. Jeanne Repentir had bluish purple eyes; Victoire’s, as we know, were pale gray.

In an almost identical manner, they had both got pregnant by a
black male. As for Gratien Philogène, Jeanne Repentir’s short-lived partner, he had recognized his daughter. However, he had taken so little care of her that he had let her die of tuberculosis at the age of thirteen, whereas he could have had her treated in a sanatorium in France. After that Jeanne Repentir had fallen madly in love with Gervais de Puyrode, a white Creole from Martinique, owner at the time of the Courcelles sugar factory in Sainte-Anne. Barely escaping the fire that burned down his property, Gervais, together with Jeanne and Vitalis, his newborn son, took refuge on the White Mango estate not far from New Orleans. Passion doesn’t last, it’s a well-known fact. Cradling Vitalis in her arms, Jeanne Repentir was soon back in Guadeloupe, where, taking advantage of her travel experiences, she set up her own business. As for Vitalis, he was so handsome, blond and curly-haired, that the priests would choose him every year to crown the Virgin Mary during the August 15 celebrations at the cathedral of Saint-Pierre and Saint-Paul. Apart from that, he was a little brat who broke his mother’s heart by playing hooky and spending his time fighting the little ragamuffins in the Vatable Canal district. Jeanne Repentir lived in expectation of a letter from Gervais, who would bring her back to White Mango, where she and her son would take up their rightful place. She had seen this moment in her dreams and her dreams never lied.

Other things separated them. One of them was fundamental.

Since her mother’s family had not lacked presence of mind, Jeanne Repentir had been educated and knew how to read and write. Her invoices, written in blue ink on squared mauve stationery (my mother kept several of them), were proof of it. She spoke the most refined French, at times a little affected. The two women so alike yet so different would often meet in the afternoons in Jeanne Repentir’s home, composed of four rooms, since the living room was divided in two by a cretonne drape behind which the fittings took place. Victoire sat head lowered over the hems that Jeanne Repentir gave her to overcast, listening intently to her friend’s phantasmagorical tales.

“New Orleans,” she recounted, turning nonchalantly the handle of her Singer sewing machine, “believe me, I never liked that city. It’s built on the stench of the swamps. As soon as dusk falls, there’s a terrible smell and humidity oozes out of everywhere. You can’t even bury the dead for fear the bodies will emerge from the mud and come back to haunt the living.

“I left because of the yellow fever epidemic that broke out that year. I had never seen anything like it. They would cover the heaps of corpses with quicklime and burn them on the sidewalks, in the storm channels and in the yards. What with the stench of the swamps, you can imagine what it was like. Of course there are some things I miss. In the French market, they used to sell bananas as red as pomegranates, grapes as sticky as dates, china, porcelain, and picanninies tattooed like monkeys.”

Having nothing as juicy to recount, Victoire brought desserts that she knew Jeanne Repentir was particularly fond of.

“I’ve got a sweet tooth!” she laughed, showing off her English.

A mamee apple pound cake. A soufflé of ripe papaya. A custard flan with cashew fruit from La Désirade.

“You’re a poet, a poet,” Jeanne Repentir would say, biting greedily into these small wonders. “You don’t know it, but you’re so much better than your daughter.”

She too didn’t like Jeanne very much, although she was one of her best customers. Not that she took offense because Jeanne was jealous of her friendship with Victoire. That’s how children are. But she knew that despite her white skin and her sojourn in the United States, Jeanne looked down upon her. A dressmaker! A subaltern!

When she didn’t have any urgent orders, she would accompany Victoire to the Place de la Victoire, where they met up with Anne-Marie. In the shade of the music kiosk, there was a court-bouillon of gossip, as the saying goes, that Victoire had no other choice but to swallow.

“If she keeps puffing herself up like a peacock, Jeanne will burst!” Jeanne Repentir guffawed.

“She’s like the frog who aspires to become bigger than the ox!” chimed in Anne-Marie, remembering her La Fontaine fables.

Anne-Marie never suggested Victoire return to live on the rue de Nassau, for she knew Victoire would never accept it, but she made no mystery of what she thought of the life Victoire was leading at her daughter’s.

“They’ll kill you. All that counts for them,” she declared in contempt, “is appearances. They’ve got no real feelings.”

