Island Beneath the Sea (53 page)

Rosette burst into the house with the mulish expression that had this year replaced her coquetry. She tore off her dress, and locked herself in her room without a word. Violette was hysterical, screaming that that little troublemaker was going to pay, that she had nearly destroyed the ball, that she had deceived everyone, and that she had made her waste time, effort, and money because she had never intended to be
placee
, the ball had been a vehicle for meeting that wretched Maurice. Violette was certain. Rosette and Maurice had in some inexplicable fashion planned to meet there, because the girl could not go out alone. How she sent and received messages was a mystery she refused to reveal, despite the slapping Violette gave her. That confirmed a suspicion Tete had always had: the
z'etoiles
of those two children were joined in heaven: some nights they were clearly visible to the right of the moon.

After the scene in the library of the house where he had confronted his father, Maurice left determined to cut his ties to his family forever. Sancho was able to soothe Valmorain a little and then follow his nephew to the apartment they shared, where he found Maurice distraught, red with fever and with pain in his gut. With his servant's help, Sancho got Maurice's clothing off and put him in bed, then forced him to drink a glass of warm whiskey with sugar and lemon, an improvised remedy that occurred to him as a palliative for the pangs of love and which also tumbled Maurice into a deep sleep. He told his servant to keep him cool with wet cloths to bring down his temperature, but that did not keep Maurice from raving with delirium the rest of the afternoon and a good part of the night.

The next morning the youth waked with less fever. The room was dark because the drapes had been closed but he did not want to call the servant, although he needed water and a cup of coffee. When he tried to get up to use the chamber pot, all his muscles were sore, as if he had galloped horseback a week, and he chose to go back to bed. Shortly afterward Sancho arrived with Parmentier. The doctor, who had known Maurice since he was a boy, could only repeat the cliche observation that time slips away faster than money. Where had the years gone? Maurice had gone out the door in short pants and returned through another changed into a man. The doctor examined him meticulously without reaching a diagnosis; the picture still was not clear, he said, he would have to wait. He ordered Maurice to stay in bed and see how he got along. He had recently attended two sailors in the nuns' hospital who had typhus. It wasn't an epidemic, he assured them, these were isolated cases, but they should be aware of that possibility. Rats from the ships often spread the illness, and perhaps Maurice had been infected on the voyage.

"I am sure it isn't typhus, Doctor," Maurice mumbled, embarrassed.

"What is it then?" Parmentier smiled.

"Nerves."

"Nerves?" Sancho repeated, highly amused. "The thing old maids suffer?"

"This is something I haven't done since I was a boy, Doctor, but I haven't forgotten, and I suppose you haven't either. Don't you remember Le Cap?"

Parmentier saw the little boy Maurice had been at that time, raging with fever from being harassed by ghosts of the tortured men who walked through his house.

"I hope you're right," said Parmentier. "Your uncle Sancho told me what happened at the ball and the fight you had with your father."

"He insulted Rosette! He spoke of her as if she were a tramp," said Maurice.

"My brother-in-law is very angry, as is logical," Sancho interrupted. "Maurice has it in his head to marry Rosette. He not only means to defy his father but the entire world."

"All we ask is for everyone to leave us in peace, Uncle," said Maurice.

"No one will leave you in peace, because if you go ahead with your plan society will be endangered. Imagine the example you two will set. It would be like a hole in the dike. First a trickle and then a deluge that would destroy everything in its path."

"We would go far away, where no one knows us," Maurice insisted.

"Where? To live with Indians, covered with stinking skins and eating corn? I'd like to know how long love would last under those conditions!"

"You are very young, Maurice, you have your whole life ahead of you," the physician argued weakly.

"My life. Apparently that's the only thing that counts. And Rosette? Maybe her life doesn't count too? I love her, Doctor!"

"I understand you better than anyone, son. My lifetime companion, the mother of my three children, is a mulatta," Parmentier confessed.

"Yes, but she isn't your sister!" Sancho exclaimed.

"That doesn't matter," Maurice replied.

"Explain to him, Doctor, that defective children are born of such unions," Sancho insisted.

