Island Beneath the Sea (40 page)

Considering that the situation in Cuba was continuously growing worse for refugees, Dr. Parmentier decided to test his fortune in New Orleans, and if things went well, he would send for his family later. Then, for the first time in the eighteen years they had been together, Adele spoke up and stated that they would not be separated again; they would all go together, or no one would go. She was prepared to continue to live a clandestine life, hidden, like the sin of the man she loved, but she would not allow her family to be torn apart. She proposed that they travel on the same ship, she and the children in third class, and that they debark separately, so that no one would see them together. She herself got passports, after bribing the proper authorities, as was the usual custom, and proving that she was free and could support her children with her work. She was not going to New Orleans to ask for charity, she told the consul with her characteristic smoothness, but to be a seamstress.

When Violette Boisier learned that her friends were planning to emigrate for the second time, she exploded in a fit of rage and weeping, something that had often happened when she was young but not in recent years. She felt betrayed by Adele.

"How can you follow that man who does not recognize you as the mother of his children?" she sobbed.

"He loves me the best he can," Adele replied, without anger.

"He has taught his children to pretend in public that they don't know him!" Violette exclaimed.

"But he supports them, educates them, and loves them very much. He is a good father. My life is bound to his, Violette, and we are not going to be apart again."

"And me? What's to become of me here alone?" Violette asked her, disconsolate.

"You could come with us," her friend suggested.

That idea seemed splendid to Violette. She had heard that there was a flourishing society of free people of color in New Orleans, where all of them could prosper. Without losing a minute, she consulted with Loula, and they both agreed that nothing was holding them in Cuba. New Orleans would be their last chance to put down roots and make plans for their old age.

Toulouse Valmorain, who had by means of sporadic letters kept in touch with Parmentier during those seven years, offered him his aid and hospitality, but he warned that there were more physicians in New Orleans than bakers, and the competition would be strong. Fortunately Parmentier's French royal license would be good in Louisiana. "And here," he added in his letter, "you won't have to speak Spanish, my most esteemed friend, because the language is French." Parmentier descended from the ship and fell into the embrace of his friend, who was waiting on the dock. They hadn't seen each other since 1793. Valmorain did not remember his friend being so small and fragile, and in turn Parmentier did not remember Valmorain that rotund. Valmorain had a new air of satisfaction; there was no trace of the tormented man with whom he'd had those interminable philosophical and political discussions in Saint-Domingue.

While the rest of the passengers debarked, they waited for the luggage. Valmorain did not notice Adele at all, a dark mulatta with two boys and a girl, who was attempting to hire a cart to transport her bundles, but he did notice among the crowd a woman wearing a handsome vermilion travel suit with a hat, bag, and gloves of the same color, so beautiful it would have been impossible not to notice her. He recognized her immediately, although that was the last place he expected to see her. He shouted out her name and ran to greet her with a boyish enthusiasm. "Monsieur Valmorain, what a surprise!" Violette Boisier exclaimed, holding out a gloved hand, but he put his hands on her shoulders and planted three kisses on her face, in the French style. He found, enchanted, that Violette had changed very little, and that the years had made her even more desirable. She told him in a few words that she was widowed, and that Jean-Martin was studying in France. Valmorain did not remember who that Jean-Martin was, but when he learned that she'd come alone, he was overcome by his youthful desires. His farewell words, "I hope you will allow me the honor of visiting you," were spoken in the intimate tone he hadn't used with her for a decade. They were interrupted at that instant by Loula, who was cursing at a pair of porters to get them to carry their trunks. "The rules haven't changed," she told him, elbowing him aside; "you will have to get in line if you plan to be received by madame."

