“Carmélien and Jacques wanted to polish him off. Rosa wept, saying there was no point having two boys in jail as well. In the end she was right because today the Good Lord has done justice.”
At the thought of this justice sent from heaven without having to go and fetch it, Sylvestre Ramsaran couldn’t help smirking triumphantly, although it was hardly fitting at a deathbed. But how could he pretend to be grief-stricken when he wasn’t?
This little smirk did not escape the attention of the others and reinforced the opinion in Rivière au Sel that Sylvestre Ramsaran’s heart had been completely spoiled by money. He did not take after Rodrigue, his father, who had had such a good reputation that the poor would line up in front of his kitchen twice a day at meal times. Once death has cut a man down, in fact, there’s no need for bitterness or desire for revenge. Sylvestre Ramsaran, therefore, had no right to triumph openly over Francis Sancher. Sylvestre knew what people thought about him and was none the worse for it. On the contrary. He was glad for his buffalo hide! It had taken him years of hardship to fashion it.
He had started to piece it together and sew it up as a little boy after that disastrous first visit to the temple. Sylvestre was merely the fourth son of Rodrigue Ramsaran. So he didn’t really interest his father. He went on living his life at school as a quiet dunce whom the teachers interrogated once a month for form’s sake, never even bothering to send him into detention. On Thursdays he would roam freely with other boys of his age, aiming at birds with his slingshot, trying to catch them with glue or picking bunches of wildflowers for his mother whom he worshiped. One day when he was coming back from the woods with his belly showing and his face sticky from mango juice, his father had cast his eyes on him in surprise.
“Danila, how old is that boy now?”
Danila, whose hands were red from plucking a chicken, had made a quick calculation in her head.
“He’ll be ten on September second!”
“Ten!”
The following Sunday—orders were orders—Danila had dressed him in white, combed a part into his thick black hair and whispered in his ear with undefinable pride:
“Today you’re going to the temple with your papa!”
To the temple? The word meant nothing to him. Sylvestre had, indeed, got a glimpse in his parents’ room, where he never went, of pictures in loud colors, framed with garlands of multicolored lightbulbs, depicting women with a thousand snaky arms, others holding a sort of guitar in one hand and a flower in the other, and characters with an elephant’s trunk wound above their potbellied stomachs. All that had nothing to do with him and was part of the disquieting and mysterious realm of grown-ups.
The temple wasn’t anything to look at: a cabin topped by a red flag which the rain had soaked and wrapped like a rag around its mast. Yet the veneration of the faces around him convinced him that something big was going to happen. Soon the smell of incense rose up while the noise of cymbals and drums got gradually louder. It was like being in a dream and Sylvestre couldn’t say what fascinated him the most: the chanting of the priests or the smell of the flowers, the candles or the camphor burning on a tray. Knowing nothing about his people’s past, his imagination had never escaped beyond the sparkling horizon of the island. But now he felt mysteriously transported to a foreign land—murmuring and sweet-smelling like the sea.
It was then that a group of young boys dressed in white had led in the bleating, reluctant goats. They were made to smell the incense, then with one blow, wham! their heads were sliced off. Their little heads with innocent eyes flew into the air while their blood gushed out over the soil. A scream then went up, but Sylvestre didn’t know whether it came from his mouth or not, while a burning stream of urine soaked and soiled his fine, white drill trousers.
From that day on Sylvestre had been the-boy-who-had-shamed-his-papa. Every time the Ramsarans got together they dug up this story. With their mouths full of Colombo25 they would add all sorts of fantastic details and half truths, with the result that Sylvestre no longer knew whether he had vomited, urinated or defecated; if he had screamed or if he had run away terrified to the other end of the savanna. It was to erase those images that Sylvestre had become a fervent Hindu, celebrating samblmani26 and divapali27 alike, and shaving the heads of his children on the banks of the river Moustique. Alas, all to no avail. The eighty-year-old Rodrigue would still repeat with his head nodding up and down:
“I fè mwen ront tou bonman! Sé ront i fè mwen ront!” (He made me feel so ashamed! So ashamed!)
When Sylvestre Ramsaran, by the sweat of his brow, had accumulated more money than he had ever dreamed of, he had wanted to take his young wife to India. Not on a package tour, as was customary, but as individual travelers. They would take the plane from Roissy Charles-de-Gaulle airport, and after having flown over the roof of half the world they would arrive in a land that stretched over the horizon, here brown and bare, there green and humming with bird song, as warm and embracing as a mother, as recalcitrant as a young bride. In the city of Jaipur, the wind moans through the thousand windows of the palace.
