Island Beneath the Sea (48 page)

The journey on a ship that had to skirt summer storms and with difficulty escape an attack by the English, and then a coach to Paris, did not bring the father and son together. Valmorain had conceived the trip in order to postpone for a few months more his wife's displeasure at seeing Maurice again, but he couldn't put it off indefinitely; soon he would have to confront a situation that had not been eased by the years. Hortense never lost a chance to spew venom upon that stepson whom each year she tried vainly to replace with her own son without producing anything but girls. For her, Valmorain had exiled Maurice from the family, and now he repented. A decade had gone by without a serious concern for his son; he was always occupied with his own affairs, first in Saint-Domingue, then in Louisiana, and last with Hortense and the births of the girls. The boy was a stranger who answered his sparse letters in a couple of formal sentences regarding the progress of his studies but he never asked about any member of the family; it was as if he wanted to leave it settled that he had no connection to them. He didn't even react when his father wrote him in a single line that Tete and Rosette had been emancipated and were no longer connected to the Valmorains.

Valmorain was afraid he'd lost his son at some point during those hectic years. This introverted young man, tall and handsome, with his mother's features, did not in any way resemble the rosy-cheeked boy he'd cradled in his arms, praying heaven to protect him from all harm. He loved him as much as he ever had, maybe more, because his emotion was stained with guilt. He tried to convince himself that his fatherly affection was returned by Maurice, even though they were temporarily distanced, but he had his doubts. He had laid out ambitious plans for his son without ever having asked him what he wanted to do with his life. In truth, he knew nothing about his interests or experiences; it was centuries since they had spoken. He wanted to win him back, and had imagined that those months alone together in France would act to establish an adult relationship. He had to prove to him his affection and to make clear that Hortense and her daughters would not change Maurice's situation as his only heir, but every time he tried to broach the subject there was no response. "The tradition of primogeniture is very wise, Maurice; wealth must not be divided among sons because with each division the family's fortune is lessened. Being the firstborn, you will receive my entire estate, and you will have to look after your sisters. When I'm no longer here, you will be the head of the Valmorains. It's time to start preparing you; you will learn to invest money, manage the plantation, and make your way in society," he told him. Silence. Conversations died before they began. Valmorain navigated from one monologue to another.

Maurice took in without comment Napoleonic France, always at war, the museums, palaces, parks, and avenues his father wanted to show him. They visited the ruined chateau where his grandmother was living out her last years, caring for two unwed daughters more deteriorated by time and loneliness than she. A prideful old woman dressed in Louis XVI style, determined to ignore the changes in the world, she was firmly ensconsed in the epoch prior to the French Revolution, and had erased from her memory the Terror, the guillotine, exile in Italy, and the return to an unrecognizable country. Seeing Toulouse Valmorain, that son absent for more than thirty years, she held out a bony hand with antique rings on each finger for him to kiss, and then ordered her daughters to serve chocolate. Valmorain introduced her grandson to her and tried to summarize his own story from the time he embarked for the Antilles up to the present. She listened without a word while the sisters offered steaming little cups and plates of stale pastries, eyeing Valmorain with caution. They remembered the frivolous young man who told them good-bye with a distracted kiss and left with his valet and several trunks to spend a few weeks with their father in Saint-Domingue, only never to return. They didn't recognize that brother with the scanty hair, double chin, and paunch, who spoke with a strange accent. They knew something of the uprising of slaves in the colony--they'd heard a few sentences here and there about atrocities on that decadent island, but they'd not connected them to a member of their family. They had never been curious to know where the funds that supported them came from. Bloodstained sugar, rebel slaves, burned plantations, exile, and all the rest their brother mentioned was as incomprehensible to them as a conversation in Chinese.

The mother, on the other hand, knew exactly what Valmorain was referring to, but now nothing interested her too much in this world; her heart was too dry for affection and news. She listened to him in an indifferent silence, and at the end, the one question she asked was if she could count on more money because what he regularly sent barely covered things. It was absolutely necessary to repair that house depleted by the years and vicissitudes, she said; she couldn't die leaving her daughters unsheltered. Valmorain and Maurice stayed inside those lugubrious walls for two days that seemed as long as two weeks. "We won't see each other again, better that way," were the elderly dame's words as she told her son and grandson good-bye.

