Victoire (13 page)

Although they had left at dawn, when they arrived at Fort-de-France, night had fallen. They could not make out much of the bay, one of the most beautiful in the world, whatever Césaire might think. The town, which like La Pointe was a constant victim of conflagrations, hurricanes, and earthquakes, appeared sad and haggard. The unfortunate coaling girls, described with a dubious lyricism by Lafcadio Hearn, were bent double under their loads as they filed up the gangways of a steamer belonging to the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique bound for Bordeaux. Women carrying water jars waddled along one behind another. Boniface, Anne-Marie, and Victoire ignored the line of carriages for hire and walked. Unlike La Pointe, where walking was a perilous exercise because of the pickpockets, beggars, piles of garbage, and all sorts of clutter, the streets of Fort-de-France were practically deserted. The municipality had just renamed them and they bore the names of contemporary writers: Victor Hugo, Schoelcher, Isambert, and Perrinon. To save money, Boniface took a room for three in the Hotel du Prince Alfred. The window opened onto the oasis of tamarind and mango trees on the Savane. According to a tradition recently revived, the oompah-oompah of a band could be
heard. They were playing
La Belle Hélène
by Offenbach. For one moment Anne-Marie was tempted to look for a bench, sit down, and listen. But she was utterly worn-out, like Boniface and Victoire. The trio did not even have the strength to go and admire the statue of the Empress Joséphine de Beauharnais, which had just been erected and nobody had yet thought of slashing her neck. Cutthroat statue. They retired for the night.

In what manner of fashion?

The moon in her curiosity peeked through the persiennes, but there was nothing ambiguous to see, if only to reveal the social hierarchy of the time.

Out of respect for the two women, Boniface removed only his patent leather shoes and jacket. He lay down practically fully dressed on the bench, set beside the bow-fronted armoire, and immediately filled the room with his snores. Anne-Marie slipped on her batiste nightdress. Propped up against her pillows, she began to read
L’Imitation de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ.
She had put on quite a bit of weight, a genuine Rubens, blonde and pink. She blamed her portliness on Victoire’s sumptuous cooking and her irrepressible sweet tooth, especially for the
rahat-loukoum
they sold at the patisserie Trébert. Victoire, sitting at the very edge of the bed, undid her headtie and removed one by one the pins that held her buns, releasing her long black hair. Then, in her burlap nightdress as rough as a flour sack from France, she flopped down onto the patch of carat palm mat between the bed and the bench. Around midnight Anne-Marie woke her for a body friction with camphorated alcohol. She wasn’t feeling too well.

The wedding took place at Le François on the family estate. They traveled in a hired “family-size” carriage. Today the Walberg sugar plantation is a famous landmark. It has been transformed by an enterprising heir into a five-star hotel. Tourists book certain rooms months in advance, insisting they sleep in the former slave shacks. Although these have been updated, they are a reminder of a past age.

At that time the plantation produced its bushels of sugar year
in, year out. The wedding of Philimond and Amélie, which it was hosting, was what is commonly called a beautiful wedding. For the marriage ceremony, three hundred and fifty guests, most of them from Saint-Pierre, crowded into the church, destroyed in 1891 by a hurricane that had killed sixty people, and rebuilt on the spot miraculously designated in a vision by one of the nuns of a neighboring convent. The wedding banquet was served on tables laid out in the plantation yard illuminated
a giorno
by torchères. Two orchestras that were a hit in the cabarets of Saint-Pierre, commonly cited as the uncontested capital of good taste, continued playing fashionable melodies one after another while waiting for the ball to open in the former boiling house. They would dance the cotillion and the cake walk imported from America until dawn. They would also sashay to the sounds of the beguine that was all the rage from one end of the island to the other:

Manman, mwen desann Sèn Pyè

In order to satisfy the desires of all these guests who were living their final days without knowing it, about twenty domestics had been laboring since dawn in the disused mill, transformed into a kitchen. Victoire was not afraid of the competition by the caterers, who’d also come from Saint-Pierre, with their guinea fowl stew. She was preparing one of her culinary triumphs, duck cooked in cassava and lemongrass—which I came across quite by chance years later in Belem—when a handsome Negro, somewhat of a dandy in his tight-fitting dark jacket, approached Victoire. She had met his insistent eyes with a beating heart several times. Once, he had even purposely brushed up against her. His name was Alexandre Arconte and he was the wine waiter, or in other words the employee in charge of drinks lent by O’Lanyer and Sons from Saint-Pierre and supervising a host of waiters skilled at pouring aperitifs, white wine, red wine, champagne, and liqueurs stored in the vinegar cellar. Victoire was red and sweating from the heat of the bagasse
and kindling, which for economy’s sake had replaced the charcoal. Consequently, he placed a glass of orange wine between her hands, which she gratefully accepted.

