The Queen of England, Elizabeth II, is sitting with her crown of diamonds planted squarely on her head at the end of a long, rectangular table decorated with flowers from Guadeloupe. There are nursery flowers, of course, arum lilies, orchids, mainly spathoglottis plicata from Malaysia, as well as striped scorpion flowers on long, curved spikes, lilies of the Virgin with heavy, bluish petals, torch lilies that seem to have been set artificially at the end of their straight, leafless stems, Barbados lilies and roses; but also hardy, wild flowers, surprising the eye with their unexpected bloom: the seaside potato, the leaf of life that flowers in the undergrowth behind the beach, the goosefoot creeper, the yellow heliconia, the red heliconia and many, many others.
The Queen of England smiles at me, she has a tooth filled with gold from Guyana in her lower jaw, and says to me:
“Are you the one growing all these flowers?”
I nod my head and she asks:
“What is the name of your nurseries?”
“Since 1905 they have carried the family name,” I answer. “The Lameaulnes Nurseries.”
So the Queen of England says:
“Bravo! Henceforth, you shall be our purveyor. By appointment to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II …”
For over thirty years, as soon as he closed his eyes, Loulou had been having the same dream. That’s how he realized he had fallen asleep amid the murmurs of the rain and the night, amid the chattering interspersed with laughter from the men and the hum of prayers from the women.
He had no idea where this interest in the Royal Family came from nor why this dream was set on haunting him. The first time it had happened, he had woken up all bewildered beside Melissa, his mistress at the time, who was sleeping like a log, a trickle of shiny saliva dribbling from the corner of her mouth. His mother was still alive, locked in her unfair preference for his younger brother Paolo. When the dream came back a second time, he had told himself that perhaps it was a sign of things to come that would bring a smile to those lips forever pinched as far as he was concerned. His mother would understand his love for her. She would appreciate his efforts. But the years had gone by and the dream had never materialized.
Loulou felt like going home to a warm bed. How could he ever pretend he missed Francis Sancher and not wish him to burn in the sea of hell after a terrible crossing? He the atheist, who no longer believed in all this religious nonsense, saw himself again as the credulous child whose mother’s maledictions made him tremble.
“You’ll end up in jail! If the Good Lord doesn’t punish you in this world, it’ll be in the next! He’ll get you in the end!”
Why hadn’t she loved him? Once again, Loulou asked himself the question. Once again, he couldn’t find an answer. Taking advantage of a lull in the running fire of jokes, he got up with his glass full, before the volley started again. Jerbaud, the stonemason, had already cleared his throat and was starting a “Méssié kouté, kouté …” (Listen, Gentlemen, listen …)
Oh, no, it wasn’t jokes that were buzzing through his head. It was bitter, vengeful thoughts, murderous thoughts regarding this malevolent corpse who, when alive, had poisoned his life.
“No, no, no! That’s not the way he should have died. His death had been too clean, too gentle. They should have found him with his brains shot out, splattered among the trumpet vines, soaking the lichen and moss with his blood. Since Aristide didn’t have the guts, I’m the one who should have done it. But I didn’t do anything either.”
He took a gulp of rum and the liquid seared his palate and burned all the way down his esophagus. Nevertheless, he was shaking. From the cold and damp, since the rain had not let up. Not only was it dripping onto this Panama hat which he was perhaps one of the last to wear in Guadeloupe, but a genuine pool was lapping at his feet, ensconced in the patent leather boots he had been ordering from a shop in New Orleans for over thirty years. He had gone to New Orleans on his honeymoon with his first wife, and since poor Aurore had never been in very good health—she was dead at thirty, to prove it—the coffee and doughnuts of the French Quarter had laid her up in her hotel room. So he had gone out walking alone, unimpressed by this town which he thought looked like Cap-Haïtien where he had family. Rounding a street corner he had come across a bootmaker. A pair of magnificent boots in the shop window! One hundred dollars at the time! He had paid for them without haggling. It was his only good memory of a ten-day tête-à-tête with a completely useless wife.
He took another swig of rum, asked himself what he was doing here, listening to these coarse jokes, these tales told over a hundred times before and this droning of hypocritical prayers. Why does death have this power? Why does it silence hatreds, violence and bitterness and force us to bend down on two knees when it turns up? And even more than that, it hastens to transform people’s minds. Soon someone will probably start to embroider a legend around Francis Sancher and make him out to be a misunderstood hero.
