Madeleine's Ghost (40 page)

It was my husband's desire that I should bear him sons to carry on the illustrious name of de la Roca, which he informed me was among the most honorable in Spain or elsewhere and was one of the few families of sufficient antiquity to remain with their heads covered before the king. Outside of my simple reproductive duties, I was free to do as I liked as long as I conducted myself in a manner befitting the wife of a grandee of Spain. I must not allow myself a familiar demeanor in public or in private with the servants. I was not permitted to cultivate the friendship of members of the opposite sex. My virtue must be of the stainless variety, unimpeachable. He would speak of these things only once. The honor of his family, which was as precious to him as blood or air, depended on my strict adherence to the codes of formal behavior. Then he took his leave, polite as you please, and did not return till three months after my girl was born, and I was ready to be raped again.

Honor! Virtue! The man made my skin crawl! It does not take long for a sheltered girl to learn the nature of evil in the world. Cynics say that evil is banality, that it resides mostly in not acting, as when Pontius Pilate turned Christ over to the Jews. I say evil is something different. It is an active force and has as its main component an absolute belief in one's own worth and
singularity. Think of Satan cast out of heaven with his dark angels. What was his sin? Pride.

That my husband, Don André de la Roca, is a callous and prideful monster is well known in New Orleans. You have no doubt heard many cruelties attached to his name. I am here to tell you they are all true.

This is one story. Many years before I was born, and before the slave uprising on his native St.-Domingue, Don André was a very rich young man and possessed vast and prosperous estates there. But he so mistreated the slaves in his possession that one day they grew bold enough to kidnap one of the overseers. They did not kill the man but only asked him to take a few simple requests to Don André. They asked for more to eat for strength during the long hours in the cane brakes, and they asked to be allowed to walk for a brief time on Sunday without their shackles, as was the custom on surrounding estates. All this was in accordance with the Code Noir, which I believe still regulates the treatment of slaves in most parts of the West Indies.

My husband replied to these reasonable requests by lashing to death the slaves who had kidnapped the overseer. Then, as an example to the rest, he selected ten at random from the ranks of the field laborers and crucified them along the road leading to his estate, like a Roman general out of Plutarch.

Esplanade, which is now the fashionable street of the Creole population in New Orleans, was in the first days of my residence there just a swampy trail at the edge of town. I was one of those who gave the thoroughfare its reputation as an elegant place to live.

As you can guess, left to my own devices in a town as riotous and pleasure-loving as ours, I became a woman of fashion, noted for my entertainments and my extravagant style of living. The terms of the wedding contract allowed me a substantial private income and the living off certain properties, including the town of Coeur de France, built on land belonging to the family. True to his word, my husband left me to my life as long as no scandal was attached to my name. He visited my bedroom once a month as
he had promised and left by the back door as if he had just committed a shameful deed.

I soon discovered that his conjugal interests lay in the darker quarters of the city—I mean, in a particular small but well-appointed house beneath the ramparts.

Like many aristocratic gentlemen—and I use the term with contempt—my husband kept a quadroon woman and a second mulatto family. He had several children by the woman, whom I saw once or twice around town. She was a common-looking creature, favoring garish yellow silk dresses, her hair always done up with feathers and colored beads. Don André had met her at one of the Quadroon Balls in that place on Chartres Street where the pretty light-skinned quadroon girls paint themselves up to attract the attentions of wealthy white men.

It is a disgusting institution, which leads to a disgusting double life and sorrow for everyone in the end, at least everyone who has a heart. And if there is one thing I can't stand in the world, it is the life of lies. Be a villain if you choose, but at least be an honest villain. You may raise your eyebrow, monsieur. I am a whore. Still, I know the difference between right and wrong.

True, many men tried to make love to me after my marriage, and it is not so unusual to take a lover in New Orleans, but I spurned them all. A perverse sense of honor kept me aloof from all offers of affection. Out of a twisted sort of pride, I wished to show my husband and my father just how honorable a woman I could be, even when surrounded by the corruption and cruelty of our age. In this way I kept my heart barren and empty until my twenty-third year.

Often our lives plod along, each day like the one before. Then, in a single moment, everything is changed. This is the way it was with me. In August, a month before my twenty-fourth birthday, I received news that Papa had been killed in a hunting accident in the bayou near Belle Azure. The slaves bore him up from the swamp on a bier of cane and saw grass, and there was much weeping on the plantation. He had always been a just
master to his slaves, never unnecessarily cruel or a lover of the whip. Though I did not know it then, everything changed for me with this event, and I was rocked from pride and apathy into a new life.

Don André and I traveled downriver to the funeral in a barge draped in black, as is the custom. I saw Papa interred in the crypt beside my lost mother, and I shed a few tears for the world that might have been and for my papa, who, despite his hasty judgments, had never been a cruel man.

