“I missed out on my youth, except for that episode blackened by the folly of sin. Old age is creeping on. In the grimness of my heart I rejected and insulted this man when he wanted to help me, and now I can do nothing to make up for it.”
At the age of fifteen when I walked through the streets of La Pointe with my hair hanging down my back, the men used to look at me and their eyes gleamed. At the lycée, I came first in everything and the teachers said I would go far. Alas, that year my father, who worked for the Internal Revenue Services and every year took our small family to French France for the holidays, was carried off by typhoid. So my Mother Courage riveted herself to her piano stool and began to give lessons to the children of people she knew. Very quickly we realized that this wasn’t enough, for with my two younger sisters and my little brother we were five. Five mouths to feed on scales, arpeggios and “le Clavecin bien tempéré.”51 I was wondering what I could do to help (enter the teachers’ training college to become an elementary school teacher?) when one evening she called me into her room. On a low table an eternal flame burned in front of a picture of my father with his bushy mustache and his thick hair brushed back, away from the front.
“God is my witness,” she sobbed. “It breaks my heart to say this, but Emmanuel Pélagie came to speak to me about you for the right reason. He would be a godsend in our desert!”
Emmanuel Pélagie! I knew Emmanuel Pélagie. I’d seen him at my father’s funeral, straight as an I under the hot three-o’clock sun. Emmanuel Pélagie was the country’s pride and joy. He was a very black man, not bad-looking, born in the Canal Vatable district to a poor woman. Despite that, he had become an engineer for the forestry commission and worked somewhere in Africa.
“I don’t want to go to Africa,” I stammered.
My mother took me by the hand.
“You won’t have to. He doesn’t want to go back. He wants to settle down here and find a wife.”
“But why me?” I shouted. “Why me?”
My mother started to cry. Two months later I was married.
Perhaps another woman would have been beside herself with joy. My husband was the director of the research station for agronomy in Guadeloupe. We lived in a company villa in Le Gosier with seven acres of grounds. We entertained all sorts of people: the subprefect, French French on assignment, people from Martinique and Guyana, and once even a béké52 with a “de” to his name. I ordered my dresses from the Trois Quartiers department store in Paris. Every evening there were fifteen to twenty places laid for dinner. From five in the morning my servants would be crumbling the crabmeat, making the flaky pastry and plucking fowl.
But I suffered martyrdom. I couldn’t bear Emmanuel Pélagie. I couldn’t bear the sound of his voice as he held forth at dinner:
“It’s a mistake to believe that Africans and West Indians have anything in common, apart from the color of their skin. In certain cases, that is! Take my wife. You’d think she’s Spanish! Our society is a society of cross-breeding. I reject the word ‘Creole’ that some are using. I’ve worked for five years on an okoumé plantation in the Ivory Coast. Precious wood, you know. And to speak to my employees I needed an interpreter. An interpreter! We couldn’t communicate. As blacks we couldn’t communicate!”
Or else:
“The law of March 19, 1946 has been drained of any meaning by every government since 1947, when the three-party system broke up. We need to form political parties demanding autonomy for Guadeloupe!”
I couldn’t bear his laugh. I couldn’t bear the smell of his mouthwash when he kissed me or his Jean-Marie Farina body cologne when he came near me. Fortunately he was so absorbed in himself that he didn’t notice anything. Once he had taken his nightly pleasure, he would turn his back on me with the telling sigh of a state of well-being I couldn’t share.
Apparently I was one of the few people who did not think highly of Emmanuel Pélagie. There was an unending stream of visitors through our living room. On days when he didn’t work he held an audience. The telephone, which we were one of the first to have, never stopped ringing. It didn’t take me long to find out what was behind it all. Emmanuel Pélagie was in politics. He had become a fervent admirer of a certain Rosan Girard and followed him about like a faithful dog. I heard him talk about war in Algeria, riots in Fort de France, and sporadic violence in Le Moule. It didn’t interest me in the least. I shut my ears and I shut my heart.
Two or three years passed like that; Emmanuel Pélagie running to his political meetings, me busy doing the thousand-and-one nothings that make up the life of a middle-class housewife. My loathing for my husband grew by the minute. For he would say one thing and then do another.
