Victoire (5 page)

“Ninnainne, lévé.
”

Thérèse would stretch catlike in her light brown colonial medallion bed made of locust wood, sit up amid the tangle of fine linen sheets, smile, and dismiss Victoire with the wave of her hand. And that’s as far as it went.

Unlike La Pointe or Saint-Pierre in Martinique, Grand Bourg could boast of neither a theater nor a concert hall. Every Tuesday, Fulgence, Gaëtane, and their friends, who made up the embryo of a local bourgeoisie, gathered in the living room to listen to Thérèse. For them she would play just a few simple pieces: a little Chopin, sometimes some Liszt, not too virtuoso, or else
The Carnival of Venice
and
The Siege of Saragossa
. Victoire, instead of serving the guests the bowls of coconut sorbet and homemade cookies, braved the furious looks of Danila and had the nerve to go and sit behind a potted palm and listen in ecstasy to the flow of music.

The high point of these private concerts was when Thérèse played the
Cantos Flamencos,
anonymous gypsy ballads she had adapted for the piano.

F
OUR
 

On January 1, 1889, when thirty-four loyal Légitimus followers sat down to lunch, Fulgence introduced his protégé, the new elementary school teacher at Les Basses. Dernier Argilius, the youngest and last son of a poor farm laborer’s family from Saint-Louis, bore his name, since his parents wanted the Good Lord to know that finally they had had enough. After fourteen children, and four who had died, they no longer wanted His heavenly gifts. Dernier was one of the first holders of the colonial diploma and a member of the Republican Youth Committee. It was rumored he was a former Légitimus party militant, a
zambo.
After the elections he had apparently been seen patrolling the streets and brandishing a stick, threatening people with light skins. There is a photo of him in a book by Jean-Pierre Sainton, a Guadeloupean historian. The requisite very black skin, a head of thick, frizzy hair curling over a domed forehead, a determined look, a broad nose, clearly drawn lips, and dressed in a tight-fitting frock coat. His expression is arrogant and mocking.
On bel nèg!
as the saying goes. Women devoured him with their eyes, lingering surreptitiously over the treasure that fitted tightly in his impeccable woolen trousers.

He wrote editorials in Légitimus’s broadsheets. I discovered one: “We are hungry, we are thirsty, we are barefoot, we have no work;
we have no home, we survive thanks to the grace of God. Our families are impoverished. Our women have lost their beauty, bruised under the heel of destitution.”

My reason for reproducing this piece of grandiloquent prose at the risk of boring my reader is because I would like to ask a question that I deem important. Dernier Argilius has gone down in history like Jean-Hégésippe Légitimus as an ardent defender of the illiterate oppressed Negroes emerging from the belly of slavery. When he died tragically in 1899, the entire island went into mourning. Ever since then, theses, monographs, and biographies have been written on the subject of this role model and martyr. My question, then, is what is an exemplary man? Is it only his writings, his public speeches, and his gesticulations that count? What weight does his personal life and private behavior carry? Dernier Argilius took advantage of I don’t know how many women, wrecked the life of at least one of them, and engendered I don’t know how many bastards who grew up without a father. Doesn’t that count?

From the very minute Thérèse’s and Dernier’s eyes met, sparks flew that set their bodies on fire. During lunch he drew up a chair to her left and whispered pell-mell all the clichés of a miserable childhood, a humiliated adolescence, and a passion for the Race from a very early age. During dessert, she sat at the piano and accompanied him as he thundered out with his bass voice the old political favorites; all the guests joined in with a frenzy exacerbated by the alcohol ingurgitated:

Nou voyé on blanc alé
I pa fè annyen ban nou
Voyé on pwèmyé milat
I pa fè annyen ban nou
Voyé on dézyèm milat
An nou voyé Léjé alé pou I défann no z’entéré
An nou voyé Léjé alé pou I monté o Pawlèman!

