Authors: Maryse Conde
Valérie-Anne was married one Sunday in August 1914, at La Regrettée on her father-in-law’s estate in Matouba.
War had just been declared in Europe. The majority of Guadeloupeans, however, did not know or did not care. They did not know it would be so deadly and that so many of them would leave to lose their lives there.
Despite her failing health, Victoire did not hesitate for one moment. Showing initiative for the first time in her life, she did not ask Jeanne for permission to leave La Pointe. Jeanne had to accept the fait accompli when two days before the wedding, very early in the morning, the Cleveland came to pick Victoire up on the rue de Condé.
They stopped to buy gas at the Shell gas station, the only one on the island. Located in the harbor so as to refuel the first motorized boats and automobiles, it caused a sensation. Bystanders spent hours admiring the mechanized pumps and the attendants in their red and white uniforms with a shell spread across the middle of their backs. Victoire sat next to Jérémie, the chauffeur, so as to let Anne-Marie spread out her weight in the back. He spoke to her with familiarity, like someone of the same social status. Had she been
following the massive strikes that had shaken the sugar industry to its core? Ah, those needy
maléré
who up till now had been reduced to silence with a plateful of calalu were realizing their strength. They were becoming a proletariat with a formidable force. Victoire did not know what to say. She realized to what extent she was nothing but a leftover from the old days. The modern words were “labor unions,” “strikes,” and “demands.” Jérémie told her there had been a union for domestics for some years. She should have joined. You have to defend yourself since black or white, the boss is the same. A rich mulatto is a white man. A rich black man, a mulatto. The only concern of either is to exploit the weakest.
Bewildered, Victoire was hearing this type of discourse for the first time. I wonder what she thought about it. Did she fully understand it?
Neither she nor Anne-Marie had ever gone farther than Petit Bourg when they stayed at Vernou. Very soon, they found themselves indisposed by the bumps and jolts of the automobile to pay attention to the picturesque landscape. Yet the sight was not to be missed. To the right, villages perched in the opaque green of the foothills. To the left, the blue of the ocean dotted with little white specks of foam. Soon Anne-Marie was snoring. She only woke up when they reached Dolé-les-Bains, where, because of its reputation, she insisted on having lunch.
The spa at Dolé-les-Bains was the first to attract tourists to Guadeloupe. Cubans—recognizable more than anything else by their enormous Havana cigars and bicolor leather shoes—and all sorts of Europeans, French, English, Dutch, and Swedish fought over the rooms in its five-star hotel. From the restaurant guests enjoyed an unobstructed view of the islands of Les Saintes. A sophisticated personnel, trained in Haiti, officiated. While Victoire, as usual, merely nibbled at her food, Anne-Marie ate too much. She helped herself twice to the excellent thrush pâté, the crab
matété,
and above all the chocolate-flavored coconut flan. Around two o’clock they resumed their journey to Basse-Terre. It was the first time either of them
had set foot in the capital, since they had never paid Jeanne a visit while she was a student at Versailles. The town was cool, bourgeois, and peaceful. The authorities constantly compared it to La Pointe: “Here, there is a sense of calm,” the governors wrote. “It is crime free and trials take place without incident.”
Both women were impressed by the battalion of ships waiting offshore to be loaded, by the tamarind trees on the Cours Nolivos, and, above all, the imposing silhouette of the volcano La Soufrière in the distance. The threatening smoke from the fumaroles twirling up into the sky reminded Victoire of the Montagne Pelée and recalled in her heart the happy stay in Saint-Pierre, Martinique, which she had erased from her memory as if it were taboo. Soon, Anne-Marie complained that the air was becoming increasingly cooler as they approached Matouba and they had to stop the car and look for a shawl in the trunk. Uttering cries of fright, she was terrified when the car set off along a winding, mountainous road that threatened to be swallowed up by a dense vegetation of giant red and white dasheen leaves, breadnut trees, all sorts of palms, and the foliage of the ubiquitous lofty tree fern. Jérémie was chuckling to himself.