Oh, yes, Rivière au Sel’s memory had had no trouble turning his great-grandfather Gabriel, the one who set up the nurseries, into a man with an open heart, who in his generosity gave work to everyone. Whereas in reality this devil of a man, who had been rejected by his family because he had married a Negro girl, detested the niggers in his employ and made them feel it. Besides, he took after his predecessors. The first of the Lameaulnes, Dieudonné Désiré, the owner of a sugar plantation near Marin in Martinique, used to take aim at his slaves’ heads and fire bullets into them, doubling up with laughter at their final grimace. Loulou should have been born in those days when might was right. Not in the days of Social Security and Family Allowances. Two weeks earlier a lackey from the Labor Inspectorate had come up to see him. He had heard that the nurseries were employing illegal Haitian workers and had warned Loulou that he could incur heavy penalties. Fines. Imprisonment. Loulou had almost shoved his French back into his mouth.
Yes, he should have been born in another age. Or else in another country. Guadeloupe was too small for him. It did not allow a man to show what he is capable of. Australia! That’s where he should have been born. Vast stretches of virgin land burnt by the sun. Struggling hand to hand with Nature, rebellious as a teenager forced into love.
Such is the popular imagination. It transforms a man, whitens him or blackens him to the point that his own mother, the woman who gave him birth, cannot recognize him.
What had it turned his brother Paolo into? A talented poet, an artist, because he had obtained a mention in a poetry contest for one sonnet. Whereas he, Loulou, passed for the idiot in the family.
When he was sixteen, his father, Ferdinand, had been struck dead by a bee sting on his neck, and his uncles, who had always treated their brother little better than a bitako,22 nicknaming him Kakabef,23 because he had stayed behind to work the family property at Rivière au Sel, and seating him at the very bottom of the family table, had decided that, after all, this land was perhaps worth something in the banana boom. They had therefore pestered his widow out of her mind to get rid of it and then entrust them with the money from the sale and with the education of her two boys. Mathilda would have accepted, tired, so tired as she was with two boys on her hands who did not get along at all and fought like wild dogs. But Loulou, with all his sixteen years, had said:
And he had kept his word.
He had quit the lycée Carnot, where he was no worse than anyone else in mathematics, and had given up a life of pleasure. He would get up at four in the morning, when the night still had the horizon under lock and key, and toil under the sun till evening, when he would grope his way to bed, too tired to screw any woman or even think about it.
Meanwhile, Paolo flunked his baccalauréat three then four times, stayed in bed until noon, bad-talked about him behind his back and had himself pampered by their mother. Until the day he took out the old Peugeot and went and crashed it into one of the pink cedars on the edge of the road. Ever since that day his mother had been in deep mourning and, meal after meal, had sat on the other side of the table, her eyes locked in reproach, as if he had pushed the car with his own two hands.
Yet the reputation of the Lameaulnes Nurseries grew. Orders for his anthuriums came from Nice, Cherbourg and Paris. His roses perfumed the gardens of the Préfecture and his casuarinas shaded the public parks. But nobody was in the least grateful for that. Nobody appreciates the values of endurance and perseverance.
The rain, driven by the wind, soaked his trousers. He stood up, now obliged to take refuge inside the house, and his gaze met that of Aristide, huddled up like an animal about to break his leash. His hatred for his son boiled in his heart. He remembered with contempt their visit to Francis Sancher when he had been laid out in the dust. It was after that visit he had made up his mind to act alone.
Alone.
He had told himself that threats and violence were of no avail, and he had prepared a little speech in his head. Out early while the field-workers were still dragging their feet wretchedly to their instruments of labor, he had found Francis Sancher disheveled, sleeping off a hangover on the veranda. Mira, like a servant, was washing down the steps.
He had been convincing, begging even.
“Listen to what I have to say. We’re both on the same side. The history books call our ancestors the Discoverers. Okay, they soiled their blood with Negro women; in your case, it must have been Indian. And yet we’ve got nothing in common with these nappy-head niggers, these peasants who have always handled a machete or driven an oxcart for us. Don’t treat Mira as if she were the child of one of these good-for-nothings.”
