Victoire (24 page)

I have roamed around the police station quite a bit, hoping in vain to obtain some explanation. Unfortunately, too many years have passed. The gendarmes themselves have changed and darkened in skin. Many young Guadeloupeans now choose to become gendarmes the way they join the state security police force—in order to escape unemployment.

These rendezvous on the Place de la Victoire and visits to the gendarmerie had been going on for some weeks when the SS
Isaura
moored alongside the quay. Jeanne was back, exalted by the
marvels of Paris, whose memory still haunted her. Never had La Pointe seemed to her so small and mean. She and Auguste had attempted to decipher the
Mona Lisa
’s smile in the Louvre. They had even traveled to Chartres by train to admire the cathedral’s famous angel. After having heard the habanera from
Carmen
so many times, Jeanne had dragged Auguste to the opera. But they had both been bored to death. The love of José for his cigar worker had left them cold. Jeanne had brought back four trunks full of clothes, toys for the children, and records for Victoire:
The Barber of Seville, The Sicilian Vespers,
and
Rigoletto
as well as rugs, paintings, and ornaments for her house, which had acquired the reputation of being one of the best decorated in La Pointe, years before the one on the rue Alexandre-Isaac. Her mother seemed to be in better shape than when she left. Relaxed. Less pale. Almost smiling. The perfect grandmother. She tenderly helped Auguste take his first steps along the balcony and lulled Jean to sleep.

Alas, some good souls, who did not dare approach Jeanne, took it upon themselves to inform Auguste of the reasons for this metamorphosis and made no secret of their comments.

“It hasn’t been six months since she buried Boniface Walberg! And already she’s seeing someone else! If she hasn’t a heart, at least she should behave herself!”

Deeply upset, Auguste waited three days before he picked up courage to tell Jeanne, who couldn’t believe her ears. A gendarme! In order to understand their reaction, we must bear in mind what the gendarmes represented in the social hierarchy of the time. The gendarme was the very opposite of the white Creole and the most vile and despised category, the last rung on the ladder: a martinet who does the colonizers’ dirty job. The fact that Victoire, after Boniface, had teamed up with a gendarme betrayed an uncommon wish to hurt both her daughter and son-in-law. It was also a sign of perversion. The enormity of the accusation stunned Auguste. He had started to assume his role of extinguishing the home fires and refused to fully believe in such an accusation.

“Ask her,” he advised. “Let her speak. See what she has to say.”

Jeanne went straight for it, head down.

Personally, I remain convinced that there was nothing between Victoire and Deligny but the séances, the invocations to the deceased, and words of comfort on his part. In my opinion, they shared solitude and grief, not sensuality. Victoire, then, was almost forty years old. An ancestor, an old woman for her time. The time had not yet come when people got married with one foot in the grave. Jeanne was so easily duped and so quick to swallow the slander because, deep down, she had always considered her mother a sort of Jezebel. I think that, beside herself with anger, she lost all sense of proportion and Victoire, as usual, did not defend herself. It was the final split between the two women. And it was never to mend either.

Antoine Deligny exited the picture in January 1913, after a last mass for his dearly departed at the church of Saint-Pierre and Saint-Paul, when he sailed back to France on the SS
Canada
. He retired to Trouville-sur-Mer, where he was born. I know that he wrote the text for a collection of watercolors entitled
Gendarmes in Guadeloupe: The Colony at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century.
I have been unable to find a copy of the book, but during one of my visits to my friend Letizia Galli, who lives in the apartments of Les Roches Noires, I discovered while nosing around the museum with her that a certain Antoine Deligny had worked as a guide during an exhibition of the painter Eugène Boudin, one of whose works was
On the Beach at Trouville
. The museum employees were both intrigued and helpful and gave me the address of the house where he had lived around 1920. I rushed over to find that it was now a pharmacy and nobody could recall anything about him.

After Antoine Deligny left for Trouville, life in La Pointe resumed its former color.

The only difference being that Victoire no longer cooked.