The estate of La Regrettée was spread over 187 acres and numbered over six hundred coffee trees, which the farm workers were beginning to cut down since coffee was no longer profitable. Bananas were said to have a promising future. If the weather had been more pleasant, the place would have been splendid. But the sky weighed low and gray. The Du Veuzits welcomed Anne-Marie effusively and accommodated her in one of the best rooms in the Great House, whereas Victoire, like Jérémie, had to be content with a bed in the former drying house, converted into a dormitory for the servants. She did not think of it as a humiliation. If she felt morose, it was not because of the ambiguous mistress-servant position, which had long ceased to bother her. It was because suddenly the landscape was so like Saint-Pierre in Martinique that she couldn’t get the memory of Alexandre out of her head. As if the past were shaking up his ashes and coming back to haunt and burn her.
The next day was bustling with activity. Victoire would have preferred to stay in the gardens at La Regrettée, where some magnificent Malabar glory lilies were growing. Instead, she had to follow the intrepid Anne-Marie, who had herself driven to the Bains Jaunes, thus named because their waters were strongly mixed with sulfur. A paved road, called the Pas-du-Roy, leading to the baths was unfit for cars but fairly easy for walkers. They had barely returned to La Regrettée when the rain that had been threatening since morning came down in fury. The wind then joined in and it was as if hordes of neighing horses were being whipped as they galloped around the Great House. This lasted the whole night long.
On the day of the wedding, the sun rose radiant.
Three hundred guests—some had come from Martinique and even Puerto Rico, where the du Veuzits had family—squeezed into the former coffee plantation house. Everyone agreed that Victoire was not looking well and seemed sad. Living with her daughter did not suit her! Not surprising! Jeanne was an ungrateful person who was now bad-mouthing religion. (Jeanne had just written that article on teaching in
Trait d’Union
that I have mentioned.) The nuns at Versailles had taken offense and interpreted it as an attack against their teaching methods. The guests also regretted the absence of Boniface Jr. Anticipating a fad that was later to thrive among the middle classes of Guadeloupe and Martinique, he had given as an excuse a hunting trip to the game-rich forests of Haiti that had not yet been felled by the Haitian peasants. On the other hand, everyone was touched by the young bride. Under her bonnet and veil, she looked rather like a first communicant.
“Qué linda!”
the matrons of Puerto Rico exclaimed in tears.
As is always the case with weddings, it reminded them of their youth, the time of illusions when the assiduous suitor had not yet metamorphosed into a fickle husband. They got worked up, emotionally imagining an innocent and virginal Valérie-Anne, whereas the cunning little minx, taking advantage of her chaperone’s inattention, had arranged on several occasions to taste the forbidden fruit.
When Valerie-Anne had tenderly placed her head on Victoire’s shoulder and begged her to take charge of the wedding banquet, Victoire hadn’t dared tell her the truth. How could she confess she was henceforth incapable of cooking? Now that she had her back to the wall, in order to create an illusion, she had surrounded herself with a regiment of dark-skinned coolies with oily hair and red dots in the middle of their foreheads who could barely understand Creole since they came from Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras. We should mention in passing that because of this Indian domesticity, the du Veuzits proclaimed they had never enslaved any blacks and had nothing to do with slavery. This did not prevent Jean-René, one of Valérie-Anne’s sons and president of the banana planters’ union, from being assassinated in 1995 by his plantation workers, who had had enough of him. Victoire was back again amid the smell of browned pork crackling, stuffed fowl, braised lamb, chives, garlic, and spices. But she neither created nor invented anything new. All she did was reel off old recipes to these docile flunkies, more used to throwing together curried
colombos
than perfecting culinary feats—like a novelist who shamelessly uses over again the tricks of the trade in her best-sellers. She looked at her hands and the chagrin at having lost her gift weighed her down. Moreover, this wedding constantly reminded her of another: Philimond’s. That time too they had carelessly amused themselves in the shadow of a volcano that had taken offense. In its cruelty it had destroyed their society from top to bottom.
When they went to sit down, the maids of honor passed out white rectangular cartons with gold lettering that Anne-Marie, true to character, had had printed. But this time she did not communicate the menu to the press, as if she knew that Victoire’s role was a fabrication. In the secret of their hearts, all those who sat down at table were disappointed. Victoire was not in one of her good days, you could sense it. They didn’t hold it against her, however. What writer produces one masterpiece after another?