Underneath all his fancy talk he secretly despised his fellow countrymen, and only felt at ease with the French French who streamed through our dining room. He would parade in front of them, playing The Magic Flute or Madama Butterfly on the record player. Never a béguine or a mazurka! During dinner I could never find anything to say to the French French sitting beside me, and wondered whether they were alive, if they had blood under their skin or were simply big white masks without sexuality or feeling.
Those were curious years for Guadeloupe! After dark, people would paint strange letters on walls that rang out like alarm bells. Offensive inscriptions such as “De Gaulle murderer” or “Down with colonialism!” I heard Emmanuel speak out about factories and unemployment of agricultural workers. He had meetings with doctors, lawyers and top civil servants like himself, who pretended to speak Creole among themselves and dared to address me with the words “Dodose sa kaye?” (How goes it, Dodose?)
It made me so angry to think that a few hours later Emmanuel would be tying his bow tie and singing Madama Butterfly.
One evening, during one of those endless dinners, I found myself sitting next to a young engineer from the Forestry Commission. He had blue eyes like the sky on a fine day. When the goat vol-au-vent was being served, he took my hand under the table.
Ah, Pierre-Henri de Vindreuil! My opinion about the French French changed overnight.
We used to meet in his high-rise apartment on the hill of Massabielle level with the rusty roofs of La Pointe. The hum of the town below mingled with our cries, then with our long intimate confidences following our embraces. For the first time I talked about myself and somebody listened. Oh, the infinite delight of it! I talked about my mother, who now had all she could wish for from Emmanuel. I talked about the sacrifice I had consented to at the age of sixteen. I talked about my sad marriage. On this last point, Pierre-Henri had trouble understanding me and expressed his surprise.
“He looks intelligent though!”
A woman doesn’t need intelligence. How would you live with a genius? She needs tenderness, love!
Nothing came to warn me in my happiness that misfortune was slyly creeping up on me. I remember it was just before Christmas. Tall Christmas trees laden with artificial snow stood in the Lebanese shop windows, and when the offices closed there was a rush to order Yule logs from a fashionable cake shop behind the cathedral. The well-to-do went to French France, and I cursed the hypocrisy of Emmanuel Pélagie, who vetoed taking such a trip. How I too would have liked to dine on oysters and white wine in an elegant restaurant!
One afternoon Pierre-Henri suddenly announced he had been called back to Paris. I returned home, shattered, to find our veranda filled with men and women in tears. Emmanuel Pélagie had been beaten, then arrested by the police during a political meeting that had been banned by the Prefecture. He spent several days in jail. When he came out he was transferred for disciplinary reasons to the Research Station at Rivière au Sel to manage an experimental plantation of mahoganies from Honduras. His career was broken. Rivière au Sel!
I hate this dark, dank place. I look for the sky but it is hidden from the eye by the Spanish oaks, genipas and the giant mountain immortelles arching over the bay-rum and coral trees and the pink cedars, that in turn hang over the wild birchberry and guava trees. All these ageless creatures sink their heavy roots into the dark, spongy soil, while the creepers swing, pointing their forked tongues at face level, and the epiphytes feast voraciously on the trees and branches. While Emmanuel Pélagie watched over his mahogany saplings, I would walk as far as the pond at Bois Sec, among the tree ferns and the bamboo groves, praying to the Good Lord that one of the spirits, which this place is supposed to be infested with, would pounce on me and take away my meaningless life. After he left for French France on December 23, Pierre-Henri never wrote. As for Emmanuel, gone were the fancy speeches! Gone were the operatic arias! He withdrew into himself, as if he’d become deaf and dumb, and virtually stopped speaking to me. Sometimes I caught his look, as grave as the Last Judgment, and I shivered.
One morning, no sooner had I swallowed my first cup of coffee than I had a bout of nausea. I was pregnant. Pregnant! I took it the Good Lord was being bountiful. My baby gave me hope. While it kicked in the safety of my womb I told it:
“You shall be my refuge and my consolation. You shall be the youth I never had. You shall be my sunshine!”