"Not always," the doctor murmured, thoughtful.

Maurice's mouth was dry, and again he felt his body burning. He closed his eyes, annoyed with himself for not being able to control his shivers, undoubtedly caused by his accursed imagination. He wasn't listening to his uncle; he had the sound of a roaring waterfall in his ears.

Parmentier interrupted the list of Sancho's arguments. "I think there is a way we can satisfy everyone, and for Maurice and Rosette to be together." He explained that very few people knew they were half siblings, and besides, it would not be the first time that something like that had happened. The masters' promiscuity with their slaves produced every kind of confused relationship, he added. No one knew absolutely what happened in the intimacy of a house, to say nothing of a plantation. The Creoles did not attach too much importance to love affairs among relatives of different races--not only among brother and sister but also father and daughter--as long as it wasn't aired in public. Whites with whites, on the other hand, was intolerable.

"Where are we going with this, Doctor?" asked Maurice.

"
Placage
. Think about it, son. You would treat Rosette the way you would a wife, and although you did not live with her openly you could visit her whenever you wanted. Rosette would be respected in her circles. Your position would not change, and that way you could protect her much better than if you were a pariah, and poor in addition, as you would be if you persist in marrying her."

"Brilliant, Doctor!" Sancho burst out before Maurice could open his mouth. "All we need is for Toulouse Valmorain to accept it."

In the following days, while Maurice fought what turned out to be typhus, definitively, Sancho tried to convince his brother-in-law of the advantages of
placage
for Maurice and Rosette. If previously Valmorain had been willing to finance the expenses of a girl he didn't know, there was no reason to refuse it to the only girl Maurice desired. Up to that point, Valmorain listened with lowered head, but attentive.

"Besides, she was brought up in the bosom of your family, and you can be sure that she's decent, refined, and well educated," Sancho added, but the minute he said it, he realized the error of reminding Valmorain that Rosette was his daughter: it was as if he had pinched him.

"I would rather see Maurice dead than keeping that strumpet!" he bellowed.

The Spaniard crossed himself automatically: that was tempting the devil.

"Pay no attention to me, Sancho, that slipped out without my thinking," his brother-in-law mumbled, also shaken by superstitious apprehension.

"Calm down, dear friend. Children always rebel, it's normal, but sooner or later they become reasonable," said Sancho, serving himself a cognac. "Your opposition merely strengthens Maurice's stubbornness. All you will do is drive him away."

"The one who's losing is him."

"Think it over. You are losing too. You aren't young anymore, and your health is failing. Who will look after you in your old age? Who will manage the plantation and your businesses when you can no longer do it? Who will look after Hortense and the girls?"

"You."

"Me?" and a happy laugh burst from Sancho. "I'm a rogue, Toulouse! You can see me becoming the pillar of the family? Not even God would wish that!"

"If Maurice betrays me you will have to help me, Sancho. You are my partner and my only friend."

"Please, don't frighten me."

"I think you're right. I must not fight Maurice face to face but be shrewd. The boy needs to cool down, think of his future, enjoy himself as befitting his age, and meet other women. That little cheat needs to disappear."

"How?" Sancho asked.

"There are ways."

"What ways?"

"For example, offer her a good sum to go away and leave my son alone. Money buys everything, Sancho, but if that doesn't work--well, we would take other measures."

"Don't count on me for anything like that!" said Sancho, alarmed. "Maurice would never forgive you."

"He wouldn't have to know."

"I would tell him. Precisely because I love you like a brother, Toulouse, I'm not going to let you do such an evil thing. You would regret it all your life," Sancho replied.

"Don't fret, my friend. I was joking. You know I'm not capable of killing a fly."