Maurice docilely went everywhere with his father, except the classy brothel where Valmorain planned to fete him with the most expensive cocottes in Paris.

"What is it with you, son? This is normal and necessary. One must discharge the body's humors and clear the mind, that way one can concentrate on other things."

"I have no difficulty concentrating, monsieur."

"I've told you to call me Papa, Maurice. I suppose that in your trips with your Uncle Sancho...well, you wouldn't have been lacking for opportunities...."

"That is a private matter," Maurice interrupted.

"I hope that the American school hasn't made you religious or effeminate," his father commented in a jesting tone, but it came out with a growl.

The boy gave no explanations. Thanks to his uncle he wasn't a virgin; in the last vacation time Sancho had succeeded in initiating him, using an ingenious scheme dictated by necessity. He suspected that his nephew suffered the desires and fantasies proper for his age but was a romantic and was repelled by the idea of love reduced to a commercial transaction. It was up to him to help Maurice, he decided. They were in the prosperous port of Savannah, in Georgia, which Sancho wanted to know through the countless diversions it offered, and Maurice as well, because Professor Harrison Cobb had cited it as an example of negotiable morality.

G
eorgia, founded in 1733, was the thirteenth and last of the colonies founded in the new world and Savannah was its first city. The settlers maintained friendly relations with the indigenous tribes, thus avoiding the violence that was the scourge of other colonies. In the beginning, slavery--along with liquor and lawyers--was forbidden in Georgia, but soon it was realized that the climate and the quality of the soil were ideal for cultivating rice and cotton, and slavery was legalized. After independence, Georgia was converted into another state of the Union, and Savannah flourished as the port of entry for the traffic in Africans that supplied the region's plantations. "This demonstrates, Maurice, that decency quickly succumbs before greed. If it's a matter of getting rich, the majority of men will sacrifice their soul. You cannot imagine how well the planters in Georgia live, thanks to their slaves," Harrison Cobb had declared. The youth did not have to imagine it--he had lived in Saint-Domingue and New Orleans--and he accepted his uncle Sancho's suggestion that they spend their vacation in Savannah so as not to disappoint his teacher. "Love of justice is not enough to defeat slavery, Maurice; you have to see the reality and know in detail the laws and gears of politics," Cobb maintained, who was preparing his student to triumph where he himself had failed. The man knew his limitations; he had neither the temperament nor the health to fight in Congress, as he had dreamed of in his youth, but he was a good teacher; he knew how to recognize the talent of a student and to mold his character.

While Sancho Garcia del Solar fully enjoyed the refinement and hospitality of Savannah, Maurice suffered the guilt of having a good time. What would he tell his teacher when he returned to school? That he had stayed in a charming hotel, attended by an army of solicitous servants, and that there had not been hours enough to indulge his life as an irresponsible bon vivant?

They had scarcely been a day in Savannah when Sancho made friends with a Scots widow who lived two blocks from the hotel. The woman offered to show them the city, with the mansions, monuments, churches, and parks that had been beautifully reconstructed after a devastating fire. Faithful to her word, the widow appeared with her daughter, the delicate Giselle, and the four went out in the afternoon, thus beginning a very convenient friendship for uncle and nephew. They spent many hours together.

While the mother and Sancho played interminable games of cards, and from time to time disappeared from the hotel without explanation, Giselle took charge of showing Maurice around. They went out alone on horseback, far from the vigilance of the Scots widow, which surprised Maurice, who had never seen a girl have such freedom. Several times Giselle took him to a solitary beach, where they shared a light lunch and bottle of wine. She didn't talk much and what she said was so categorically banal that Maurice didn't feel intimidated, words he normally stored in his chest spilled out in torrents. At last he had a listener who did not yawn at his philosophical thoughts but listened with obvious admiration. From time to time her feminine fingers would carelessly brush him, and from those touches to more daring caresses took only three setting suns. Those outdoor assaults, peppered with insects, entangled in clothing, spiced by the fear of discovery, left Maurice in glory, and Giselle quite bored.