“Just look at them!” he murmured, not budging. “Has anything changed since the days of slavery? They’re having the time of their lives, whereas we are working ourselves to death.”

She vaguely sensed the truth in his words. For Victoire, who had always worked without ever possessing anything, without ever receiving anything in return, who could neither read nor write, who lived off the goodwill of a white family, the abolition of slavery had changed absolutely nothing.

What would happen if she quit her collar, she asked herself once again? She could become a street seller and sell popular dishes such as rice and beans, fried fish and court bouillon. Or else become a hawker, toting merchandise from village to village, far from the main marketplaces. Difficult and exhausting work that frightened her. Was she lacking in courage?

She did not know what to say. Apparently Alexandre was not offended by her silence, since he invited her to sip a glass of Dutch anisette with him. A few hours later, when couples slipped their arms around each other’s waist and with wings on their heels flew to the ballroom, inquisitive eyes followed them as they delved into the park’s thick vegetation. I imagine it was something like the beginning of the world: acres of woodland lush with casuarinas, trumpet bushes, cigar-box cedars, palms and silk cotton trees, crisscrossed by forest paths and tracks running in every direction. If you followed those to the south, you came to the sea and a gentle beach strewn with shells and seaweed.

Anne-Marie was the first to sound the alarm when the morning after the wedding her faithful Victoire did not tap on her door. She had to wash her hair herself. As for the caterers, waiters, and employees of O’Lanyer and Sons who embarked on the
Topaze
for Saint-Pierre at the end of the afternoon, they noticed that Alexandre was missing and had to set sail without him.

On the evening of the fourth day, those who remained in the vicinity of Le François organized a search party for the missing couple. In vain. Boniface looked a sorry sight. His grief even softened the heart of Anne-Marie, who dabbed his tears like a maman.

“Bon dyé!
” he gasped. “O Lord, if she dies, I die too.”

“Who’s talking about dying?” she berated him.

Anne-Marie decided not to leave, which put her hosts in a predicament, since they were anxious to get back to Saint-Pierre. She did not know how she would explain Victoire’s absence on her return to La Pointe and imagined all sorts of lies in her head: Victoire had wandered off into the woods and been bitten by a poisonous trigonocephale snake. The thick groves around the Walberg plantation were swarming with them. Most unlikely. Let’s try something else: Victoire had been tempted by the offer of a restaurant owner who had proposed a small fortune for her to work in the kitchen. Quite implausible too. So what could she invent?

After almost two weeks, her hosts were at the end of their tether and she had to resign herself to set off back home again with Boniface.

Back on the rue de Nassau, she briefly explained to Jeanne in disbelief that her mother was staying in Martinique for a time. Then, clutching her to her heart, she burst into tears, which had the effect of terrifying the child. What was her mother doing in Martinique? She must be dead and they were afraid to tell her. Jeanne began imagining Victoire carried away by a huge wave or struck by lightning or crushed by a tree.

Life resumed its usual routine.

Or almost.

By way of letters from friends and relatives in Martinique, the affair soon reached the ears of the bourgeois circle of harpies in La Pointe, who gleefully badmouthed Victoire. They let fly at her, calling her
bòbò
, slut, a debauched individual, and a heartless mother who disrespected respectable households at the most sacred of times. At the sisters’ day school, Jeanne heard snatches of these sto
ries, each more revolting than the last. The nuns pretended to take pity on her and were lavish with their consolation. Their compassion, however, was worse than their contempt.

Fortunately, back home, it was another story.

Here again I have nothing juicy to offer. Under the white skins of Anne-Marie and Boniface, deep down beat the heart of a normal man and woman. Both fretted about the poor abandoned child.

