Island Beneath the Sea (49 page)

The governor's sharp nose warned him that the visitors were hiding something. The sugar mission seemed as suspicious as the man's muscular physique, which did not correspond to Claiborne's concept of a scientist, but those doubts did not excuse him from greeting him with the hospitality that was de rigueur in New Orleans. After a frugal luncheon, served by free Negroes since he did not own slaves, he offered his guests lodging. The secretary translated that it would not be necessary; they had come for a few days and would stay in a hotel while they awaited the ship that would take them back to France.

As soon as they left, Claiborne had them followed discreetly, and so learned that in the evening the two men left the hotel, the dark young man in the direction of Chartres Street and the muscular Morisset on a rented horse to a modest blacksmith shop at the end of Saint Philip Street.

The governor had been right in his suspicions: of science, Morisset had not a smattering; he was a Bonapartist spy. In December 1804 Napoleon had become the emperor of France; he himself placed the crown on his head, since he did not consider even the pope, especially invited for the occasion, worthy to do it. Napoleon had conquered half of Europe, but he still faced the problem of Great Britain, that tiny nation of horrible climate and homely people, defying him from the other side of the narrow English Channel. On October 21, 1805, those nations met in conflict off Cape Trafalgar, on the southwest coast of Spain, on one side the Franco-Spanish fleet of thirty-three ships and on the other the English twenty-seven, under the command of the celebrated admiral Horatio Nelson, genius of war at sea. Nelson died in the battle, following a spectacular victory in which the enemy fleet was destroyed and the Napoleonic dream of invading England was ended. Just at that time Pauline Bonaparte visited her brother to offer her condolences for the bad news of Trafalgar. Pauline had cut her hair to place in the coffin of her cuckolded husband, General Leclerc, dead of fever in Saint-Domingue and buried in Paris. The dramatic gesture of the inconsolable widow drew laughter across Europe. Without her long mahogany-colored hair, worn in the style of the Greek goddesses, Pauline looked so young that soon the style became the vogue. That day she arrived adorned with a tiara of famous Borghese diamonds, accompanied by Morisset.

Napoleon suspected that the visitor was another of his sister's lovers, and received him in bad humor, but he was immediately interested when Pauline told him that the ship in which Morisset had sailed across the Caribbean had been attacked by pirates, and that he had been the prisoner of Jean Lafitte for several months, until he could pay his ransom and return to France. During his captivity he had developed a certain friendship with Lafitte based on chess matches. Napoleon interrogated the man about Lafitte's noteworthy organization, which controlled the Caribbean with its ships; no boat was safe except those of the United States, which, because of the pirate's capricious loyalty to the Americans, were never attacked.

The emperor led Morisset into a little room where they spent two hours in private. Perhaps Lafitte was the solution to a dilemma that had tormented him since the disaster at Trafalgar: how to prevent the English from controlling maritime commerce. As he did not have the naval capacity to stop them, he had thought of allying himself with the Americans, who had been in a dispute with Great Britain since the War of Independence in 1775, but President Jefferson wanted to consolidate his territory and was not thinking of intervening in European conflicts. With a spark of inspiration, like so many that had taken him from a modest rank in the army to the peak of power, Napoleon charged Isidor Morisset with recruiting pirates to harass English ships in the Atlantic. Morisset understood that this was a delicate mission, since the emperor could not appear to be allied with buccaneers, and conjectured that, with his cover as a scientist, he could travel without attracting too much attention. The brothers Jean and Pierre Lafitte had grown untouchably rich over the years from piratical booty and every kind of contraband, but American authorities did not tolerate evasion of taxes, and despite Lafitte's manifest sympathy for the United States' democracy, he was declared an outlaw.

Jean-Martin Relais did not know the man he was going to accompany across the Atlantic. One Monday morning the director of the military academy had called him to his office, handed him money, and ordered him to buy civilian clothing and a trunk; he was going to sail in two days. "Do not say a word of this, Relais, it is a confidential mission," the director instructed. Faithful to his military education, the young man obeyed without asking questions. Later he learned that he'd been selected for being the sharpest in the English course, and because the director thought that since he came from the colonies he would not drop dead at the first bite of a tropical mosquito.