Suddenly the unexpected occurred and the incredible dream came true. At death’s door following a fall from his horse, Gervais de Puyrode sent for Jeanne Repentir and Vitalis with the intention of putting himself in God’s good graces before the final reckoning by marrying the mother and legitimizing the son. Within a week the deliveries were completed, and the Golden Thimble emptied of all its contents. Even the sewing machine found a buyer. Late one afternoon Anne-Marie and Victoire sadly accompanied Jeanne and Vitalis, who embarked for New York on board the SS
Valparaiso.
From there they would take the train south to New Orleans. Under the almond trees on the Foulon wharf, Anne-Marie and Jeanne Repentir cried their hearts out while Victoire stood to one side, dry-eyed, yet just as deeply distressed. Was it the end of their friendship? Would they ever see each other again? On this point Jeanne Repentir was categorical. She could not imagine her life without visiting Guadeloupe.
Pawol sé van,
goes the proverb! Yes, words are a lot of wind and hot air. Weeks, months went by. Mother and son were never heard of again. Not even a hurriedly scribbled letter or cheap card. Jeanne Repentir and Vitalis seemed to have disappeared into a ghostly limbo.

A few years ago I was invited by Tulane University and made the mandatory rounds of the plantation houses in Louisiana. However hard I pressed my guides with questions, nobody had ever heard of White Mango or of a family from Guadeloupe who was said to have settled there at the beginning of the twentieth century. Wasn’t it rather a family of Haitians? There were plenty of those, especially in the region of Lafayette. I ended my stay no wiser.

Was the information I got from my mother pure fantasy?

Nobody knows what Victoire felt when the person who helped color the gray of her days left. She became neither more morose nor more withdrawn. Her daily routine set in once again.

Fortunately, at the end of December, her daughter gave her the most wonderful of gifts. She announced that she would not be able to travel to France during the long vacation. God had decided otherwise. He had blessed their union.

She was expecting a baby in July.

S
IXTEEN
 

1911 began therefore as a year of grace.

The neighbors, watching Victoire come and go, noticed that she seemed less stressed, to use a current expression. With less reprimands, the servants played along. Tensions and resentment seemed forgotten.

In fact, under her impassive air, Victoire was overjoyed.

“Marvel of marvels! My daughter is pregnant! The woman I carried inside me is now carrying her own child. A little stranger has taken refuge inside her. It’s breathing and feeding thanks to her. In nine months we shall know its face. Marvel of marvels!”

This belly that was miraculously swelling was a bond of sweetness that tied her to her daughter.

Only spoiled women experience painful pregnancies. The others don’t have the time. From the very first months, Jeanne was tortured by nausea, vomiting, and dizzy spells. Once she even fainted in a store where she was ordering the lawn and lace of her layette. Victoire did not spare her efforts. Twenty times a day she ran to the Dubouchage school to take her all kinds of herb teas: greasy bush, couch grass, semicontract, worm grass, old maid, and rock balsam that ensure the equilibrium of the body. The most extraordinary
thing was that Jeanne got her appetite back, possessed once again of those cravings she hadn’t had since the age of reason. Victoire responded with devotion, feeling at last avenged for so many years of indifference. She would lovingly prepare chicken breasts, veal cutlets, and fish fillets. She cooked up purees and breadfruit stews. She especially strived hard to make desserts, puddings, creams, and flans, since pregnant women need excess sugar to nourish the brain.

Despite her health, Jeanne refused any kind of sick leave and, pushing her belly in front of her, walked with difficulty to the Dubouchage school. She had too high an opinion of the importance of her job to pamper herself. For her it was more than a mission. It was a calling. She had suffered so much humiliation in the religious establishments where she had been educated that she was convinced of the need for a secular, republican education.

Seeing her walk past, elderly gossips who claimed to be clairvoyant announced she would have a daughter: her belly had the shape of a full moon. That would have pleased Auguste. But she would angrily hear nothing of the sort. Her child would be a boy. His name would be Auguste, like his father, and would lay the first stone of the “Boucolon dynasty.” One might argue that the Boucolon dynasty was already well established: Auguste’s first two sons already bore the name. But she attached no importance to them whatsoever—they complained bitterly about it later on—and considered them at best as two bastards. Despite the bush teas and baths, Jeanne was no better. Her legs were heavy and stiff with cramps at night. Nightmares would wake her up. One of them in particular: she was making her way through the roots and trees of a mangrove swamp. She did not know who was steering the boat and she was scared. The boatman’s face was hidden under a hood like a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Suddenly the boat overturned and she was floundering in the mud.

So as not to disturb Auguste, she transferred her night things to a little room in the attic that Victoire came to share with her.

These were moments of intimacy that perhaps mother and daughter had previously never known and were never to know again. Jeanne had seldom seen her mother undressed, without her ungainly headtie, with her long, straight schoolgirl’s hair reaching down to her shoulders. Like a little kid, she got great fun passing a comb back and forth through Victoire’s hair. She became permeated with her subtle sensuality, vaguely envying her, for she had always been convinced she herself had no sex appeal. She all too often had been a wallflower at the afternoon dances in Basse-Terre, where they sometimes went, unbeknown to the nuns. No bashful lover, frantic with desire, had waited for her behind the boarding school wall. I am convinced that the only man she had made love to was my father. If she felt any passion, she controlled it very closely and let nothing show.