Adele rented a small cottage on Rampart Street, where many free women of color lived, most of them kept by a white protector, according to the traditional system of
placage
, or "left-handed marriage," which had started in the early times of the colony when it was not easy to convince a young European woman to follow a man to those savage lands. There were nearly two thousand arrangements of that kind in the city. Adele's dwelling was similar to others on her street: small, comfortable, well ventilated, with a back patio with walls covered in bougainvillea. Dr. Parmentier had an apartment a few blocks away, where he had also installed his clinic, but he spent his free hours with his family much more openly than he had in Le Cap or Havana. The only thing strange about this situation was the age of the participants, because a
placage
was an arrangement between white men and girls about fifteen; Dr. Parmentier was nearly sixty, and Adele could have been the grandmother of any of her neighbors.

Violette and Loula found a larger house on Chartres. It took them only a few turns around the place d'Armes, the dike at the hour of the afternoon strolls, and Pere Antoine's church at midday on Sunday to assess the vanity of the local women. The whites had succeeded in passing a law that forbade women of color to wear a hat, jewels, or showy clothes in public places, under threat of a lashing. The result was that the mulattas adorned themselves in their
tignons
with such charm that they surpassed the finest hat from Paris, and displayed necklines so tempting that any jewel would have been a distraction; they had such elegant bearing that by comparison the white women looked like washerwomen. Violette and Loula immediately calculated the money they could make with their beauty lotions, especially the snail slime creme and pearls dissolved in lemon juice to clear the skin.

The School in Boston

T
he whiplash Maurice had dealt Hortense Guizot had not prevented her from attending Marigny's celebrated ball; she masked it under a fine veil that draped to the floor and covered the pins that closed the dress at the back, but the blow left an ugly bruise for several weeks. Using that blemish she had convinced Valmorain to send his son to Boston. She also had another point: she had menstruated only once since the birth of Marie-Hortense. She was pregnant again and had to pamper her nerves; it would be better to send the boy away for a while. Her conception was not a marvel, the rumor she attempted to spread among her friends, but due to the fact that two weeks after giving birth she was frolicking with her husband with the same determination as during her honeymoon. This time it would be a son, she was sure, destined to carry on the family name and the family dynasty. No one dared remind her that a Maurice Valmorain already existed.

Maurice detested the school from the moment he crossed the threshold and the heavy wooden double door closed behind his back. His displeasure lasted unrelieved to the third year, when he had an exceptional teacher. He arrived in Boston in winter beneath an icy mist and found an entirely gray world: overcast sky, squares covered with frost, and skeletal trees with ugly, numbed birds on the naked branches. He had never known true cold. The winter went on forever; he went around with pains in his bones, ears blue with cold, and hands red with chilblains; he did not take off his overcoat even to sleep and lived with one eye on the sky, hoping to see a miserable ray of sun. The dormitory had a coal stove at one end that was lighted only two hours in the evening, so the boys could dry their socks. The sheets were always icy, the walls stained with greenish mold, and to wash in the mornings he had to break a skim of ice on the basins.

The boys, noisy and quarrelsome, in uniforms as gray as the landscape, talked a language Maurice could barely decipher--his tutor Gaspard Severin had had only a smattering of English--and he had to improvise the rest in his classes with the help of a dictionary. Months went by before he could answer his teachers' questions, and a year before he shared in the jokes of his American companions, who called him "the Frenchy" and bedeviled him with ingenious torments. His uncle Sancho's peculiar notions of boxing were useful because they enabled him to defend himself by kicking his enemies' balls, and his practices in dueling served him well to emerge victorious in the tourneys imposed by the school director, who made bets with the teachers and then punished the loser.

The food had the purely didactic purpose of tempering character. Whoever was capable of swallowing boiled liver or chicken necks with bits of feathers still attached, accompanied by cauliflower and burned rice, could confront the hazards of life, including war, for which the Americans were always preparing. Maurice, used to Celestine's refined kitchen, fasted like a fakir for thirteen days without anyone's caring a whit, and finally, when he fainted from hunger, there was no alternative left but to eat what was put on his plate.

Discipline was as iron hard as it was absurd. The unhappy boys had to leap out of bed at dawn, wash off with icy water, run three times around the courtyard, slipping in pools of water, to warm up--if tingling in your hands can be called warm--and study Latin for two hours before a breakfast of hot chocolate, dry bread, and lumpy oatmeal, then endure several hours of classes and sports, at which Maurice was incompetent. At the end of the day, when the victims were swooning with fatigue, they were given a moralizing lecture for one or two hours, depending on the director's inspiration. Their calvary ended in reciting in chorus the Declaration of Independence.

