Madeleine's Ghost (42 page)

Then I heard a crashing through the bayou and the barking of dogs and the shouts of men. I left the clothes floating in the water and ran up the slope through the underbrush to the lodge, a thick humming that was the sound of my own blood in my ears.

There were seven men in the hunting party—my husband, four huge Negroes from the fields, and two white men I did not know. A dozen bloodhounds growled and frisked nervously about the yard, tails down, as dogs will do when they know something is up. Esteban knelt trembling before Don André. I was too far away to hear their words. My husband made an impatient sign, and I watched in horror as one of the bucks took Esteban around the neck with his huge hands and snapped his spine in a second as a child would snap a twig. I heard the awful cracking sound and saw my love's eyes bulge out and go dark. I started to scream and screamed until I went faint and fell to the ground.

A few minutes later, revived by a mouthful of brandy, I found myself on the porch of the lodge, arms held fast behind my back by one of the big buck Negroes. Don André looked me up and down, expressionless. When he saw that I was fully awake, he nodded gently at the buck who had killed Esteban. This one took out a heavy curved knife, cut Esteban's body down the middle as you cut open a calf for the roasting, and reached inside and fumbled about as if it were an old sack. In another moment he pulled out a dripping red organ that I saw was my lover's heart.

It was then I begged them to kill me, so I could fly to my beloved Esteban in death. But my husband turned to me with a weary and understanding smile that was all the more horrible considering the circumstances.

“You are my wife,” he said, “and you will remain my wife. That is the more sublime torture.” Then he told the buck to throw Esteban's heart to the dogs so that they might devour it before me. At this I begged and pleaded most piteously to be allowed to eat the heart myself. If I could eat his heart, I thought, I could keep Esteban's love inside me forever. Even Don André was surprised at this request and hesitated for a moment. “If you love the traitorous bastard that much,” he said at last, “then fight the dogs for him.”

The buck threw Esteban's heart to the dogs, and the other let me go, and I scrambled into the mud of the yard and fought the dogs for the heart. But these beasts have hard claws and sharp teeth, while I am made of softer flesh. I received many bites and scratches and only managed to get a single mouthful of my lover's heart, still warm from his body. It tasted of his love, of salt and life like the fluid of his seed. But one of the dogs tore the precious
organ from my grasp and trotted off into the woods to devour it in private, and I fell into a swoon from the pain and horror of my ordeal.

I lay sick for many days, caught in a fever between sensuous dreams of my dead lover and monstrous visions of gore and riven organs. When I awoke from this madness, I found Don André at my bedside, his hands clasped, calm as death itself. My cousin Albane stood by his side, dressed in the mourning that always seemed to suit her so well. She looked skinny and paler than usual. Her eyes, ringed with dark circles, were fixed
on
the floor.

Helpless and weak as I was, I cursed my husband and informed him that I would have M. Levallier contact the government prosecutor in New Orleans with the particulars of this odious crime. “Unless you kill me now while you are able,” I said, “you will be arrested and dragged in irons before the court, where they will convict you for the murder of my beloved Esteban.”

But he listened calmly to my threats, and I could see in his face that his revenge was not yet complete. At last he informed me with a cold smile that the quadroon slave called Esteban de Vasconcellos had been disposed of legally and in the presence of the sheriff of Plaquemines Parish and his appointed deputy for the crime of violating a white woman. The punishment for this crime, as everyone knows, is death,

I looked from Albane's white face to my husband's black eyes, the eyes of an unfeeling animal mistakenly endowed with intellect, and I saw that this statement was true. He then went on to tell me that the quadroon slave called Esteban de Vasconcellos was in fact his own son, born on St.-Domingue out of a youthful union with a mulatto slave woman of his former estate.

“Yes, the boy looked like a white man and showed a quick wit,” he said. “But he was
still
a Negro and a slave under the laws of the United States and under the regulations of the Code Noir. Long ago, out of a mistaken affection for his mother, who died during the uprising, I promised to send the boy to Europe, where he might be educated properly. This was a terrible mistake, which I realize only now. It is always a mistake to educate a
Negro above his station. For that alone I am responsible. But your whorish and base passions are to blame in every other respect. If you had encouraged this marriage between your ward and my son, no one would have been the wiser. Instead you took the slave for yourself and lay with him in fornication, and in so doing sullied the precious honor of the de la Rocas. The slave is dead. You will live on to ponder your misdeeds.”

Don André then paused for a while for this terrible information to sink into my brain. But if he waited for me to express regret or horror concerning my love for the person whom he identified as a Negro and a slave, he waited in vain. For in that instant I abandoned all conceptions I had of the differences between Negroes and whites, between slave and free. Esteban was a slave and I had loved him, and I still loved him. Don André was white and a monster and a murderer, and I hated him with the full force of my passion.