The youth rode at full gallop to Marseille, where Isidor Morisset was waiting with tickets in hand. Jean-Martin silently gave thanks that the man scarcely looked at him; he'd been nervous, thinking they would share a narrow stateroom during the voyage. Nothing injured his monumental pride as much as intimations from other men.

"Don't you want to know where we're going?" Morisset asked when they'd been several days on the high seas without any conversation other than a few words of courtesy.

"I am going wherever France commands me," Relais replied, snapping to attention, on the defensive.

"No military moves, boy. We're civilians, understood?"

"Yes, sir!"

"Speak like normal people do, man, for God's sake!"

"At your orders, sir."

Jean-Martin soon discovered that Morisset, so somber and unpleasant in company, could be fascinating in private. Alcohol loosened his tongue and relaxed him to the point he seemed a different man, amiable, sarcastic, smiling. He played a good game of cards and had a thousand stories that he told without elaboration, in a few sentences. Between glasses of cognac they were coming to know each other, and between them grew the natural intimacy of good comrades.

"Once Pauline Bonaparte invited me to her boudoir," Morisset told him. "An Antillean black, covered only by a loincloth, carried her in and bathed her in front of me. La Bonaparte took pride in being able to seduce anyone, but it didn't work with me."

"Why not?"

"I am annoyed by female stupidity."

"Do you prefer male stupidity?" the youth joked with a touch of a tease; he too had had a few glasses and felt at ease.

"I prefer horses."

But Jean-Martin was more interested in the pirates than in equine virtues or the beautiful Pauline's bath, and again turned the conversation to the subject of the adventure his new friend had lived among them when he was held on Barataria Island. As Morisset knew that not even imperial warships dared approach the Lafitte brothers' island, he had flatly discarded the idea of going there without being invited; their throats would be slit before they stepped onto the beach, not giving them any opportunity to lay out their daring proposition. In addition, he wasn't sure that Napoleon's name would open the Lafittes' door--it might be just the opposite--and that is why he had decided to approach them in New Orleans, a neutral territory.

"The Lafittes are outlaws. I don't know how we're going to find them," he told Jean-Martin.

"It will be very easy, they don't hide," the youth assured him.

"How do you know that?"

"From my mother's letters."

Until that instant it hadn't occurred to Relais to mention that his mother lived in that city; it seemed an insignificant detail, given the magnitude of the mission the emperor had charged them with.

"Your mother knows the Lafittes?"

"Everyone knows them, they are the kings of the Mississippi," Jean-Martin answered.

A
t six o'clock in the evening, Violette Boisier was resting naked and damp with pleasure in the bed of Sancho Garcia del Solar. Ever since Rosette and Tete had been living with her and her house was invaded by students for the
placage
, she had preferred her lover's apartment for making love, or just to have her siesta if the spirit did not move them to more. At first Violette tried to clean and beautify the place, but she hadn't the least inclination to play at being a maid, and it was absurd to lose precious hours of intimacy trying to sort out Sancho's monumental clutter. Sancho's only servant did nothing but brew coffee. Valmorain had lent him to Sancho because it was impossible to sell him; no one would have bought him. He'd fallen from a roof and done something to his brain that caused him to wander around alone, laughing. With good reason, Hortense Guizot could not stand to have him around. Sancho tolerated him and even had a liking for him, for the quality of his coffee and because he didn't steal change when he went shopping in the Marche Francais. The man disturbed Violette; she thought that he spied on them when they made love. "That's just your idea, woman. He is so dim-witted he doesn't have the sense to do that," her lover said soothingly.

At that same moment Loula and Tete were sitting in wicker chairs on the street in front of the yellow house, as neighbors did at dusk. The notes of a piano exercise hammered the peace of the autumn evening. Loula was smoking her black cigar with half-closed eyes, savoring the rest her bones demanded, and Tete was sewing a baby's gown. The curve of her belly was not yet noticeable but she had already told her small circle of friends about her pregnancy, and the only one who'd been surprised was Rosette, who went around so self-absorbed that she hadn't noticed the love between her mother and Zacharie. That was where Jean-Martin Relais found them. He hadn't written to announce his voyage because his orders were to keep it secret, and in addition the letter would have arrived after he did.