Not only did she no longer set foot in the little outhouse at the back, but she lost interest in everything, she who used to sniff the
meat and fowl for hours, inspect the gills of the fish, and scrape the yams to judge the whiteness of their flesh.

I don’t think it was a deliberate refusal on her part. It would be difficult to imagine a writer mutilating herself and renouncing her gift on purpose. The gift of writing deserts her, leaves her devastated like the shore after a tsunami. Suddenly, sounds, images, and smells no longer secretly speak to her in a language that only she can decipher. What I mean is that if Victoire no longer cooked, it didn’t mean she was rebelling against Jeanne or against society in general. It was the consequence of the loss of her creativity, the result of an immense weariness and a pernicious feeling of what’s the use.

J
EANNE WAS SO
absorbed by correcting her pupils’ homework, preparing her lessons, paying visits to the Grands Nègres, worrying about decorum, and caring for her children that first of all she didn’t notice. It was Auguste who had to tell her. Hadn’t she noticed? Her mother no longer did absolutely anything. The week before, she had been unwell for the weekly reception and they had had to make do with Gastonia’s cooking. Wouldn’t the same thing happen for the next board of directors’ dinner? Shouldn’t they ask her what was worrying her?

Jeanne began by answering in no uncertain terms that her mother was not a cook at his beck and call and consequently, she was free to do as she pleased. Then she suspected that this change of behavior could have some worrisome significance. She therefore dashed into the room where Victoire, who stayed in bed later and later, was still lounging between the sheets.

How thin she had gotten these last few months! My God, what had she been thinking? The person she loved most in the world, even though she expressed it so badly, was wasting away and she had not even noticed it! Her skin was diaphanous and her sticky,
patchy hair floated like dead seaweed over her shoulders. All the love she felt toward her surged back to her heart, flooding her with its burning wave. She sat down on the bed beside her and took her hand.

“Ka ki ni?”
she asked softly.

What was wrong? Victoire shrugged her shoulders and played down her condition.

She was tired, that’s all. A weariness that tied her down from morning till night. She had lost all willpower. If she were to take her own advice, she wouldn’t get out of bed the entire day. Yet she categorically refused to send for the doctor. What she needed was rest. Nothing but rest. And more rest.

Jeanne was perspicacious enough to clearly see the first signs of depression, even though she refused to acknowledge the cause. Constantly accused, victimized, bullied, and prevented from enjoying what in Victoire’s own eyes could have lit up her life—love, friendship, and remembrance of lost ones—Victoire was losing her footing. With the energy she was known for, Jeanne undertook to care for her mother. In order to do so, she established a drastic set of rules. She gave orders to the servants that the children were not to disturb Victoire. Especially Auguste, to whom Victoire gave everything he wanted. The result was that she made two people unhappy instead of one. Deprived of his grandmother, poor pasty-faced Auguste whimpered from morning to night and began to regress. He antagonized the servants, who called him all sorts of names:

“Tèbè! Kouyon! Sòti là!”

They reserved their adoration for Jean, the little rascal, who walked, stumbled, fell, and bruised himself all over, treating his brother with the contempt that God reserves for inferior creatures.

Before leaving for the Dubouchage school, Jeanne made sure that Victoire’s breakfast tray was well stocked with coffee, coconut cassava cakes bought straight from a shop in the outlying district, soft-boiled eggs, and fresh fruit. Several times during the course of
the morning she was tempted to leave the class and run back to the rue de Condé. Her sense of duty forbade it and she dispatched two trusted pupils who came back with a detailed report.

“Blood pressure 110 over 80, miss.”

“She hasn’t got a temperature, miss. It’s 98.6 Fahrenheit.”

