That summer Jules Beluche did not show up in Boston, instead Sancho Garcia del Solar, in his wide-brimmed hat, thundered up at full gallop with another horse in tow. He jumped down and brushed off the dust with his hat before embracing his nephew. Jules Beluche had been knifed over some gambling debts, and the Guizots intervened to squelch gossip; however distant the relationship that united them, sharp tongues would associate Beluche with the honorable branch of the family. They did what any Creoles of their class did in similar circumstances: they paid his debts, took him in until his wound healed and he could look after himself, gave him pocket money, and put him on a boat with instructions not to get off until he reached Texas, and never to return to New Orleans. Sancho told Maurice all that, doubled over with laughter.
"That could have been me, Maurice. Up till now I've been lucky, but any day they will bring you the news that your favorite uncle has been stitched like a quilt in some hole of a gaming house," he added.
"May God not let that happen, Uncle. Have you come to take me home?" Maurice asked in a voice that shifted from baritone to soprano in the same sentence.
"What makes you think that, boy! Do you want to be buried all summer on the plantation? You and I are going on a trip," Sancho announced.
"That's what I did with Beluche."
"Don't compare me to him, Maurice. I do not intend to contribute to your civic formation by showing you monuments, I mean to pervert you, what do you think of that?"
"How, Uncle?"
"In Cuba, my nephew. No better place for a couple of truants like us. How old are you?"
"Fifteen."
"And your voice hasn't changed yet?"
"It changed, Uncle, but I have a c-cold," the boy stammered.
"By your age I was a hell raiser. You're a little behind, Maurice. Pack your things, because we leave tomorrow," Sancho ordered.
Sancho still had many friends and no few lovers in Cuba, who proposed to shower him with attention during that vacation and put up with his companion, that strange boy who spent his time writing letters and suggested absurd subjects of conversation like slavery and democracy, something none of them had formed an opinion about. It amused them to see Sancho in the role of nursemaid, which he performed with unsuspected dedication. He turned down the best sprees in order not to leave his nephew alone, and stopped going to animal fights-bulls with bears, snakes with weasels, cocks with cocks, dogs with dogs-because they disturbed Maurice. Sancho decided to teach the boy to drink and, halfway through the night ended by cleaning up his vomit. He taught him all his card tricks, but Maurice lacked malice and instead had to pay up after others less principled fleeced him. Soon Sancho had also abandoned the idea of initiating him into the free-for-alls of love, for when he tried it Maurice nearly died of fright. He had arranged the details with a good-hearted woman friend, not young but still attractive, who was willing to act as teacher to the nephew for the pure pleasure of doing the uncle a favor. "This kid is still green behind the ears," Sancho muttered, mortified, when Maurice ran away upon seeing the woman in a provocative negligee reclining on a divan. "No one has ever rebuffed me like that, Sancho." She laughed. "Close the door and come console me." Despite those stumbles, Maurice had an unforgettable summer and returned to school taller, stronger, tanned, and with a definite tenor voice. "Don't study too hard, because it will ruin your sight and your character, get ready for next summer. I'm going to take you to Mexico," Sancho told his nephew as he left. He did as he promised, and from then on Maurice eagerly looked forward to summer.
In 1805, Maurice's last year of school, it was not Sancho who came for him, as he had before, but his father. Maurice deduced that he was there to announce some bad news and was afraid for Tete or Rosette, but it wasn't anything like that, it seemed. Valmorain had organized a trip to France to visit a grandmother and two hypothetical aunts his son had never heard mentioned. "And then we will go home, monsieur?" Maurice had asked, thinking of Rosette, whose letters lined the bottom of his trunk. He had written her one hundred ninety-three letters without a thought for the inevitable changes she had experienced in those nine years they'd been apart; he remembered her as the little girl dressed in ribbons and laces that he'd seen for the last time shortly before his father's marriage to Hortense Guizot. He couldn't imagine her at fifteen, just as she couldn't think of him as eighteen. "Of course we'll go home, son, your mother and sisters are waiting to see you," Valmorain lied.
The journey on a ship that had to skirt summer storms and with difficulty escape an attack by the English, and then a coach to Paris, did not bring the father and son together. Valmorain had conceived the trip in order to postpone for a few months more his wife's displeasure at seeing Maurice again, but he couldn't put it off indefinitely; soon he would have to confront a situation that had not been eased by the years. Hortense never lost a chance to spew venom upon that stepson whom each year she tried vainly to replace with her own son without producing anything but girls. For her, Valmorain had exiled Maurice from the family, and now he repented. A decade had gone by without a serious concern for his son; he was always occupied with his own affairs, first in Saint-Domingue, then in Louisiana, and last with Hortense and the births of the girls. The boy was a stranger who answered his sparse letters in a couple of formal sentences regarding the progress of his studies but he never asked about any member of the family; it was as if he wanted to leave it settled that he had no connection to them. He didn't even react when his father wrote him in a single line that Tete and Rosette had been emancipated and were no longer connected to the Valmorains.
Valmorain was afraid he'd lost his son at some point during those hectic years. This introverted young man, tall and handsome, with his mother's features, did not in any way resemble the rosy-cheeked boy he'd cradled in his arms, praying heaven to protect him from all harm. He loved him as much as he ever had, maybe more, because his emotion was stained with guilt. He tried to convince himself that his fatherly affection was returned by Maurice, even though they were temporarily distanced, but he had his doubts. He had laid out ambitious plans for his son without ever having asked him what he wanted to do with his life. In truth, he knew nothing about his interests or experiences; it was centuries since they had spoken. He wanted to win him back, and had imagined that those months alone together in France would act to establish an adult relationship. He had to prove to him his affection and to make clear that Hortense and her daughters would not change Maurice's situation as his only heir, but every time he tried to broach the subject there was no response. "The tradition of primogeniture is very wise, Maurice; wealth must not be divided among sons because with each division the family's fortune is lessened. Being the firstborn, you will receive my entire estate, and you will have to look after your sisters. When I'm no longer here, you will be the head of the Valmorains. It's time to start preparing you; you will learn to invest money, manage the plantation, and make your way in society," he told him. Silence. Conversations died before they began. Valmorain navigated from one monologue to another.
Maurice took in without comment Napoleonic France, always at war, the museums, palaces, parks, and avenues his father wanted to show him. They visited the ruined chateau where his grandmother was living out her last years, caring for two unwed daughters more deteriorated by time and loneliness than she. A prideful old woman dressed in Louis XVI style, determined to ignore the changes in the world, she was firmly ensconsed in the epoch prior to the French Revolution, and had erased from her memory the Terror, the guillotine, exile in Italy, and the return to an unrecognizable country. Seeing Toulouse Valmorain, that son absent for more than thirty years, she held out a bony hand with antique rings on each finger for him to kiss, and then ordered her daughters to serve chocolate. Valmorain introduced her grandson to her and tried to summarize his own story from the time he embarked for the Antilles up to the present. She listened without a word while the sisters offered steaming little cups and plates of stale pastries, eyeing Valmorain with caution. They remembered the frivolous young man who told them good-bye with a distracted kiss and left with his valet and several trunks to spend a few weeks with their father in Saint-Domingue, only never to return. They didn't recognize that brother with the scanty hair, double chin, and paunch, who spoke with a strange accent. They knew something of the uprising of slaves in the colony-they'd heard a few sentences here and there about atrocities on that decadent island, but they'd not connected them to a member of their family. They had never been curious to know where the funds that supported them came from. Bloodstained sugar, rebel slaves, burned plantations, exile, and all the rest their brother mentioned was as incomprehensible to them as a conversation in Chinese.