Loula wasn't expecting him, and as it had been several years since she had seen him she didn't recognize him. When he stopped before her, all she did was take another puff on her cigar. "It's me, Jean-Martin," the boy exclaimed emotionally. It took the huge woman seconds to make him out through the smoke and to be aware it was in fact her boy, her prince, the light of her old eyes. Her shrieks of pleasure shattered the street. She hugged him around the waist, lifted him off the ground, and covered him with kisses and tears while he stood on tiptoe, trying to defend his dignity. "Where is Maman?" Jean-Martin asked as soon as he could free himself and pick up his hat from under their feet. "At church, son, praying for the soul of your departed father. Let's go inside; I'm going to make some coffee while my friend Tete goes to look for her," Loula replied without an instant's hesitation. Tete went running off in the direction of Sancho's apartment.

In the drawing room of the house, Jean-Martin saw a girl dressed in blue playing the piano with a cup on her head. "Rosette! Look who's here! My boy, my Jean-Martin!" Loula screeched in introduction. Rosette interrupted her musical exercises and slowly turned. They greeted each other, he with a stiff nod and click of his heels and she with a fluttering of her giraffe eyelashes. "Welcome, monsieur. Not a day goes by that madame and Loula do not speak of you," said Rosette with the forced courtesy learned from the Ursulines. Nothing could be more true. The memory of the young man floated through the house like a ghost, and from hearing about him so often Rosette already knew him.

Loula took Rosette's cup and went to tend to the coffee, and her exclamations of joy blasted in from the patio. Rosette and Jean-Martin, sitting in silence on the edge of their chairs, cast furtive glances at each other with the feeling they had met before. Twenty minutes later, when Jean-Martin was on his third piece of pastry, Violette came panting in, with Tete close behind. Jean-Martin thought his mother looked more beautiful than he remembered, and did not wonder why she was coming from mass with her hair in a tangle and dress badly buttoned.

From the doorway Tete watched the uncomfortable youth with amusement as Loula pinched his cheeks and his mother kissed and kissed him without letting go of his hand. The salt winds of the crossing had darkened Jean-Martin's skin several tones, and the years of military formation had reinforced the stiffness inspired by the man he thought was his father. He remembered Etienne Relais as strong, stoic, and severe, and for that treasured even more the tenderness he had showered on him in the strict intimacy of the home. His mother and Loula, on the other hand, had always treated him like a baby, and apparently would continue to do so. To compensate for his pretty face, he always kept an exaggerated distance, an icy posture, and that stony expression military men tend to have. In his childhood he'd had to put up with being mistaken for a girl, and in adolescence his schoolmates taunted him or fell in love with him. Those family caresses in front of Rosette and the mulatta, whose name he hadn't caught, embarrassed him, but he did not dare reject them. Tete did not notice that Jean-Martin had the same features as Rosette, she had always thought her daughter resembled Violette Boisier, and that seemed to have been accentuated in the months of training for the
placage
, during which the girl imitated her teacher's mannerisms.

In the meantime, Morisset had gone to the blacksmith shop on Saint Philip Street, which he had found out was a screen for illegal transactions; he did not, however, find the person he was looking for. He was tempted to leave a note for Jean Lafitte asking for a meeting and reminding him of the relationship they had developed over a chessboard, but realized that would be a major mistake. He had been spying for three months, posing as a scientist, and still was not used to the caution his mission demanded; at every turn he surprised himself on the verge of being imprudent. Later that same day, when Jean-Martin introduced him to his mother, his precautions seemed ridiculous, she offered quite casually to introduce him to the pirates. They were in the drawing room of the yellow house, which had become a little crowded with the family and those who had come to meet Jean-Martin: Dr. Parmentier, Adele, Sancho, and some neighbor women.