Valmorain's laugh sounded like a bark. Sancho left, worried, while his brother-in-law kept thinking about the
placage
. It seemed the most logical alternative, but to sponsor such a relationship between brother and sister was very dangerous. If it came to be known, his honor would be irreparably stained, and everyone would turn their backs on the Valmorains. How would they show themselves in public? He had to think about the future of his five daughters, his businesses, and his social position, just as Hortense had pointed out to him. He could not have imagined that Hortense herself had already circulated that news. Put in the position of choosing between saving her family's reputation, every Creole lady's first priority, or ruining her stepson's, Hortense ceded to the temptation of the second. If the matter had been in her hands, she herself would have married Maurice to Rosette, gladly, to destroy him. She didn't like the
placage
Sancho proposed because once their spirits cooled, as always happened over time, Maurice could exercise his rights as firstborn son without anyone's remembering his slip. People have bad memories. The only practical solution was for her stepson to be forever repudiated by his father. "Marry a quadroon? Perfect. Let him do it and live among blacks, as he deserves," she had commented to her sisters and friends, who in turn made it their business to repeat it.

In Love

T
ete and Rosette had left the yellow house on Chartres the day after the embarrassing episode at the Cordon Bleu ball. Violette Boisier's fit of rage had quickly passed, and she forgave Rosette because she was always moved by thwarted love, but nevertheless she felt relieved when Tete announced that she did not want to abuse her hospitality any longer. It was better to put a little distance between them, she thought. Tete took her daughter to the boardinghouse where years ago the tutor Gaspard Severin had lived, while the little house Zacharie had bought two blocks from Adele was being remodeled. She continued to work with Violette as she always had, and started Rosette sewing with Adele, it was time for the girl to earn a living. She was powerless before the hurricane that had been unleashed. She inevitably had compassion for her daughter but could not get close enough to try to help her, Rosette had closed up like a mollusk. Rosette was not talking to anyone. She sewed in a hostile silence, waiting for Maurice with granite hardness, blind to the curiosity of others and deaf to the advice of the women around her: her mother, Violette, Loula, Adele, and a dozen nosy neighbors.

Tete learned of the confrontation between Maurice and Toulouse Valmorain from Adele, who had been told by Parmentier, and from Sancho, who made a quick visit to the pension to bring her news of Maurice. He told her that the youth was weakened by the typhus, but out of danger, and that he wanted to see Rosette as soon as possible. "He asked me to intercede and ask if you would see him, Tete," he added. "Maurice is my son, Don Sancho, he doesn't need to send me messages. I am waiting to see him," was her response. She could speak with frankness, since Rosette had gone to deliver some sewing. It had been several weeks since they had seen each other; Sancho had disappeared from the neighborhood. He hadn't dared be seen near Violette Boisier since she caught him with Adi Soupir, the same frivolous girl he had been close to earlier. Sancho won nothing by swearing he had run into her in the place d'Armes and invited her to have an innocent glass of sherry, that was all. What was bad about that? But Violette had no interest in competing with any rival for the artichoke heart of that Spaniard, least of all with someone half her age.

According to Sancho, Toulouse Valmorain had demanded that his son come speak with him as soon as he was on his feet. Maurice struggled to dress and went to his father's house, he didn't want to keep putting off a resolution. Until he clarified things with his father he was not free to present himself to Rosette. When he saw his son's yellow skin and the way his clothes hung off him--he had lost several kilos during his brief illness--Valmorain was frightened. The old fear that death was going to carry him off that had so often assaulted him when Maurice was a boy again squeezed his chest. Urged by Hortense Guizot, he was prepared to impose his authority, but he realized that he loved Maurice too much: anything was preferable to fighting with his son. On impulse, he opted for the
placage
he previously had opposed out of pride and his wife's advice. He saw lucidly that it was the only possible way out. "I will give you what is suitable, son. You will have enough to buy a bungalow for that girl and keep her as is expected. I will pray that there is no scandal and that God will pardon you both. I ask only that you never speak of her in my presence, or in your mother's," Valmorain told him.

Maurice's reaction was not what had been expected by either his father or Sancho, who was also in the library. He replied that he appreciated his father's offer of help, but that was not the destiny he would choose. He did not intend to continue to submit to society's hypocrisy or to expose Rosette to the injustice of
placage
, in which she would be trapped while he enjoyed total freedom. In addition, that would be a stigma for the political career he was planning to follow. He said that he was going to return to Boston and live among more civilized people; he would study law, and then, from Congress and newspapers, he would try to change the Constitution, the laws, and finally the customs not only in the United States but in the world.