When Don André saw that I was not moved by his revelation, he let loose one final arrow.

“You should know that it was your own dear cousin who informed me of your perfidious adultery,” he said. “As soon as she discovered your whereabouts, she sent for me. But now the poor girl appears distressed at the outcome of her efforts. Pity. Allow me to leave you two alone to commiserate over the death of a Negro slave.”

And he bowed with ultimate contempt and left the room.

After he was gone, Albane tried to speak to me. She pleaded for forgiveness and expressed herself with much emotion, but I cannot tell you now what she said. I turned my face to the wall and did not hear a single word of it. And at last she, too, fell silent and left me alone with my grief.

In the months of my recuperation I lay propped in a chair on the top-floor gallery at Belle Azure, watching the light change over the river and plotting my revenge. The thought of my revenge was the only thing that kept me from taking my own life.

Since the law would not touch my husband, I must be the one to drive the dagger into his heart. I imagined this scene many times—armed with a knife or a pistol, walking up to him in his coffeehouse on Bourbon Street and
ending his life in a second with a single bloody eruption. But I came to consider that this assassination would be too quick an act. He would suffer little, and at his age he was no longer much afraid of death.

By and by I discovered through correspondence with a few friends in town that Don André had fabricated a near-fatal bout of cholera to explain my prolonged absence from society. News of my affair with Esteban, and of his death, were not known in New Orleans, having been hushed up by my husband and his agents. This detail revealed my husband's weakness, put the true weapon in my hand. The place to wound him was in his pride. I must bring dishonor to his precious family name, drag it in the mud once and for all. And after it had been dragged in the mud for a good long time, all Louisiana would come to know the dishonorable circumstances of my life. A woman may perhaps be excused one affair, or even two, but thousands! Only from such a mortification would Don André truly suffer.

So this is the reason I have become a whore, the common prostitute you will share the bed with tonight. Understand that I am a whore now only because I alone have willed it. I was not driven to this vile trade through need, like all the other poor sluts. I am a whore out of spite, to work my revenge on the only person in all Louisiana whose pride is greater than my own, that monster of arrogance, my husband, Don André Villejo de la Roca. It is his portrait you see there, staring down at us now from the wall over my whore's bed. He has watched like a guardian demon over the sweating backs of countless men. Watched as I opened my legs for them and took their pleasure into my body. My body, which is the weapon I shall use to strike him in the heart of his pride, for there alone is he capable of sustaining a mortal wound.

When I was well again, I left Belle Azure in the middle of the night and fled north, to reach a place beyond my husband's reach. As you know, he is too powerful in Louisiana to allow me a free career of harlotry in that province. I stopped for a while in Savannah, in Charleston, in Baltimore and Philadelphia, but in each place received intelligence that my husband's agents were on my trail and under orders to end my life.

At last, four years ago, I arrived in New York City and from there crossed the river to Brooklyn and this dingy neighborhood near the docks. Here I believe I have escaped him utterly. I put my card on the door, as is the fashion with whores, and installed myself in these squalid rooms. I am famous among the sailors for my looks, which are better than those of the common prostitute, and for my willingness to sleep with anyone. Negro or white, man or boy, I treat them all alike. I take them inside my body, into the wound that is my love.

But you are the first man I have met from home in many long years, one of my own people. This is why I have told you my story tonight. You have been very patient with me, kind enough to listen. Also, you are a gentleman, and I think you are sympathetic to my plight. Because after all my suffering, something has gone terribly wrong. My plans have been interfered with, and I think you know who is responsible. Monsieur, please, I am in desperate need of your help … please.… You must help me.…

H
OURS HAVE
passed, or days. It should be dawn out the windows of Molesworth's room, but there is still the same impenetrable blackness, still the same night, endless, vast, that holds us in its dark hand.

Sometimes I am naked and alone, blind with fever and lying prone on my stained sheets, digital thermometer beeping in alarm beneath my tongue. Sometimes I am with a prostitute named Madeleine in a rope-sprung four-poster, in a room that is much like Molesworth's room, in a house that is like my own, in a town that is not Brooklyn, that is instead Brooklyn lost in a terrible darkness.

Now she is begging me to help her. She is weeping; she is tearing at her hair. The lamentations fill my ears; they are loud and have lasted for more than a century. Now I can see her tears glinting in the dim light of the tallow candles; now I can see them fall from her cheeks to her bare
breasts. Now she is naked, and on her shoulder a blue scattering of marks that might have been made by the teeth of a dog.