When we arrived on Jamaica, the messenger urged us to hurry through the streets of Port Royal. I had never seen a richer city nor one that was decked out in as gaudy a way, with colorful houses of stone and wood, flowers appearing here and there, fountains and gardens and rotundas, so different from the muddy streets and gray buildings of my natal city, or the meager, plain wood buildings on Tortuga. It seemed ready for a festival, Port Royal did, and women wandered along the paved streets, laughing shamelessly, all dressed up in fine fabrics, hats, stockings of which their short dresses coquettishly allowed glimpses … For a youth such as I, brought up in poverty and slavery, Jamaica seemed like Babylon in all its glory, and its lovely women like spirits of joyfulness and well-being. So that the messenger kept pulling at us to hurry us along, and my head kept twisting back so that we might remain there, as my eyes were simply starting out of my head with all that color, those low necklines, the flowers and brightly painted façades, those ankles bare or else scarcely concealed under thin stockings …
Finally we arrived at our destination. It was perhaps the most imposing building in all of Port Royal, high as a church, surrounded by a lovely and very carefully tended garden, filled with flowers, peacocks, pheasants, and ducks, with ponds where small swans were swimming, their heads and necks being completely black and a white streak over their eyes. What was this palace to which we had been brought? We did not use the principal entrance; instead we went around the building along its left side, from where we could see a deep fosse in which an enormous beast lay inert beneath the sun’s rays, flattened out like a serpent but with jaws like those of a wolf, which was called an “alligator,” so I was told, and this one in particular was the “temple alligator,” because it seemed placed there to guard the one that adorned this side of the garden with its also vivid colors, astonishing in a shrine so reminiscent of Rome.
By the door on the left side we entered a hall (I did not know yet that this was a “little drawing-room” of The House) very richly furnished, with curtains and fine tapestries, a chandelier above the center of the room, a lacquered table … I had not yet managed to take it all in when Madame entered. How I regret, even now, having spent the whole journey and the entire time since my arrival without asking what I had been called for! My character is always like that: I lend my attention to what I should not, entertaining myself with the details and allowing the most important thing to get by me unnoticed; staring at the little things, in disregard of the whole to which they belong.…
Madame asked to speak with me alone, and Pineau and the messenger left the room.
“It’s happened to us again, once more at the full moon, everyone at once, and I have had to”—and here she broke into tears —“close The House because none of us can work. Besides, it makes everyone start crying and fighting with each other, because there is no one who is not susceptible, now that we’ve all got the Red Flag up. And now there is no le Nègre Miel to help us.… Just think! If it happened to us this month, next month it will do the same, and the next month, and the next … And if they all come back”—she had not ceased weeping, she was really upset—“if they get here with all their loot on days like this, we’ll lose everything! All of us! It will be our ruin! Do what le Nègre Miel did, I beg of you! They say he taught you everything.… Change our days, so that some get it one day and others on another, like that! That accursed full moon! Get us out of this rhythm, because if it falls on the full moon, as le Nègre Miel knew only too well, it brings us pain, inflammations, and shattered nerves.… And we can’t have it! The servants are never done washing the sheets, and the water in the pool out back looks like a river of blood! Look!”
She took me by the hand and we left the room, going toward the inside patio. I was unable to get over my confusion. I did not know what she was talking about, I did not understand a thing, and she gave me no time to think because she was now talking about something else, telling me about her life when she was the French painter’s mistress. What “river of blood”? I was thinking, when I saw it before my own eyes, the black slaves rubbing huge, bloodstained sheets on the washing rocks, everything permeated with an odor that I was already familiar with, without recalling where it came from long ago, when I was a child.… She would not let go of my hand nor did she stop talking: “… If you didn’t bring enough medications, come back before the weeks go by, please, and you can take it out in trade with whomever you choose here, with me if you like, anyone you prefer, and you can come any time you wish, as le Nègre Miel always did … always, that is, until he became acquainted with you, because then he was no longer faithful to us …” I was not resisting, or else my dullness did not resist the need to show itself, because I might at least have been able to close my mouth; and even though the sight of such a river of blood kept my feet glued to the floor, I having had no dealings with blood before this, I could have let myself be drawn along without opening my mouth; yet said I, “Who did this to them? Where are the wounds?”
“What wounds?”
“The ones with all the blood.”
Madame gently brought me back into The House; she was also bewildered now and, without attempting to calm me in my fussing, made me climb the stairs. I do not know exactly when I became quieted down, but my voice seemed to have aroused the whole house. We were all in an immense bedroom and they surrounded me there, passing along from one to the next, in whispers, the phrase that defined me, “He’s that friend of le Nègre Miel”; most of them were in their undergarments and their hair unfastened, as if it were midnight when it was actually midday, until, after beginning with my stupid questions once more (“Who’s been hurt? Where are the injuries? Why call on me? Let us get someone with weapons to …”), Madame, who had brought me upstairs, screamed out: “This fellow doesn’t know anything!” half in fury and half hysterical, and some of the others broke out in laughter, others began to cry, and some simply turned away, when a girl of about my own age with deep rings under her eyes brought her face close to mine and asked, “You really don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“About the Red Flag. Didn’t le Nègre Miel tell you what to do about it?”
I said “no” by shaking my head, and the ones who were left in the room began to ask each other, “Could he have told him about it under a different name?”
“Ask him.”
“Hey, you, what do you call this curse we get every month?”
I did not understand a thing and I did not know what to do, being partly ashamed and partly humiliated, on the verge of tears, when Isabelle came in, all made up and dressed for a party, huge and blond, and asked, “Is this him?” as if there were another man in the room with whom I might be confused. She came closer but still kept her distance and would not sit down, as if I were somehow disgusting; not even looking me in the eye, she introduced herself and explained, “I am the one le Nègre Miel usually slept with, if he didn’t feel like having someone else. What we need is for you to bring us some l’herbe folle. Are you familiar with that herb?”
I nodded in assent, still unable to speak.
“Do you know how to prepare it?”
I nodded again.
“Go back to your island, find that herb, prepare it, and give it to us spaced out, the way he used to do so we don’t all get this thing at the same time. And while you’re at it, look for someone to help you get over being such a blockhead!”