When she came home for lunch she expected to find Victoire in her rocking chair, her back resting on a pile of cushions. Forbidding her to confront the perils of the stairs, she had Victoire’s meals sent up to her. Then she enclosed her under her mosquito net for a long siesta. So as to occupy her, she brought her piles of illustrated albums, which Victoire looked at with Auguste, who managed to slip in and join her. Pictures illustrating the tales of Grimm, Andersen, and Perrault. She took pity on the little match girl and admired Karen’s red shoes, which reminded her of Thérèse Jovial’s present. But the picture she preferred above all was the wolf disguised as the grandmother in “Little Red Riding Hood.” Auguste and she reveled in its big gleaming eyes behind spectacles, its large pointy ears under its nightcap, and its sharp teeth sticking out of its mouth. There was only one point on which Jeanne never managed to impose her will. Around four in the afternoon, Victoire flouted all restraints, got dressed, and, as best she could, dragged herself to Anne-Marie on the Place de la Victoire as if it were a salutary recreation.

Times had changed. As a result of deep budgetary cuts, there were no more municipal concerts. Only the bands from the ocean liners moored at quay performed from time to time. The one from an Italian ship, the SS
Stromboli
, gave a performance of
The Barber of Seville
in magnificent costumes.

Yet in the eyes of Victoire, Anne-Marie, who could no longer fit into her dresses, was still just as entertaining as ever. She never stopped talking about her children. A certain Maximilien du Veuzit, a lad of seventeen, the only son of a white Creole from the region of Saint-Claude, who had had the rich idea of exchanging his coffee plantations for banana groves, had noticed Valérie-Anne at an after
noon birthday party and ever since had been languishing for her. In order to leave her mother and the rue de Nassau, Valérie-Anne would have given herself to the devil in person if he had wanted her. Consequently, she too claimed to be lovesick.

Should she let them get married?

Without stopping, Anne-Marie became venomous.

“Give me some news about Jeanne.”

She had added some new grievances. Apparently she too had frequented Antoine Deligny’s spiritualism séances. Not to get in touch with Boniface, whom she had seen enough of while he was alive, but to communicate with her mother and above all her beloved Etienne, who had passed away accidentally the year before. She had been outraged by Jeanne’s accusations. Especially the way she had treated the gendarme. According to her, Jeanne had sent a series of letters denouncing him to the assistant governor general, which accounted for his expulsion from the colony. This seems to me most unlikely. At the time, Jeanne had no access to colonial administration circles. I would even say that as an educated black woman she was automatically suspect. The French authorities had not yet cataloged her among the totally inoffensive, right-thinking personalities whom they showered with republican decorations such as the Palmes Académiques, the Ordre du Mérite Social, and, what was the crowning achievement for my father, the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. Yet as I have said, I have not managed to shed any light on this mysterious affair. Anything, therefore, is possible.

Given her state of health, Anne-Marie would accompany Victoire back to the corner of the rue de Condé and the rue de la Liberté, but not a step farther. She would only set foot in Jeanne’s house once Victoire was really sick and bedridden.

Because of this drastic agenda, life on the rue de Condé became even less enjoyable. In the evening, the children, educated as Europeans, were sent to bed very early. The
mabos
left as early as six in the evening and the servants a little later, after they had served supper. Auguste would then read his newspapers, with a preference
for
Le Nouvelliste
and its editorials. Sitting opposite him, Jeanne would prepare her lessons and begin carefully correcting the pile of homework. Around nine o’clock she would go up to tuck in her mother, who was listening to records on her gramophone, a present from Boniface. It took all her self-control not to burst into tears and shower her with kisses on seeing how frail her mother had become. Instead, she turned down the lamp on the bedside table, for economy’s sake. Shadows stretched over the walls and the tropical night, the color of Indian ink, took possession of the room. Victoire often listened to her records far into the night. She was oblivious to the fact that the sounds carried on the night air and seeped through the persiennes shutters amidst the silence of the street.

“Ka sa yé sa?”
the neighbors asked, perplexed.

Music is meant to stir the blood and deliver electric shocks to the heart, the belly, and the sex. It’s meant to stiffen your calves with pleasure and set you dancing.

Ah! The Boucolons were a funny lot!

N
INETEEN