In the meantime, their blood was boiling with excitement. They were soaked with the burning sweat of desire. If they had been free
to do so, they would have rushed into Thérèse’s bedroom and, flouting bourgeois preliminaries, gone into action. Instead, they had to wait one long week, the time it took to elude Danila’s vigilance and especially that of Gaëtane, who would be constantly warning her daughter:

“Pa ti ni konsomasyon san bénédisyon.”
(No consummation without a benediction).

Dernier, however, was not entirely blinded by passion, if passion there was. He devised a project that was approved by the party cadres and comrades in La Pointe with whom he corresponded regularly. Together with Thérèse, he would be in charge of an association that aimed at teaching political awareness to the laboring masses on Marie-Galante by way of the arts. He proposed calling it “A Call to the Arts, Citizens.” Thérèse preferred “A Call to the Arts, New Citizens.” But Dernier thought the adjective useless, even redundant, and his decision prevailed. Literary nights, poetry evenings, and music recitals were held one after another in the newly painted town hall, but apart from the usual handful of Fulgence’s and Gaëtane’s friends, it remained hopelessly empty.

For the festival of Sainte-Cécile, Thérèse managed to have the philharmonic orchestra shipped over from La Pointe. The forty-three musicians in their blue and white uniforms and white helmets lined up in front of the town hall and played to perfection excerpts from Meyerbeer’s work. Apart from a few ragged urchins chewing on
grabyo koko
candies, not a peasant, farm laborer, fisherman, or worker took the trouble to turn up. Thérèse was so mortified she agreed to go along with Dernier, who suggested they concentrate their efforts on the school. At least there the audience is captive. The school principal, M. Isaac, an uptight mulatto, had hardened prejudices, but he feared Légitimus’s people and complied with every request.

Thérèse and Dernier then decided to form a choral society. Unfortunately, they were unable to come to an agreement. As a feminist, lest we forget, Thérèse insisted on including women’s voices
and singing the famous “Hallelujah” chorus from Handel’s
Messiah.
Dernier, who was against mixing the sexes, was all for teaching the same songs that the socialists sang in the Workers Chorale in La Pointe.

Marie-Galante, however, was impatient to hear about their engagement.

Some indiscretions had revealed their affair. It’s true the lovers hid nothing. They galloped on horseback across the island to their trysts, Thérèse’s butt strapped tight into an old pair of her father’s trousers and her hair straightened with a hot iron and held in place by a net. They would meet in a cabin belonging to one of Dernier’s brothers. In order to make up for its modest surroundings, Dernier had brought in a bed made of locust wood and an oval mirror in which it was whispered the couple gazed at their reflection before the act of penetration. Despite all that, people were understanding. Firstly, because the sin of love is not a sin. And then putting Easter before Lent is no crime! Who hasn’t committed it? In fact, what marriage can claim to have escaped concubinage or
béni-rété
? The young girls who hoped to be bridesmaids had selected their gowns from the Printemps catalog. Others got help from dress patterns. Thérèse, an artist to her fingertips, drew her wedding dress on sheets of ecru paper and showed the sketches to her mother’s dressmaker, who shook her head, helpless.

“An pé’é jen pé!
” (I could never manage that.)

Against all expectations, on December 23, 1889, Dernier Argilius slipped onto the steamer for La Pointe. A little surprised, Thérèse, however, did not worry inordinately about this trip. She knew he loathed celebrating Christmas in the Catholic manner. Like his political mentor, he dreamed of combining December 24 with the anniversary of the death of Victor Schoelcher, combining the savior of the black race with the liberator of the Jews. She only began to suspect the truth when some good souls came to inform her that Dernier had emptied his house in Les Basses of all his papers, clothes, and, above all, the books in his library. Utterly distraught,
she ran over to Monsieur Isaac, who confirmed that Dernier Argilius had left Marie-Galante for good, and good riddance! At the request of Jean-Hégésippe Légitimus, he had turned his back on teaching to devote himself entirely to journalism. Later on he was to become director of the newspaper
Le Peuple
.