“We shall have to tell her the truth in the end,” sighed Anne-Marie.

“Wait a bit! She’ll come back!” maintained Boniface, who wanted to keep hope alive. Despite the odds. Despite the silence and the passing months.

They did not think for one moment of abusing or abandoning her. On the contrary! They were more considerate toward her than ever, especially Anne-Marie. At Christmas they gave her a gold bangle, her first jewel.

Polite society had begun to forget about Victoire, who had disappeared for over a year, when one fine morning with a wicker basket on her head she pushed open the door to the house on the rue de Nassau and quite simply cried out “I’m back” to the stunned servants:

“Mi mwen.”

She went up to the Regency room to unpack her things without bothering to answer Anne-Marie, who was bombarding her with questions. At noon, contrary to habit, she went to fetch her child from school. Jeanne, who had recently dreamed of her mother turning purple from being suffocated by a boa constrictor around her neck, saw her suddenly turn up at the gate, surprisingly spruce, the mask of a young girl tacked onto her face. She almost ran to embrace her but, taking control of herself, merely asked how she was:

“Ou bien mèsi?”

As a result, tongues started wagging again. Some vital information was passed on. It was rumored that Alexandre Arconte was not what he made himself out to be. Instead of an upstairs-downstairs house, he possessed merely a modest two-room shack. Instead of a tidy sum
in the bank, he hadn’t a penny to his name. Venal Victoire had realized her mistake. Beauty does not put food on the table. Leave Boniface for this fly-by-night? Reason had taken the upper hand.

These events had a tragic epilogue.

Less than two weeks after Victoire returned home, on May 8, 1902, Mount Pelée started belching fire. With a wave of her magic wand, the wicked fairy turned the pearl of the Antilles into the ghost town visited today by tourists and souvenir hunters. Not one survivor, except for Cyparis, saved by his solitary confinement. Among the thirty thousand victims of the catastrophe there were Philimond and his young bride, most of the wedding guests, the musicians, the caterers, the domestics, and Alexandre. If she had stayed with him in Martinique, Victoire would have suffered the same fate.

Boniface and Anne-Marie had trouble getting over the fact that a year earlier they had danced with a group of
morituri,
whereas Victoire got the impression of having escaped the arms of a cadaver. She never forgave herself for having left Alexandre when the most terrible danger was looming behind him. Night after night she saw herself making love to a mummy who unwound his bandages one by one, revealing a putrescent flesh. She believed too that she had been punished for having abandoned her daughter for so long. In short, she was in agony. On May 20, 1902, Anne-Marie sent Etienne a letter containing this terse sentence: “Only her faith in God is keeping our faithful Victoire alive.”

I hardly need say that this little-known, badly elucidated incident aroused my curiosity to the fullest. Although we know for sure that Philimond Walberg and his wife perished together with the aristocracy of Saint-Pierre, that the offices of O’Lanyer and Sons, rue Victor Hugo, were destroyed from top to bottom, there is nothing to prove that Alexander was in town on that day. Perhaps by chance, with the help of good luck, he had traveled to Fort-de-France or Le François on business the day before or the day before that. My task proved to be arduous. All I could find in the newspapers of that time, archived in the Schoelcher Library in Fort-de-France, were ad
vertisements for wines and liquors by O’Lanyer, father and son. No mention of Alexandre Arconte. I was about to give up my research when a student from Martinique working on one of my books sent me an e-mail. Her name: Denise Arconte.

Yes, Alexandre was the elder brother of her grandfather, who unfortunately perished in the catastrophe. She had no information of a possible liaison with a girl from Guadeloupe. She thought he was married to a certain Louise Girondin, who, together with their three children, had perished with him. At the most she knew he owned a restaurant in Saint-Pierre called Le Gargantua, something quite unusual for the time, when tourism was unheard of and people ate at home. My research turned up nothing on Le Gargantua.

All that we have left is our imagination.

One evening I pushed open the door to Le Gargantua. Modest. Not much room. Background music: Martinican beguines—“Bavaroise,” “Marie-Clémence,” “Agoulou.” Five or six tables occupied by some sailors from Venezuela. Alexandre carries his virility proudly with prominent attributes. I look at the menu. Prix fixe. Fairly simple.