The rest of the vacation went by too quickly, and naturally Maurice fell in love like the teenager he was, love heightened with remorse at having stained Giselle's honor. There was only one gentlemanly way to remedy his fault, as he explained to Sancho as soon as he gathered his courage.

"I am going to ask for Giselle's hand," he announced.

"Have you lost your mind, Maurice? How can you marry her if you don't know how to blow your nose!"

"Have some respect, Uncle. I am a man from head to toe."

"Because you bedded the girl?" and Sancho let out a noisy guffaw.

The uncle barely avoided the punch Maurice aimed at his face. The matter became crystal clear to Maurice shortly after, when the Scots woman told him that the girl was not really her daughter and Giselle confessed that that was her theater name; she wasn't sixteen but twenty-four, and Sancho Garcia del Solar had paid her to entertain his nephew. The uncle admitted that he'd committed a monstrous foolishness, and tried to joke about it, but he had gone too far, and Maurice, devastated, swore he would never speak to him as long as he lived. Nonetheless, when they reached Boston there were two letters from Rosette waiting, and his passion for the beauty of Savannah evaporated, and he was able to forgive his uncle. When they said good-bye, they embraced with their usual camaraderie and the promise to see each other soon.

On the trip to France, Maurice did not tell his father anything about what had happened in Savannah. Valmorain, after softening his son with liquor, insisted twice more that he pleasure himself with ladies of the dawn, but he was not able to make Maurice change his mind, and in the end decided not to mention the subject again until they reached New Orleans, where he would provide him a
garconniere
, a bachelor apartment like those young Creoles of his social position enjoyed. For the time being, he would not allow his son's suspicious chastity to endanger the tenuous equilibrium of their relationship.

Spies

J
ean-Martin Relais turned up in New Orleans three weeks before the first Cordon Bleu ball his mother organized. He came without the military academy uniform he had worn since he was thirteen in the role of secretary to Isidor Morisset, a scientist who was traveling to evaluate the properties of the land in the Antilles and Florida; he had the idea of establishing sugar plantations, given the losses reported by the colony in Saint-Domingue, which seemed definitive. In the new Republique Negre d'Haiti, General Dessalines was massacring, in systematic fashion, all whites, the very ones whom he'd invited to return. If Napoleon was planning to reach a commercial accord with Haiti, since he'd not been able to occupy it with his troops, he desisted after these horrible slaughters, in which even infants ended in common graves.

Isidor Morisset was a man with an impenetrable gaze, a broken nose, and wrestler's shoulders that burst the stitching of his jacket; he was red as a brick from the merciless sun on the crossing and equipped with a monosyllabic vocabulary that made him disagreeable from the minute he opened his mouth. His sentences--always too brief--sounded like sneezes. He wore the suspicious expression of someone who expects the worst from his fellow man, and answered questions with snuffs and snorts. He was immediately welcomed by Governor Claiborne with the attentions due to a stranger owed the respect attested to in the letters of recommendation from a number of scientific societies, delivered by the secretary on a carpet of embossed green leather.

Claiborne, dressed in mourning because of the death of his wife and daughter, victims of the recent epidemic of yellow fever, took note of the secretary's dark skin. From the way Morisset introduced him, he supposed that this mulatto was free and greeted him as such. One never knows what the proper etiquette is with these Mediterranean peoples, the governor thought. He was not a man to appreciate male beauty easily, but he could not help staring at the youth's delicate features--the thick eyelashes, the feminine mouth, the round, dimpled chin--in such contrast to the slim, limber body of undoubted masculine proportions. The youth, cultivated and with impeccable manners, served as interpreter, since Morisset spoke only French. The secretary's command of English left a great deal to be desired, but it was enough, given that Morisset was a man of very few words.