Thérèse went down on both knees to beg Fulgence—the outraged father who threatened to write straightway to Légitimus to tell him of his protégé’s unspeakable behavior—to remain silent. She reminded him that there had never been a promise of marriage in the true sense of the term. When she finally managed to get him to promise to stay put, she swallowed a whole bottle of what she thought to be arnica. In actual fact it was a purgative that Gaëtane had concocted with cassia and castor oil. Her entire body became inflamed. She defecated for a whole week and almost died: dehydration, sudden drop in blood pressure, and everything else. She regained consciousness only to be blinded by a photo on the front page of
L’Emancipation:
Dernier Argilius piously leading a pilgrimage to the Schoelcher museum, inaugurated with great pomp two years earlier, in front of a crowd of ecstatic workers. She fainted once again. After a month, she came through, but was so weak that Léonora Bilé, a Congolese, skillful in the art of herbs, came every day from Trianon to massage her wasted body with coconut oil macerated in balata bark.

It’s a common fact that misfortune never comes singly. Thérèse was gradually recovering from this abominable desertion when they discovered that Victoire, who as usual never said a word, never divulged a thing, was hiding a belly under her shapeless
golle
dresses. Danila, who had been spying on her for weeks, had noticed that she no longer washed her bloodstained rags once a month. To be honest, she had been nurturing deep down an unspeakable intuition. When she confided her suspicions to Gaëtane, the latter expressed her doubts. Didn’t Victoire take communion every Sunday at eight o’clock mass? Would she dare commit such a mortal sin? In order to back up her accusation, Danila had to force the unfortunate Vic
toire to bare the still modest yet incomparable calabash of a belly with a darker stripe down the middle and topped by an enormous tumbler of a belly button.

Pregnant!

For whom? By whom?

Like Oraison with Eliette seventeen years earlier, Fulgence was called to the rescue from his office at the town hall and unbuckled his belt. Victoire was less resilient than her mother. After five bloody lashes on her shoulders, she let it out, the name that Danila had not dared pronounce.

Thérèse fell into a swoon.

N
OBODY WILL EVER
know anything about the relations my grandmother Victoire had with Dernier Argilius.

That story has been erased. Deleted from memory. But I want to know.

I want to know how they communicated their desire, where they met and how many times. How did they manage to hide on an island where nothing is secret? Was Victoire pregnant straightaway? What drove her to him? Did her chaste adolescent heart become inflamed at first sight during that famous New Year’s lunch? Didn’t she have any consideration for her godmother, Thérèse, whose passion for Dernier was common knowledge? Or did she want to take revenge on her arrogance? Years later Thérèse told some close friends:

“Despite everything I did for her, she was always jealous of me. I could see that in her eyes, but I never took her seriously.”

She claimed that Victoire never felt anything for Dernier. All she was looking for was a man of standing, “a valid father.” She called her an ungrateful wretch, calculating and manipulating. I don’t believe a word.

As for Dernier, nobody will ever know why the man who possessed the most desirable young girl on Marie-Galante bedded also
one of the most destitute. Nor why he turned his back on both of them at the same time.

I can therefore only use my imagination.

It wasn’t rape; that I’m certain of.

For her future son-in-law, whose heart she wanted to win through his stomach, Gaëtane used to send over a series of small dishes. At noon Danila would pile the plates on a tray that she covered with an embroidered napkin. With the tray on her head Victoire would trot off to Les Basses, which was then a densely populated suburb on the outskirts of Grand Bourg. She never found Dernier at home. He could be found either at the schoolhouse helping out the dunces, or downing neat rums at the Rayon d’Argent rum store with the party’s farm laborers. She would push open the door, which was never locked (in those days a burglary was unheard of), and arrange the plates on the table. That too was a moment of liberty that she made the most of. In order to comply with his political opinions, Dernier lived in a modest two-room cabin. The place, however, was unique. Books! Piles of books! Everywhere you looked. Piled up on the floor. Stacked haphazardly on shelves along the walls. Some were dog-eared. Others were annotated. Yet others were in shreds. You sensed that their owner loved them and read them. Not like Fulgence, who kept his leather-bound volumes in a mahogany glass cabinet and never touched them.