Maurice, who had been spoiled by Tete growing up, submitted to that prison routine without complaint. Following in the footsteps of the other boys and defending himself from the bullies kept him so busy that his nightmares ended, and he did not think anymore of the gallows in Le Cap. He enjoyed learning. At first, he hid his eagerness for books so as not to be perceived as arrogant, but soon he began to help the others with their lessons and that way earned respect. He did not confess to anyone that he knew how to play the piano, dance a quadrille, and write poetry; the other boys would have drawn and quartered him. His companions watched him write letters with the dedication of a medieval monk, but did not openly make fun because he told them they were for his invalid mother. The mother, like the homeland, was not a subject for jokes: she was sacred.

Maurice coughed throughout the winter, but with spring it cleared up. For months he had huddled in his overcoat, with his head sunk between his shoulders, stooping, invisible. When the sun warmed his bones and he could take off his two jackets, his wool underdrawers, the mufflers, the gloves, and the overcoat, and walk erect, he realized his clothing was too tight and too short. He had undergone one of those classic growth spurts typical of pubescent boys, and from being the thinnest in his level had become one of the tallest and strongest. Observing the world from above, with several centimeters' advantage, made him feel safe.

The summer with its warm humidity did not bother Maurice, used to the boiling climate of the Caribbean. The college emptied, the students and most of the teachers left on vacation, and Maurice was left nearly alone, awaiting instructions to return to his family. Those instructions never arrived; instead his father sent Jules Beluche, the same chaperon who had come with him on the long, depressing voyage on the ship from his home in New Orleans, across the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, sailing around the peninsula of Florida, slipping along the Sargasso Sea, and facing the waves of the Atlantic Ocean, to the school in Boston. The chaperon, a remote relative of the Guizot family who'd fallen on bad times, was a middle-aged man who took pity on the boy and tried to make the voyage as agreeable as possible, but in Maurice's memory it would always be associated with his exile from his paternal hearth.

Beluche appeared at the school with a letter from Valmorain, explaining to his son the reasons why he would not go home that year and containing enough money to buy clothing, books, and any whim he might want to indulge. His orders were to take Maurice on a cultural trip to the historical city of Philadelphia, a place every young man of his position should know because it was there that the seed of the American nation had germinated, as Valmorain's letter pompously stated. Maurice left with Beluche, and for those weeks of forced tourism he remained silent and indifferent, trying to disguise the interest the trip aroused in him and to fight off the sympathy he was beginning to feel for that poor devil Beluche.

The next summer the boy was again left waiting two weeks at the school with his trunk all packed, until the same chaperon showed up to take him to Washington and other cities he had no desire to visit.

Harrison Cobb, one of the few teachers who stayed at the college during Christmas week, had noticed Maurice Valmorain because he was the only student who did not have visitors or gifts, and who spent the holidays reading alone in the nearly empty building. Cobb belonged to one of the oldest families in Boston, established in the city since the beginning of the seventeenth century and of noble origin, as everyone knew but he denied. He was a fanatic defender of the American republic and abominated nobility. He was the first abolitionist Maurice met, and he would mark the boy profoundly. In Louisiana abolitionism was considered worse than syphilis, but in the state of Massachusetts the subject of slavery was discussed constantly because the state's constitution, written twenty years before, contained a clause that prohibited it.

Cobb found an avid intellect in Maurice, and a fervent heart in which his humanitarian arguments immediately took root. Among other books, he had him read
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
, published in 1789 in London with enormous success. This dramatic story of an African slave, written in the first person, had caused a commotion among European and American audiences, but few knew of it in Louisiana, and the boy had never heard it mentioned. The teacher and his student spent evenings studying, analyzing, and discussing; Maurice could at last articulate the uneasiness slavery had always caused him.