The next morning I had a table and some chairs brought out to the upstairs gallery, and the funeral party assembled there for the reading of the will. There was the lawyer, M. Levallier, his clerk, myself and my husband, various relations, and finally my cousin Albane d'Aurevilley. She was now a thin girl of nineteen and, I observed, not without a certain colorless and ephemeral beauty. Her fine straw-colored hair set off those odd blue eyes. But the whiteness of her skin was her chief attraction. Beneath its translucent china surface, you could see, even at a distance, the slight tracery of veins.

I had not laid eyes on Albane since the horsewhipping of almost eight years before, and I watched her now from behind my fan while the will was read. She sat dressed in black as at our first meeting, straight-backed, her eyes downcast, her pale lips trembling. For it became apparent from the particulars of the will that Papa's feelings had cooled toward the girl in the years of my absence. Instead of half his property, he left her only a modest sum for a dowry and an acre or two of land bordering the Prasères lagoon where he had his fishing camp and lodge. But even these small bequests were not hers outright. He asked that first I accept my cousin as my ward and see her properly married. Only then would the terms of the will be put into effect.

I received Albane later in Papa's library. I sat patiently in Papa's chair as she knelt and wept well-rehearsed tears over my knuckles and begged my pardon for any past offenses and commended herself to my care. Here was a girl who knew on which side her bread was buttered! “If there is any ill feeling between us,” she implored me, “let it be forgotten at this sad time. Let us come together as sisters in memory of the man who loved us both too well.” Then she bent and took my foot and put it on her neck. It was a gesture worthy of La Magdalene! Against my own better judgment, I was moved by her pretty speech and her biblical gesture. I took her into my arms
then, told her that the past was indeed forgotten, that we were now friends. My father's wishes would be honored, I said. At the end of the proper mourning period we would see her made a bride.

The following September I moved down to Belle Azure, while my husband remained in New Orleans with his quadroon wife. And I threw myself into the arrangements with some zeal. The old house's many rooms were opened and refurbished. I even regilded the ancient French fire screen in the front hall which bears the arms of the Prasères family. Then I planned a lavish
season
of
entertainment
, culminating in a grand ball just before Christmas. I contacted friends in New Orleans and announced that my cousin Albane d'Aurevilley would be coming out. Also, in the most discreet manner possible, I let it be known that the poor girl's dowry and holdings would be augmented substantially from my own pocket in the event of a suitable marriage.

The parties I gave were written up in the New Orleans papers in two languages, in
L'Abeille and
the
Louisiana Gazette
, and much talked about in society. My husband was obliged, to his dismay, to leave New Orleans and come downriver for a time. He stood by my side in his pompous and seignorial Spanish manner in the uniform of a king who no longer held sway over the province, and deigned to join the dancing for an old-fashioned gavotte or two.

Each party lasted a week, with various entertainments, including a carnival masque and a sort of historical tragedy from the hand of the young dramatist Victor Hugo, which had been recently performed at the Comédie Française in Paris. Bachelors journeyed from miles around, from as far away as Mobile and Natchez. All the bedrooms of the great house were full, sometimes with a half dozen sleeping to a room and others in hammocks on the galleries. I spent a fortune, which came largely from my husband's bank account in New Orleans. Musicians and actors and extra cooks lived in tents in the backyard. We had Madame Lecoute, the hairdresser of Royal Street, to fix Albane's hair, and for the girl's party dresses Mademoiselle Annabelle Loury, the well-known modiste, who was herself in communication with the most fashionable dressmakers of the European continent.

Still, it was a very difficult task. Albane was not naturally witty or
much of a conversationalist. Her pale charms were popular only with a certain morose, intellectual type of young man whom she naturally despised as weak. She was made four proposals of marriage from bachelors of this effeminate type, but of respectable means, yet she found some fault with all of them. They were too fat or too lean, or their faces were pocked or they were losing their hair, or they spoke with annoying lisps or did not speak much at all.

Sadly, the more robust young men whom she admired from a physical standpoint would have nothing to do with her. Her manner was gloomy, and when she turned those strange blue eyes on you, there was a chill that went down your back. You thought of priests and winding sheets and the wages of sin and other uncomfortable things, not of weddings and the pleasures of the marriage bed. I exaggerate, but there was definitely something. Perhaps she still had the gris-gris on her, as the house slaves had once insisted.

Esteban de Vasconcellos came to Belle Azure for the last and grandest party of the season, just before Christmas. He arrived alone at dusk, without manservant or valet, on the packet from New Orleans. He brought with him only a small valise and a letter of introduction from my husband, who had remained in town—so he said—on business.