Alas, I forgot the Good Lord breathes only vengeance!
A few hours after he was born, while I was basking in that postnatal peace and already imagining my life changed forever by this innocent little ball of flesh, Sonny, my newborn son, had a brain hemorrhage. Mentally handicapped for life!
When the doctors left us alone, face to face with our misfortune, Emmanuel Pélagie looked me straight in the eyes and said only: “It’s your fault.”
What did he mean? That’s the question I’ve been asking myself ever since. Does Emmanuel Pélagie know it was the sin I committed over and over again with Pierre-Henri that was the cause of all this desolation in our lives? Just thinking about it, letting the memory of him work its way to the very depths of my soul, still sends a thrill through me. We have never sat down and talked about it, and day after day I have to live with this stony face opposite me.
You can easily understand that in my state of mind I had no time to waste thinking about Francis Sancher. I knew that Sonny was often at his house, but I couldn’t stop him. The people of Rivière au Sel hate strangers. They hate them so much they’ll say anything about them. When I first came here, I used to take the air of an evening with my unfortunate Sonny. All the shutters would be lowered as we went by, while invisible mouths whispered after us in slander:
“Look at them! She had her fling in La Pointe. And he’s the cross the Good Lord sent her to bear.”
“Now mind she hasn’t come to do her dirty business around here.”
So when Madame Mondésir told me that Francis Sancher was a makoumeh who did his perverted thing with Moïse, and Madame Poirier that he had been a gunrunner in Africa and hid his filthy lucre under his mattress, I didn’t take any notice. Now it so happened that one evening I was coming back from a walk to Bois l’Etang when I met him. I like this place; it is supposed to be haunted by the spirits of our ancestors, who died and were buried during slavery. The sky is always gray and inked out by the knife-edge ridges of the mountain. Water lilies, duckweed and stiff tufts of grass carpet the dead eye of the pond, and the air is full of whispers, whistling noises and twittering. People avoid the place and I never meet anyone, except for that wretched Xantippe, whom I’ve seen several times cutting his way with a machete under the tall trees. I had gone back up by way of the Saint-Charles forest path, steep at this point under the shade of the pink cedars, when I came face to face with Francis Sancher.
I must confess that for a man no one could say anything good about, I was surprised by the gentle glow in his eyes, harking back to dreams that were still smoldering, to illusions still glimmering and to hopes churned by the rushing rivers of life. He walked straight up to me and greeted me very politely: “I was on my way over to your house, Madame.”
I was immediately on my guard and asked:
“To my house? What were you thinking of doing at my house?”
He didn’t let himself be taken aback by my rebuff, and went on to explain:
“I wanted to talk to you about Sonny. I’m a doctor, you know. This isn’t my specialty, but—”
I interrupted him then and there.
“I don’t need you to tell me how to look after my child.”
And as he stood there staring at me without reproach, words surged up into my mouth, coarse words, insults that rang out in the silence of the undergrowth, words that were not directed at him, but at life itself, which had been so unjust to me and buried my best years in this dismal jail. Then my words, my insults melted into water, bitter with all my grief.
That’s the way it happened. This man, who loved my poor child who is so much in need of love, is dead. My pain and my regret at not having listened to him still haunt me. And yet he showed me the way.
I started to ask myself questions in the secret of my heart. Do I really love my unfortunate Sonny? Isn’t he just a cross that I long to lay down? Isn’t he a constantly open wound to my pride? A painful incarnation of my remorse? Or a punishment inflicted on Emmanuel, whom I continue to hate but have never known how to leave? I must put an end to all this. From now on, I’ll take care of Sonny. I’ll knock on the door of every hospital, every clinic and dispensary. I’ll lay siege to every doctor. I’ll try every new treatment. I’ll go to the end of the world, if need be. I’ll leave Emmanuel, locked in his bitterness, and Rivière au Sel stuck in its perpetual meanness.
Yes, there is a time to seek and a time to lose; a time to keep and a time to cast away; a time to rend and a time to sew; a time to keep silent, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate.
Now is the time for me to start over again.