Francis Sancher had looked at him straight in the eye for a long time, then said in a decided tone of voice:
“You’re mistaken. We’re no longer on the same side and what’s more I don’t belong to any side. And yet, to a certain extent, you’re right. To start off with, it’s true, we were on the same side. That’s why I left for the other side of the world. I can’t say the journey ended successfully. I was shipwrecked, washed up on the shore …”
Loulou had first listened politely. Yet realizing how far Francis Sancher was straying from the subject, he had brought him back to the beaten track.
“Don’t talk rubbish when I’ve come to speak to you about my daughter.”
Francis Sancher had then walked up to him. Fearing he was in for the same fate as Aristide, Loulou wished he had brought along the gun he used for shooting thrushes. But Francis Sancher hadn’t laid a finger on him, merely spitting out in his face:
“You call that rubbish? Of course, you wouldn’t understand. Now clear off!”
Thereupon Mira had slowed the scrubbing movement of her brush and begged:
“Go away! Please go away!”
Loulou had returned home, wondering who was taking his or her revenge. His mother, locked forever in her blind preference? Paolo, deprived of his youth and making him pay for it? Aurore Dugazon, to whom he had given so little consideration? For the first time, he the tireless fighter, who in thirty-five years had treated himself twice to a ten-day vacation, first when he had taken Aurore Dugazon to New Orleans, only to see her take to her hotel bed because of a coffee and doughnuts, and then when he had taken Dinah to Amsterdam, a damp city, which was a fine choice for her sanctimonious kind since the whores flaunted themselves half-naked in red-lighted loggias—he wanted to put an end to everything. He wanted to lay down his old bones in the marble prison of the Lameaulnes vault under the compassionate casuarinas.
When the affair had taken an appalling turn for the worse and Mira had returned home with her belly, leaving Vilma, Vilma Ramsaran, a mere child whose confirmation had been celebrated a few years earlier, to take her place, Loulou went into a frenzy and concluded that it could only be Paolo. Only he was capable of deploying such malice. He had gone to find Sylvestre Ramsaran, who had sung “Maréchal, nous voilà” with him every July 14 in Governor Sorin’s time. He never knew quite how to address him, for although one had as much money as the other, they were not of the same race. Twenty years earlier, a Ramsaran would have kept his eyes lowered in front of a Lameaulnes. Brought together by the same misfortune as fathers, he had asked him worriedly:
Sylvestre had gestured his powerlessness.
“Carmélien and Jacques want to finish him off. But their maman is asking what would be the point of having two boys in jail as well. Since Vilma is not yet eighteen, we could press charges, but all we’ll get is our name in France-Antilles.”
“So you’re just going to sit idly by?”
There had been silence. Then Sylvestre had resumed mysteriously:
“Moïse says he’s hiding stolen money in a trunk.”
Loulou had shrugged his shoulders and gone on his way.
The chain of mountains was adorned with the fleeting green of days without rain. For the water that had fallen from the sky to fill jars, drums and barrels had temporarily slaked Nature’s thirst. Two dark red-necked hummingbirds were piercing the hearts of the hibiscus. His majesty the sun was keeping watch over his kingdom.
Deep in his thoughts, Loulou had first passed Xantippe, whom he hadn’t even looked at, and then two women, whom the bus had set down at the crossroads and who were climbing the steep hill.
“Say what you like,” they couldn’t help commenting, “misfortune has its own justice! Not only does it take care of those who don’t have a penny to their name or are as black as you and me. It punches left and right. Punching the po chappé,24 the mulattoes, the Indians and, from what I hear, even the whites over there in French France! There goes a man who used to walk upright, so upright that you’d never think that one day he’d be laid in a hole like the rest of us. Now look at him!”
And it was true, Loulou had aged. All he needed was bloodshot eyes and a pipe stuck between blackened tooth stumps to look like an old bag of bones.
Loulou looked around for a chair and with a frown got the unfortunate Sonny to give up his seat. Sonny had calmed down and was sighing in rhythm to the chanting of the women.
“For everything its season, and for every activity under heaven its time: a time to be born and a time to die …”
He took a glass from the hands of Mademoiselle Léocadie Timothée who had got up and was shakily serving drinks, while her old head nodded gently from her great age and her mouth murmured in prayer.