But Rosa had made a face. All she could dream of was a winter in Paris, a lackluster city, which Sylvestre had visited twice. So India had crawled into that corner of his dreams that would never materialize.
Sylvestre had been an attentive papa for his boys, protective to the point that he had been worried to death about Carmélien until the boy had got back from Bordeaux and gone to live with Hosannah Taillefer, a câpresse, not in the least bit Indian—but times have changed from the days when Indians only married Indians, God works in mysterious ways; Sylvestre had been worried out of his mind about Jacques who, unlike his older brother, sowed his wild oats; he had tightened his control over Alain, who was basically lazy by nature, and pampered Alix who, by coincidence, had been born on his fortieth birthday. However, he had always considered Vilma as belonging to Rosa and had kept himself at a discreet distance from the circle of women. He had shown his love for her once by choosing her a husband, Marius Vindrex, the only son of his bosom friend, who had inherited some rich land up at Dillon from his mother, a Barthélemy, and owned the biggest sawmill in the area. For what matters in today’s Guadeloupe is no longer the color of your skin—well, not entirely—nor an education. It was our fathers who worked themselves to the bone to be able to stick their fly-specked paper diplomas on their wooden walls. Nowadays, the high school graduates, master embroiderers of French French, sit on their doorsteps waiting for their unemployment checks. No, what matters is money, and Vilma would have money to spare. Marius had already bought land at Sainte-Anne and planned to build a studio residence for tourists, with private bathrooms.
Sylvestre had never understood why this child of his who never said anything but “Yes, Papa,” with eyes lowered, had rebelled, taking up with a good-for-nothing stranger, half-mad and old enough to be her father. Who knows what goes on in that secret calabash of a young girl’s head? Did she reproach him for taking her out of school? Had she decided to punish him by tarnishing his name?
Until Francis Sancher had seduced his daughter, Sylvestre Ramsaran had never given him a second thought. He had other things on his mind! At the start of the year, a tropical depression had flattened his banana plantations. It was a crying shame! Tons of bananas down the drain, and as for any compensation, not a word from the préfet, Diablotin. Then a disease had attacked his experimental plantation of limes. New crops were as fragile and capricious as young girls and people were never tired of lamenting the good old days of sugarcane when, year in and year out, the oxcarts had trundled along to the factory, loaded to capacity. Sylvestre had been reluctant to change his ways. But you have to keep up with the times!
There was no denying the fact that the death of sugarcane was sounding the knell for something else in the country. What can we call it?
Sylvestre recalled how he used to hand out the pay to the workers for Rodrigue, calling each of them by their name, week after week:
“Louis Albert!”
“Louison Fils-Aimé!”
He remembered how he guided their stiff fingers, clumsily clutching the pen that scratched the register. How he snapped his whip over the head of the oxen as he drove the cart. Now everything was electronic and Carmélien was seriously talking of buying a computer for his crayfish business!
No, he really hadn’t had time to waste thinking about Francis Sancher. One day, he had gone into Chez Christian, something he seldom did, disliking the bunch of drunks who had been holding up the counter since morning, and he had seen him leaning against the bar. Even though he was drunk at five in the afternoon, you could see immediately that here was a man of education and learning, who had nothing in common with the country louts around him. He was hollering out:
“I shall return each season with a chattering, green bird on my fist …”
And the men were laughing behind his back and pointedly touching their forehead. Not long after that Sylvestre had heard about Mira’s rape and, devoid of compassion, had said to himself deep down that by hanging around in gullies she had reaped what she had sown. What a crying shame! Little did he know that the future would be even uglier and that his daughter, his own daughter … ! A wave of anger washed over him. What was he going to do with this papaless child who would soon open its eyes to the world? What was he going to do with Vilma’s ruined youth?
He turned towards Vilma, who was plunged in tears, and his eyes met Rosa’s, perpetually hostile, perpetually accusing, constantly contradicting his wife’s docile behavior. In the name of Heaven! What could Rosa possibly reproach him for? Throughout their almost thirty years of life together, Sylvestre had only escaped their hardly hospitable bed once. Ah, Céleste Rigaud! To his dying day he would remember the smell of the sea from her thighs. Recalling this, his lips curled up in a smile and people exchanged meaningful looks of surprise. Was Sylvestre Ramsaran forgetting where he was and what was kicking in his daughter’s belly?