Around five o’clock the wedding couple left for Trois Rivières,
where the boat for Terre-de-Haut, an island in Les Saintes, was waiting for them. There they would spend their honeymoon, for Maximilien, although he had been to Venice and Rio de Janeiro, considered the Saintes one of the marvels of the world. Except for a few fishermen, descendants of Bretons, as blond as corn, the island was virtually uninhabited: beaches of white sand, the sea. In other words, paradise on earth! As Valérie-Anne was throwing her arms around Victoire’s neck, her “true maman” as she liked to call her, and showering her with kisses, she noticed that her cheeks were soaked with tears.
“You’re crying,” she exclaimed. “But why?”
Victoire was incapable of saying why.
My theory is that beginning with that stay at La Regrettée, Victoire was convinced there was nothing left for her on this earth, where her life had lost both meaning and usefulness, and she turned to face death.
A
T THE RISK
of irritating Jeanne, Victoire had to stay behind another week at La Regrettée. It’s true it wasn’t her fault. She had caught cold and could not leave on the appointed day.
They were strange, the times she spent in the deserted drying house. Only Jérémie stayed behind with her and faithfully brought her grogs and herb teas. He talked to her untiringly of the importance of labor unions and strikes. Thus began an odd friendship. Later on when Victoire was bedridden, Jérémie found his way to the rue de Condé. He would sit down in her bedroom, ignoring Jeanne’s snooty expression and suspicious looks since she took him for a nobody—which he wasn’t. Jérémie Cabriou, that was his full name, founded a few years later the first unified union of workers in Guadeloupe, of Marxist allegiance. He was also the first to give his political speeches in Creole, something Légitimus and his people, I think, were incapable of doing. To my knowledge he was
the only person who offered to teach Victoire how to read and write. But she brushed him aside.
“An ja two vyé à pwézan!”
“Too old!” he protested. “You must be joking!”
He had no idea that something had died in her.
At night the drying house at La Regrettée was left to the racket of the wind. It made a hell of a row, rushing through the corridors, banging doors and windows, mewing as it burst into the dormitory and playing leapfrog over the single beds. Victoire was unable to get to sleep. Her mind, haunted by the fever, relived and dramatized all the quarrels with her daughter, hearing once again all the remarks she had made to her in anger or impatience. Instead of treating them as a banal result of that inevitable conflict of generations that every parent goes through, she loaded them with a formidable meaning.
She believed she understood why her presence on the rue de Condé was causing a growing embarrassment. The more Auguste and Jeanne felt at ease in the circle of Grands Nègres, the more she reminded them of an embarrassing past.
One dream in particular had a lasting impression on her, she who unlike Caldonia never paid any attention to them. She was following Alexandre along a narrow path, uneasy and stumbling over hidden roots. Suddenly he stopped. They found themselves on a plateau, flat as a platform, at the top of La Soufrière. Or was it the Montagne Pelée? Lost amid the smell of sulfur and lightning. In front of them the ocean.
“Don’t be long,” Alexandre said. “I’ll be waiting for you. It’s been too long already.”
Then he threw himself like a swimmer into the void. She woke up panting. All around her the cavern of the night resounded with the din of insects and the vociferations of frogs.
Yes, what was she still doing on this earth?
Death, if you call her, is always ready to answer “present,” that’s a fact. She heard Victoire’s voice.
Victoire’s fever went down, however, and her cough improved under the combined effects of Jérémie’s grogs and herb teas, perhaps, and she returned to La Pointe.
Major changes were in the works on the rue de Condé. In October Auguste left his job as principal of the school for boys on the rue Henri IV. The effect of this was first of all a lot of additional work that he hadn’t foreseen. Instead of having an easy time of it, taking his time to walk to his office, going out at ten o’clock for a cane juice at La Palmeraie while joking with the owner, M. Carabin, and nonchalantly presiding over the staff meetings and prize giving, Auguste locked himself up the entire day in a stuffy building on the rue Gambetta and often worked late into the night. Since dividends were still limited, there were no more lavish receptions awash in fine wines. Once a week, the directors of the Caisse Coopérative des Prêts squeezed into the living room, which they filled with thick smoke. When midnight caught up with them, heads lowered over their calculations, they snacked on codfish sandwiches and beer bought from the local corner store.